Terah and I recently decided that each of us could use a day off of not having to do work or supervise boys. Yesterday I had the day off work so that was mine. I took my Kindle, along with its Gutenberg copy of War and Peace, which yes, I m reading for fun. I slept in a bit, then got breakfast and sat down at Botanica, the Wichita Gardens with the Kindle for awhile. That was a nice way to spend the morning. Today was Terah s day off. Initially I thought of taking the boys to The Cosmosphere, one of the world s premier space museums, or to the Kansas Aviation Museum. But then I realized that the Midland Railway, a historic excursion line in Baldwin City, KS, was having their first train trip of the year. And it s the Easter special: you take the train a few miles out of town, get off, the kids do an Easter egg hunt, then also get to get their picture taken with the Easter bunny. Kid paradise, right? What could be better? So this is how my alarm came to be set for 5:15 on a Saturday morning. Oliver woke up early, but I had to get Jacob up. He was groggy, trying to cover his face and ears, and annoyed at me for trying to wake him up. Until I said, Jacob, it s time to get ready for the car trip to the train ride. Can you go get dressed for the day? Silence. Then about 5 seconds later, he jumped up, said, OK dad, I will do it, and he did. We drove our 2.5 hours. I had set out a non-dirty breakfast in the car for them the night before, so they munched while we drove. Then had to wait in a huge line for our tickets. An hour later we had them got the last 3 tickets for the first departure of the day, 10AM and ran to get on the train before it left. Jacob and Oliver both got very quiet. Sometimes Jacob especially does that when he s very excited about things. He doesn t always look it right then, but I knew I d be hearing about it later. He had his face almost pressed to the window the whole way. Oh, and yes, he dressed himself and I didn t check to make sure he had the correct shirt, or that it wasn t on inside-out, until it was too late. Oops. We rode in an ex-CP car built in 1936. One of the cars on the train was built in the 1890s quite some neat equipment. Anyhow, next came the hunt. There were two large lawns covered in eggs, separated by age group. Jacob and Oliver were in the younger group, but still only got a few eggs (there were lots of other parents, uhm, helping their kids by picking up eggs the kids were too slow to get and putting them in baskets ) But they were thrilled with the experience so that s what counts. They moved the locomotive to the other end of the train for the trip back using an adjacent track. Lots of the kids watched them couple it back on. Jacob and Oliver were particularly interested nothing could have distracted them from watching that train though they didn t particularly like the noise of the horn. On the way back, someone in an Easter bunny suit was on the train for pictures. I took the boys there. They usually refuse to sit on laps of Santa and such, so I didn t figure much success. They actually agreed to do it. And despite their expressions in this photo, Jacob later told me over and over how much fun it was to be with the Easter bunny. After we got back, we headed for the car. Jacob insisted on carrying his own Easter bag, and predictably wound up carrying it upside down for awhile. So his bag had some grass in it from picking the candy back up. Oliver discovered some rocks by a ditch and had fun throwing them in to make a splash, so we paused for that for awhile. By this point it was about noon. So at this point, what does a dad who has managed to keep two active boys in line for an hour, help them with an egg hunt and giant rabbit, and keep them from falling into the ditch they re throwing rocks into, do? Say that it s time to eat lunch and then head for home so we can be there in time for supper? Or go for MORE ADVENTURE? I said, Jacob, how would you like to eat lunch inside a big train station in Kansas City? Pause for a couple of seconds to think. YEAH! I have never had lunch in a train station before! Let s go! Shall we go NOW? So I gave them the leftover breakfast to eat during the hour drive on towards the beautiful Kansas City Union Station. It s one of the few grand American train stations that survives intact, and is just stunning. Jacob and Oliver both fell asleep on the way there. We parked, walked inside, and Jacob just froze. Dad WOW! That ceiling is SO HIGH! I can t even reach it! He then raised his hand as high as it would go and said, See dad, it is so high I can t touch it! (Most ceilings are, but this one is indeed much, much taller than most.) We ate lunch in the second level of a restaurant right in the Grand Hall, which Jacob really enjoyed. Here s Jacob, annoyed that I pulled out the camera again: Then we went exploring for an hour. Jacob talked about his adventure . We went up the elevators and checked out the balconies. Then we found the Model Railroad Experience. And oh my. The boys were visibly the most excited they had been all day. Oliver just froze at the spot he walked through the door, not caring to move and see the rest of the exhibit because he was so fascinated by what he already saw. There was a huge layout in the middle of the room, and smaller ones in adjacent rooms. We finally made our way there, and Oliver just ran round and round one of them, following a train, excitedly yelling There it is! There it is! There it is! Here s a photo from the big layout: Jacob cried when it was time to go, but I had promised them some dessert before we left, so after a bite of ice cream we were on our way. On the way home, every 15 minutes or so, Jacob would make a remark like this: Dad, the train ride was SO fun! or Dad, I really liked Kansas City Union Station! and so forth, naming every highlight of the day for him several times over: the Easter bunny, the egg hunt, train ride, and everything about Union Station. On the way home, we stopped at our favorite restaurant in Emporia: BobbyD s Merchant St. BBQ. This is always a hit for everyone in the family. A down-home place that has excellent food, is not far off our path, and never seems to have a wait. Yum.

A recent email from a user of one of my small software tools prompted me to write this entry If you read Wikipedia's page on Second system effect, it doesn't say much and it's hard to internalise what it means. Some other resources describe it better, but actually learning it first-hand is, shall we say, enlightening. Fortunately, I learned this in my spare time, and not at work. Back in 2002, I started working on a small tool (bakonf) to basically backup /etc and generate a tar archive out of it. It had some other features of course that made it a bit more useful than tar c /etc, but not many. It worked well and I was using it to make incremental dumps of server configuration ready to write to a CD on a few servers. A while later (around a year or so), I came to the conclusion that just having a tar archive is not enough, and rather one would want to be able to check differences between the filesystem and the archive, and ideally between multiple servers configurations (note, this was before DVCSs) online. I started working on cfvers in my free time and initially made reasonable progress. However, I didn't know to hold back from changing the scope and features, so actual progress in the form of a beta release was always postponed. Then came changes to the transport protocol, to the structure of the app, etc., all the fun. Note that this was in my free time, done in bursts of work in a month, then a few months with no work at all, so not too much work overall. Still, I slowly realised that this will go nowhere, so at the end of 2006 I finally gave up on developing it and marked the project as obsolete. However, bakonf is still doing its job, and I've done a few small commits to it in order to add compatibility with Python 3.x as recent as last year. I got an email about it from a user at the start of this year, so it definitely outlived its supposed replacement. Hah! Overall, it was a great lesson. Maybe it wasn't just second system effect, but also not enough effort invested by me, or bad planning, so on. But for me it drove the point home that writing the second version of something is filled with dangerous decisions

While preparing my slides for the Rcpp workshop this Thursday, I had wondered about more nice examples motivating Rcpp. So I posed a quick question on the rcpp-devel list. And I received a few friendly answers. My favourite, so far, was a suggestion by Lance Bachmeier who sent me a short script which used both R and C++ (via Rcpp) to simulate a first-order vector autoregressive process (and he ensured me that it worked well enough on his graduate students). It is indeed a great example as it involves (simple) matrix multiplication in an iterative fashion. Which makes it a great example not only for Rcpp but also for our RcppArmadillo package (which wraps Conrad Sanderson's wonderful Armadillo C++ templated library for linear algebra and more). And at the same time, we can also add another look at the new and shiny R compiler I also blogged about recently. So Lance and I iterated over this a little more over email, and I now added this as a new (and initial) example file in the RcppArmadillo SVN repo. (As an aside: The newest version 0.2.19 of RcppArmadillo has been sitting in incoming at CRAN since earlier in the week while the archive maintainer takes a well-deserved vacation. It should hit the public archive within a few days, and is otherwise available too from my site.) So let's walk through the example:

R> ## parameter and error terms used throughout
R> a <- matrix(c(0.5,0.1,0.1,0.5),nrow=2)
R> e <- matrix(rnorm(10000),ncol=2)
R> ## Let's start with the R version
R> rSim <- function(coeff, errors)  
+   simdata <- matrix(0, nrow(errors), ncol(errors))
+   for (row in 2:nrow(errors))  
+     simdata[row,] = coeff %*% simdata[(row-1),] + errors[row,]
+    
+   return(simdata)
+  
R> rData <- rSim(a, e)                     # generated by R

This starts with a simple enough loop. After skipping the first row, each iteration multiplies the previous row with the parameters and adds error terms. We can then turn to the R compiler:

R> ## Now let's load the R compiler (requires R 2.13 or later)
R> suppressMessages(require(compiler))
R> compRsim <- cmpfun(rSim)
R> compRData <- compRsim(a,e)              # generated by R 'compiled'
R> stopifnot(all.equal(rData, compRData))  # checking results

Nice and easy: We load the compiler package, create a compiled function and use it. We check the results and surely enough find them to be identical. With that, time to turn to C++ using Armadillo via RcppArmadillo:

R> ## Now load 'inline' to compile C++ code on the fly
R> suppressMessages(require(inline))
R> code <- '
+   arma::mat coeff = Rcpp::as<arma::mat>(a);
+   arma::mat errors = Rcpp::as<arma::mat>(e);
+   int m = errors.n_rows; int n = errors.n_cols;
+   arma::mat simdata(m,n);
+   simdata.row(0) = arma::zeros<arma::mat>(1,n);
+   for (int row=1; row<m; row++)  
+     simdata.row(row) = simdata.row(row-1)*trans(coeff)+errors.row(row);
+    
+   return Rcpp::wrap(simdata);
+ '
R> ## create the compiled function
R> rcppSim <- cxxfunction(signature(a="numeric",e="numeric"),
+                        code,plugin="RcppArmadillo")
R> rcppData <- rcppSim(a,e)                # generated by C++ code
R> stopifnot(all.equal(rData, rcppData))   # checking results

Here we load the inline package to compile, link and load C++ snippets. We define a short C++ function in the code variable, declare a signature taking a and e as before and ask cxxfunction() to deploy the plugin for RcppArmadillo so that it and Rcpp are found during build. With that, we have a compiled function to generate data, and we once again check the result. The C++ code is pretty straightforward as well. We can instatiate Armadillo matrices directly from the R objects we pass down; we then run a similar loop building the result row by row. Now, with all the build-up, here is the final timing comparison, using the rbenchmark package:

R> ## now load the rbenchmark package and compare all three
R> suppressMessages(library(rbenchmark))
R> res <- benchmark(rcppSim(a,e),
+                  rSim(a,e),
+                  compRsim(a,e),
+                  columns=c("test", "replications", "elapsed",
+                            "relative", "user.self", "sys.self"),
+                  order="relative")
R> print(res)
            test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
1  rcppSim(a, e)          100   0.038   1.0000      0.04        0
3 compRsim(a, e)          100   2.011  52.9211      2.01        0
2     rSim(a, e)          100   4.148 109.1579      4.14        0

So in a real-world example involving looping and some algebra (which is of course already done by BLAS and LAPACK libraries), the new R compiler improves by more than a factor of two, cutting time from 4.14 seconds down to about 2 seconds. Yet, this still leaves the C++ solution, clocking in at a mere 38 milliseconds, ahead by a factor of over fifty relative to the new R compiler And compared to just R itself, the simple solution involving Rcpp and RcppArmadillo is almost 110 times faster. As I mentioned, I quite like this example ;-).

Sebastian Thrun gave an interesting TED talk about the Google driverless car project and explains how his main aim is to avoid all the needless road deaths that are due to human error [1]. Finally a good use for the Google street-view type data! AnnMarie Thomas gave an interesting short TED talk about using play-dough to make circuits [2]. There are two recipies for play-dough, the one made with salt conducts well and the one made with sugar conducts poorly. That allows making wires with salty dough and insulators with the sugar dough. John Robb has published an interesting article about a Chinese fake revolutionary group that is triggering a backlash from Chinese security forces [3]. Even if this isn t accurate it seems like a good way to make people hate their local security forces and thus demand political change. Chris Rock made an interesting observation, we aren t making progress on racial issues, white people are getting less crazy [4]. Red Hill has an interesting article about 486 motherboards with fake cache chips that were sold in the 90 s [5]. One thing I disagree with is that they blame the customers for seeking low prices. When a white-box PC cost $2000 (which is $3000 in today s money) it made sense to try and get the cheapest option possible. Now that major department stores sell name-brand laptops for $400 it really makes sense to buy name-brand quality rather than white-box rubbish. IHollaBack.org is an interesting project to combat street harassment of women [6]. Psychology Today has an interesting article by Joe Navarro (former FBI counter-intelligence agent and author) about the serious implications of attempting to detect lies [7]. His main point is that most people over-estimate their ability to detect lies and because the legal system believes such claims from law enforcement officers many innocent people get found guilty and criminals get away free! Cory Doctorow wrote an informative article about the ways of persuading people to pay for content that can be obtained for free [8]. The main message seems to be that the big media companies are doing things the wrong way in everything that they do. The news satire site CBS Breaking News has an interesting about page explaining their mission [9]. They stopped their automated disaster generator after the Japanese Tsunami, while I can understand them wanting to keep some good taste and be sympathetic to the plight of the Japanese people it seems that they have forgotten that there is always a disaster somewhere. The typical bus plunge is just as bad as the Tsunami to the people on the bus and their relatives! Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Satoshi Kanazawa explaining how criminals don t specialise, the psychological factors that make someone likely to commit one crime will make them likely to commit others, this makes it logical to collect DNA samples from all criminals [10]. Psychology Today has an interesting blog post by Dave Niose about a landmark US legal case in 1948 where Vashti McCollum had to escalate to the Supreme Court to allow her children to receive secular education [11]. We need something like this in Australia now as the religious extremists are going too far in indoctrinating children. Sam Richards gave a TED talk titled A Radical Experiment in Empathy which aims to teach Americans how to understand the way that people in the middle-east feel [12]. The comments suggest that his talk wasn t successful. Of course the fact that empathy doesn t have a clear definition in the English language doesn t help, and the fact that most people don t seem to interpret it in any way that corresponds to any dictionary and that most people seem unable to define what they mean by it makes things worse. At the moment I can t think of any examples of successfully teaching empathy to unwilling people. The people who want to learn will do so eventually, you can have some good success in helping them to learn faster. Kathryn Schulz gave an interesting TED talk about Being Wrong [13]. One interesting point that she makes concerns the way that people assume that people who disagree are ignorant, stupid, or evil instead of just having a different set of data or a different understanding of the same data. Of course it is possible for someone to be ignorant/stupid/evil AND have a different understanding. Marcin Jakubowski gave an inspiring TED talk about his project to develop free blueprints that allow anyone to create all machines needed to sustain civilisation with minimal cost [14]. His Open Source Ecology project has a blog and a wiki with blueprints and files for CAD/CAM [15]. Dave Meslin gave an insightful TED talk about apathy in the political process [16]. Among other things he compares council notices that supposedly request citizen input with adverts for running shoes which encourage people to buy them. One thing he didn t mention is the difference that technology can make, a short council advert with a QR code is probably a lot more useful than the current dense text-based adverts for today s audience.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_thrun_google_s_driverless_car.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_thomas_squishy_circuits.html
• [3] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/04/the-jasmine-revolution.html
• [4] http://www.youtube.com/v/z_L7qoP17-w
• [5] http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
• [6] http://www.ihollaback.org/
• [7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201010/detecting-lies-v-detecting-truth-serious-implications
• [8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2011/apr/20/digital-free-persuade-pay-cory-doctorow
• [9] http://cbsbreakingnews.com/about
• [10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201008/does-it-make-sense-collect-dna-samples-misdemeanor-convict
• [11] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201104/atheist-mom-goes-the-supreme-court-and-wins
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_richards_a_radical_experiment_in_empathy.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
• [15] http://opensourceecology.org/
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html

Apologies for yet more politics; normal-ish service will be resumed shortly, I hope. I've just put the following into the "BBC News website feedback" form, but I doubt it will have any impact. Quoting it here for the record... The BBC news website appears to be showing a systemic bias over the AV referendum. For the last few weeks, there has been regular coverage of the referendum and it seems that there has been the usual blind adherence to "balance" - every story about AV has included some of the (incorrect, unscientific, even hate-filled) propaganda from the "no to AV" campaign without critique or analysis. It's difficult to see any justification for this except deliberate editorial bias, but I don't imagine that there's much that can be done about that. However, right now on the BBC News front page at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ I can see that there is a link "Referendum views" that points to yet another opinion piece from a "No" campaigner (Frederick Forsyth). I only see a single view here, not the plural "views" suggested. I don't see any positive view for AV promoted from the front page at all, nor any link from this puff piece to the other articles that have been written in the recent past. Looking further, I can see that there *has*, in fact, been a positive piece on the News Front Page today (from Billy Bragg) but there are no visible links to it any more. Both articles were posted/updated at the same time this morning (22nd April, 08:34 BST) yet now only the negative one remains. Very shoddy, and not at all what I would expect from the BBC.

A newly founded Logic Group in Mumbai, which seems to be a private thing but some professors from the IIT Bombay are taking part, has approached me and asked if I can give a talk about Church s lambda calculus and how he used it to show that Hilbert s Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable. They are starting a series of talk on logic on the occasion of Turing s 100th birth year and because I am finally leaving the IIT campus in two days, my talk turned out to be the opening talk for the series. Roughly guessed about fifty people attended, some professors but most of them students from fields other than mathematics and computer science I hope that they were not too confused by distinguishing truth and provability, expressability and computability, of which I did not give a proper explanation.
I started with a historical exposition of the state of logic in the beginning 20th century, then gave an introduction to lambda calculus, encoding of natural numbers in then, G del encoding. Finally I sketched the proof of the unsolvability of the question whether a lambda term has a normal form and then concluded by showing how this implies that the Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable.
I have before hand written out the talk in full, and again I ended up saying completely different things or at least said things completely different. Nevertheless, I am sharing the (planned) text of my talk, including the timeline that I draw on the whiteboard.

Just a note that the slides are available (non-slideshare link) for my presentation Tuning an old but free phone (description) that I held in the tremendously great event FSCONS 2010. It could be described as a smaller scale FOSDEM, but that would be actually down-playing it since the free software effects on society are something that I've actually never seen elsewhere on such a scale. My talk was among the purely technical ones, though.

I was planning to hold on with this blog post until the recorded videos arrive, but since it seems it might not be during this year I will just post this now that slides are available.

I've shared a few photos as well at Flickr...


Keynote: Karin Kosina, The Inanna Project. A tech + art workshop for female artists in Damascus, Syria. An experiment in art, technology, and the transformative power of Free Hardware and Software.


Erik de Bruijn, The Future of RepRap, a self-replicating open source 3D printer that fabricates arbitrary objects including parts of itself.


Social event at the Berg 211.


Malin Nilsson on Gender, class and global flows. Using free software to fuel a revolution in home based industrial work.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies.


Keynote: Glyn Moody, Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies (audience).

A few summaries available on a Qaiku seminar channel.

Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk. She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike. Who are you? My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle ) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment. My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in 2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in 2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly this day (Apr 18th) three years ago. You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased. The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge. Here s a quick example why: When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4, debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month, there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13 of them were women. You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the average ratio of women in Free Software. So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time. There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness. On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to see! That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take initiative. What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough. If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously! Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and newcomers. Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people: Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different aspects of that question and all of them have very good points. I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women. That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills, sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already active in Free Software. So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame. So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting measures. You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5 and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I still have one of them today. ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon 2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world. By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to. Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way, Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of many of our contacts. You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain? Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media. They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams, we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to introduce interested newcomers to our work. What s the biggest problem of Debian? In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts. This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us quite a bunch of very capable people. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will appreciate that more again in the future. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community, some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.

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Thank you to Meike for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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When you don t update a blog, it gets stale fast. Tim Bray Of course, I didn t intend to violate this basic rule of blogging. It just happened one thing leads to another, and pretty soon you notice just how little your front page has changed in the past two-and-a-half years. So, I shall begin again. Quite a bit has changed:

• It s especially ironic, given the previous post, that our family has given in and replaced the main television with a HDTV. Not that I ve changed pmy mind much; it s just that I ve decided to live with the limitations of the technology, and have figured out how to work around some of them.
• Although my suspicion of the cloud remains, my participation has greatly increased. I m now on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and piles of Google services.
• There s been a major health scare in the family, which is now behind us.

All of these will get their own posts in the very near future. In the meantime, enjoy the new look. (Especially on mobile!)

Generally speaking it is a really bad idea to hold passwords in cleartext. I am actually amazed people still do this! The standard way of holding passwords that has been around for years is to encrypt or hash the password and store the result, called a ciphertext. There have been many ways of hashing the password, starting off with plain old crypt with no salt (a random pair of characters) then crypt with salt through to MD5 and SHA. The thing is, each one of these hashing techniques results in a ciphertext in a different length. Now with most languages, this doesn t matter because you know what hash you are using; its simply the name of the function or some flag you set. PHP is different, because all of these methods use the one function called crypt which is a little confusing because it is more than plain old crypt. Around the PHP version 5.3 the developers started putting in the more complex hash algorithms which is good, but the ciphertext has been growing. A lot of applications store this hashed password in a database and the decision needs to be made; how big should this field be? For a long while, 50 characters would be enough and this is what programs like jffnms use. Unfortunately the SHA-512 algorithm needs 98 characters so what you get is half a hash stored. When the user enters their password, the program compares the full hash from that password to the half hash in the database and it always fails. I ve adjusted JFFNMS to use 200 character long fields which is fine for now. The problem is who knows what the future will bring?

Related articles

• France to require cleartext password storage (boingboing.net)
• Are You Sure SHA-1+Salt Is Enough For Passwords? (it.slashdot.org)
• What All This MD5 Hash Stuff Actually Means [Technology Explained] (makeuseof.com)
• Serious Security Flaw in Amazon.com Passwords (techie-buzz.com)

Virgin Mobile Excessive BillingIn my previous post about the Xperia X10 I mentioned being billed excessively for bandwidth use [1].On Friday when I phoned Virgin I was repeatedly told that there was nothing that could be done about the bill. I demanded to be transferred to someone with authority to change my bill, I was told that wasn t possible so I demanded to be transferred to a supervisor. As no supervisors were available at the time I had to be called back.The Supervisor Tonight I received a call from someone who s employed to deal with disputed bills, after explaining the situation I was offered a discount of $150, that s a 64% discount on the $234. I rejected that offer and explained that I only used 7% more data than was permitted in the month and only did so because of a previous phone call with a Virgin representative telling me that the billing period ended at the month end (which I couldn t verify at the time because the Virgin CRM system was down [2]). Thus it doesn t seem reasonable to charge me 7* the regular billing amount for the entire month.I was asked what I thought would be a reasonable extra charge, I suggested 7.4% more than the $39 contract, IE an extra $3 that wasn t well received. Then I suggested that as the $49 Smart Cap plan would have covered the extra data use it could be reasonable for me to pay $49 for the month. The Virgin representative then offered me a $200 discount on the bill and I accepted that. So I got a 85.5% discount on the disputed amount, that s not too bad, it s enough to make this scam less profitable to Virgin (particularly when I publish information about it) and enough to make it not worth the effort of a TIO complaint.That makes it a bill of $102.36 instead of the original $302.36. That is $29 for one month of the Big Cap $29 for my wife, $39 for one month of the Smart Cap $39 for me, $33.99 for Virgin excessive bandwidth charges (down from $233.99), and $0.37 Account Charges which is described as a Payment Processing Fee presumably a fee for paying by credit card.The Ethical IssueTo make it clear, I think that only a minority of mobile phone customers have an ability to track their bandwidth and understand their bill which equals mine. I also think that only a minority of customers are as willing as I am to argue with random people about such things. I am sure that employees of Virgin Mobile know this and they devised a billing plan to trap customers. I think that this doesn t comply with the ethical standards that Richard Branson has advocated in several TV interviews that I have watched.The Next IssueNow the only remaining issue is that I signed up for an offer 3 Months Free ^ access fee on Topless, Smart & Easy caps with this phone. Save up to $267, just by buying online which continued Promo code: reggae Use this promo code & we ll automatically credit your first 3 months access fees , but so far they have not credited it. It s a pity I didn t realise this before and get it done in the same call.ConclusionI m starting to regret not keeping my LG U990 Viewty with a pre-paid SIM from Lebara [3] or Amaysim [4]. Amaysim has a minimum pre-paid value of $10 which lasts for 90 days, and the SIM will then receive calls for 180 days after the credit has run out this means $10 per 260 days (an average of $7.11 per year) if you just want to receive calls. Lebara has a period of 120 days before the number expires, so that means it costs $10 per 210 days or an average of $5.75 per year to receive calls only.Telstra charges $150 for one year of mobile net access which allows 10G of data transfer [5]. So it seems that a good option would be an old phone and a new Android tablet. $150 per year ($12.50 per month) for mobile net access and something between $5.75 and $40 per year for phone access (depending on whether you want to make calls) gives enough savings over the cost of a post-paid plan to buy a decent tablet.I think that the Android phone is definitely the best deal for my wife because she really only wants to carry one device, also she likes having longer conversations on the phone so the plan where she gets up to 450 minutes for $29 per month is a reasonable deal particularly as calls to me are free and calls to her relatives will be free if they get Virgin phones (something that now seems doubtful given their over-billing).I m happy to carry multiple devices (my past record is having four mobile phones and getting a tailor-made coat to fit all the geek stuff I carried) so a phone and a tablet is a reasonable option for me. But the Xperia X10 will do the job for the next two years and I ve got no great regrets.On the up-side, Virgin did send me a couple of free movie tickets after their CRM stuff-up.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/04/17/more-about-xperia-x10/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/23/virgin-mobile-crm-upgrade-failure/
• [3] http://www.lebara-mobile.com.au/
• [4] http://www.amaysim.com.au/
• [5] http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond-internet/mobile-broadband/prepaid/rates/index.htm

I ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn t allow replacing the kernel. I m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for my wife and trying it out I bought one for myself. I knew about it s problems in advance and wanted a relatively cheap phone with a large high resolution screen, and the Xperia X10 was the best match for my criteria.ChargingThere has been a recent trend towards using USB for charging devices. Sony provides a tiny wall-wart PSU which has a USB socket and a short (1m) USB cable that can be used to charge the phone from it s PSU or from a PC. The size is really convenient, as the phone has a short battery life I ll probably want to take the PSU to more places than I would for other phones I ve owned.The short USB cable saves weight and tangle when travelling, but can be inconvenient. I m currently working on the phone while it s plugged into my laptop, that works well and I can make calls while it s connected. If the phone was connected to a USB port on a tower computer that was on the ground then the cable could be too short to make a call, if it was charging on a power point near the floor then I wouldn t even be able to use the computer functionality let alone make calls without kneeling. My Viewty has a 175cm charging cable which alleviates these problems. I ve got a 50cm USB extension cable that I use for charging my phone while I m in bed that is just long enough to allow me to check my email without getting out of bed!The socket for connecting the USB cable is protected by a plastic lid that is connected by a strip of rubber. For a socket that will be used at least twice a day this isn t a good mechanical design. The plastic slide on the LG U990 Viewty seems like a much better design.As an aside it s a pity that they aren t designing cars with USB charging sockets built in. Some new cars have a socket for one USB flash drive to be attached to the radio, but really they need at least one USB charging port per seat. It would also be nice if they made power points with USB charging sockets built in, I d buy a few of those if they made them.Preserving the BatteryI ve been running Juice Defender to reduce the battery use, at the moment it is claiming to have extended battery life by 69%. That combined with turning off things that aren t needed (such as WiFi) has made the phone reasonably usable. I can survive more than 12 hours during which I use the phone a lot without charging it.XperiaX10.net has an interesting review of replacement batteries [5]. I m not going to buy them because the largest battery requires a replacement back case which prevents using an external case to prevent damage and the smaller one doesn t provide enough of a benefit and the design of the phone makes it difficult to change batteries so carrying a spare battery isn t a good option.Cursor Control KeysThe HP/Compaq iPaQs that I own from ~10 years ago have a single button that can be moved up/down/left/right to act as a cursor, it can also be pressed inwards to act as an ENTER key (or whatever the application might want for a fifth function). Having some sort of hardware cursor control is really handy, I often end up deleting several characters when I want to replace one because getting the cursor onto the desired character is too difficult.Adding more hardware keys would require making the phone bigger, but that would be fine by me. As described in my previous post about phone cameras I d like to have a phone that s thicker to have a better camera with a greater focal distance for a larger lens [2].Core Phone FunctionalityI really miss having separate green and red buttons for making/answering calls and for rejecting/ending calls.A really common operation is to call back the last person who called. To do this on my LG U990 Viewty I press the green button twice on my home screen which took less than a second. On the Xperia this involves selecting the phone icon from the home screen, then the call log icon, then the call that is desired, then the Call user line. That is four presses in different parts of the screen compared to pressing the same hardware button twice. I m investigating dialer applets right now, the Dialler One applet has a good interface for calling people who have called or been called recently but it still requires two presses on different parts of the screen. With my old Viewty I could call back the last person by feel without even looking at the phone!In the last 6 years the standard functionality of phones has been to include multiple profiles for noises. My Viewty has profiles named Normal , Silent , Vibrate only , Outdoor , Headset (automatically selected when a headset is connected), and three customised ones. The Xperia has only one setting, and that is three icon presses away from the home screen. It does allow changing the volume by hardware switches on the side which includes going to vibrate-only and silent mode. While this is useful, it s not the best way that two precious hardware keys could be used. It also doesn t allow control over all the different notifications, I d like to be able to activate a noise profile and have every application respond to it in an appropriate manner. This is a deficiency in Android 2.1 not in the phone itself.In many ways this phone has the worst phone functionality of any mobile phone I ve ever owned, I think that this is more the fault of the Android designers than Sony Ericsson.Android UpdatesSony had previously claimed that they wouldn t support Android later than 2.1. Now Sony has announced that they will support Gingerbread Android 2.3 [3]. So one of the major complaints about the Xperia will soon be addressed.TetheringThe build of Android that the Xperia runs at the moment doesn t support Wifi tethering. I m currently using with Easy Tether for USB tethering [4]. It s not free software and requires it s own code to run as root on your Linux system that is being tethered (which is easily locked down with SE Linux), but it basically works. The down-side with Easy Tether is that it proxies all the connections so you can t run traceroute etc and in the free version you can t use UDP.K9 MailK9 Mail fixes some of the problems in the default Android email program that I described in my previous post. It allows selection of SSL with a default port of 993 for IMAPs. It uses mail.example.com as the mail server address for an email address of user@example.com (so I ll add a mail CNAME to the domains I run). When I connected initially it told me that the SSL key was not signed by a CA and asked if I wanted to save it or reject it this is the correct and desired functionality. It also correctly parses URLs from the email (or at least has fixed the bug that I discovered in the default email app).One problem I ve found with K9 is that it seems to timeout on large folders. This is probably partly the fault of Virgin Mobile being slow for IP access, but I wonder whether K9 doesn t pipeline IMAP commands as Virgin can do bulk transfer at reasonable speeds (80KB/s) and it mainly fails on latency (900ms being typical). The result is that a folder with more than 500 messages that need to be copied to the phone will never get synchronised. When I started reading mail on my phone I had to move mail from some of the bigger folders into other folders to avoid timeouts. As an aside the amount of time I ve saved by reading email on the go has already paid for the phone.MediascapeThe Sony Mediascape software is used for categorising photos. One function of this is to assign names to photos, the names come from the contact list so if you photograph someone who you can t phone then you need to add a contact list entry for them. This also means that you couldn t conveniently add names to non-humans, I guess I could have added a contact list entry Mr Crash Dump for photos of system crash logs. But a bigger problem is that it decides what is a picture of a person, a picture of someone who is not centered in the photo or a profile picture can be regarded as not a photo of a person and therefore not subject to being associated with a contact list. Finally when selecting a name for a picture it displays the entire contacts list in a small font instead of displaying favorites, I have the phone numbers of many clients in my contacts list who I will never photograph Mediascape just isn t much good. If I feel the need to do something serious in this regard I ll search the app store for something free that s better.ProtectionFor $15 each I bought one grey and one clear Gel Case from J2K. This case covers the sides and back of the phone with a firm rubber layer that will hopefully allow it to bounce rather than break. It also extends slightly higher than the screen which should stop the screen being scratched if the phone is left face-down on a hard surface on the vibrate setting.One problem with the Gel Case is that by it s design it has to cover the buttons on the sides, due to a design or manufacturing problem the clear case that my wife uses can press slightly on the shutter button which disables the three main buttons on the front. So when the menu or back button stops working she has to slightly move the Gel Case out from the side. I m thinking of just cutting out a section of the Gel Case there, that will make it difficult to press the shutter button, but you can use the touch screen to take photos and there doesn t seem to be any other use for the shutter button so this shouldn t be a problem. The clear and grey cases have different designs, the grey one has a hole over the raised Sony logo which makes it fit a little better as well as not having the shutter problem, so it seems to be a later design I don t know whether all clear cases have the same problem but I recommend that someone who only has one Xperia X10 get the grey case just in case.Web BrowsingI m experimenting with using my own web proxy to compress the data sent to the phone. Unfortunately the Android settings for a web proxy only apply to the main web browser, not to all the other applications that use web services. Also the built-in web browser requires pressing the settings hardware button followed by at least two touch-screen presses to change between windows or close a window and it doesn t seem to support making the short-press action be to open a link in a new window. So I will have to find another web browser to use.Bandwidth UseThe 3G Watchdog applet is really good for tracking the data transfer and optionally cutting off 3G access before the quota is exceeded. Unfortunately Virgin has already sent me a bill with $234 in extra charges for bandwidth use because I used 1.6G instead of my 1.5G quota. A Virgin representative had told me over the phone that the billing period would be based on the end of the month, so while every calendar month has had less than 1.5G used because I used more than average in the end of March and the start of April that counts as excess data in the 14th March to 13th April period.I m going to appeal this to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, I don t think that it s reasonable that I should be billed almost 7* the normal bill for exceeding the quota by 7.4% based on following the instructions of a Virgin employee. While I could have read the previous bill that they sent me to discover the end of billing period dates, I don t think that I should be expected to distrust everything that a Virgin employee says. If they billed me an extra $20 then I d just pay it, but $234 is unreasonable.ConclusionSince using the phone I ve found significant benefits in web browsing and reading email with the major limitation being the small screen (relative to a Netbook or Laptop). So if I was to buy another phone I would probably consider a Dell Streak which seems to be the largest Android phone on the market at the moment.Given the amount of use that I ve got I would be happy to spend more money and therefore consider a more expensive phone. But I don t regret the decision to save money by getting an Xperia X10.Finally when a telco tries to stick me with a $234 excess charge it really detracts from the value of having a phone contract. If I end up having to pay that then it s half the value of a smart-phone lost in one telco scam. This is enough to make a contract with Virgin a bad option, after this contract expires I may use VOIP and a pre-paid SIM from Telstra NextG if their network is still the best. Another possibility is to just use a small tablet and skip having a mobile phone, email and Jabber plus SMS from the people who lack net access will probably do.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/11/26/quality-of-cameras-in-phones/
• [3] http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/products/2011/03/25/update-on-xperia%E2%84%A2-x10/
• [4] http://www.mobile-stream.com/easytether/android.html
• [5] http://www.xperiax10.net/2010/08/02/mugen-power-xperia-x10-battery-review-%E2%80%93-part-1/

I have released version 0.16 of Obnam, my backup application. It adds encryption support. My personal Debian repository has binaries for squeeze in i386, amd64, and armel architectures. More importantly, this is the first BETA release. Obnam should now be feature complete for real use. Performance is lacking and there are many bugs remaining. There are no known bugs that would corrupt backed up data, or prevent its recovery. I've made a roadmap for 1.0, which later on everyone will get a great big laugh about.

Apparently I ve won the lottery. What is even more amazing is that it is one based not in Australia but in the UK ELO (England Lottery Organisation) and I didn t even buy a ticket. Even more amazing is even though this organisation is based in England, they don t write English very well; perhaps its declining school standards. They re so concerned about giving you the maximum return on the dollar (or pound) they don t even use a proper co.uk email address but a free webmail from umail. It is, of course a scam. Popularly known as Nigerian 419 or advanced-fee fraud. You can win the money but.. well it seems there is some holdup and you need to pay some release fee or some bribe to get your dollars. What makes me a little sad is it was for only 250,000 UK pounds. I feel ripped off as a few google searches showed people being offered over 500,000 pounds on the same scam. Don t these crooks know I have a high aussie dollar exchange rate to overcome? About the only interesting thing about it was that my dspam filters missed it but they ve now been retrained with that miss. I think sending it as a pdf was why it made it through. And I now cannot get ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) songs out of my head, thanks a lot scammers! (It s a livin thing, ya know)

Related articles

• FBI Warns of Spam, Lottery Scams and Potassium Iodide Price Gouging (walletpop.com)
• Detecting scams (cyberdefend.wordpress.com)
• Getting Scammed, Doesn t Make You an Idiot, Stupid (socyberty.com)
• Jamaican Lottery Scam: Woman loses $370,000 in Jamaican Lottery Fraud!! (darnellthenewsman.com)

MeeGo Summit FI is now nearing completion, with several keynotes and other presentations, Meegathon 24h contest just coming to an end and a lot of interesting discussions had. See full program for details. Yesterday was a hugely energetic day, but today the lack of sleep starts to kick in a bit at least for me.

Some highlights via photos:



Keynote venue was a movie theater




MeeGo status update by Valtteri Halla / Intel - talking among else about tablets, IVI, and the 20 person team at Nokia doing MeeGo(.com) for N900 phone





Mikko Terho / Nokia - "Internet for the next billion => Qt good candidate", "code wins politics and standards"




Carsten Munk / Nomovok - "Hacking your existence: the importance of open-ended devices in the MeeGo world"




In addition to MeeGo tablet demonstrations a Wayland compositor was demoed by a Nomovok employee.



One of the many Qt / QML related talks was held by Tapani Mikola / Nokia



Evening party




Day 2 started with a few more presentations and Finhack event launching in the Protomo room as well

Still remaining for the day are Meegathon demonstrations (well actually I'm right now already following those while finishing this - cool demos!) , Meegathon awards, a panel discussion on "MeeGo, Nokia, Finns - finished? Can MeeGo be important in Finland without being inside Nokia's core?", BoF sessions and finally Intel AppUp Application Lab including some MeeGo table give-outs.

Thanks to organizers, many of whom were volunteers. The event has been running completely smoothly, coming not as a big surprise after the hugely successful last summer's Akademy 2010 also held in Tampere.

Update: I reported the deluge issues and added a new problem about the lack of click on tapping on the touchpad.

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I know that installation reports and upgrade reports need to be submitted to the BTS, but I just want to point out some issues for people that might hit the same issue on upgrade from lenny to squeeze.

But before that I must say I like the new Debian site(s) look.

Issue number one: When upgrading from lenny's deluge to squeeze's deluge, the new version of the app is quite different from the prevoious version. Here are some things to take into account:

• when starting for the first time the new version it will take ages to check (and probably recalculate some checksums); make sure you don't mind the I/O activity when you start it; a torrent will not be available until this check is done
  
• the new version relies on a client-server model which is disabled if you use the "classic mode" (Edit->Preferences->Interface)
• some features available in the old version are not available in the new version (e.g.: graph for traffic and embedded search function)
• some features are availbale as modules, but there are just a few modules
• when starting the graphical interface in the new mode, don't use the "Start daemon" button, use the "Connect" button. If you start the daemon via the "Start daemon" button the "Connect" button will become "Disconnect" although the client is NOT connected. Using the "Connect" button directly solves the problem.
• There is an ugly side panel (on the left side) which, IMHO has no real function or use, except filtering in the view the active downloads or similar things
• when choosing the place to save a torrent and trying to set that place as the default location, deluge will not remember that setting
• closing now (with the daemon option) the app will close just the client, but the server/daemon will remain in the background, unless is explicitly closed (there is a dedicated menu entry)
  

Issue number 2: I seem to experience some weird glyph/graphic area reshuffling in GNOME (maybe X?) after recovering from hibernate. With a total (according to my current sloppy counting) 5 resumes, things get back to normal, but I suspect the next hibernate-resume cycle will restart the glyph reshuffling cycle.

By glyph/graphic area reshuffling I mean alterations of the shapes of the glyphs (and some areas on the background picture) in such a manner that it seems that within a set of 8/16/N (?) lines are shifted/rotated sideways with some undefined and different ammount each, but in a reproducible manner ("b" will always be doodled in the same way, no matter if is in the word "be" or if is in the word "absurd".

I'll try to provide some picture in the bug report, once I report this issue in BTS.

Update: I reported this in Debian's BTS and upstream (with screenshots, too). I am not convinced the problem is in the kernel since I tried an old kernel and saw the same issue. I suspect X is at fault.

Issue number 3: This is more like a convenience issue. In the past I was using "hibernate" with uswsusp which I understand is now broken beyond repair and replaced by pm-utils. The thing I miss in the hibernate process now is the ability to abort the hibernation process as it was possible in lenny's uswsusp by pressing the backspace key during the storing of the state on disk phase.


Issue number 4: The upgrade process was quite tedious because once I tried upgrading aptitude, python2.6 was pulled in and almost all apps ended up needing upgrading due to the chaining of necessary package upgrades.


Issue number 5: For some weird reason pulseaudio was initially installed making playback of any audio impossible (the apps wanting to emit noises would just freeze but they were TERM-inatable) and later I've seen a default null audio sink was defined for me. Killing pulseaudio and removing the ~/.pulse directory fixed the issue (but I should probably see why pulseaudio didn't work properly in the first place because I suspect the problem will reappear at the next restart - I usually use hibernate).

Issue number 6: Tapping the touchpad no longer results in a click. Maybe some packages got removed? And, no, it is the same when I remove the external mouse, so it is not because of some smart behaviour of that sort.

Otherwise I am quite satisfied with the result of the upgrade. A huge "thank you" to all people involved in the development of squeeze.

As the project for the course System specification and implementation , which introduced the Event-B formalism to us, I modeled the algorithm given in one of the constructive proofs of Vizing s theorem and showed it to be correct, using the Event-B tool Rodin. Vizing s theorem states

For a finite undirected graph without autoloops and without multiple edges, at any vertex of which no more than N edges meet, N+1 colors suffice for an edge coloring such that edges incident on the same vertex are of different color.

You can find more details about my approach and my conclusions about Event-B and Rodin in the project report and you can download my Rodin model. I was asked in the comments about my conclusions, so I ll reply here. The proof looks unweidly, but I do think that refinement based proofs, where possible, increase clarity, as more, but smaller steps have to be looked at. Also note that I had no prior exposure to Rodin, so some thing could have been done quicker and easier with more experience. But Rodin itself is not the theorem proving tool of my choice. More detail in the report, shortly put: Its math is too weak and not expressive enough, individual proofs are WORN (write-once-read-never) and can easily be lost when changing the models and there is too little emphasis on correctness, e.g. no trusted core base approach known from dedicated theorem provers. So I would use a different tool for proving mathematical statements, nevertheless the idea of refinements, and trying to find those small-steps-refinements, can also help coming up with better proofs in those tools.

Most probably haven't noticed yet but I finished the Mono 2.10.1 debian packaging effort of the past 3 months and uploaded it to Debian/Experimental. With Mono 2.10 I had to make the biggest changes in Mono packaging since the big Mono 2.0 upload. The runtime no longer supports the 1.0 and 2.0 runtime profile, instead it now supports the 2.0 and 4.0 runtime profile. This meant I had to drop all libmono*1.0-cil packages and add libmono*4.0-cil packages. This sounds like a lot of s/1.0/4.0/ work but it actually wasn't. Mono 2.10 ships a lot of new libraries over 2.6 and I had again to decide where they should go. "Where should this $library go?" I have been playing this game for the past 7 years maintaining Mono and I finally gave up on it... What, where, when, why? I could give now a 2 hours talk of the issues behind the current packaging approach (keeping the number of library packages low) but instead I will do something else. Please, just take a look at this picture for a second: If your browser crashed, your eyes hurt or your brain simply melted, I think you have got the idea. The Big Split The cure? cli-common-dev! This is a package that contains 2 extremely important debhelper packaging tools for packaging Mono/CLI related packages called dh_makeclilibs and dh_clideps. If you don't know these, they do exact the same thing as dh_makeshlibs and dh_shlibdeps do. dh_makeclilibs generates library dependency tracking information and dh_clideps consumes that information to automatically generate the package dependencies for you. So each library of the 4.0 runtime profile has now it's own package, simple as that, the rest does cli-common-dev for me and you. "Hey, that Mono packaging bastard is polluting the Debian archive because of his laziness!" No, I am not. This packaging change not only has the advantage of simplifying the packaging and with that bringing new Mono versions faster to you but also reduces the typical install size for applications as they will only pull in the really used libraries of Mono instead of groups of them. I don't have any numbers handy right now as none of the applications are built against Mono 2.10 (yet), but when the transition starts we will get numbers. New Features There is also a new SGen flavor of Mono available called mono-runtime-sgen which is no longer using the conservative non-generational Boehm's garbage collector but SGen which is a simple generational garbage collector with promising advantages. And here some more Mono 2.8/2.10 news from /usr/share/doc/mono-runtime/NEWS.Debian.gz:

• SGen Precise Stack Scanning
• Enhanced SIMD with new methods for Vector data type conversions and swapping elements in vectors
• ASP.NET MVC 3.0 (not included, only supported)
• The C# Interactive Shell can now be used as shebang: #!/usr/bin/csharp
• .NET 4.0 runtime
• C# 4.0 compiler
• ASP.NET 4.0
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• System.Data.Services.Client (OData)
• glib was replaced with eglib
• Removed .NET 1.1 runtime

Architecture Regressions With the initial upload of Mono 2.10.1 to Debian/Experimental the architecture world broke apart and it regressed on all Mono architectures except for i386 and amd64 There is a reason it's called experimental isn't there? In mono 2.10.1-3 I could solve all regressions except for kfreebsd-* and armel. Jo Shields fixed the remaining regressions and the world started to look good again in mono 2.10.1-4! He also took care of mono-basic, mod-mono and xsp, but mod-mono and xsp are still waiting for the translation call deadline to pass by so they can also be uploaded to Debian/Experimental. Planned Transition As mentioned above, there will be a Mono 2.10 transition needed when the packages hit Debian/Unstable. There is no ETA yet on this when it will happen as I have to coordinate this with debian-release first. But as things are not showtime ready in experimental anyhow, this will not happen too soonish. The Mono 2.10 transition plan will be covered in a following post. GIVMENOWPLX OMG, all this rumbling about Mono 2.10 and I still haven't said a word on how to obtain it, sorry about this, just do this and I will shut up now:

echo "deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install -t experimental mono-complete

(this is the easiest way of getting only mono 2.10.1 from experimental)

This is old actually old news, but I suspect some people have forgotten or maybe do not understand to what extend. We decided to break overrides in 2.5.0~rc1[1], as explained in Raphael s email to d-d-a@l.d.o. As the email mentions there were two breakages the tag merges and the file prefix change. Especially the latter seem to be causing confusion (or at least pings/questions/emails for me). The long story short:

All overrides listing files with a prefix of ./ or / will not work as of 2.5.0~rc1

If you are curious as to why, please have a look at #534940. Fixing the override is simply a matter of removing the ./ or / prefix(es). If you discover a tag that still uses ./ or / as file name prefix, please file a bug (assuming someone did not beat you to it). I am not entirely sure if the FTP-masters have updated the copy of Lintian that handles auto-rejects[2], so you may have keep the old/broken override if it is for a non-fatal auto-reject tag. This is especially true for the embedded-zlib tag that were merged into embedded-library. [1] On a related note, this is why this is 2.5.0~rc1 and not 2.4.4. [2] I also do not know when they plan to do it if they have not already done so, but Tolimar has informed me that 2.5.0~rc2 is in squeeze-backports. >.>

We're heading to release candidates for phpMyAdmin 3.4.0 (probably once GSoC application/evaluation rush period is over), so the translators have less time to make the translations better. There is no new complete translation, so we still have 14 translations at 100%:

• Catalan
• Chinese (China)
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are still lot of translations which would need some love, for example:

• Finnish
• Norvegian
• Polish

Recently two of our prospective GSoC students started to contribute to translations, so there is great progress in Sinhala and Hindi translations. Looking forward to have these completed soon :-). You can also help make translation to your language better! If your language is missing just let me know (either in comments or by email).

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