Good morning all! It feels like forever since I last blogged . Which is extremely bad of me *slaps own wrist*. However, I m been horrendously stupidly busy. As some of you may know, I m very much an Android fan. Recently, I ve gotten myself a shiny Galaxy SII. Given the fact that alongside my day job of being a Web Developer for an Online Retailer, I m also a Voluntary Ambulance Person I thought it d be useful to ask my current workplace if they d provide me a mobile phone cover for my new phone. Of course, work were more than happy to provide me with a shiny Samsung Galaxy S2 case (I actually went for the Case-Mate Barely There in brushed aluminium). Being a voluntary Ambulance Person, I regularly have to go to random places to pick up an ambulance/attend an event. Because of that I rely quite heavily on Google Maps and it s navigation features (Free Sat Nav in my opinion, the killer feature of Android). Having only had my phone a week, I started to find that there were a few problems with the GPS. Whereas previously, I d been able to lock on almost instantly, It d now take me about half an hour (literally) to get a lock on anything. I tried Googling, I tried everything I could think of, but to no avail. I downloaded GPS Test, and it was showing that while it was picking up a couple of sattelites, it wasn t picking up enough to get a decent lock The image above is a screenshot of the GPS test from directly outside my front door, taken after it had settled down. As you can imagine, I wasn t happy and was ready to send the phone back. Then, for some reason, a brainwave hit me (It doesn t happen often). What changed from when it was working to now? I know! The Case *takes case off, tries GPS test again* It can be amazing what happens when you realise that shiny case you have is mainly made of aluminium. Guess what works well at deflecting radio signals and the like You got it, aluminium. So now I need to decide whether to get another case or whether to just take the case off when I need to do sensible things. Other than the case problem, I m finding that the Samsung Galaxy SII is a great phone (as soon as I got rid of Touchwiz). I m not a fan of the OEM Samsung crap that s been bolted onto the phone, and will, as soon as there s a decent release, be putting a copy of CyanogenMod on the phone (I ve already made most of the tweaks I just want rid of SNS) In other news I ve started more and more gaming again. If you re interested in a couple of rounds of TF2 or some SC2 (or some Portal 2 Co-Op) then give me a shout with your Steam ID / Battle.net ID and I ll see what I can do. I m thinking of starting doing some Let s Play Videos, as my Youtube Channel is looking a bit sparse! I m going to try and start blogging a bit more aswell so if there s anything you want to see me blog about pop a post in the comments below! Till next time..

here's my list of recent RC bug fixes, again comprising bugs which already had a patch in the BTS:

• #625330 fileschanged: "fileschanged: ftbfs with gcc-4.6 -Werror"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634414 src:libnsbmp: "libnsbmp: FTBFS: src/libnsbmp.c:297:11: error: variable 'uheight' set but not used [-Werror=unused-but-set-variable]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643348 src:ale: "ale: FTBFS: ui/unsupported.h:35:30: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643350 src:alsamixergui: "alsamixergui: FTBFS: Fl_AM.cxx:154:20: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643353 src:asmix: "asmix: FTBFS: asmix.c:580:5: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643356 src:babl: "babl: FTBFS: babl-model.c:49:7: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643404 src:gyrus: "gyrus: FTBFS: gyrus-admin.c:1474:4: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643431 src:libnet: "libnet: FTBFS: libnet_init.c:88:17: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Bart Martens, upload to DELAYED/2

As you may have noticed, I'm testing DIASPORA* as a blogging platform. Its been working reasonably well recently for me, with friends and family; even though the "Main" platform joindiaspora.com is not giving general invites, the code works and a bunch of distributed 'pods' have been set up. You can make entries public, and I've tested a public address for this: http://diaspora.sceal.ie/u/amckinstry which looks ok, a bit plain for the moment, but I'll work on that later. The problem has been the atom feed is garbage. (It's putting the content into both the Subject line (as unadulterated MarkDown, no less), and into the content). So, I've put the old blog back up for the moment. While I debug some Ruby on Rails, not a language i'm too familiar with ... Note: only logged in DIASPORA users can leave notes on the Diaspora site, but go to the login page and registrations are open. At least until spammers notice... Tags diaspora, ruby, debugging, blogging

#### Are Earths still Rare ? #### #exoplanets, #phd Greg Lauglin has an interesting blog entry up at [oklo.org](http://oklo.org/2011/09/10/concordance/), basically describing a paper they've posted to [arxiv.org](http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5842). They've been tying together the results from the HARPS team (probably the most prolific exoplanet discoverty team on Earth, with the results from Kepler, the NASA exoplanet discovery mission. Now the two instruments work differently: HARPS by radial velocity, while Kepler is a transit mission. They give different results, and presuming they're accurate, Wolfgang & Laughlin basically come up with the explanation: there are two different populations of "Super-Earths" : dense "Super-Mercuries" and "Sub-Neptunes". Gaidos et al. also come up with a similar result [by different methods](http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5686) ( [via](http://oklo.org/2011/09/10/concordance/#comment-34543) ). So how does this affect the number of Earth-like planets? "Super-Mercuries" are very dense, suggesting that they may lack the volatile elements needed for life ( water ... ) while "sub-Neptunes" would have too much hydrogen: accumulating a relatively dense H2 atmosphere that would make a liquid water ocean unlikely. Meanwhile on another continent not far away, Hal Levison proposes [a new theory](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/10/peashooter_theory_aims_to_expa.html) for planet formation, based on planet embyos being shot through the stellar disk during the early period of planet formation. Hal has a good reputation in the field, even if this theory sounds off-the-wall, its worth investigating. I find this work interesting as it may help answer the question, *are there any ocean planets?*, which my PhD thesis relies on. We have candidates like [Gliese 1214b](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/GJ_1214_b) for which the problem at the moment is telling whether or not they are really Neptunes-with-little-gas, or more water planets. This work seems to imply small sub-Neptunes are unlikely. Hmm.

It has been a while since I last ranted about the Deutsche Bahn, our national train service monopoly. Out of necessity, I ve since become one of their frequent travellers. Together with the spiffy, silver card, I received a pamphlet, in which the advantages of frequent travellers are listed. When I compare those advantages to what was promised, I cannot help but notice quite a few differences to my disadvantage. Since I refused to believe that the Deutsche Bahn could be this stupid, I double-checked with the service hotline, and I now have the information to report:

1. While the website promises free access to DB lounges for two , the pamphlet clarifies this: free access to DB lounges for you and your partner, provided each of you owns a first-class, long-distance ticket. What they left out: Oh, you don t need the frequent traveller status for that, the ticket suffices. Or, put differently: the frequent traveller status does not give you any access to the lounges. False advertising, anyone?
2. The pamphlet explains that there are special seat areas reserved for frequent travellers. However, one must not be a frequent traveller to use them. So should I expect people to prompt me to show my card or clear my seat. And should I be expected to prompt people to flash the card or leave? Not feasible, anyone?
3. I am told that I get priority treatment at the counter, except there is only one counter (in Munich), usually with a line of people for 1st-class and frequent travellers. All other travellers get delegated to 12 counters by an efficient number system, which means one is better off picking a number and standing in line. The other day, a lady came and flashed her frequent traveller card, expecting people to make way, but obviously noone did. Did they actually think about this, anyone?

I don t need to go into detail on the other benefits : they claim that there is special, reserved parking, but that s probably only on paper. They claim reductions in hotels and rental cars, but probably limited to availability, they claim exclusive events, but those are likely the ones noone goes to anyway. And they claim a service hotline, but it s a premium-rate number. So all in all, Deutsche Bahn have once again managed to disappoint. The frequent traveller card does not give any benefits. It rather makes me regret having spent so much money on this company. Scratch frequent traveller , make it repeat idiot . NP: Steven Wilson: Grace for Drowning

#### [WATER FRACTIONS IN EXTRASOLAR PLANETESIMALS](http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1110/1110.1774v1.pdf) #### Jura & Xu, Arxiv.org. #exoplanets, #water, #phd > Abstract: With the goal of using externally-polluted white dwarfs to investigate the water fractions of extrasolar planetesimals, we assemble from the literature a sample that we estimate to be more than 60% complete of DB white dwarfs warmer than 13,000 K, more luminous than 3 10 3 L and within 80 pc of the Sun. When considering all the stars together, we find the summed mass accretion rate of heavy atoms exceeds that of hydrogen by over a factor of 1000. If so, this sub-population of extrasolar asteroids treated as an ensemble has little water and is at least a factor of 20 drier than CI chondrites, the most primitive meteorites. In contrast, while an apparent excess of oxygen in a single DB can be interpreted as evidence that the accreted material originated in a water-rich parent body, we show that at least in some cases, there can be sufficient uncertainties in the time history of the accretion rate that such an argument may be ambiguous. Regardless of the difficulty associated with interpreting the results from an individual object, our analysis of the population of polluted DBs provides indirect observational support for the theoretical view that a snow line is important in disks where rocky planetesimals form. Ok, so we now have a way of estimating how wet planetary systems *were*, at the time they fell into the white dwarf star. Not very representative of the time they before the planet got roasted to a crisp by the stars Red Giant stage, however. Recovering the hydrogenation state of serpentinized minerals might be possible and useful.

No, my blog isn't dead, and neither is me. It's just that way too many things happened since this year's debconf that got me a bit off tracks. I managed to do daily business like keeping my packages in shape and the backports queue low, and that was mostly it. No clue if that will change anytime soon, but I guess I would like to keep you updated with an event where you can meet me next week: There will be the Global 2000 Birthday Party going on in the WUK on Thursday 20th, so if you happen to be in Vienna at that time, drop by and enjoy some great bands. ... which brings me to one of the local bands from Vienna: Heinz aus Wien. They are around for well over 10 years now and are still rocking quite well. Here are some examples of their songs, like always:

• Wir sind immer noch: A sort of love song for this great town, Vienna.
• Lieb im Prinzip: A very pithy song about relationships.
• Ich hab mit Tocotronic Bier getrunken: Quite funny song from their early days, and interestingly, people regularly claim that it was done by a different band ...

Like always, enjoy!

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This morning, when turning on TV, my ears have been yet another time hurt by the stupidity of a self-appointed economist, trying to intoxicate people with his fantasies about economy being able to regulate itself. Seriously. All neoliberals, please shut the fuck up. Now. The world has been running out of your ideas for more than 30 years. We lowered salaries and taxes, making the world run through credit. We gave everything to those who were already born with everything. Economy was almost brought to the verge of implosion thanks to your crazy ideas. For 4 years since the subprimes crisis, you psychopaths have kept on explaining it happened because we have not listened to you enough, and that the solution is to lower salaries even more. A quick look at the situation in Greece and UK should be enough to understand where this is going. It is time for something new. So shut up now, and let others fix the mess you have left behind.

Our friends Andrew and Janice finally tied the knot last Sunday, in Langkawi, Malaysia. They're Aussies currently living in New York, and Janice is of Malaysian descent, so I think part of the reason was to accommodate some Malaysian relatives that wouldn't be able to travel, and the other reason was that it was going to mean a bunch of people had to travel anyway, so why not travel somewhere a bit exotic? As my sister is getting married later this month in Brisbane, we decided to spare Zoe two massive international flights in close succession, and Sarah and Zoe flew out a few days ahead of me, and went to Brisbane, and then Zoe, Sarah and her mum flew to Langkawi from there, and I flew there from San Francisco, with the plan being for Sarah and Zoe to hang out in Brisbane for the 4 weeks in between weddings. It was the longest amount of travel I think I've ever done. I hadn't sat down and calculated what the travel time was beforehand, and when I got on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and they said it was going to be nearly 14 hours just to Hong Kong, I nearly wept. The only good thing about it was I didn't have to wrangle a toddler as well. From there, I had to get to Singapore, with a several hour layover, and then another flight from Singapore to Langkawi. I left SFO at 1:20am on Monday morning, and finally arrived at about 7am (San Francisco time) the following day. I didn't even bother getting off the plane in Hong Kong, it was only an hour and a half layover. I think the layover in Singapore was 5 hours, and it was a separate flight. Singapore airport at least was pretty good to kill time in. It was funny, I was reading Wired while I was killing time in Singapore, and they had an article, which included a side bar on 10 Best Airports to Get Stuck In, and I observed that getting to Langkawi and back involved using 4 of them. The flight into Langkawi was more eventful than usual. I was dozing a bit as we were coming in to land, and I woke up to the sensation of taking off again. I wondered if we'd had an aborted landing? Sure enough, soon after, the captain got on the public address and said that they'd had to abort the landing due to bad weather in Langkawi. He had pretty bad Engrish, thanking us for our frustration and saying something about fuel, so I didn't get a lot of the details. We proceeded to circle for a while before finally landing. I think the flight ended up landing something like an hour or more later than scheduled. So that was mildly exciting. Langkawi airport was one of those little "walk across the tarmac" places. I think I stood the closest to an operating jet engine that I ever have, as another aeroplane taxied in to a stop between my plane and the terminal while I was walking to it. Loud. Anyway, that was all just me getting there. Sarah had a bit of fun getting to Brisbane on her own with Zoe. She's now too long to sleep in an in-flight bassinet, and doesn't seem to like sleeping vertically in the Ergo Baby Carrier (possibly she was too hot in it). I think she got a bit of sleep lying across Sarah's lap, but Sarah didn't get much sleep. I think there was similar fun for the Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur flight, but at least she had two laps to lie across for that one. Sarah, Zoe and Sarah's mum arrived in Langkawi earlier in the day on Tuesday, and I made it to the resort at about 10pm (local time) and pretty much immediately crashed for the night. The Westin Langkawi was just fabulous. I don't think we've stayed at a resort since our honeymoon, and this resort was a whole other level compared to Heron Island. The rooms were very comfortable, and the resort was very accommodating of a toddler. Their Kids Club menu was excellent. The breakfast buffet (included in our room rate) was the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever seen in a hotel. The only thing missing was bacon, being a Muslim country, but I can live without that. It was pretty easy to just fill up on breakfast, skip lunch and just have a light dinner. The on-resort dining prices were also very reasonable. The off-resort prices were even cheaper. The resort facilities in general were very comprehensive. Three pools. A children's play room. A well equipped gym and recreational area including squash courts. An extremely nice day spa. The thing I liked best about the whole destination wedding thing was all of the activities leading up to the actual wedding. The wedding was on the Sunday, and we had the Hen's and Buck's parties on Friday. Apparently Australia is the only place that calls it a Buck's party. The rest of the world calls it a Stag party, how about that? There was some last-minute changes to the Buck's party, and we ended up chartering this huge $2 million yacht for 4 hours and going for a cruise and doing some jetskiing and water sports. The captain was Aussie, so we all had a good chat with him. Apparently it's a corporate vessel, with an exclusive chartering arrangement with the Westin. On Friday night, we all went out to a seafood buffet dinner at the Yellow Cafe over at Cenang Beach. Most of the guys and girls already knew each other courtesy of the day's activities, so dinner involved a lot of meeting the other halves. What I really liked about all of the pre-wedding stuff was that by the time the wedding rolled around, you really felt like you knew a bunch of Andrew and Janice's family and friends, which I think made the whole thing feel a lot more intimate. Saturday was a recovery day. Sarah's aunties Glenda (who was in Singapore on business) and Vicki (who lives in Thailand) had joined us at the resort by this stage, so we were all knocking around together checking out the island. We took the cable car to the top, but unfortunately the sky bridge was closed due to the inclement weather. There was a lot of touristy stuff at the bottom of where the cable car was, and Zoe got to have an encounter with a very large python. She even tried to give it a kiss. One of the things that was surprising was how popular Zoe was with all of the locals and other Asian tourists. We could probably have charged for photographs. There was a little girl, who I thought was possibly a similar age to Zoe (turned out she was two and a half) and I asked her parents if I could take a photo of the two girls together, and no sooner had they sat down together and a virtual paparazzi materialised out of nowhere taking photographs. Similarly, all of the staff at the Westin were totally taken by Zoe, and wanted to touch her. To her credit, Zoe handled all of the extra attention pretty well. The wedding wasn't until 6pm on Sunday, so we did a 4 hour island hopping boat tour in the morning. That was a bit of an experience. It was nothing short of sheer bedlam trying to board the right boat at the wharf (I use the term lightly) and then the boat's captain had to arrange the passengers appropriately so as to keep the boat on an even keel. It was a narrow motor boat with a canopy cover over the back two thirds of it. First stop was Dayang Bunting Island, home of Pregnant Maiden Lake, where we stopped for 45 minutes. More bedlam ensued getting off the boat at the wharf there (there was veritable flotilla of tour boats all trying to load and unload at the same time). Monkeys abounded. They seemed incredibly tame. We were practically tripping over them. Zoe didn't seem to be as taken by the monkeys as I thought she would. It was a short walk up a reasonable flight of stairs to get to the lake, though some incredibly humid jungle, and once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to do in the time we had available. So we dunked Zoe's feet in the lake a few times and then made our way back to the chaos at the wharf and got back on our boat. We stopped for a similar amount of time at another island with a pretty nice beach, and Zoe had enough time to a quick swim in the ocean with Sarah, and then we made our way back to the boat again to another spot where we watched sea eagle feeding. Heaps of eagles circling overhead would take turns to swoop down and grab fish and fly off again. It was impressive. I think I managed to snap some good action shots with the long lens. Then we had the wedding itself. It was on the beach out the front of the Heavenly Spa on the resort. Let me say, the Westin knows how to put a wedding together. The ceremony was as lovely as the location. For the reception, the one 5 bedroom villa on the resort was booked for the night. Dinner was a buffet on the lawn out the front (briefly delayed thanks to a rain shower) and then speeches and general partying happened around the terrace out the back of the villa. There were some beautiful speeches. Janice's brought a tear to my eye. Part of the whole package included something like a 10 person video crew that were running around capturing everything. It felt a bit surreal. It was definitely the most high-end wedding I've ever been to (sorry Scott and Julie, your "Wedding of the Century" has been eclipsed by the "Wedding of the Millennium"). Monday was a wind down day. Zoe mercifully gave us a sleep in until 8am. Our flights didn't leave until the evening on Tuesday, so after we checked out we went for a drive around the island to try and get Zoe to take a nap in the car. We ended up at the fruit farm, which to the best of my understanding is run by the government. Zoe had fallen asleep by this stage, and Sarah said she'd stay behind in the car and have a nap too. So her mum and I went on the tour. It was a fun little tour. There were only four of us on it. They drive you around the farm on the back of a truck and show you the various crops they have. They stop at a few places and give you a bunch of fruit samples, attempt to answer your questions, and take funny pictures of you. The favourite seemed to be to dangle a fruit on a knife up close in front of the camera while having the subject(s) in the background look like they're carrying an enormous fruit. We got back to the car to an upset Sarah and small group of locals milling around. Sarah had managed to lock Zoe in the car for about 30 minutes when she got out to make her a sandwich after Zoe had woken up from her nap. Fortunately the engine was running and the air conditioning was on, so there was no risk of Zoe overheating (on the contrary, she was a bit on the cool side). Some kind locals had somehow figured out which car rental company to call (it's possible there's only one) and someone came out with a spare key, so the crisis was averted just before we got back to the car. It's the first time Zoe's been locked in the car (it's pretty much impossible in the Prius) and it was just our luck that it'd happen in a foreign country! One of the saddest things about Langkawi was the amount of garbage floating around in the ocean, and washing up on the beaches. I was swimming in the ocean off the yacht while we were out on the Buck's party, and it was disgusting. The jetski was temporarily disabled due to sucking in something. We visited Black Sand Beach, which was supposed to be something of a tourist attraction. Covered in trash. Ian Kiernan would be sad. The captain of the yacht we were on for the Buck's party said it was all from Thailand and got flushed out of all the rivers and streams by the recent rain. Just goes to show how connected everything is. The house is very quiet without Sarah and Zoe, but my friend Liam is visiting from Zurich for a couple of weeks, so that's helping break the silence. I'm using the time to get a heap of things done that I don't otherwise get time to get done. Unfortunately the photos from the trip are only available on Facebook at the moment, but they'll eventually get uploaded here.

another week, another list of fixed RC bugs, again most of them with patches from ubuntu. &, as zack said today, the next freeze is not really imminent but it's getter closer.

• #625002 src:ctemplate: "ctemplate: FTBFS: ./src/ctemplate/template_dictionary.h:73:11: error: 'ptrdiff_t' does not name a type"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625005 src:cdrdao: "cdrdao: FTBFS: ScsiIf-linux.cc:287:37: error: no matching function for call to 'stat::stat(const char [22], stat*)'"
  add patch from brian m. carlson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625064 src:zziplib: "zziplib: FTBFS: x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc: error: unrecognized option '--export-dynamic'"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625068 src:liborigin: "liborigin: FTBFS: tree.hh:138:21: error: 'ptrdiff_t' does not name a type"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625080 src:fstrcmp: "fstrcmp: FTBFS: ./lib/diffseq.h:461:38: error: 'bxbest' may be used uninitialized in this function [-Werror=uninitialized]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #625096 src:zipios++: "zipios++: FTBFS: directory.h:85:12: error: 'ptrdiff_t' does not name a type"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Julian Taylor, upload to DELAYED/2
• #634394 src:gauche-c-wrapper: "gauche-c-wrapper: FTBFS: gcc: error: /usr/lib/libffi_pic.a: No such file or directory"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #644189 libcrypt-dsa-perl: "libcrypt-dsa-perl: signing leaks secret key on systems"
  upload package with patch prepared by Harlan (pkg-perl)
• #644423 libterm-readline-gnu-perl: "libterm-readline-gnu-perl: FTBFS: Could not find neither libtermcap.a, libncurses.a, or libcurses."
  add patch to find -ltinfo (pkg-perl)

I just uploaded a snapshot of GNU Screen to Debian Experimental. The package (4.1.0~20110819git450e8f3-1) is based on upstream s HEAD whose most recent commit currently dates to the 19th of August 2011. While the upload fixes tons of bugs which accumulated over the past two years in Debian s, Ubuntu s and upstream s bug tracker, I don t yet regard it as suitable for the next stable release (and hence for Debian Unstable) since there s one not so nice issue about it:

• #644788: screen 4.1.0 can t attach to a running/detached screen 4.0.3 session

Nevertheless it fixes a lot of open issues (of which the oldest is a wishlist bug report dating back to 1998 :-) and I didn t want to withhold it from the rest of the Debian community so I uploaded it to Debian Experimental. Issues closed in Debian Experimental

• #25096: digraph table should be run-time configurable
• #152961: lacks tsl/fsl/dsl caps
• #176626: mini-curses type of interface for screen -r w/ multiple screens? (Fixed by suggesting iselect, screenie or byobu)
• #223320: does not switch mouse mode
• #344759: mishandles xterm control string to set window title
• #353090: please enable the built-in telnet
• #361274: cannot reattach to sessionname if there is another session with similar sessionname
• #450421: please raise MAXWIN to at least 100 (merged with #499273)
• #461107: Requires test -t 0 even when opening a new window on existing screen
• #481411: window created with -d -m silently ignores -X exec
• #488619: Session name string escape
• #496750: screen -d -m and -D -m segfault if setenv given with no value in a configuration file
• #532240: screen with caption SEGVs when resized to 1 line tall
• #541793: C-a h (mis)documented twice
• #558724: breaks altscreen
• #560231: Please remove restriction on user/login name length
• #578729: outputs spaces when refreshing/attaching a window with defbce on
• #591624: segfault when running screen -d -m with layout save default in .screenrc
• #603009: Updating the screen Uploaders list
• #612990: /etc/init.d/screen-cleanup: should check for existence of screen binary
• #621704: Fix slow scrolling in vertical splits
• #630535: manpage typo
• #641867: version bump (this bug report sparked the upload :-)

Issues which will be closed in Ubuntu

• #183849: update to git version of screen
• #315237: crashes with certain options and terminal sizes
• #582153: doesn t accept login names longer than 20 chars
• #588846: slow when using vertical split
• #702094: Copying and pasting from mutt includes many trailing spaces
• #786292: segfaults if using layout saving with -D -m
• #788670: segfault in screen/byobu in natty

Please test the version from Experimental If you are affected by one of the issues mentioned above, please try the version from Debian Experimental and check if they re resolved for you, too. Thanks to all who contributed! A lot of the fixes have been made or applied upstream by Sadrul Habib Chowdhury who also industriously tagged Debian bug reports as fixed-upstream . Thanks! Thanks also to Brian P Kroth who gave the initial spark to this upload by packaging Fedora 15 s git snapshot for Debian and filing bug although the upload is based on the current HEAD version of GNU Screen as this fixes some more important issues than the snapshot Fedora 15 includes. That way also two patches from Fedora/RedHat s screen package are included in this upload. (Co-) Maintainer wanted! Oh, and if you care about the state of GNU Screen in Debian, I d really appreciate if you d join in and contribute to our collab-maint git repository there are still a lot of issues unresolved and I know that I won t be able to fix all of them myself. And since Hessophanes unfortunately currently has not enough time for the package, we definitely need more people maintaining this package. P.S. Yes, I know about tmux and tried to get some of my setups working with it, too. But I still prefer screen over tmux. :-)

Here in Norway the public libraries are debating with the publishing houses how to handle electronic books. Surprisingly, the libraries seem to be willing to accept digital restriction mechanisms (DRM) on books and renting e-books with artificial scarcity from the publishing houses. Time limited renting (2-3 years) is one proposed model, and only allowing X borrowers for each book is another. Personally I find it amazing that libraries are even considering such models. Anyway, while reading part of this debate, it occurred to me that someone should present a more sensible approach to the libraries, to allow its borrowers to get used to a better model. The idea is simple: Create a computer system for the libraries, either in the form of a Live DVD or a installable distribution, that provide a simple kiosk solution to hand out free e-books. As a start, the books distributed by Project Gutenberg (abount 36,000 books), Project Runenberg (1149 books) and The Internet Archive (3,033,748 books) could be included, but any book where the copyright has expired or with a free licence could be distributed. The computer system would make it easy to:

• Copy e-books into a USB stick, reading tablets, cell phones and other relevant equipment.
• Show the books for reading on the the screen in the library.

In addition to such kiosk solution, there should probably be a web site as well to allow people easy access to these books without visiting the library. The site would be the distribution point for the kiosk systems, which would connect regularly to fetch any new books available. Are there anyone working on a system like this? I guess it would fit any library in the world, and not just the Norwegian public libraries. :)

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (144.3 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg work While taking care of the last details for the hardening feature in dpkg 1.16.1, I have mailed debian-devel to find volunteers to handle a hardening release goal. The objective is to ensure a large number of packages have been converted/rebuilt to actually use the new hardening build flags. Then I prepared the draft of the announce of the dpkg 1.16.1 upload (aka Bits of dpkg maintainers sent to debian-devel-announce) which got expanded by Guillem to also cover new features since dpkg 1.15.7. update-alternatives got some refactoring by Guillem which resulted in a regression that has been fortunately discovered by Sven Joachim. I fixed that regression and did some further cleanup inspired by the root cause of this regression (see top 4 commits here). Note that Sven is one of the few persons who are running the git version of dpkg. Hopefully the number of tester will increase since I recently documented the APT repositories with autobuilt versions of dpkg in the wiki. At the end of the month, I started working on a bugfix release (what s going to be 1.16.1.1) by fixing some of the unavoidable problems discovered after an upload that accumulated more than 4 months worth of work (see top 4 commits here). The Debian Administrator s Handbook I spent countless hours finalizing the launch of the crowdfunding campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook and it went live on September 27th. So far it s on good track with more than 63% of the base funding already secured. But we still have a long way to go to reach the liberation goal (we re at 21%). It s still worth nothing that more than 55% of the money raised has been put in the liberation fund so there are many persons who care about getting the book freed. More than 250 persons are supporting the project currently with an average contribution of 38 EUR. I would have expected much less for the average contribution but many more supporters. I still hope we can get more people on board with the perspective of a good DFSG-free Debian ebook. Did you order your copy? If not, click here and fix this! By the way Paypal used to be required but it s no longer the case, you can support the project just with your usual credit card. Misc blog updates Over time, I have written many useful articles for Debian users and Debian contributors. But scattered in the history, they are somewhat difficult to find. To fix this I have created some index pages listing them. Check them out:

• Mastering Debian
• Contributing to Debian
• Debian Packaging Tutorials

Two new articles joined those pages this month: How to triage bugs in the Debian Bug Tracking System and Understand dpkg and don t get stuck with a maintainer script failure. While writing the first article, I noticed we lacked a good page showing the most buggy packages so I quickly created it (with the help of UDD): http://qa.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugs-by-source Misc packaging work I did a small update to the developer s reference. Luca Falavigna submitted a patch to clarify how one is supposed to deal with meta-packages (cf #569219), I improved it and integrated the result in the SVN repository. I upgraded nautilus-dropbox to version 0.6.9 and while doing this I discovered a bug in mergechanges (filed as #640782). I uploaded a new release of quilt mainly to add the Multi-Arch: foreign field so that it can satisfy dependencies of foreign packages (i.e. packages of a different architecture). Django released some security advisories (tracked in #641405) and since the maintainer did not deal with the issue, I stepped up to the task (I m a backup maintainer) and released the fixed version 1.3.1 to unstable. I took the opportunity to switch from python-support to dh_python2, and do some misc improvements to the packaging (see changelog). I wanted to update publican to a newer version but it turned out to be not possible because Debian doesn t have the latest version of docbook-xsl yet. I also discovered some bugs in the test suite and forwarded upstream the patch I created (see upstream bug). On top of this, fop was failing due to some java problem related to the introduction of multiarch. After having reported the bug, the java maintainers quickly released a fixed version. So now publican is ready in the git repository but it s waiting on the docbook-xsl update. I got in touch with the maintainer who said he would have the time to take care of it by mid-october. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Today I was wondering that I had almost no new mail in my inbox in the morning. After a while I decided to have a look into the server logfiles . so I learned that postfix wasn t able to deliver mails via lmtp cause of:

Oct 7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR db4: Logging region out of memory; you may need to increase its size
Oct 7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR: opening /var/lib/cyrus/deliver.db: Cannot allocate memory
Oct 7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: DBERROR: opening /var/lib/cyrus/deliver.db: cyrusdb error
Oct 7 07:45:56 post cyrus/lmtpunix[307]: FATAL: lmtpd: unable to init duplicate delivery database
Oct 7 07:45:56 post cyrus/master[754]: service lmtpunix pid 307 in READY state: terminated abnormally Seems like this can be fixed with:

/etc/init.d/cyrus2.2 stop
cat< /var/lib/cyrus/db/DB_CONFIG
set_cachesize 0 2097152 1
set_lg_regionmax 1048576
EOM
/etc/init.d/cyrus2.2 start Looking more closer into the logs, it turned out that this trouble started last night when I connected with a client running the soon to be released Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot using the new kmail2. So it looks like the KDE/Ubuntu folks broke again kmail (or any KDE subsystem), as it also has troubles when migrating over from kmail(1) and it looks like it s not able to access most of the imap subfolders. Well done!

The Ubuntu Technical Board conducts a regular review of the most popular Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas (previous reviews conducted by Matt Zimmerman and Martin Pitt). This time it was my turn. Apologies for the late arrival of this review. Contact lens in the Unity Dash (#27584) Unity supports Lenses, which provide a consistent way for users to quickly search for information via the Dash. Current lenses include Applications, Files, and Music, but a number of people have asked for contacts to be accessible using the same interface. While Canonical's DX team isn't currently working on this for Ubuntu 11.10 or 12.04, we'd love somebody who's interested in this to get involved. Allison Randal explains how to get started, including some skeleton example code and several useful links. Displaying Ubuntu version information (#27460) Several people have asked for it to be more obvious what Ubuntu version they're running, as well as other general information about their system. John Lea, user experience architect on the Unity team, responds that in Ubuntu 11.10 the new LightDM greeter shows the Ubuntu version number, making that basic information very easily visible. For more detail, System Settings -> System Info provides a simple summary. Volume adjustments for headphone use (#27275) People often find that they need to adjust their sound volume when plugging in or removing headphones. It seems as though the computer ought to be able to remember this kind of thing and do it automatically; after all, a major goal of Ubuntu is to make the desktop Just Work. David Henningson, a member of Canonical's OEM Services group and an Ubuntu audio developer, responds on his blog with a summary of how PulseAudio jack detection has improved matters in Ubuntu 11.10, and what's left to do:

The good news: in the upcoming Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10), this is actually working. The bad news: it isn't working for everyone.

Making it easier to find software to handle a file (#28148) Ubuntu is not always as helpful as it could be when you don't have the right software installed to handle a particular file. Michael Vogt, one of the developers of the Ubuntu Software Center, responded to this. It seems that most of the pieces to make this work nicely are in place, but there are a few more bits of glue required:

Thanks a lot for this suggestion. I like the idea and it's something that software-center itself supports now. In the coming version 5.0 we will offer to "sort by top-rated" (based on the ratings&reviews data). It's also possible to search for an application based on its mime data. To search for a mime-type, you can enter "mime:text/html" or "mime:audio/ogg" into the search field. What is needed however is better integration into the file manager nautilus. I will make sure this gets attention at the next developer meeting and filed bug #860536 about it. In nautilus, there is now a button called "Find applications online" available as an option when opening an unknown file or when the user selects "open with...other application" in the context menu. But that will not use the data from software-center.

Show pop-up alert on low battery (#28037) Some users have reported on Brainstorm that they are not alerted frequently enough when their laptop's battery is low, as they clearly ought to be. This is an odd one, because there are already several power alert levels and this has been working well for us for some time. Nevertheless, enough people have voted for this idea that there must be something behind it, perhaps a bug that only affects certain systems. Martin Pitt, technical lead of the Ubuntu desktop team, has responded directly to the Brainstorm idea with a description of the current system and how to file a bug when it does not work as intended.

Woodchuck and FrOSCon

At the end of August, I attended FrOSCon in Bonn again, after skipping it last year. The evening before FrOSCon however, I visited Neal Walfield, his wife Isabel and their little son Noam in D sseldorf. Besides having a great time and a lovely dinner, I was most impressed by their collection of Maemo devices (they had at least two N770s, an N900 and, to my jealousy, an N950) which Neal is doing research on these days. He works on woodchuck, which is a project investigating how to improve data availability on mobile devices and our conversation prompted him to implement ATP Woodchuck, which makes smarter decisions when to run APT upgrade on your Maemo device then the standard updater. As part of the research, they also run a user behaviour study which I joined, where one installs a client which records various data off your N900 and sends them anonymized (he seems to be doing a good job at that) to figure out how people use their mobile devices and hopefully enhance the experience. So if you have a N900, you should consider joining the study so they get better data.
The next day, I picked up Martin Michlmayr nearby and we headed for FrOSCon. I was quite impressed by the Makerbot at the Tarent booth, but I still don't know what they are really doing and why they had it on display... In the afternoon, I attended a couple of talks in the PostgreSQL developer room and a talk about a big OpenVPN deployment, before ending the day with the excellent as always social event barbeque. On Sunday, I went to quite a few talks, but I thought that two of them were particularly interesting:
Michael "Monty" Widenius of MySQL gave a talk titled "Why going open source will improve your product" about starting businesses on an open source project, or how business can/should open-source their product. Besides a detailed discussion about the various forms of Open Source licenses and the Open-Core model, he proposed the idea of "Business Source" (see slide 20 of his presentation), where a startup would distribute the source code under a non-commercial (but otherwise open-source) license with the explicit guarantee that the license would be changed to a true FLOSS license at some defined point in the future, giving the company a head start to develop and nurture their project. I asked whether this has been already implemented in practise and how the community could be sure that e.g. lawyers after a hostile takeover would not just remove that part of the copyright notice, as long as a true distribution under a FLOSS license has not happened yet. Monty wasn't aware of any real-word cases, and he did not seem to be concerned about this and said the original intent would be clear in a possible court case. This was the first time I heard about this approach, I wonder how other people think about it, whether it would work in practise and be a useful thing to have?
Second, I attended a talk by Gregor Geiermann, a Ph.D. student in linguistics on "Perceptions of rudeness in Free Software communities". He conducted an online survey about the perceived rudeness of several forum thread posts on Ubuntu Forums. Survey participants were first asked a couple of generic questions about their gender, nationality etc. and were then presented with a series of posts. For each post, they were asked to rate how rude they thought it was on a scale of 1 to 5 and they also had the possibility to highlight the parts of the post they considered rude as well as add comments. He presented a neat web application for analyzing the results, which makes it possible to select different groups (he did male vs. female and Americans vs. Germans in the talk) and have their overall rudeness ratings as well as the highlighted texts visualized as different shades of blue. Comments can be easily accessed. There were quite a few interesting differences e.g. in how Germans perceived rudeness compared to Americans (RTFM comments were considered less rude by Germans for example, IIRC). In response to my question, he said he intended to release the web application as open source and this might be an interesting tool for FLOSS projects to analyze how their public communication channels are perceived by various groups. Unfortunately, I cannot find any other resources about this on the web as of today, so I should try to contact him about it at some point.

There's a new call for testing for the next point release of Debian Squeeze. Please test the packages in squeeze-proposed-updates on some stable machines if possible, so that we don't screw up your production machines with bad updates in a week. The point release is scheduled for October 8th, i.e. next Saturday. Don't forget to copy the debian-release mailing list when you encounter regressions. Thanks for your efforts.

If you want to receive these notices by mail, please subscribe to the debian-stable-announce mailing list.

Traditionally, when you start a program to view a document, for instance xpdf resume.pdf, it stays in foreground, and only returns when it finishes, when you are done with the document. Of course you can still run it in background if you want. Nowadays, several programs behave in a different way, for instance Evince. When you first start it, it stays in foreground as usual. However, if you launch it a second time while the first instance it still running, it will reuse this existing instance, asking it to open your document in a new window, and immediately return. Other examples are Firefox and LibreOffice.This behaviour is certainly more efficient in terms of memory usage and speed, but it is non-standard and causes subtle problems. When you open the attachment of an email message, or when you open a document from the Web without saving it permanently, the mailer or the browser saves the document to a temporary file, and then run a viewer with that file. As this is a temporary file, so they cannot leave it forever in /tmp; in fact they should delete it when you are done viewing it. I think the usual way to implement that is to delete it when the viewer returns: with a program that returns immediately, this means deleting it even before it has had a chance to load it. So, if you can no longer directly open a PDF attachment from Mutt, or if you are unable to view the compressed documentation of the LaTeX class Beamer with texdoc (which uncompresses it to a temporary file and calls a PDF viewer on it), you can blame your modern PDF viewer that returns before you are finished and start hacking your mailcap file. And if you are the author of such a program, please consider implementing a way to keep a lightweight process that does not return before the main process has closed the document or to disable process reuse.

There has been a lot of talk recently questioning the trust authorities that underpin the SSL/TLS world. After a few high-profile incidents, it is clear that there is something wrong with this structure.

While some people have suggested that DNSSEC might solve this problem, here are three Firefox add-ons that can be used today to enhance the security of HTTPS:

• Certificate Patrol applies the "trust on first use" principle familiar to most ssh users. It keeps track of the certificates you get for the sites you visit and displays a warning if important elements (e.g. the certificate authority) change.


• Perspectives uses a network of certificate notaries to issue a warning when you encounter a certificate that is different from what other Perspectives users see.


• Monkeysphere takes advantage of the PGP/GPG web-of-trust to verify the authenticity of certificates.

Unlike the Convergence approach which completely takes over certificate handling, all three of the above add-ons can be used together.