... or why I mutilated your java package in Debian This post is especially addressed to what we Debian Developers refer to as upstream maintainers, that is the people who write/maintain the software that we package for Debian. It is meant to explain why, in some cases, Debian Developers prefer to mutilate your work rather than upload it to Debian Archives in a state that gives it proper credit. And to apologize. These opinions are my own, but I have a faint feeling that I'm not the only Debian Developer working like that, and that this few words could help soothe the relation betwenn Debian Developers and Upstream Maintainers, which can be quite tense some times... It happens unfortunately quite often (too often!) that I disable (or don't enable) features in programs I package. Exact reasons vary, but they essentially fall into two categories:

• A feature requires code that does not comply to Debian Free Software Guidelines, which Debian cannot distribute. This is a no-go.
• A relatively minor feature depends on other software that are not packaged yet, and in which I don't have specific interest, which means I would not be able to maintain them properly (or it would require too much packaging work and so on...).

When a program has features which falls in one of these categories, I have two choices: either I give up packaging the software or I give up some of the features... For packages for which I care, obviously the second option looks better from my point of view as a Debian Developer. Java packages are especially affected by this problem, for a very simple reason. Java is one of the few (I don't say only because I'll probably be flamed to death) programming languages which allows very easy distribution of binary platform-independent libraries, in the form of JAR files. Many projects simply reuse and embed JAR files published for other projects in their own JAR files, often without precise references to where the source code can be found. Packaging a moderately-sized Java application often rely on dozens of embedded JARs, which we need to remove from the packages we build (as Debian does not distribute binaries without sources for many reasons), and for which we need to hunt down the original source code and often packaging the original project, which might pull in yet other dependencies and so on... A true nightmare ! That's why it is so tempting some times to simply drop some of the code, possibly write patches to disable references to removed libraries, and be done with it. Therefore, I would wish to publicly apologize to any upstream developer I've offended by stripping down apparently carelessly their beautiful software before uploading to the Debian Archives; I hope they now understand why I've done that. Note to users: it is not because one of the features of your favorite software has been disabled by its (Debian) maintainer that you need to turn away from Debian ! Rather, file a bug report against the package. You'll get the reasons why the feature was disabled, and you have a chance to convince the maintainer to switch it back on.

I had previously sought alternative, innovative search engines, but none of the proposed options made me particularly happy. About a year ago, I came across DuckDuckGo, and today, I ve been using DDG as my primary search provider for exactly 10 months. The reasons why I switched included

• my dislike of the Google information monopoly and the potential that a single, corporate entity with financial interests, gets to censor the information I see. I am sceptical of their Do-no-evil promise because there s nothing binding about it, and if it gets in the way of money-making, I am sure it ll be discarded at a whim if it even still exists.
• the awareness that my usage augments their database (although I am probably too far away from mainstream to provide useful data), which translates into more funds available to them to further strengthen their market position.
• my belief that the days of index-based searches are over, given how 95% (or more) of user-generated content is bogus. Google undoubtedly optimises the results with obscure, secret algorithms, but that s just not enough for me.
• Of course the name DuckDuckGo was perhaps the strongest reason to switch. :)

I am aware that DuckDuckGo is index-based itself, using the Yahoo API, which, in turns means that DuckDuckGo may already be using Bing data. Sounds a bit like out of the frying pan into the fire, unfortunately. I am still investigating better search solutions, sticking with DuckDuckGo meanwhile. Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo doesn t quite cut the mustard at all times, forcing me to go to Google instead. For this reason I am glad to find that the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has not been discontinued, but simply renamed to OptimizeGoogle. This extension allows me to anonymise my identity towards Google, remove click tracking (which Google doesn t want you to know about and hence hide with JavaScript), hide ads, and customise a slew of other aspects of the giant s search engine. It alleviates some of the aforementioned concerns, but not all. Maybe it s time to rethink the way I use the web and lower my search needs. If you are using Firefox, try it out! If you re still using Internet Exploder, you should not, and instead upgrade to Firefox. Users of other browsers might find similar functionality for their application, or might want to switch as well. NP: Tunng: Comments from the Inner Chorus

So far the networking of virtual machines has usually been managed by configuring a Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) in the host, i.e. the good old implementation of 802.1D in the Linux Kernel:

A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) is a capability within a physical end station that supports local bridging between multiple virtual end stations and (optionally) the external bridging environment.

While this works well and in some cases is the best solution, in other setups performances or policy needs dictate that the traffic between virtual machines is forwarded to an external bridge (the Ethernet switch connected to the host) and back without having in the host a real bridge learning MAC addresses from its ports and implementing the STP. Enters the VEPA:

A Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) is a capability within a physical end station that collaborates with an adjacent, external bridge to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks. The VEPA collaborates by forwarding all station-originated frames to the adjacent bridge for frame processing and frame relay (including "hairpin" forwarding) and by steering and replicating frames received from the VEPA uplink to the appropriate destinations.

Support for VEPAs has been added to Linux 2.6.33 with a simple change to the macvlan driver. The next step will be to use the macvtap driver (available in 2.6.34), which exposes a tap character device usable by kvm-qemu and "connected" to a macvlan-like interface.

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

FOSDEM is the usual awesomeness this year, I'm just too tired for too many words, so I'll keep this post very brief.

Once again, the videoteam needs your help. Please consider lending us your helping hands, so that we can record the room 1308 tomorrow/today (sunday) without burning out totally. From 10oo to 17oo there are seven talks scheduled with a total break time of 30min. And we are 3 or 4 people doing this, and have 4 jobs to fullfill: 2 camera operators, video and audio-mixer, not even mentioning handing microphones to the people in the audience. This obviously really cannot work.

So, if you can, please help us. Either just show up or even better, just show up and add yourself at the volunteer wiki page. Doing the latter will help us even more, as we can plan our ad-hoc work better.

Following an idea originated through contributions from Belgian beer, and to motivate zack a bit more to actually go for it, I've setup the alias leader@debian-community.org to point to his email address. Please send motivational emails ;-)

Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry): There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:

Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)

Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.

There s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true. Too bad they aren t doing it with ebooks. I ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses. In the year or so since I ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I m aware of:

• Huston Smith s Why Religion Matters included some illustrations, but they were scanned at such a low resolution that the text was completely unreadable, even at maximum zoom.
• All electronic editions of Lord of the Rings, not just the Kindle version, suffered some serious issues including missing words and deleting 19 characters after each instance of a particular letter.
• Shmoop converted Project Gutenberg versions of The Iliad and Odyssey, but converted each line of Gutenberg text to a Kindle paragraph, wrecking word wrapping.
• Countless examples of hyphenated words in the middle of lines (probably from someone forcing a hyphenation point in a print edition), paragraphs that should have been block-indented but weren t, etc.

In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it. Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion. Bottom line: If they re going to sell me an inferior product, don t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all. Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it. It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers. I'm really proud of her. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her. She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

The first time we looked at this condo that we ended up buying, I looked at the cupboard under the stairs, and could visualise a small 19 inch rack in the lower part of it, with all of my computer gear in it. When we got structured cabling installed, I had the CAT-6 cabling terminated onto a basic 19 inch patch panel, with the intent of mounting this in a rack. Then it became a case of trying to find a rack. My favourite junk shop, Weird Stuff, didn't have anything that wasn't full height, so I started looking around online. There's certainly a lot of variance in price. I settled on a 26U Intellinet rack from New Tech, because based on the dimensions on the website, it would fit in the space I had in mind. When we assembled it, it became obvious that the dimensions quoted were the inside dimensions and not the outside dimensions, and it was about 4 centimetres too tall. In hindsight, I should have figured that out. 26 x 1.75 is 45.5. This is where I must give a shout out to New Tech. Sarah called them up, explained the situation, and they agreed to take the rack back, and sent us some shipping labels to ship it back. We managed to find a more simple rack, a 20U Middle Atlantic, which arrived today, and was significantly easier to put together. The only downside: no rear mounting holes. I don't think it'll be a huge problem, though. All I'm planning on mounting in the immediate future are the patch panel, some sort of cable management, a Catalyst switch, and a power strip. At some point in the future, once we stop spending money hand over fist, I'll look at getting a rack mountable server to replace the hodge podge of computers I'm currently running. What I wish we'd discovered about two days ago, was the Lack Rack. This would have been perfect (and so much cheaper).

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days). The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks. The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time. We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone. When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive. The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line. Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately. But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

I was trying not to complain about it, but now that the number of people asking me about it is getting bigger, my frustration got the best of me. So unfortunately I won t see you all there.

The current state of g-i, the graphical version of the Debian installer is very concerning. Currently, the GTK+ version in squeeze (2.18 and soon 2.20) has very serious bugs in the DirectFB backend, which make it unusable for g-i. Because of that, the first alpha version of d-i will ship without graphical installer support. Unless someone steps up and does something, this will be the end of the graphical installer. Among other things, it means the end of support for several languages: Indic scripts, Thai, Amharic, and all RTL languages. Option 1: fix GTK+ DirectFB support Until now, we always found some good wills who volunteered to fix GTK+ so that g-i worked again. I d like to thank Attilio Fiandrotti and Sven Neumann for their past work, but unfortunately it seems they have better things to do now. If someone takes over their work and hacks on GTK+ to get it to work correctly again on DirectFB, we will be able to go on this way at least for the squeeze release. This requires someone with serious DirectFB knowledge who will not be afraid to dig into the GDK internals. Option 2: switch to X11 If GTK+ doesn t work on DirectFB, there is another plan, but it needs to happen fast. It should be possible to make the installer work on X11. This has the advantage that we know X11 works fine and is maintained in the long term, and so does the X11 GTK+ backend. This has also the drawback to make the installation media slightly larger. This requires quite some work on udebs:

• Packaging of a number of libraries: at least libx11, libxi, libxext, libxrender, libxft, libdrm, libgcrypt, libpciaccess, libpixman, libxau, libxfont, libudev
• Maybe a few extras: libxcursor and dmz-cursor-theme (to have a nice cursor), libxrandr (to be able to select the installation resolution), libthai (for Thai language support)
• Packaging of the X server: xorg-server, xserver-xorg-video-fbdev
• Changes in the gtk+2.0 configure scripts so that other X11 extensions can be explicitly disabled
• Rework of udebs for cairo, pango1.0 and gtk+2.0 so that they are built against X11
• Rebuild the installer against the X11 GTK+ version
• Changes in the installer startup scripts: start the X server, configure the keyboard the X11 way, etc.

It looks like a lot, but there s nothing complicated in it. Anyone familiar enough with Debian can do this, with a little support from the maintainers of said packages. So this could well be you. Assuming you re interested in keeping g-i alive. Alternatives Other possibilities to support complex languages include:

• Use festival to ask questions and voice recognition software for the answers (we offer no guarantees for accidental wiping of your hard drive).
• Boot a live OS in a virtual machine and ask the user to run Google translation on the text (unfortunately we d need to ask in English).
• Render PNGs of all questions that could be asked and display them directly using DirectFB (requires migrating to Blu-ray by default for installation media).
• Port the installer to use the GTK+ Win32 port and pre-seed all the debconf questions before rebooting.
• Come on, be creative.

Linux.conf.au 2010 has come to an end and I am looking back at an intense week of conferencing. A big shout out to the organisers for their excellent work. I think LCA (as well as DebConf) just keeps getting better every year. This does not at all discredit previous organisers, because they were the best at their times and then passed on the wisdom and experience to help make it even better in the following year. The week started off with the DistroSummit, which Fabio and I organised. Slides are forthcoming, as I failed to get them off the speakers right after their talks it s interesting how stress levels and adrenaline can cause one to forget the most obvious things. This is where experience comes in. I ll be there again next year, I hope, to do things better. The theme of the day was cross-distro collaboration, and we started the day a little bit on the Debian-side with Lucas Nussbaum telling us about quality assurance in Debian, alongside an overview of available resources. We hoped to give people from other distros pointers, and solicit feedback that would enable us to tie quality assurance closer together. Next up was Bdale Garbee who talked about the status of the Linux Standard Base. While I am really interested in such standardisation efforts, I realised during his talks that I had considerable difficulties paying attention because as organiser of the conference, I had all sorts of other things occupying my thoughts. I proceeded to tell the audience the room was mostly filled throughout the day with an estimated 40 50 folks, and I d say about half of them stayed throughout, while the other half came in and left the room between talks. I could not get the projector to work with my laptop after the upgrade to Kernel Mode Setting, and thus used the whiteboard to give a brief introduction to vcs-pkg.org, talk about the current state of affairs, summarise the trends in discussions around patch management and collaboration, give an outlook of what s up next, and solicit some discussion. Sadly, just like during Bdale s talk, I found myself worrying over the organisation of the day, rather than actually taking in most of the discussion. Fortunately, others have written about the most important points, so I defer to them. Michael Homer then told us about GoboLinux s Aliens system, which is a way to integrate domain-specific packages with distro-specific package maintenance e.g. how to get APT to handle CPAN directly, or how to let YUM manage Python packages. The ensuing discussion was interesting, and we carried it over to the next slot, because Scott, the next speaker, was stuck in traffic. To summarise briefly: scripting languages have a lot of NIH-style solutions because it works for them, but these are a nightmare to distro packagers. One symptom of the status quo is that complex software packages like Zimbra are forced to distribute all required components in their installation packages, which make distro packaging, quality assurance, and security support even harder. I don t think we found a solution, other than the need for further standardisation (like the LSB), but the road seems to be a long and windy one. Laszlo Peter introduced the audience to SourceJuicer, a new build system used by OpenSolaris. The idea is that contributors submit packages via a web interface, kicking off a workflow incorporating discussion and vetting, and only after changes have been signed-off are packages forwarded to auto-builders and eventually end up in the package repository. This is very similar to upload ideas I ve had a while ago, which I ve started to (finally) implement. Unfortunately, SourceJuicer seems very specific to OpenSolaris, as well as non-modular, so that I probably won t be able to reuse e.g. the web interface on top of a Debian-specific package builder. After the break, Dustin Kirkland stepped up to tell us about his user experience of Launchpad. Unfortunately, I found his talk a bit too enthusiastic. Launchpad undoubtedly has some very cool features and ideas, but it s just one of the available solutions. The dicussion of Launchpad also dominated the next talk, in which Lucas Nussbaum told us about the Debian-Ubuntu relationship. While his presentation showed that the relationship was improving (Matt Zimmerman made the point that there are rather many relationships, rather than one relationship), I was a bit disturbed by the comments of Launchpad developers in the room, ranging from Debian is declining anyway to Just use Launchpad if you want to collaborate with others and not go down . There was a slight aura of arrogance in their comments which tainted my experience of the otherwise constructive discussions of the day. Overall I had a great time. Debian and Ubuntu made up the vast majority of attendants, with only a handful of representatives from other distros present. I wonder why that would be. One reason might be that around 70% of LCA attendants declared themselves Debian or Ubuntu users, and so there weren t many other distros around. Another might be that I still haven t spread the word enough. Let s hope to do better next year! Thanks to all the speakers. We may have organised the day, but you made it happen and interesting! Slides and recordings of the talks will be linked from the archived website when they become available (yes, the archive page does not exist yet either).

Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

Kiwis have to be one of the cutest birds of all time. A bit chubby and clumsy looking, they are (to me, at least), walking, breathing icon of furry cuteness. Truth be told, I did not see one live in action during my recent trip to New Zealand, but I did see a Weka bird which is pretty similar. (Micah and I just consulted the Internets and agreed that we did in fact see cherubic Kiwi not a Weka. In fact, Micah almost ran one over on the west coast of the southern island but his quick reflexes born from years of saving servers while typing saved the bird. So as you can tell by now I finally got to go to New Zealand for a few weeks, even able to travel the south island before attending THE Linux conference of the region, LCA where I gave a talk (video to be posted when available). I jumped at the opportunity and was thrilled to find out that I could actually spend some time traveling around before the intense week long conference. So on January 5th I headed down with Micah to what I have found out is one of the windiest cities on earth ( Windy Wellington ) for a few days before heading to the south island to do a loop on the northern half of the island. I wanted to conquer the mountains made famous by a certain set of movies, but last semester was all about sitting in front of the computer, a sort of agonizing life of the mind, which did not prepare me physically for mountain trekking or as it call it there, tramping. So we decided to stick close to the coast (with one transalpine train that serenaded us through some awesome mountain passes) and hike along the coast, snorkel and swim, and kayak. After Andrew showed us around Wellington, we headed to the sea town of Kaikoura brimming with sea life, such as seals, dolphins, and birds. The two highlights there were our snorkeling trip and a hike along the peninsula. Originally we were going to go diving but I arrived to NZ with a head cold so we opted for the sinus friendlier version and snorkeled in the massive kelp forest, which was strikingly beautiful (I am used to tropical reefs and waters). There happened to be a lot of seals and given their curious nature, they would dart over right next to you and play. One seal I called him the twirler was chubby and mellow and twirled next to me for a long while. The lady seals were sleeker and faster and liked to dive deep down and the zoom up and surprise you. As someone who has spent a lot of time underwater, I found it fun and weird to be with animals that pay attention to you given that most of the sea life ignores you. The hike in Kaikoura was fantastic as well. You go high on a bluff and stare down at this water sparkling with the most beautiful blue hues brought out even more majestically by the white rocks. If I were to go back I would hike along the water and up above on the bluff. After a brief stopover in Christchurch to visit a friend, we took the transalpine train (across Arthur s pass) which was superbly beautiful and arrived on the west coast whose seas are far more rough, rocky, andtemperamental than on the east coast. The vegetation is lush as lush can be and you get the feeling that dinosaurs would have been a happy lot in these parts. The cool part about this area are the many rivers that feed into the ocean (we spent an afternoon swimming and exploring the caves in one) and then what are called the pancake rocks, which are odd geological creatures that really amaze. We then made our way to the Marlborough Sounds area, which includes the city of Nelson (apparently the sunniest in New Zealand) as well as many olive and grape vineyards in outlying areas. We spent some time in the Alpine lakes region hiking but more of the time on the coast. The highlight for me and it is a place I would love to go back to is the Abel Tasman National Park. We spent time hiking and kayaking there and you can even hike down the coast for 5-6 days (there are excellent camping facilities along the way). The coast is simply majestic with alpine like forest conditions (unfortunately a cool old tree whose name I can t remember is no longer common). This forest is situated along the most stunning waters, an electric but totally clear turquoise blue deceivingly inviting because the water was quite cold (but not as cold as the Oregon coast over the summer, which I went swimming in only once after weeks of bike travel). Along with the blue, parts of the coastal waters were a stunning clear green that I have never seen despite my many sea travels. If you ever plan on going to the South Island, I would not miss this area and might even try to spend a few days or more hiking the coastal trails and listening to the cool-as/sweet as birds, one of which has double vocal cords so it sings what sounds to be like totally electronic bird calls. We returned via the same ferry a massive 7 story ship from Picton to Wellington but the conditions were far far worse during our return trip. When we got out of the sounds, we hit the Cook Straight, notorious for being rough and tumble. And indeed, once we hit the waves, I felt like I was no longer in a boat but amusement park ride, the bow of the ship thrown high only to fall hard on upon the waves. It was sort of fun or fun for about 10 minutes until people, most especially kids, started yaking all over the place. It was really the most flagrant yakfest I have ever experienced (I mean it is a 7 story ferry, you can fit a lot of people on that boat) and that made the sail particularly difficult. I have pretty strong sea legs, never once getting sick sick during the year I spent at sea but massive yaking will bring out the sea sick feeling in even the hardiest of sea souls and I was thrilled to arrive in Wellington. Wellington is the only large city I spent any considerable time in and it is a pretty awesome one. The city center area is flat and by the water, with a magnificent area filled with museums, the national library, parks, breweries, and piers where kids like to jump off high things. The botanical gardens were the most beautiful I have been to and since I am a flower nut, I was in high heaven. In this area there are a ridiculous number of great coffee shops (NYC has a thing or two to learn as we don t have enough, I suspect it has something to do with insane real estate prices). The city is surrounded by hills populated by houses, some of the precipitously perched on cliffs that require lifts to get to! It was a wonderful home base for what was a sweet as conference (as they would say down there). And I hope to write about it sometime soon.

A short while ago I bought a new device, a HP Mini 5101. Basically a slightly oversized pocket calculator, but exactly what I wanted: It is painful to do anything real on it, but it can be used if there is really no better way. And this is exactly what I want to take with me on the vacation starting soon. A device that ensures I will not use it for more than the emergency case and as backup storage for pictures I take. This little thing has a tiny 10.1 (non-glare, I want it painful but even there is a limit. Idiot mirrors, brrr) TFT (1366x768), an Atom N280 with 1.66GHz, 2G RAM, a 160Gb disc, 3 usb ports, wifi, gigabit lan, bluetooth and a 3G module. It ships with one of those pain adventures with which the seller shows you how much they hate you (Windows XP), but that did only boot twice yet. Once to check everything works, for the second read on. It weights 1.3kg and HP imagines some 8 and a half hour runtime with the 6-cell battery. ACPI and powertop predict between 7 and 14hours, depending on my workload and probably the phase of the moon. But 7 will do nicely. Of course I put a Debian on this device. It runs all well. As it has no optical drive its either usbboot or netboot and off it goes. Easy install, only need to remember installing the broadcom-sta packages and building the module for the kernel to get wifi. Otherwise its a simple install and the stuff works out of the box. Except for one thing. I can not get this goddamn 3G module to work. It works fine in Windows, confirming this was the second time I did boot this abomination of a bad joke. When using that HP manager thingie for 3G, its all fine and works. When you then reboot into Linux - it also works. Annoying. It is one of those Qualcomm Gobi USB chipsets and to function it needs it firmware transferred over. Fine. Using google one can easily find gobiloader, which is meant to do that. Just get the firmware from Windows and let gobiloader do the rest. Except - it does not work. Everything I can find tells me it should, ie. various posts on various places on the net, the usbids the device has when without firmware and after this windows crap put firmware into it, everything looks exactly like it should. Yet, gobi_loader simply hangs itself right in the first while (1) loop, where it wants to send the first real data after the set of 3 magics it send before. The write never times out, the firmware never gets into the device, its not usable. Argh. Dear lazyweb, anyone out there with an idea? I tested various firmwares (the one I found in Windows, the one you can find at vendors download page, various of the 10 different you find in each), even let it run for some while before interrupting. Unfortunately I do not have enough clue in this area to debug what is happening here, nor to fix this up myself.

Of course, one would expect me to react to this post. Apparently, from my cumulated experience, joking about funny translations is a very widespread game among german-speaking developers (of course, as everybody knows, us French do translate everissing and no single Frainche DiDi will make such fun abaouttel10n wouhorke, aha). I'd say: more generally widespread among people .who jargonize about computing so often in their daily work that they often forget that not everybody, even in a country where people are as clever about English as German/Austrian/Swiss folks are (we all know that 100% population in these places speak a very perfect English) do understand what "downgrade" means. Seriously, "funny" translations are our (translators) daily nightmare. We hate them because we know people hate us (or make jokes about our work) when they face them. The example taken by Patrick is a nice case as "downgrade" is tricky for all of us. For instance, French translators have chosen "revenir la version pr c dente" as "bring back to former version". This is about the only "right" way to say what's being done ("d grader" is another option but that has a negative connotation). Of course, I often *hear* people (incl. me) say "downgrader" which is an horrible neologism....and of course doesn't say anything to people who are clueless in English. English is, unfortunately, often a very compact language. This is our daily pain. So, as German translation of "to downgrade", what do *you* propose, Patrick? "Downgradieren"? Tricky, eh? Taken from APT for "downgrade":

• German: deaktualizieren
• French: revenir la version pr c dente
• Spanish: desactualizar
• Italian: retrocedere
• Danish: nedgraderingen (hope this is the inifitive, just guessing)
• Dutch: degraderen
• etc.

Hint: you can see this with "apt-get source aptitude" and look in po/ for you favorite language. That sounds funny to you? Fine. But as usual in free software, please report.....and patches welcome...

In desperate need to organize my collection of scientific papers, I had a look at various tools which could help me organizing them. Probably one of the best out there is Mendeley. Mendeley seems to be a very good tool to keep your massive collection of pdfs under control. Unfortunately a very basic function, namely looking up a newly imported paper in Google Scholar to get attributes like: Authors, Year, etc. right, is bundled with a Mendeley account. I guess that s their way of forcing the user to participate to their community stuff, since without the Google Scholar lookup Mendeley is pretty useless unless you want to fill all the attributes manually. So I decided to write my own tool to make the lookup. Unfortunately Google does not really want to give away that precious data: they don t provide an API and even block certain User-Agents from accessing the page. Then, there is also the problem of scraping the results page to get the right data. The first problem can be trivially solved by setting a common User-Agent string, the second one can be elegantly circumvented by using the bibtex files provided in the search results. The bibtex entries are however only showed if you enabled them in the settings, which are stored in a cookie. After a few tries, I figured that the CF attribute (citation format?) controls which bibliography format should be offered in the results page and CF=4 corresponds to bibtex. Generating a fake cookie is easy, but you have to know what must be included. In this case it looks like a 16 digit hex as ID and the CF attribute is sufficient. The ID is probably supposed to be your id, but a randomly generated one also works like a charm. The resulting cookie looks like this: GSP=ID=762a112b5c765732:CF=4 All you have to do now is to query Google Scholar using the user string and the cookie:

...
# fake google id (looks like it is a 16 elements hex)
google_id = hashlib.md5(str(random.random())).hexdigest()[:16]
GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL =  http://scholar.google.com 
HEADERS =  User-Agent  :  Mozilla/5.0 ,
         Cookie  :  GSP=ID=%s:CF=4  % google_id  
def query(searchstr):
     "Return a list of bibtex items. " 
    searchstr =  /scholar?q= +urllib2.quote(searchstr)
    url = GOOGLE_SCHOLAR_URL + searchstr
    request = urllib2.Request(url, headers=HEADERS)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    html = response.read()
    # grab the bibtex links
     

And Google Scholar will offer you links to the bibtex files of the results. Getting those links is easy since they all start with "/scholar.bib". Just search for those and download the targets. The complete code is available on github. It can be used as a python library or a standalone application, you just call it like this: gscolar "some author or title" and it will print the first ten results in bibtex to stdout.

Knowing full well that it will cause many of my readers to tut and roll their eyes at me I derive slight pleasure from confessing that I have now eaten at McDonalds on 6 continents. To make it worse I only did so in Asia and Australia so I could say I had.

It does lead me into a slightly more valid ramble. I'm not particularly bothered about eating on my own. I like food (even if I'm picky about what I like), but I prefer it with company. This means I'm not particularly great about being organised to cook complicated things when I'm on my own; largely the whole thing just turns into dealing with hunger. It also mean I'm bad at finding nice places to eat out while travelling. Which, when you're travelling for a month to some interesting places, is a bit of a bugger. I've got a bit better at actually going to nice places, and trying not to bolt my food into me so I can get out ASAP but instead enjoy it. A book helps. Also places that aren't quite as busy (which if you have no agenda is nicely achieved by letting your body clock desync from the world around you). Unfortunately I didn't really do so until after Hong Kong. Guess I'll just have to go back at some point...

(More on my travels at some point, maybe. I've started the tortuous journey home now.)

Coming to New Zealand for an extended period of time, I figured it would make sense to purchase a prepay mobile plan to make it easier to mix with locals. Not knowing better, I went with Vodafone, which I whole-heartedly regret: their website is a massive pain in the ass, their price plans completely over the top, and their customer service representative incompetent and unfriendly. My latest experience eclipsed all previous encounters, and makes me want to tell you about it: Between all the obscure add-ons Vodafone threw at me when I bought this SIM card, two weeks ago I couldn t figure out how my balance had decreased from $30 to $0 when I rarely ever made calls. I wrote an e-mail to their customer service hotline, and it took them a week to get back to me, with the following text:

Due to being a Prepay Customer, unfortunately usage details are not available as per terms and conditions. I have although checked your usage and can confirm that all charges are correct.

Obviously, I wasn t going to accept this claim of omniscience, so when last weekend, $20 disappeared over the course of a day, that was the catalyst for me to reopen the ticket and reply along the lines of:

Only I know when I used my phone and thus only I can determine whether the charges are correct. Please show the full records to me, or else

This seemed to convince the representative, and 8 messages and 11 days after my initial request, I was told I could request the records at $5/30 records. Yes, you read that right: they wanted to charge me to view the records. I thus replied:

I am NOT willing to pay for that. If you are unable to comply with my desire for transparency, then I shall terminate the contract and make sure to inform the media as well as the consumer institute of this conduct. As stated previously, I shall also consult with a lawyer. Charging consumers to view data that is obviously available is a strong indication that you do not want me to see it. I can t imaging why this would be the case other than the data being inconsistent with reality.

That worked, and I finally got an Excel sheet with my usage data, which allowed me to track down the depletion of my account: to lure customers in, they promise free calls to other Vodafone numbers for the first four weekends. There are three problems with that though:

1. Having purchased my card on Saturday afternoon, I was annoyed to find out that the remaining 34 hours of that weekend would be counted as a whole weekend.
2. They don t provide a way by which to find out whether a given number actually belongs to Vodafone or not. The 021 prefix is not enough of an indication.
3. They don t actually tell you anywhere but the aforementioned horrific website that the addon has expired.

So thanks, Vodafone. You ve lost a customer, who should have gone with 2degrees in the first place, who have much lower rates, even though their data coverage doesn t seem as good. I don t need data anyway. I ll still insist on Vodafone providing the data in a Free format. You can find more information about NZ mobile phone providers on the LCA2010 wiki page. NP: Age Pryor: Shank s Pony