I have an imaginary automobile. It is the finest hybrid of German and Japanese engineering. It has a peppy little engine and a turning radius so small it would make a baby camel cry, and a six-speed manual transmission, and it is powered by the urine of vegan bears. My imaginary father asked me why I would possibly want to buy an imaginary car with a manual transmission. Obviously, whichever marketing campaign brainwashed him in the first place wasn't strong enough on the memetics, because after borrowing my imaginary car, he shut the hell up. You see, it's considerably more fun to drive than an automatic. There are other benefits as well, of course. The primary one is that the transmission does what I want. An automatic transmission is configured for maximum comfort , so it wastes a lot of power when shifting. With a manual, you can slip from gear to gear with minimal clutch time, or in some cases, if you're feeling sassy, without using the clutch at all. You can control your engine speed so that your shift will be just as smooth as an automatic without the egregiously long clutch disengagement or shift overlap. You also can see the road in front of you, so you're always going to be smarter than an automatic transmission, unless you don't understand how slopes work or what collisions with other cars mean to your well-being. Now some NRA member is going to point out that you can get a shift kit and tweak your automatic to be less awful. While spending money on this type of thing sounds like a great idea, a shift kit is not going to bring an automatic into the same league as my car. I can still start the car when the battery's dead. I can get higher fuel efficiency (vegan bears don't exactly urinate for free). I can shift into fifth gear, and coming from a full stop, drive up a hill without stalling (this is particularly useful when a squirrel has gnawed the teeth off of all your other gears). Furthermore, shift kit or not, an automatic is absolutely no fun. Someday, when transmissions have advanced into the realm of liquid hyperspace buckminsterfullerene cones that commune with the unicorns, and they'll have cameras and radar feeding the car's computer with useful information about its surroundings so it can make intelligent shift decisions faster than a human. Then I'll have to choose between saner and more fun. That era has not yet arrived. This is a lousy metaphor for debhelper.

Very often, folks want to refer to both the free and open source software communities in a way that is inclusive of and respectful of groups who identify with either term. Saying "free and open source software" is a mouthful. That said, there was no been consensus on what we should do instead. The Wikipedia article on alternative terms for free software suggests that FOSS, F/OSS, FLOSS, and "software libre" are contenders. I've heard all. Of course, the choice of 4+ competing alternative terms is probably worse than the problem we were seeking to solve. In academic circles, the big debate seems to be between FOSS and FLOSS. I was always a FOSS partisan. But I've seen increased momentum on the FLOSS side and I'm ready to declare that FLOSS has won. I know it makes you think of dental hygiene and I agree that it is unfortunate. It wasn't my first choice either. But I can see where things are going. FLOSS Manuals and the folks at the FLOSS Research Group at Syracuse who launched the FLOSSHub and the associated FLOSS Papers deserve some of the credit. If we can get over the irony of having spent so much time arguing over what was intended to be compromise terminology in the first place, lets see if we actually start talking to each other.

I've been using virtual machines (KVM, these days) as isolated environments to do things like build packages as root. Unfortunately, some of these activities require decent-sized chunks of random data (pulled from /dev/random). But /dev/random pulls from the kernel's entropy pool, which in turn is replenished from "hardware" events. But a virtual machine has no actual hardware, and if it is only doing isolated package builds, there is very little activity to feed the kernel's entropy pool. So the builds and test suites that rely on this randomness all hang for a long long time. :( My current way to get around this is to replace /dev/random with the /dev/urandom device, which does not block if the entropy pool is depleted:

mknod /dev/newrandom c 1 9
chmod --reference=/dev/random /dev/newrandom
mv -f /dev/newrandom /dev/random

This has the consequence that the "randomness" these commands use doesn't have as much "real" entropy, though some operating systems (like FreeBSD) have a non-blocking /dev/random by default (and it's also questionable what "real" entropy means for a virtual machine in the first place). I'm also using cowbuilder within these VMs to do package builds. But cowbuilder has its own /dev tree, with its own device nodes, so this needs to be fixed too. So after you have successfully done cowbuilder --create, you need to modify the random device within the cowbuilder chroot:

mknod /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/dev/newrandom c 1 9
chmod --reference=/var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/dev/random /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/dev/newrandom
mv -f /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/dev/newrandom /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/dev/random

Hopefully this will be useful for other people using cowbuilder (or other build strategies) on isolated virtual machines. If you've worked around this problem in other ways (or if there's a security concern about this approach), i'd be happy to hear about the details.

Signal boost. While returning from a trip to the US (in other words, going to Canada) on December 8th, Canadian SF author Peter Watts was attacked, beaten, pepper-sprayed, and imprisoned without access to legal counsel by the US Border Patrol. See also his post on the subject. The government's case has obviously not yet been presented. However, given the past behavior of the US Department of Homeland Security, I find Watts's description of the event entirely credible. This is an outrage. This is the kind of thing that happens in third-world dictatorships. See also Making Light and Boing Boing. John Scalzi's post has information on how to donate money to Watts to get through this legal fight. I will be giving him money. I also plan on calling my US Representative and Senators when I'm no longer at work, as this sort of treatment of a Canadian citizen warrants a Congressional investigation and heads rolling, not only at the agent level but at the Homeland Security management level. Even apart from basic questions of human rights, Homeland Security is going to systematically destroy the tourist industry in the United States if this sort of behavior is not stomped on immediately and severely. There are border patrol guards who are probably still on duty today who are common criminals and belong in prison for assault. ETA: The government's side of the story. This is pretty much what I expected, and with the data available so far, I feel confirmed in my initial reaction. This level of force is completely disproportional and flatly unacceptable short of Watts pulling a weapon on the agents, which they are not claiming that he did and which therefore he clearly didn't do. I'm highly skeptical of this supposed "choking" of a police officer after they pepper-sprayed him. This reads like the standard cover-your-ass charges filed by the police after they beat someone up. Once they've provoked the struggle by grabbing you and have done something as painful and disorienting as pepper-spraying you, chances are you're going to physically react in ways that they can conveniently misinterpret and use as the basis for charges. People elsewhere have pointed out that contacting Congressional representatives is probably better done Monday morning since nothing will happen during the weekend.

I guess I ve never been one to do things a certain way just because that s how they re normally done. I took my first college class pretty young, back in 1995, just after my freshman year in high school. By the time of my junior year in high school, I was well on my way through the computer science curriculum at Wichita State, and would probably have graduated from WSU at about age 20 had I not moved to Dallas, and then Indianapolis, for jobs. I did so because I (correctly) thought that in my line of work, experience was more important than a degree. However, playing into that was the incorrect notion that an education was useful primarily as a means to a career a notion that colleges and universities unfortunately have been promoting themselves. After moving back to Kansas, I started work to finish my degree I had effectively one year left had I been a full-time student. But it was difficult doing so, living almost an hour from Wichita, having a full-time job, and then when Jacob was on the way, I stopped classes entirely. Having online classes available to help me finish out the degree has been great. A year ago, I re-thought the value of education to me, concluding that there is a lot of value in education for its own sake. Looking at education as little more than a means to a career is the wrong way to approach it. Since I have had that re-evaluation, I ve adjusted my path even at this late point, and have enjoyed my classes more than I ever had before because of it. Graduating! So anyhow, here I am, graduating in a few days, 14 years after I started. I ve had some good news this semester, too: I ll pass the requirements to be a graduate of the WSU honors program, and also to graduate magna cum laude. So it may have taken me 14 years to do finish college, but at least I ve done it well . It feels weird to be about to be done with college, after so many years of being almost done, except for And a question I ve been thinking about a lot is: What next? Obviously I ll start by taking a break from college stuff. I want to be able to spend more time with Terah, Oliver, and Jacob, and there are things around the house that need attention. But after that? I figure I have a few options: No more college, but some reading. I do enjoy reading, and especially reading older works that are nicely out of copyright and thus free. I ve read few of the classics, but I enjoy reading them, and want to be better informed about them too. That could be fun. But sometimes it s hard to know how to place things in context. For instance, I don t think I could have gotten as much out of reading some famous philosophers as I did by doing so in a class that put them all in context and discussed criticisms of different positions. I also wouldn t necessarily have the ability to discuss and debate ideas with my classmates. Take the occasional undergraduate class in a topic that interests me. I m especially interested in history and literature, and haven t had much exposure at the college level in either. Various online courses are available from universities in Kansas on those topics. I could take a course or two each year and become a better-informed, more well-rounded person, and study an interesting topic at the same time. Maybe this would eventually lead to a degree, and maybe not. It would be fine either way. Graduate studies. It s a lot of work, and I m not sure it would be all that interesting to me. I ve looked some at curricula. I don t think that I m interested in computer science as a graduate program; I enjoy coding more than theorizing and analysis. But I also don t think that a graduate MIS or some such degree is for me; most of them appear to either focus on Windows or cover things that I ve already known how to do for years, and thus I wonder just what the point of them is (in addition to questioning how rigorous the curriculum is). I could also, down the road, pursue a graduate degree in something like English, philosophy, or history, but it seems a natural path to that would be to take more undergraduate classes in those topics first. So for now, I ll sit tight. I ll see how I feel by summer, how pressed for time I feel at home, and if I still feel the desire to take more classes. If so, I suspect I ll try to take some undergraduate classes in whatever sounds interesting to me at the time. In a way, that is quite freeing take a class on whatever topic I like, without a defined degree in mind. I ve never been free to do that before, and I like the idea of it.

Barnes and Noble's new nook ebook reader is now shipping to people. Mine[1] is due to turn up tomorrow, but the instruction manual is available for download already. Quoting from it:

Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in this Agreement, certain components of the
Software are licensed subject to the General Public License Version 2.0, a copy of which is attached
as Exhibit A (the GPL License ). You may not use these components except in compliance with
the GPL License. In addition, you may have additional rights with respect to such components
under the GPL License, including, without limitation, the right to obtain the source code for such
components from us. You may obtain a copy of such source code by contacting us through the
contact information provided on the Web Site. We will provide such source code in accordance
with the GPL License.

Which is all very promising[2], except contacting them via either phone or email reveals that nobody has the faintest idea what I'm talking about. I can certainly imagine that they have other concerns right now (delaying your initial shipments by up to two weeks depending on how early people ordered suggests some kind of utter failure somewhere in the chain), but it's depressing that approximately nobody appears to be able to get this right.

Updated:

After further conversations with tech support, I was told that I'll be mailed a CD of source within two weeks.

[1] I had a Sony, which unfortunately had a bit of an accident. On the other hand, it was running 2.4, so maybe it was a lucky escape of some sort?
[2] Well, apart from the traditional confusion of the GPL as something that claims to restrict use

I really liked doing stuff like Zack s RCBW in the past, but nowadays I m busy with some buildds, reporting RC bugs because some maintainers don t test their uploads, as well as posting patches to fix FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD. But from time to time, it s also fun to close RC bugs. Here s a new concept (that I probably won t reproduce as regularly as Zack and his minions, though): RCBN for Release-Critical Bugs of the Night. Those are now closed:

• #552862: postman: FTBFS: cgi-lib.c:238: error: conflicting types for 'getline'
• #545621: regina-normal: FTBFS: problem linking with boost
• #540427: jconv: Build-Depends on libc6-dev (>= 2.7)
• #540669: kflickr: FTBFS: '.libs/libkflickrpart.so': No such file or directory
• #554638: jconv_0.8.1-1(ia64/unstable): FTBFS: build-depnds libc6-dev
• #527732: orpie: FTBFS: (.data+0x2c0): undefined reference to 'ml_gsl_vector_float_minmaxindex'
• #520862: libkarma - FTBFS: /usr/bin/csc: Command not found

Many thanks to Peter Green, to Ruben Molina, and to Ilya Barygin for their patches. Special thanks to Richard Darst for orpie s patches: he even managed to get rid of embedded code copies while addressing the FTBFS. Nice! Unfortunately, in the same time, I had to open some FTBFS/RC bugs:

• #559766: java3d: FTBFS on non-Linux ports
• #559767: java3d: FTBFS on armel: install: cannot stat 'j3d-core/build/default/ '
• #559768: java3d: FTBFS on hppa: java compilation issues
• #559771: evolution-dev: Might be missing a Depends on libgtkhtml*-dev
• #559781: ktoon: FTBFS with current ffmpeg
• #559794: libfvm-dev: *LOTS* of undefined references

So, what s next? Get back to work!

This is a new version of my script to automate some of the work of backporting Debian packages. This version sets the urgency of the changelog of the backport to the highest urgency of the changelogs included in the *.changes file and allows adding an additional entry to the changelog of the backport. It also handles a distribution of etch-backports properly. I unfortunately had to revert the change in the previous version to use -nc, since unaccountably using -nc to suppress running make clean before building the source package forces a binary package build that doesn't include the source package in the *.changes file. I filed a bug against dpkg about this. In the meantime, you'll continue to need to satisfy the requirements for debian/rules clean outside of any build chroot. This version also adds some automated backporting logic that I needed for the Shibboleth packages. You can get the latest version from my miscellaneous scripts page.

Lil is white trash. She does not live in a double-wide and make hot dog casserole, and in foreign lands she could easily pass, but she is white trash nonetheless. Lyle is white trash. He does not buy potted meat or have a car up on blocks in his yard, but he is white trash nonetheless. One day Lil and Lyle met, and something drew them together. Perhaps it was a disturbance in the philotic web, or maybe a magical Jungian archetype of a dirty rag as a gas cap that resonated in their minds, but whatever it was, they decided to keep in touch online and get to know each other better, with clear non-platonic overtones. Lyle had a penchant for underdressed girls with a modest amount of tattooes and piercings and a full-on bent for drunken promiscuity. While Lil did not fit this stereotype well, she played up her sexual indiscriminateness and made up a few fetishes to impress him. Lil needed a boy who would not judge her for all her faults and long history of poor decision-making. So Lyle pretended not to judge. One-third deceit, one-third misinterpretation of Internet ambiguities, and one-third imagination led them to develop unrealistic perceptions of each other. Since they also had unrealistic perceptions of themselves, were fairly narcissistic, and were almost totally caught up in their own private melodramas, it took a while for the veil to come down. Come down it did, like an avalanche of Kraft Dinner boxes falling off a Canadian supermarket shelf. Then they were angry. Then they were sad. Then they brushed on fresh new coats of self-delusion and heated up some chicken nuggets.

Once you release something what gets at least a little bit popular, you can expect to receive fixes in various strange forms. Since I started to use Git for Gammu development merging all these crazy things is much more easier. The problem with these changes in past was that they are generally based on some random old versions (for example random daily snapshot). Now I just find the right place in history where to start (ChangeLog usually gives good hint where to search in the history), create branch and start to apply changes I received. I worst case (like it happened today) the "changes" is whole tarball with different changes made to different files. Fortunately I recently found great git add -i, which allows me to pick whatever changes I want from the patch. When all this is done, all I need is to merge changes back to master and Git is usually clever enough to handle it. PS: And yes, I'd really love if people would be able to send me series of patches, but it does not seem to happen in near future.

My patience with the noise of airlines has run out, on my trip from AU to US I didn t get any sleep due to the cramped seat and the noise of the plane. While I can t do anything about the cramped seat without spending a lot of money it seems that I can do something about the noise with moderate expense. I ve been researching Noise Canceling Headphones [1]. The principle of such devices is that they have a microphone on the outside and a speaker on the inside to generate sound that is 180 degrees out of phase which will then almost cancel out the ambient noise. Apparently such devices are very effective for low frequencies but less effective for high frequencies. High frequencies are more easily blocked by sound insulation, so the ideal seems to be around the ear headphones with lots of padding to passively stop noise with active noise canceling to deal with the lower frequencies. So I m now planning on buying a set of headphones before I leave the US. Choice Magazine (an Australian independent product review organisation) published a review of noise canceling headphones in 2007, it has some interesting information but is not suitable for buying advice today [2]. Choice gave the best results to the Jabra C820s which had just gone out of production when they published the review and by now could only be bought on eBay. The Jabra had an active cancellation of 14.3dB and a passive cancellation of 8.3dB. The best active cancellation of all the reviewed products was 19.5dB for the Bose QuietComfort 3 which incidentally only had a passive cancellation of 4.8dB. Both the Bose and Jabra products got good reviews in a mailing list discussion. It s a pity that Jabra is now only manufacturing products for call centers. I am not considering the headphones that go on top of the ears, they will inherently give less passive protection due to the design and they will annoy me. I am also not considering the ear-buds because I don t like putting things in my ears. I will note that there are some very positive reviews of some of the ear-bud devices. The Etymotic Research devices get very good reviews and are apparently on sale at reasonable prices in Apple stores (among other places) [3]. Anyone who wants noise-canceling headphones and disagrees with me about the desirability of ear-bud type devices should probably consider them. The Bose QuietComfort 15 is selling for $300 (NB for this post all prices will be in US dollars) [4]. It has microphones both inside and outside the ear cup to allow better detection of ambient sound. A single AAA battery is supposed to last 35 hours, it has a detachable audio cable (for use in just blocking noise), and comes with an airline adapter (for the two-port airline sockets). It does require being turned on to listen to audio, some headphones allow you to turn off the noise canceling feature to listen to music without a battery this doesn t matter for my planned use. They have a volume switch (low and high settings) to cope with airlines that set the volume too high. They are specifically designed for passengers in commercial jet aircraft. Surprisingly the Bose web site doesn t mention the number of dB of audio protection and none of the reviews I have read have mentioned it either. The store Brookstone was recommended, they have some unbranded noise canceling headphones, but as they are on the ear and more expensive than comparable Sony products ($130 vs $100) I eliminated them quickly. Sony has a good range of noise-canceling headphones [5]. They have ear-buds starting at $90 and on-ear headphones for as little as $50. They have two models of over the ear headphones that are advertised at $200 and $400. The MDR-NC60 costs $200 and reduces noise by 12dB at 200Hz while the MDR-NC500D costs $400 and reduces noise by 20dB at 160Hz. I don t know why they didn t measure both headphones at the same frequency or give any information on passive sound insulation. They state that the MDR-NC500D was voted as being better than the Bose QC2 and QC3 but made no such claim about the MDR-NC60 presumably the older Bose devices were rated as better than the MDR-NC60, and I have to wonder about how the Bose QC15 would compare to the MDR-NC500D. The MDR-NC500D has an internal Lithium-Ion battery that lasts 16 hours and can take a pair of AA batteries as well for a total of 28 hours. The Sennheiser PXC 350 claims up to 32dB of passive attenuation and up to 18dB of active noise compensation [6]. Their claims about NoiseGuard (TM) cause me to lack confidence in their products. The PXC 350 is advertised at $330 and the reviews that I have read suggest that the Bose might be a better product. Sennheiser also has PXC 450 which offers 23dB of active noise compensation and costs $450. I am not going to pay $450 for headphones. It seems that the choice for over the ear noise canceling headphones comes down to the Sony MDR-NC60 at $200 and the Bose QuietComfort 15 at $300. I have the impression that the Bose product is better, but whether it is $100 better is the question. Also while I haven t forgiven Sony for Rootkitting their customers [7], this is not going to prevent me from buying the headphones that best suit my needs. Does anyone have any suggestions? Did I miss a good brand that I should be considering? Does Sennheiser have some redeeming features that I missed?

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise-cancelling_headphones
• [2] http://www.choice.com.au/Reviews-and-Tests/Technology/Phones-and-mobile-devices/Sound/Noise-cancelling-headphones-review-and-compare.aspx
• [3] http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/hf2.aspx
• [4] http://www.bose.com/controller?url=/shop_online/headphones/noise_cancelling_headphones/index.jsp
• [5] http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=3728&N=4294955699
• [6] http://www.sennheiserusa.com/private_headphones_travel-line_500371
• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

resurrecting CamlJava (testers welcome) CamlJava is a great project by almighty Xavier that bridges the OCaml and Java worlds via the respective C interfaces (Caml/C interface for OCaml and JNI for Java). Unfortunately, the last stable release was a bit out of date and seemed not to work with recent JDK (both in terms of buildability and of runtime correctness, i.e., segfaults). With the tremendous help of Gr goire Henry, I've managed to prepare a set of patches that enables to build (and use without segfaults ...) CamlJava with recent JVM: in particular it seems now to work with both Sun's JVM and OpenJDK. A Debian package has been prepared; while it gets processed by archive manager, you can get an equivalent unofficial package from my APT repo:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/
    deb-src http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/

Any form of testing is very welcome. In case you want to try O'Jacare on top of CamlJava however, you need to wait a bit more: Gr goire is working on it, but in the process he banged his head against bugs in both CamlP4 and CamlP5 (the only two available porting paths from the last stable release of O'Jacare)

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

savs seemed to agonise about posting it but I think his Top 10 crimes of Developer Engagement is spot on even if it might not be as amusing as Aral Balkan s similar message. I think it applies to my recent RFID development work too: the public information is fluffy and you have to hunt or reverse-engineer most of the technical info, the supplier websites are painful and there s almost no interaction. In the past, I d been factoring in something between 50 and 100% extra time when our co-op needed to coordinate with unknown non-co-ops. With RFID hardware work, it was well over 300% when I last calculated it and that s even though there was one pretty helpful RFID supplier. This sort of nonsense is painful, slows development massively, could kill useful technologies at birth and re-emphasises my commitment to use Open Standards as much as reasonable. Have other people got similar horror stories to share? Can we get savs s Top 10 Crimes under the noses of some high-profile people?

Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I can write a review. The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a picture a day type of thing. So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the iGala being sold pretty much exclusively by ThinkGeek. The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it appealing. So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we headed to Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's the highlights. WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA) Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the frame would not associate with my Linksys WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2, and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure. I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped. The automatic updates are brain-dead Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds. So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented the HEAD request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic a day. Taking these frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles. I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly sufficient. Transitions are unavoidable It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one. Automatic on/off time I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's "off". Photo check frequency is configurable Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day (that we change it). Built in photos are a bit too sticky There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to have at least two photos in your online source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix. The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works... Touch screen UI was adequate Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections. Fairly responsive support The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation" period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I was raising with them. It's written in Lua?! I have no familiarity with Lua, other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to be a Blackfin based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware. Easy to update Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back. The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have. Conclusion I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the price, I expected a more polished product, though. I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their Linksys WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff.... (unfortunately in German only....)

22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gew nschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anf ngst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is  blicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zur ckgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten m ssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim t v das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie m gen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste pl tzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> sch ne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> l dst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zur ck und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit f r
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne l ngre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten s cke, die sich
zur cklehnen und  ber die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren qu len lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode

Folllowing an idea by Kai Hendry, I re-implemented my Linux application screen-message, which does nothing but display a piece of text that you enter as large as possible, in HTML. So whenever you are in need of screen-message, but don t have it installed at the moment, put your browser into fullscreen mode, go toand type away.I only tested it with the web browser galeon, so I expect it to work with Firefox and related browsers. If it does not work with Internet Explorer, I can t help it but patches are welcome. The file is stored in the screen-message Darcs repository at http://darcs.nomeata.de/screen-message.upstream.PS: If anyone wants to donate a shorter domain for this, you are welcome. But I guess all good domains with sm in them are taken...

Well that was an unproductive week. Maybe I can do something interesting over the weekend? Nope, looks like I get to run around after the kids and do household chores.

Fortunately the interweb is here to entertain you! I am sure most of you have already seen it but the Muppets doing bohemian rhapsody is fun. The Nottingham university scientists explaining the small hotrod collider is amusing and two girls, one uke is safe for work.

Unfortunately there have been other happenings this week which are not so amusing, the extensive flooding in parts of the UK has caused many people a great deal of harm and in one case a policeman, protecting others, was swept to his death from a collapsing bridge.

Unfortunately due to a confluence of events I will not be able to attend the Bug Squashing Party (BSP) in Cambridge this weekend as I had originally intended. I do hope to be able to contribute some work on Sunday from here.

My work sometimes causes me to have reason to change small things in open source projects which I then have to submit for consideration upstream. Often this is as simple as providing a patch on the relevant mailing list and moving on.

Sometimes however the change is larger and I really would like to see the feature or bug fix accepted by the project. I am fortunate that my employer is enlightened enough to not only accept this but actively encourage participation in open source communities.

Most of the time the patches are accepted, with changes or updates, in a reasonable timescale. Certainly for kernel work I have got used to a submission/accept time measured in hours!

On occasion the change gets dropped on the floor or missed and you have to resubmit (even if its just to get told its uninteresting and to go away ;-). Unfortunately there are a small number of projects where getting something merged is an experience in frustration.

The particular project which has caused me the most trouble along these lines is Qemu. Daniel and I did the work to support the Samsung ARM based 2410 and 2440 System on Chip (SoC) and a couple of boards they were used on. Of course we then presented the patch to the Qemu mailing list. That was in November...No, not this year, or even last, we are talking 2006!

Unsurprisingly there were numerous issues with our first cut, we improved the patches and resubmitted them and received absolutely no feedback. Eventually we provoked the maintainer to respond, we took his feedback into account and resubmitted. After a year of so of this Daniel got bored and gave up.

Being a complete idiot and apparently sucker for punishment I decided to re-try. I completely restructured the port and started by just trying to get the absolute minimal core changed accepted. It took some time to provoke a response (oh and they altered RCS which meant I had to change my submission again, but they did change to git so that is acceptable ;-)

Earlier this year resulted in my all time favorite maintainer response. Eventually I managed to find out he actually objected to the patch because the SoC we were using actually required a slightly different processor capability set (the emulation is ARMv5 by default and the SoC in question is ARM v4te, hey I had not noticed any practical difference, and Qemu is an emulator not a simulator...but OK)

Remember this is the first time this objection has been raised in 30months of patch submission. Fine, I create a patch which adds V4te emulation and submit that. I eventually get a response, to which my reply is a little frustrated I will admit.

I have since resubmitted the patch with the corner cases fixed, it has been ignored, and I never have received a reply to my direct questions. On this three year anniversary of the original submission I am simply going to give up, something I detest doing.

I am one of those dull people that finishes what he starts, that is pretty much my role in Simtec these days, ensuring stuff we start gets finished or at least drawing the line and calling it complete. To end up with a complete failure offends my personal values.

Now please do not think I hold any ill feelings towards anyone concerned, open source maintainers perform their roles without pay and, by extension, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. I am sure people are too busy to care about the itch I wanted scratched and that overall their project has not really lost all that much by not having me as a contributor.

I know I could have forked the project, or maintained my own tree or any number of other technical solutions but at the end of 1,100 days I have finally exhausted my enthusiasm and can move on. Speaking of which, time to resubmit a kbuild change which got dropped ;-)