I'm pleased to say that a usable version of shim is now available for download. As I discussed here, this is intended for distributions that want to support secure boot but don't want to deal with Microsoft. To use it, rename shim.efi to bootx64.efi and put it in /EFI/BOOT on your UEFI install media. Drop MokManager.efi in there as well. Finally, make sure your bootloader binary is called grubx64.efi and put it in the same directory.

Now generate a certificate and put the public half as a binary DER file somewhere on your install media. On boot, the end-user will be prompted with a 10-second countdown and a menu. Choose "Enroll key from disk" and then browse the filesystem to select the key and follow the enrolment prompts. Any bootloader signed with that key will then be trusted by shim, so you probably want to make sure that your grubx64.efi image is signed with it.

If you want, you're then free to impose any level of additional signing restrictions - it's entirely possible to use this signing as the basis of a complete chain of trust, including kernel lockdowns and signed module loading. However, since the end-user has explicitly indicated that they trust your code, you're under no obligation to do so. You should make it clear to your users what level of trust they'll be able to place in their system after installing your key, if only to allow them to make an informed decision about whether they want to or not.

This binary does not contain any built-in distribution certificates. It does contain a certificate that was generated at build time and used to sign MokManager - you'll need to accept my assurance that the private key was deleted immediately after the build was completed. Other than that, it will only trust any keys that are either present in the system db or installed by the end user.

A couple of final notes: As of 17:00 EST today, I am officially (rather than merely effectively) no longer employed by Red Hat, and this binary is being provided by me rather than them, so don't ask them questions about it. Special thanks to everyone at Suse who came up with the MOK concept and did most of the implementation work - without them, this would have been impossible. Thanks also to Peter Jones for his work on debugging and writing a signing tool, and everyone else at Red Hat who contributed valuable review feedback.

comments

Have you ever wondered one of those?

• How does this plumbing behind GNOME actually work?
• What are all these processes on my system here for?
• How can I manage user permissions for system actions?
• How can I override or force user configurations?
• How do I configure GDM?
• What can I do with NetworkManager?

For those who weren t at Mini-DebConf Paris 2012 last week, let me share here again the slides:

Large deployment of GNOME from the administrator s perspective

These questions, and many others, will find the beginning of an answer here. At the very least, I hope to show people leads on where to find relevant information for their needs about administrating GNOME systems.

After seeing some book descriptions recently on planet debian, let me add some short recommendation, too. Almost everyone has heard about Gulliver's Travels already, so usually only very cursory. For example: did you know the book describes 4 journeys and not only the travel to Lilliput? Given how influential the book has been, that is even more suprising. Words like "endian" or "yahoo" originate from it. My favorite is the third travel, though, especially the acadamy of Lagado, from which I want to share two gems: " His lordship added, 'That he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go.' He only desired me to observe a ruined building, upon the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account: 'That he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a level.' He said, 'that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.' " "I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out. At my entrance, he called aloud to me, 'not to disturb his webs.' He lamented 'the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silkworms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave, as well as spin.' And he proposed further, 'that by employing spiders, the charge of dyeing silks should be wholly saved;' whereof I was fully convinced, when he showed me a vast number of flies most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us 'that the webs would take a tincture from them; and as he had them of all hues, he hoped to fit everybody s fancy, as soon as he could find proper food for the flies, of certain gums, oils, and other glutinous matter, to give a strength and consistence to the threads.'"

About a month and a half ago, I got an email from someone studying at the HELMo institute for higher eduction in Li ge, Belgium, inviting me to talk at their conference which was held today. In the email, they asked me to talk about "Debian and Open Source", which is such a wide subject that I could talk about it all day; and then they gave me 20 minutes to do it. So I picked "Debian", and focused a bit more on that, only to find out when I saw their schedule that they'd put "Open Source" there instead. Hrm. Oh well. The talk itself went pretty good. I believe I managed a good balance between introducing Debian to those who've not heard of it before, and explaining to those who have, how this Debian thing works (or is supposed to work). The fact that the audience consisted of first- and second-year IT students made this easier (in case you were wondering: the third-year students, who're supposed to graduate at the end of this eyar, organized the thing). I got some interesting questions afterwards (which is always a good sign), and only positive comments as well (which is even better). After me, Lionel Dricot held a talk which was titled "Pirate Party", but which could be summarized as his personal history into the open source world, followed by some parallels between the open source world and the pirate party.That, too, was an interesting talk, even if I'm not sure I'd vote for the pirate party (which isn't even possible in Mechelen, but ignoring that). All in all, a nice use of my time.

Review: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Publisher:	HarperTorch
Copyright:	July 2001
Printing:	May 2002
ISBN:	0-380-78903-5
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	588

At the start of American Gods, Shadow is in prison. He's done three years of a sentence of six and is about to get released on parole. He has a wife and a job waiting for him and every hope of getting back to a good life. None of that happens. The day he's released, he finds out his wife died in a car accident. The job is gone too; it was an offer from his best friend, who died in the same accident. Numb, an ex-con, with no job prospects, he's recruited by a strange man named Wednesday, with the help of a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, to drive Wednesday around the country, run errands for him, hurt people if absolutely necessary, and hold his vigil if he dies. And that's how Shadow is drawn into the conflict between old gods and young, between the gods that immigrants brought to America from the old world and the flashy new gods of technology and media that America is creating for itself. With native American gods and cultural legends watching around the edges. I first read American Gods shortly after it came out and before I started writing reviews, so this is a re-read. It's a book I'm glad I re-read before reviewing. The first time I read it, I was thoroughly engrossed and thought it was excellent. This time, I was entertained, but surprised at how slowly it moved, how disconnected it sometimes felt, and how little substance there was to the plot. Reading American Gods involves spending lots of time with Shadow, and I think one's reactions to this book will vary a lot based on how much one likes him as a character. Shadow is very withdrawn, very detached from the world, and quietly matter-of-fact in how he goes through his life. He's been through some major shocks and has been severed fairly thoroughly from society by three years in prison, and he doesn't reconnect easily. To some readers, such as myself, this comes across as taciturn competence and quiet observation, two things that I greatly enjoy reading about. I liked Shadow, liked reading between the lines for hints at his feelings, and sympathized a lot with his emotional state. But I can easily see an alternative reading that makes him a cipher or, worse, a blank spot in the book into which the reader has to insert themselves. One has to work at seeing Shadow's character and finding some sympathy for the degree to which he stays separate from the world. American Gods does have a plot, but it's the sort of plot that allows for endless digressions, background stories, and side meetings. In that, it reminded me less of Gaiman's other novels and more of several arcs of Sandman. I think it's worthwhile to think of this less as a novel and more as an extended ramble through the world as Gaiman sees it, full of mythology, stories, quirky people understanding the world in their own ways, and upwellings of the sacred and significant in the most unexpected of places. For example, the holy places of America in American Gods, analogous to the multiple small sacred places and old ruins in Europe, are roadside attractions, via a line of argument that makes much more sense than it has any right to and demonstrates a canny understanding of the expression of American entrepreneurial culture. As with much Gaiman, reading with Wikipedia or another mythological resource at hand is a good idea. Even if you have a good general knowledge of the most common mythology studied in the US, you probably won't recognize many of the figures Gaiman draws on: Czernobog, for example, or Wisakedjak. Part of the fun of this book is seeing Gaiman humanize them and embed them in modern culture and modern concerns while retaining their mythological edge and strangeness. As any reader of Sandman can tell you, this is one of Gaiman's strengths as a writer, and he does it well here. The bits with the undertakers Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jacquel (Thoth and Anubis) are absolutely brilliant and probably the best sections of the book (although Sam's exchange with the Men in Black is a strong contender).

"Back in my day, we had it all set up. You lined up when you died, and you'd answer for your evil deeds and for your good deeds, and if your evil deeds outweighed a feather, we'd feed your soul and your heart to Ammet, the Eater of Souls." "He must have eaten a lot of people." "Not as many as you'd think. It was a really heavy feather. We had it made special. You had to be pretty damn evil to tip the scales on that baby."

Like so much of Gaiman's work, this is the sort of book that contributed a half-dozen quotes to my quote file during my first reading. Gaiman always impresses me by not only managing to portray gods as human without losing the numinous edge, but sustaining that portrayal through very extended contact with the same god. And despite the interlude with the undertakers, the long interlude in small-town life in Lakeside, and the numerous other digressions and meanderings of a book that's not in much of a hurry to get anywhere, there is a plot and a definite conclusion, and Gaiman has some interesting twists in store at the end of that road. There's a lot of philosophical currents going on under the surface, not all of which cohere, but Gaiman does pull a lot of them together. The resolution can be a bit of an anticlimax, but I think it's a fitting one that's true to the nature of the story. I didn't enjoy this as much on the second reading as I did on the first. It didn't feel quite as coherent as I'd remembered it, and the meandering pace occasionally made the story feel stretched. But I do like Shadow, I love spending time in Gaiman's head and with his portrayals of deities, and American Gods is a treasure of great quotes. If you enjoy Gaiman's other work and aren't looking for a lot of plot and forward-moving energy, this is definitely recommended. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Emissaries from the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro

Series:	Andrea Cort #1
Publisher:	Eos
Copyright:	March 2008
ISBN:	0-06-144372-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	387

As a small child, Andrea Cort was a colonist on Bocai, part of a utopian project to create a mixed human and Bocaian community. Until, that is, all the members of the community woke up one day and started horrifically murdering each other for reasons that none of the survivors could ever explain. Now, she's protected from extradition by a life contract with the Diplomatic Corps and serves them as a special investigator. The scene of the investigation of this book is the strange habitat One One One. The habitat was created by the AIsource, an alliance of artificial intelligences now independent of their original creators. It's in deep space, far from any sun, and would have remained entirely unknown to the other inhabitants of the galaxy if the AIsource hadn't announced its presence. The choice to announce it was baffling, since it contains a sentient species entirely under the control of the AIsource, something that's against the shared rules of all the other species, but which they wouldn't have known about if the AIsource hadn't drawn their attention to it. After extensive negotiations, one unofficial human research group has been allowed access, and now two of the members of that group have been murdered. That's where Andrea comes in. This is Castro's first original solo novel, but he has a background in short fiction in the SF, fantasy, and horror genres and some previous collaborations and shared universe writing. The horror shows through a bit more than I'd personally prefer: the preface briefly describing Andrea's past would have been sufficient, but Castro goes back and shows it in horrific and gruesome detail as a flashback. His fight scenes are also strangely and disturbingly detailed. If you have a sensitive stomach, be aware that you may want to skim some parts of this. The overall construction of this novel, though, is not horror. It's an SF murder mystery, about halfway between a procedural and a noir detective story. Andrea does follow a coherent procedure and uses an investigative technique more sophisticated than stirring the pot and seeing what jumps out, making it not quite noir, but it has the noir tendency towards story progress via attacks on the detective and quite a lot of ongoing tension. It also involves quite a lot of setup; be aware going in that we get over a hundred pages of description of the various research group members, the details of the crimes, possible motives, and the details of the artificial habitat without a lot of forward progress on understanding the crime. Castro puts a lot of work into the design of the habitat despite leaving it mostly in the background. It could easily serve as the backdrop of a more typical Big Dumb Object SF novel. The habitable zone where the research team is and where all of Andrea's investigations take place is the effective "top" of the habitat, covered in dense foilage to which the native sentient species clings and crawls its entire life. Below is an effectively infinite fall into crushing acidic atmosphere. Castro managed to not set off my dislike of heights too badly, in part because he focuses more on Andrea's own dislike of heights rather than vividly describing the drop, but it's a constant presence throughout the novel and adds a persistant background tension. It also leads to some minor but neat clashes of perspective in conversations with the native species. For most of the book, I would have described Emissaries from the Dead as an enjoyable but not horribly original detective novel with a neat science fiction background. But there are several interesting ending twists that I won't spoil and some decisions that quite surprised me. They don't have a large effect on the plot of this book, but they make for a fascinating hook and setup for later books in the series (and I see there is a sequel). It's definitely not the sort of thing that you want spoiled before reading this book, so avoid reading blurbs and details about the sequel before reading this one. I wouldn't go out of my way to hunt down this book, but it's solid, enjoyable detective SF with a surprisingly good ending. I can see why it won the Philip K. Dick award (for best SF paperback original). Mildly recommended. Followed by The Third Claw of God. Rating: 7 out of 10

Finally, I've managed to update SUSE Studio images with Weblate to recently released 1.3. So you can now fetch there various images for your virtual machines or clouds. There is also new support for SUSE Cloud or OpenStack in SUSE Studio, so you can enjoy these as well. Within this version, I've upgraded the system to openSUSE 12.2 and included MTA in the image, so that you can send out registration emails. You can find more information about Weblate at http://weblate.org/.

Filed under: English Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Good news, everyone! So as of last Sunday, this works on all Linux archs in Debian unstable and gives you a modern version of upstart:

echo 'Yes, do as I say!'   apt-get -o DPkg::options=--force-remove-essential -y --force-yes install upstart

Thanks to the ifupdown, sysvinit, and udev maintainers for their cooperation in getting upstart support in place; to the Debian release team for accomodating the late changes needed for upstart to be supported in wheezy; and to Scott for his past maintenance of upstart in Debian. Benchmarking One of the consequences is that it's now possible to do meaningful head-to-head comparisons of boot speed between sysvinit (with startpar), upstart, and systemd. At one time or another people have tested systemd vs. sysvinit when using bash as /bin/sh, and upstart vs. sysvinit, and systemd vs. sysvinit+startpar, and there are plenty of bootcharts floating around showing results of one init system or another on one distro or another, but I'm not aware of anyone having done a real, fair comparison of the three solutions, changing nothing but the init system. I've done some initial comparisons in a barebones sid VM, and the results are definitely interesting. Sysvinit with startpar (the default in Debian) can boot a stock sid install, with no added services, in somewhere between 3.37 and 3.42 seconds (three runs). That's not a whole lot, but on the other hand this is a system with a single filesystem and no interesting services yet. Is this really as fast as we can boot? No, even this minimal system can boot faster. Testing with upstart shows that upstart can do the same job in between 3.03 and 3.19 seconds (n=3, mean=3.09). This confirms what we'd already seen in Ubuntu, that it makes a difference to boot speed to have filesystem mounting handled by an integrated process that understands the whole system instead of as a group of serialized shell scripts. What about systemd? The same test gives a boot time between 2.32 and 2.85 seconds (n=4, mean=2.48). Interesting; what would make systemd faster than upstart in sid? Well, a quick look at the system shows one possible contributing factor: the rsyslog package in Debian has a systemd unit file, but not an upstart job file. Dropping in the /etc/init/rsyslog.conf from Ubuntu has a noticeable impact, and brings the upstart boot time down nearer to that of systemd (2.78-3.03s, n=5, mean=2.92). Besides telling me that it's time to start spamming Debian maintainers with wishlist bugs asking them to include upstart jobs in their packages, this suggests that the remaining difference in boot time may be due to the outstanding init scripts in rcS.d that are made built-in no-ops by systemd but not (yet) by upstart in Debian (e.g., hwclock, hostname, udev-mtab). (In Ubuntu, /etc/rcS.d has long since been emptied out in favor of upstart jobs in the common case, since the time it takes to get to runlevel=2 is definitely a major issue for boot speed and boot parallelization.) It also gives the lie to the claim that's been made in various places that spawning shells is a major bottleneck for upstart vs. systemd. More study is certainly needed to confirm this, but at least this naive first test suggests that in spite of the purported benefits of hard-coding boot-time policies in C code, upstart with its default degree of runtime configurability is at least in the ballpark of systemd. Indeed, when OpenSuSE switched from upstart to systemd, it seems that something else in the stack managed to nullify any benefit from improving the boot-time performance of apparmor. Contrary to what some would have you believe, systemd is not some kind of silver bullet for boot speed. Upstart, with its boot-time flexibility and its long history of real-world testing in Ubuntu, is a formidable competitor to systemd in the boot speed department - and a solid solution to the many longstanding boot-time ordering bugs in Debian, which still affect users of sysvinit. I've published the bootcharts for the above tests here. Between the fact that Debian's bootchart package logs by default to /var/log/bootchart.tgz (thus overwriting on every boot) and the fact that these tests are in a VM, I haven't bothered to include the raw data, just the bootcharts themselves. The interested reader can probably generate more interesting boot charts of their own anyway - in particular, it will be interesting to see how the different init systems perform with more complicated filesystem layouts, or when booting a less trivial set of services. Other musings The boot charts have been created with the bootchart package rather than with bootchart2. For one thing, it turns out that bootchart2 includes systemd units, not init scripts; so when replacing bootchart with bootchart2, the non-matching init script is left behind and systemd in particular gets terribly confused. This is now reported as Bug #694403. In an amusing twist, while I was experimenting with bootchart2, I also noticed that having systemd installed would slow down booting with other init systems, because systemd installs udev rules which take a noticeable amount of time to run a helper command at boot even though the helper should be a no-op. So if you're doing boot speed testing of other init systems, be sure you don't have systemd on the system at the time!

Julian Treasure gave an informative TED talk about The 4 Ways Sound Affects US [1]. Among other things he claims that open plan offices reduce productivity by 66%! He suggests that people who work in such offices wear headphones and play bird-songs. Naked Capitalism has an interesting interview between John Cusack and Jonathan Turley about how the US government policy of killing US citizens without trial demonstrates the failure of their political system [2]. Washington s blog has an interesting article on the economy in Iceland [3]. Allowing the insolvent banks to go bankrupt was the best thing that they have ever done for their economy. Clay Shirky wrote an insightful article about the social environment of mailing lists and ways to limit flame-wars [4]. ZRep is an interesting program that mirrors ZFS filesystems via regular snapshots and send/recv operations [5]. It seems that it could offer similar benefits to DRBD but at the file level and with greater reliability. James Lockyer gave a movingTEDx talk about his work in providing a legal defence for the wrongly convicted [6]. This has included overturning convictions after as much as half a century in which the falsely accused had already served a life sentence. Nathan Myers wrote an epic polemic about US government policy since 9-11 [7]. It s good to see that some Americans realise it s wrong. There is an insightful TED blog post about TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi who has brain cancer [8]. Apparently he had some problems with medical records in proprietary formats which made it difficult to get experts to properly assess his condition. Open document standards can be a matter of life and death and should be mandated by federal law. Paul Wayper wrote an interesting and amusing post about Emotional Computing which compares the strategies of Apple, MS, and the FOSS community among other things [9]. Kevin Allocca of Youtube gave an insightful TED talk about why videos go viral [10]. Jason Fried gave an interesting TED talk Why Work Doesn t Happen at Work [11]. His main issues are distraction and wasted time in meetings. He gives some good ideas for how to improve productivity. But they can also be used for sabotage. If someone doesn t like their employer then they could call for meetings, incite managers to call meetings, and book meetings so that they don t follow each other and thus waste more of the day (EG meetings at 1PM and 3PM instead of having the second meeting when the first finishes). Shyam Sankar gave an interesting TED talk about human computer cooperation [12]. He describes the success of human-computer partnerships in winning chess tournaments, protein folding, and other computational challenges. It seems that the limit for many types of computation will be the ability to get people and computers to work together efficiently. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting and amusing article for Locus Magazine about some of the failings of modern sci-fi movies [13]. He is mainly concerned with pointless movies that get the science and technology aspects wrong and the way that the blockbuster budget process drives the development of such movies. Of course there are many other things wrong with sci-fi movies such as the fact that most of them are totally implausible (EG aliens who look like humans). The TED blog has an interesting interview with Catarina Mota about hacker spaces and open hardware [14]. Sociological Images has an interesting article about sporting behaviour [15]. They link to a very funny youtube video of a US high school football team who make the other team believe that they aren t playing until they win [16]

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/julian_treasure_the_4_ways_sound_affects_us.html
• [2] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/08/john-cusack-jonathan-turley-on-obamas-constitution.html
• [3] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/08/top-economists-iceland-did-it-right-everyone-else-is-doing-it-wrong.html
• [4] http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_user.html
• [5] http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/zrep/
• [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k22MJpgTUiM
• [7] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=434
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/9zzsg4s
• [9] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2012/09/17
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/kevin_allocca_why_videos_go_viral.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/shyam_sankar_the_rise_of_human_computer_cooperation.html
• [13] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/09/cory-doctorow-why-science-fiction-movies-drive-me-nuts/
• [14] http://blog.ted.com/2012/09/21/tinker-tailor-solderer-fellows-friday-with-catarina-mota/
• [15] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/12/28/context-how-do-you-play-football/
• [16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UIdI8khMkw

Related posts:

1. Links April 2012 Karen Tse gave an interesting TED talk about how to...
2. Links March 2012 Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about...
3. Links November 2011 Forbes has an interesting article about crowd-sourcing by criminals and...

I recently worked on the following RC bugs:

• #677861 lftp: FTBFS[kfreebsd-i386]: error: conflicting declaration 'typedef __int32_t gl_intptr_t'
  I provided some analysis. By rebuilding lftp s configure script with recent autotools, this should be fixed.
• #676229 gnustep-make: should depend on a chosen version of gobjc, not just "gobjc"
  This issue was fixed by an upload, but not marked as closed. I tried to reproduce it and failed (as expected), so I closed the bug.
• #694091 bcrypt: Tries to load whole file into memory regardless of the size
  I patched bcrypt to use a window of 256K over the input and output file instead of loading it into memory. I also fixed the offset types so that it works with files > 2 GiB on 32-bit platforms.

I have to say that I find the BTS to be very hard to read from the perspective of a newcomer who wants to help squashing RC bugs, both from a technical and a social standpoint. As an example for the technical side: blocking bugs are very easy to miss, so innocent bugreports which seem actionable turn out to just wait for another bug with lots of discussion. Also, it seems like the best interface to the BTS for RC bugs is UDD, so RichiH s RC report was quite helpful. For the social side: Bugreports often are in a state in which it is not clear what the next course of action is, e.g. #634261 (the bug is not considered RC, but still has severity: grave) or #684633 (dropping from testing suggested but not clear whether a removal request has been filed or not). I m aware that this is very vague critic. I suppose what I am missing is a way in which we can make the list of RC bugs more actionable. When I am browsing through RC bugs, I often open bugreports and figure out that there s nothing I can do. Possibly a way to improve this situation is by letting people claim ownership of a bug and then filtering for un-owned bugs and those which have an owner but have not seen any activity for some period of time.

Review: Dune, by Frank Herbert

Series:	Dune #1
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	1965
Printing:	September 1990
ISBN:	0-441-17271-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	537

The Atreides family, distant cousins to the imperial family, have ruled the planet of Caladan for twenty generations. Caladan is a wet farming world, comfortable and pleasant, but not horribly important. But House Atreides is feuding with House Harkonnen, and, at the start of Dune, that feud maneuvers Duke Leto into giving up his holdings and moving his family to take possession of Arrakis. Arrakis is a desert planet, previously controlled by Baron Harkonnen. It is unrelentingly hostile, home to smugglers and dangerous local desert dwellers called Fremen. But it's also one of the most important planets in the galaxy, since it's the sole origin of the chemical called melange, or spice. Spice permits a limited form of prescience, which allows the navigators of the Spacing Guild to successfully steer ships across the interstellar void. Arrakis's production of spice is what makes interstellar travel, and therefore all of interstellar civilization, possible. Dune is the story of Paul Atreides, son and heir to Duke Leto Atreides. His mother, Lady Jessica, is one of the Bene Gesserit, a secretive order of women devoted to mental and physical discipline and to the long-term genetic improvement of mankind. He is not supposed to exist; Lady Jessica was supposed to only bear a daughter of Leto. But he may be something special, the long-sought (but also dangerous) Kwisatz Haderach who can unite male and female Bene Gesserit powers. The Bene Gesserit take great interest in him from the start of Dune. More surprisingly, so do the Fremen of Arrakis; from the moment he arrives there, he seems to be fulfilling prophecies of theirs that are partly, but not entirely, ones planted by the Bene Gesserit long ago. The feud with the Harkonnens, the unstable place of Arrakis in galactic politics, the dreams of the Fremen and the Imperial ecologist on Arrakis of terraforming, Bene Gesserit plans, Paul's abilities, and the legends of the Fremen all combine in a complex mix of politics, battle, and clashes of culture. Dune is an acknowledged SF masterpiece, one of the best-known classics of the genre. It's usually found in short lists of the best SF novels ever written. It spawned five sequels by Frank Herbert (about which more in a moment), as well as numerous additional sequels and prequels by Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert. It's been adopted for the screen twice, not to mention board games, video games, and numerous other projects. This is my second reading, the first in about twenty years, but the story was still immediately familiar from having seen films and having discussed and read about the universe. This is not science fiction in any strict sense. Dune is science fiction in the same way that Star Wars is: a futuristic gloss on top of power structures inspired by feudalism, heavily mixed with mysticism, mental powers, magic, and implausible but convenient science that creates the story effects the author wants. Both Bene Gesserit powers in general and Paul's abilities in particular are effectively magic. There is some hand-waving explanation of their ability to verbally control other people as taking advantage of specific pitches and intonations that people are vulnerable to, but it's effectively spell-casting (and is a direct inspiration for Jedi mind tricks). All of the mysticism (and there's quite a lot of it in Dune, including race memory, precognition, and even molecular transformation) resembles the Force from Star Wars more than anything scientific. Dune is epic fantasy told on a science fiction stage, complete with a young protagonist coming into his powers and dangerous and sometimes hostile mentors. What Dune gets right, and what has put it so high in the pantheon of great science fiction, is the world building. Herbert sets the story tens of thousands of years into the future of humanity and then effectively projects the feeling of deep history over everything in the novel. This is the kind of book that has appendices with more background information; more to the point, it's the kind of book where you may actually read them out of curiosity. Mankind has a vast interstellar empire (Herbert's universe, like Asimov's Foundation universe, admits no aliens) governed by a system akin to the early British monarchy. An emperor rules in balance with the Great Houses, who meet in a sort of parliament. But against both is a third force: the Spacing Guild, who maintains a monopoly over all interstellar travel. (And the Bene Gesserit form an underground, secretive fourth power base.) Herbert plays with vast swaths of time and great forces of history as well as very good epic fantasy and better than nearly all SF I've read. The detailed world-building is equally good. Nearly all of Dune takes place on the desert planet of Arrakis, which has a lovingly-described ecology and local culture built entirely around scarcity of water. (The details of that ecology are much of the plot and mystery of the book, so I won't spoil them further.) While I doubt the precise details hold up to close scientific scrutiny, this is an obvious precursor to the great ecological stories of later SF, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The details all feel right and hang together in satisfying ways, while also generating the great Sand Worms of Arrakis, a key ingredient in several of the best set pieces in the history of SF. This is the sort of book where the fascinating details and discoveries about the world do as much to keep one turning the pages as the plot, although the plot is also satisfyingly twisty and tense. Unfortunately, Dune doesn't get everything right. The amount of mysticism involved is a bit much, and at times the drug-trip mystical experiences of viewpoint characters turn into excessively purple prose and nearly incomprehensible descriptions. Those mystical experiences also involve race and genetic memory, a concept that's just scientific enough to be unbelievable. A few of the other scentific cheats are also rather blantant; for example, Herbert constructs an elaborate, artificial technology of shielding that seems designed primarily as an excuse to add sword combat to a futuristic story, and I have always struggled to suspend disbelief about the way lasers and shields interact in Dune. The Spacer Guild's monopoly on interstellar travel can be explained; their monopoly on local orbital space, or even the high stratosphere, both vital to allow certain things on Arrakis to remain secret, are much more dubious. Herbert mostly doesn't try to explain these things, and as with Star Wars the less explained the cheats are, the better they work as part of the story. But the technological background doesn't hold up against much examination. Worse, for me, is the general quality of the writing. Herbert does some things very well, such as world-building, and avoids awkward infodumps. Characterization and pacing are both fairly solid; he does a good job with Paul and Jessica in particular, and I've always liked the Fremen. But he wants to put the reader in everyone's head, frequently by giving character thoughts as italicized dialogue, and to enable that he uses a perspective that I always find distracting. Most fiction is written in tight third person. This means that the viewpoint character for any given section of the book is referred to in the third person, like all the other characters, but the reader has special access to their thoughts and emotions. We get to know what they're really thinking and feeling, not just the impressions they give to others, while the non-viewpoint characters are shown only from external appearances and the thoughts of the viewpoint character. Some books hold to the same viewpoint character throughout, but more commonly books move between viewpoint characters at scene breaks to provide more angles on the book's events. First person, in which the story is told by a specific character as if they were telling a story or writing it down, is the most common alternative. Third person objective, in which we don't get any special insight into the internal thoughts of any of the characters, is less common but still unsurprising. Dune does not use any of those perspectives. Instead, Dune uses wandering third-person omniscient, in which we get the inner thoughts and emotions of a character in a scene and then a few lines later the inner thoughts and emotions of a different character. This is the sort of thing that may or may not bug you depending on how much you've read, how deep the expectations of perspective are ingrained, and how much you notice perspective. It drives me nuts. I subconsciously align with the viewpoint character of a section, and pay attention to the ways that authors indicate which character will be the viewpoint character at the start of a scene. Herbert's constant flitting from character to character makes me dizzy. We get the verbatim thoughts of everyone almost indiscriminately, making me feel like I'm randomly hopscotching through the scene. For me, this does two things: it hurts my ability to get engrossed in the story, since I'm constantly thrown out of my normal reading mode when the viewpoint unexpectedly shifts, and it makes the writing feel repetitive. One keeps hearing about the same thing from multiple perspectives, and at times the story bogs down in everyone's internal dialogues rather than showing character reactions and letting the reader draw their own conclusions. I think it tries for a cinematic perspective, but ends up making the story feel muddled. The other flaw, which I didn't notice originally but which leaped out at me during this re-read, is that Herbert's world-building uses quite a few stereotypes. The most notorious, and most widely discussed, is of course the Fremen. Herbert draws heavily on Arab and Islamic culture even beyond the obvious similarities of people living in a harsh, arid climate. He borrows some rather loaded terms and cultural markers, such as jihad, to construct a culture of potential religious fanatics. This is not all bad; the Fremen are clearly portrayed as the good guys, which is a refreshing change from more typical current portrayals of Islam. But it becomes clear that they have aligned their entire culture around influences from outside, and the whole plot of Dune can be fairly characterized as an instance of "what these people need is a white man." Paul (and Kynes before him) joins their culture as well, but Paul becomes a better native than the natives, while simultaneously bringing his outside perspective. It's the sort of plot that is more widely noticed today than it would have been in 1965. Another major example of this, and one that I found more blatant, is that Herbert turns the Harkonnen into hissable, one-sided villains and uses some nasty stereotypes to do it. The insane torturer is consistently and repeatedly described as effeminate, fat is used as a marker of moral inferiority and evil, and the primary villain is homosexual and prefers drugged young male slaves. Here too, this sort of characterization short-cut was more common in 1965, but it's not appealing and makes the (already rather camp) scenes set among the Harkonnen even less enjoyable. Less clear-cut is the way women are handled throughout Dune. I do have to give Herbert some credit, particularly for the era in which he was writing. There are powerful female characters in Dune, including both Jessica and Alia, who have their own independent power and successfully pursue their own agendas throughout. The effectively all-female Bene Gesserit is a major political power in the story and is treated by the other players with respect as well as fear. But it's hard not to also notice the general position of women as subservient to men, not only in the general culture of the Great Houses but also in the more positively-portrayed Fremen culture. Indeed, the subservience of women is even worse in Fremen culture, where they're treated like property and where being killed by a woman is a sign of shame. Again, Herbert deserves some credit for doing better than a lot of 1960s fiction, but the sexism fairy has still been at work here. None of these flaws change the fact that Dune is a masterpiece. Herbert brings together history, world building, ecology, politics, and a compelling coming-of-age story about a messiah figure into a fast-paced, sweeping epic with a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. I think they do make it a flawed masterpiece, but it's still one of those SF novels that everyone should read at least once. Sadly, it's also a masterpiece that I think has suffered from its own success in the form of sequels, prequels, and a ton of supporting material. This is one of the problems that truly excellent world building can lead to. Human history is fractal: any specific detail can be examined in more depth and will usually lead (provided that information is available at all) to even more fascinating detail. The best world building conveys that impression of depth. That's what Herbert achieves here with hints, notes, and asides: the sense that galactic history is a vast ediface with the same fractal complexity as real human history. It makes for a compelling background, but it also inspires people to dig into that background and flesh out all of the details the way that we do with human history. But this doesn't actually work; invented history created by one person simply cannot be fractal in the same way. Human history is endlessly complex because it was generated by the complex interactions of many people. Invented history is an illusion that hints at complexity by building the same surface, but one mind, or even a small number of minds, cannot generate the same depth. The result is that if one digs too deep, one removes that convincing surface and ends up with a mundane, simplistic, and unsatisfyingly fake set of events. I think that's what's happened with all of the supporting material that's been written around Dune since its original publication. Dune is of a piece, a single story that's deeply enjoyable on its own terms and leaves the reader with a satisfying impression of complexity. The systemic excavation of that complexity lessens it and reveals too much of the illusion. Yes, I want to know more about the Butlerian Jihad, but that's the point: the wanting is the sign of succesful crafting of imagined history. Reading the definitive account is more likely to leave me unsatisfied than to lead to the recursive curiosity that human history can create. The sequels to Dune written by Herbert himself are, for me, another matter. Some reviewers level the same criticism at them: that Herbert dives too far into background best left unexplored. But they have the advantage of moving forward, telling more of the story set off by Paul, and the end of Dune is a clear setup for a sequel. One of Paul's goals throughout most of the book has been left unaccomplished. I don't think Herbert dove too deep into his creation; rather, my problem with his sequels (all of which I've read, although it's been some years now) is that he took the story in a direction that I actively disliked and found painful to read. Regardless, the general consensus is that the sequels aren't as good as the original, and while Dune doesn't fully resolve its story, it's complete enough that it's possible to stop here. Stopping is the general recommendation, although I still may re-read and review the sequels at some point. Followed by Dune Messiah. Rating: 8 out of 10

For my own later reference, here are the main tools I use. Computers

• Lenovo Thinkpad X200s with 8 GiB RAM, 500 GB spinning hard disk.
  • it now 3.5 years since I bought the laptop; it is still working well
  • I've replaced the hard disk, the battery (twice), and added 4 GB RAM
• Two 1 TB USB drives for backup, USB powered.

Software

• Debian GNU/Linux, wheezy (testing).
  • Baserock at work, but it's not yet quite there for my free time hacking
• GNOME 3, with gnome-shell.
• Gedit for writing text, plus vi when gedit is not an option.
• Python, C, and shell/sed/awk/etc for programming.
  • learning Haskell
• Bzr and git for version control.
  • I like bzr, but the world has chosen git, so I use it for my new projects, and will eventually be migrating my old projects to it
  • git hosting is trickier than bzr hosting, so I don't plan on doing that myself; using gitorious.org for it for the time being, but not all that happy with it
• KVM with libvirt and virt-manager for virtualization.
  • I have a network of VM guests for running a CI system
• Firefox for web browsing.
  • I really like having MAFF
• offlineimap and mutt for e-mail.
• Rhythmbox for playing music.
• XChat for IRC.
• Liferea for RSS/Atom feeds.

Mobile devices

• Google Nexus One phone, with Android 2.something.
  • the hardware is too old to get newer Android versions, but it works fine and I care to upgrade
• A Kindle keyboard, from 2010.

Online services

• Google Calendar.
• Branchable (ikiwiki) for my websites.
• identi.ca for microblogging, though I've mainly given up on that.
  • microblogs are abysmal for discussions
• A (shared) physical server rented from Hetzner.de, for off-site backups.

So, after just having run 10K, I'm going to sit on a train for 20 hours and completely seize up. I've got me some stretching to do! I'm getting away to Portland for a few days. I'm taking the Coastal Starlight train up and back, and staying with Nigel and his family. I'm looking forward to having some time to myself on the train, I'm looking forward to the trip, because some mutual friends did it, and I've wanted to do it ever since. I'm also looking forward to catching up with Nigel, because I've barely spoken to him since he left Google, and he's a friend and fellow countryman who I really enjoyed working with. I'd also like to check out this barber shop, because I'm weird and like the idea of someone attacking my face with a cutthroat razor. And of course, you can't go to Portland without visiting Powell's City of Books. I'm probably spending as much time on the train as I am in Portland (I head back on Sunday), but I want to be back for Zoe's first dentist appointment on Tuesday.

Sarah, Zoe and I ran in the 10K Applied Materials Silicon Valley Turkey Trot this morning. Apparently it's a bit of a Silicon Valley institution (people get dressed up, particularly as turkeys), so I guess it's up there with the Bay to Breakers. This is the first time I've ever run a 10K fun run and actually run the whole way, so I'm feeling pretty happy with my fitness. In fact, I think I'm the fittest and lightest I've ever been. I'm actually a couple of kilograms under my target weight, and really pleased with myself for being able to run a 10K training run on Tuesday as well as the race today. I managed to run it in a respectable 1:05. I think I'll set a goal for myself to be able to run 10K in under an hour. No idea if that's realistic or not, but it's a goal with a nice round number. Sarah did her run in 1:06, which is impressive considering she was pushing Zoe in the jogging stroller. Zoe also did well putting up with being in the jogging stroller for that long. I think it helped having lots of things for her to look at, as well as a steady supply of food to graze on. She was having a great time running on the closed streets as we headed back to where we parked the car. We might have to make this a Thanksgiving family tradition. It'll be nice when Zoe's big enough to run in the kid's fun run as well.

Having recently acquired a Samsung Series 9 laptop, I'd like to update the BIOS. This is proving rather difficult without Windows. The first thing you download from the Samsung website isn't actually BIOS update at all; it's a Windows application which then goes and finds a BIOS update for your machine. Some time with a Windows VM, tcpdump and you'll end up at http://sbuservice.samsungmobile.com/. I'll leave interested parties to play around at that website, but with a little fiddling you can find the BIOS you're looking for. In this case, it is ITEM_20121024_754_WIN_P08AAH.exe which is the latest version, P08AAH. Unfortunately, this still won't run in any useful way -- in a virtual-machine it errors out saying the battery isn't connected. On previous endeavors such as this, running various incarnations of zip on the .exe file has found interesting components, but not in this case. Not to be deterred, some work with strings will yield the following

$ strings ./ITEM_20121024_754_WIN_P08AAH.exe   grep Copyright
inflate 1.2.7 Copyright 1995-2012 Mark Adler
deflate 1.2.7 Copyright 1995-2012 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler

Now this is interesting, because it tells us that the components aren't using some fancy compression scheme we have no hope of figuring out. Checking RFC1952 we see the following header mentioned

Each member has the following structure:
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
 ID1 ID2 CM  FLG      MTIME      XFL OS   (more-->)
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

We can easily look for that in the file. Expanding the values, what we're looking for is 0x1f 0x8b 0x08 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 0x0 which represents the compressed stream (the OS byte is 0xb for NTFS which we can just ignore). A quick hack will get that done and give us the offsets we need

$ ./look-for-headers
Found potential header at 455212
Found potential header at 677136
Found potential header at 1293930
Found potential header at 1294980
Found potential header at 2771193
Found potential header at 2779874
Found potential header at 2789142
Found potential header at 2935778
Found potential header at 3078639
Found potential header at 3083039
Found potential header at 3338552
Found potential header at 3339443
Found potential header at 3352440
Found potential header at 3366757
Found potential header at 3391734
Found potential header at 3444255
Found potential header at 3494372

So, we can feed this into a shell script and extract the streams We don't have to worry about the end-point, because zcat will handily stop outputting and ignore junk at the end of the stream. That will yield the following output files:

$ md5sum *
c014e900b02ae39d6e574c63154809b2  1293930.data
982747cd5215c7d51fa1fba255557fef  1294980.data
942c6a8332d5dd06d8f4b2a9cb386ff4  2771193.data
d98d2f80b94f70780b46d1f079a38d93  2779874.data
33ce3174b0e205f58c7cedc61adc6f32  2789142.data
1d6851288f40fa95895b2fadee8a8b82  2935778.data
3a0a9b2fa9b40bdf5721068acde351ce  3078639.data
fc166141d06934e9c7238326f18a4e68  3083039.data
8cf7f86f84afa81363d3cef44b257d50  3338552.data
85e09e18fd495599041e13b4197e1746  3339443.data
0c72004eae0131d52817f23faf8a46a7  3352440.data
26347f93721e7ac49134a17104f56090  3366757.data
26973e301da4948a0016765e40700e8c  3391734.data
c8e4675cda3aa367d523a471bb205fba  3444255.data
7bf5ea753d4cc056b9462a02ac51b160  3494372.data
a2c6562f7f43aaa0e636cc1995b7ee3d  455212.data
d5c91b007dac3a5c6317f8a8833f9304  677136.data
65c0dcd1e7e9f8f87a8e9fb706eb8768  ITEM_20121024_754_WIN_P08AAH.exe
$ file *
1293930.data:                     MS-DOS executable
1294980.data:                     data
2771193.data:                     PE32 executable (native) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
2779874.data:                     PE32+ executable (native) x86-64, for MS Windows
2789142.data:                     PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386 (stripped to external PDB), for MS Windows
2935778.data:                     PE32+ executable (console) x86-64 (stripped to external PDB), for MS Windows
3078639.data:                     MS-DOS executable
3083039.data:                     PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
3338552.data:                     ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
3339443.data:                     PE32 executable (native) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
3352440.data:                     PE32+ executable (native) x86-64, for MS Windows
3366757.data:                     PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
3391734.data:                     PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
3444255.data:                     PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
3494372.data:                     PE32 executable (DLL) (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
455212.data:                      PE32 executable (DLL) (console) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
677136.data:                      data
ITEM_20121024_754_WIN_P08AAH.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows

This is where I get a bit stuck. There is clearly a bunch of WinFlash stuff that Wine kind-of recognises, but so far I haven't managed to figure out how I might go about flashing this from a DOS boot disk. So far I know it's a "Phoenix SecureCore Tiano" based BIOS, and there is some indication that there is a UEFI app to flash the BIOS, but unfortunately I didn't set the laptop up with UEFI (note to anyone setting this up; probably a good idea to do that). I believe that if you have Windows, you can halt the install part-way through and see these files extracted in a temp directory. Possibly if we can put some file-names to the blobs it might help. There may also be a much easier way to do this that I'm completely missing. If anything comes up, I'll update this post; hopefully a future Googlenaut who enjoys BIOS hacking will drop a comment... Update 2012-11-27 I'm unfortunately less optimistic about being able to update this. Certainly the files identified above as MS-DOS executable are EFI binaries; however they are both 32-bit binaries. You can easily get an EFI shell up and running by putting a 64-bit EFI shell binary on a FAT formatted USB disk in the efi/boot/bootx64.efi but it will not run either of those binaries, presumably because they're 32-bit. A 32-bit EFI binary doesn't seem to be recognised for boot, so no luck there. A comment also mentioned some issues with Samsung's and UEFI boot in this bug though it's not clear what models are affected. Another comment mentioned binwalk which also does a nice job of finding the embedded zip streams.

$ strings ./1293930.data
...
RSDS
D:\flash\Source\ENV\src\Efi863\edk\phoenix\edk\Sample\Platform\DUET\ldr16\IA32\oemslp20.pdb
oemslp20.dll
InitializeDriver
2n3u3
$ strings ./3078639.data
en-us;zh-Hans
slp20.marker
slp20.size
slp20.offset
slp20.offset2
read marker fail!
Marker file '%s''s size(%d)!=%d
Not a valided OemMarker!
Update image data error.
marker file is updated.
marker file size too big!
Not a valided OemMarker in ROM.
Update image data error.
SLP marker is reserved.
-PROT
Prot flag is found, mProgFlag is true.
Prot flag is not found, mProgFlag is false.
Please specify input file name.
-PROT
slpFile
OEM Activation 2.0 processing
Failed to Locate Flash Support protocol.
...
D:\flash\Source\ENV\src\Efi863\edk\phoenix\edk\Sample\Platform\DUET\ldr16\IA32\SLP20.pdb

Thanks to Erich Schubert s blog posting on Planet Debian I became aware of the 2012 GNOME User Survey at Phoronix. Like back in 2006 I still use some GNOME applications, so I do consider myself as GNOME user in the widest sense and hence I filled out that survey. Additionally I have to live with GNOME 3 as a system administrator of workstations, and that s some kind of usage, too. ;-) The last question in the survey was Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? Sure I have. And since I tried to give constructive feedback instead of only ranting, here s my answer to that question as I submitted it in the survey, too, just spiced up with some hyperlinks and highlighting:

Don t try to change the users. Give the users more possibilities to change GNOME if they don t agree with your own preferences and decisions. (The trend to castrate the user was already starting with GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 made that worse IMHO.) If you really think that you need less configurability because some non-power-users are confused or challenged by too many choices, then please give the other users at least the chance to enable more configuration options. A very good example in that hindsight was Kazehakase (RIP) who offered several user interfaces (novice, intermediate and power user or such). The popular text-mode web browser Lynx does the same, too, btw. GNOME lost me mostly with the change to GNOME 2. The switch from Galeon 1.2 to 1.3/2.0 was horrible and the later switch to Epiphany made things even worse on the browser side. My short trip to GNOME as desktop environment ended with moving back to FVWM (configurable without tons of clicking, especially after moving to some other computer) and for the browser I moved on to Kazehakase back then. Nowadays I m living very well with Awesome and Ratpoison as window managers, Conkeror as web browser (which are all very configurable) and a few selected GNOME applications like Liferea (luckily still quite configurable despite I miss Gecko s about:config since the switch to WebKit), GUCharmap and Gnumeric. For people switching from Windows I nowadays recommend XFCE or maybe LXDE on low-end computers. I likely would recommend GNOME 2, too, if it still would exist. With regards to MATE I m skeptical about its persistance and future, but I m glad it exists as it solves a lot of problems and brings in just a few new ones. Cinnamon as well as SolusOS are based on the current GNOME libraries and are very likely the more persistent projects, but also very likely have the very same multi-head issues we re all barfing about at work with Ubuntu Precise. (Heck, am I glad that I use Awesome at work, too, and all four screens work perfectly as they did with FVWM before.)

Thanks to Dirk Deimeke for his (German written) pointer to Marcus Moeller s interview with Ikey Doherty (in German, too) about his Debian-/GNOME-based distribution SolusOS.

Weblate is now available for your cloud or virtual machines - BitNami has published Weblate stack. BitNami stack allows you to install native application on Linux or Mac OS X as well as provides images for virtual machines or to be run within cloud (some of these options are still waiting to be built). Also I wanted to finally release SUSE Studio images, but all I get out of that are HTTP 500 errors (whenever I tried since Friday). Luckily today I at least managed to build one image to test. This allowed me to reproduce bug with broken registration as mailserver was missing in the image.

Filed under: English Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

In May this year, in a desperate bid to bail water out of a sinking ship, HMV group sold off the Waterstones chain of bookstores. I'm fond of reading so naturally I visit Waterstones from time to time. (but not exclusively.) For many years, their promotions were unanimously structured as "3 for 2" offers: find three books in the promotion, in-store, and get the cheapest of the three for free. I hated these promotions. I always found it very challenging to find three books in the promotion that I wanted. If I was visiting to buy a specific book and found it in the promotion, on more than one occasion I left the shop empty handed: I wasn't prepared to pay full price for a book in a promotion and not get the benefit of the promotion. Since being sold, Waterstones seem to have made a lot of changes. Many new hardbacks from popular authors have debuted at a discount for a short period (Rowling, Pratchett). I've found many more discounted books not tied to others in 3-for-2-style offers, sometimes window-display stock at half price, a month or so after release. They started a loyalty-card scheme, with a 10 gift card the prize you reach once you've spent 100. (I wonder if such schemes are examples of a token economy?) Finally, they've tentatively started to explore putting cafes in their branches. The one in Newcastle is best described as 'fledgling', but it's nice to have one more place to escape for a cup of tea at lunchtimes. The cafe, as well as a very well stocked collection of magazines, were the two killer features of the sadly- defunct Borders bookseller chain. For years before we got our own Borders in the North East, I used to enjoy the York branch if I was passing. I actually managed to fill a loyalty card this year, so clearly their change in attitude has worked on me! I'm generally not a fan of gift cards, especially in today's climate, so I quickly spent it. I hold an American Express credit card, which earns me cashbask on purchases which I make with it. I think the rate is about 1%. However, I can opt to receive the cashback in the form of gift vouchers. If I do so, I get them to the value of 110% my cashback balance. One of the retailers in on the scheme are Waterstones. I'm tempted

Yesterday I was discussing in an online board how to break a decision deadlock in life. There are real deadlocks, but I don t think they are very frequent most of the time, doing a pros and cons analysis is enough to decide what to do. Sometimes our judgement is impaired by lack of objectivity or by our inability to see things from a different point of view (it s hard to think straight when everything seems to be falling apart around you); talking to a friend or relative can help in these situations. But there are times when nothing helps. When you are really stuck and nothing seems to break the deadlock. At these times I give it one or two days, sleep on the issue and if I cannot come up with a decision I assume the alternatives are equivalent to me and just flip a coin. Of course, this will do if you can postpone the decision, giving yourself (and your inner self) time to decide on a course-of-action. But is there some way to speed up the process? During the discussion, someone came up with a rather smart quote by Rothstein character in Boardwalk Empire TV series:

Flip a coin. When it s in the air, you ll know what side you re hoping for.

I found it an interesting way to give your inner self an ultimatum: decide or luck will decide instead. I ve never did it like that, for I would not flip a coin unless it s my last resort. Being such a clever psychological idea, I doubted it originated in the TV series itself, so I went on pursue of the original idea. I found a Danish poet and mathematician called Piet Hein, who wrote a poem about it circa 1969:

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP Whenever you re called on to make up your mind,
and you re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you re hoping.

And also, there are a Donald Duck comic called Flip Decision circa 1953 that introduces Flipism philosophy, which supports a rather radical anecdotal variant: make all decisions by flipping a coin. Piet Hein or Rothstein character idea is much better than Flipism, of course. Does anyone knows any older sources of the same idea?

The last week was quite productive as I was on vacation and at home town but sadly I couldn't complete this post so again merging the work with this week but this week ain't much productive as I was tired from journey back and didn't get enough time to recover. So here it goes. Debian Related

• I did a little more fine tuning of friendica package to enable http://localhost/friendica on installation and shipped virtual host configuration for Apache and Nginx which user can simply copy to setup a proper friendica instance. I'm not sure if this is right to do or not but Drupal package does this but only it doesn't enable it during installation and leaves it up to user to create required symlink to enable http://localhost/drupal7. Well this is my first time in packaging webapp so I'm all open for suggestions
• Helped Tobias Diekershoff prepare and upload the friendica package to mentors and file RFS bug. We got bug number #693504 and now we are looking for sponsors, if you are a DD reading this post and interested in federated social networking and can sponsor us it would be great :-)
• Started learning CDBS and converted the Kiwix package to CDBS. I'm glad that Jonas is helping me out when I'm struck some where. Also kiwix is now updated to latest version 0.9~rc2 and I need to do some more fine tuning before asking for upload from Jonas.
• I started helping Jonas to put up CDBS documentation. He suggested me to take over the documentation from duckcorp and then merge other documentation in CDBS git tree. As of now I only managed to separate out the chapters from docbook to markdown format. The conversion was done using pandoc but code formatting in docbook was not proper I guess so after conversion it needed some manual intervention in fixing and formatting code blocks. The repository for CDBS doc is here and as of now doesn't contain any new things.
• Converted one more of my font package fonts-gubbi to CDBS format but I'm now facing a issue that CDBS is including docs inside the generated udeb which is not right, I already posted the question on how to handle this to build-common-hackers and waiting for Jonas to reply back.
• I claimed the ITP #651600 on Roboto fonts from Android OS. After a short discussion with Fabian on pkg-fonts-devel I agreed to merge it with existing fonts-droid and renamed the source package to fonts-android which now builds fonts-droid and fonts-roboto. Package is ready but I'm still seeing if I can fix any bugs on fonts-droid before asking for a upload.
• Wrote a simple script which was derived from droid fonts package from Fedora to get the android fonts from the upstream repository automatically. Enabled this in get-orig-source target for fonts-android. Since cloning a more than 600M repository is PITA I have a local copy of fonts-android and use it to create new release of fonts-android. Additionally I should say script is not well tested ;-)
• suckless-tools has entered into Debian Experimental thanks to Jakub Wilk for a very nice review of the package which went in a long thread of more than 50 mails in debian-mentors. The package itself closed a shit load of bugs, but after upload I noticed there are still some pending bugs which I missed from adding to changelog. So I closed #606148 and #689199. Still there are 2 more bugs which seems like fixed in newer version but I need to confirm before closing them, thus making suckless-tools a bug free package.

Upstream Related I raised a pull request #8 on Gubbi fixing the Makefile to more organized and introducing xz compression in it. Additionally I removed distribution specific stuffs from Makefile and made it generic. That's all for the two weeks. This week there will be foss.in and we will be having some Debian specific mini conference, including some Debian basics to newbies and some bug squashing if any :-). So more to report next week, till then Cya.