David Welton: Coming Soon: Easy Kindle Publishing with LiberWriter.com
The Kindle isn't the most beautiful device out there - it's not "beautiful", the keyboard takes away some elegance, but I'm absolutely smitten with mine. I like to read, a lot, and being able to instantly beam books to my house is just fantastic.
Kindles and other devices like them are also changing the world of publishing, going from the known world of physical books that can't be easily copied to another information good like movies or songs with something of an uncertain future.
Yet they're also opening up many possibilities: thanks to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program, it just got very easy to publish books to a platform that a lot of people regularly search for good things to read. Once upon a time, "vanity publishing" was something done by those who simply wanted to see their names in print, but couldn't actually find a publisher, and thus carried some stigma.
Now, though, why not publish something you've always wanted to? Granted, without an editor, and publisher to promote your work, you probably won't become rich or famous, but many people write for the enjoyment of doing so. And who knows... there are already several cases of people publishing directly to the Kindle and making a decent income at it.
Indeed, I have several things I'm thinking of writing about that clicked when I found the Kindle publishing program. Maybe now it's time to dust off some ideas I've had and start working on them a little bit at a time.
Then, of course, my geeky side took over and I started wondering how the mechanics of it actually work.
Messily, it turns out: the preferred format for Kindle authoring is variant of HTML that's not at all what we're used to in these days of ever more potent CSS. The good side of it is that books mostly come out looking the same on the Kindle, and the end user can control how they want to visualize them. The bad side of the system utilized is that there are a lot of tips and tricks and little things to know about the whole process that can be annoying even for someone who knows HTML pretty well. For someone who just wants to write stuff and not worry about it, and who perhaps is not very familiar with HTML, the whole thing can be a huge mess and very frustrating.
Which of course looks like an interesting challenge. I set out to work on LiberWriter.com several weeks ago, and it should be ready within the next week or two. In short, it's a system that lets you concentrate on writing and, as much as possible, tries to get out of your way in order to let you concentrate on your content. It is also targeted very specifically at the Kindle (for the time being at least), so as to really focus on making things work on that platform. For instance, it can automatically generate a table of contents, a noted pain point in writing for the Kindle. I have a number of other ideas up my sleeve too, that I'm excited to work on.
I'm also definitely abandoning the "let's release it for free, for fun, and see if I can find a way to make money later" model of many past projects, and treating it like a business. I think the price I have in mind is very competitive, if you look at, for instance, conversion services that take word and spit out Kindle-specific HTML.
Anyway, have a look at the site and sign up if you're interested: as soon as it's ready, I'll email and let you know. There'll be a somewhat limited trial version so that you can play around with it and see if you like it before buying the full version.
A few weeks ago, at work, we were looking for a solution to a tricky printing problem: how to manage, in a centralized infrastructure, a large number of locations, worstations and printers?
One of the consultants working for us came up with a great idea. With only a 20-line patch to CUPS, workstations would be able to find which printers are on the same location. 20 lines of code, instead of a complex virtualisation solution? This is exactly the kind of reasons why we use free software: when there s something wrong, you can fix it. When you need something more, you can code it.
Now, many others could benefit of such an improvement, and we don t want to maintain a forked version of CUPS, so we forwarded it upstream, who looked interested. But upstream now being Apple, they requested a stupid 
Last weekend we've released 
Around the first bunch of postings in my 
You know it already, since Debian 6.0 non-free firmware are no longer provided by a standard Debian installation. This will cause some troubles to users who need them. I m thus going to do a small overview on the topic and teach you what you need to know to deal with the problem.
What are firmware and how are they used?
From the user s point of view, a firmware is just some data that is needed by some piece of hardware in order to function properly. The driver for that hardware typically loads the firmware on the device as part of its initialization.
In the Linux kernel, the drivers are all using a standardized interface (request_firmware) to retrieve the firmware before sending it to the device. Thanks to this standardization, it s possible to either embed the firmware in the kernel or to have it request the firmware from user-space when needed.
Debian (like most distributions) has selected the latter option. Thus when the kernel needs a firmware, it sends out a request to user-space. udev is getting the request with the name of the firmware, and in its default configuration (see 
update-initramfs will also generate a similar warning on the terminal:
again, nothing exciting to report. as you can see below, I've only worked on
pkg-perl packages. we get a surprising amount of FTBFS bugs at the moment;
many of them caused by changes in depended-upon packages, some also by human
errors (like not building in a chroot and missing build dependencies
upfront). at least the latter could be avoided quite easily ...
I've changed jobs recently and after 5 years of not having to work with a Windows system I am having all sorts of adaptation-to-Windows problems at the new job.
This appears to be kind of useful:
When coming back from DebConf9, I wrote this pledge:
For those who are interested in the world of compiz, new development
snapshots have been trickling their way into experimental for the past
week and are now available for widespread testing.
They're being sent to experimental instead of straight to unstable for a
few reasons:
but you ll be traveling the world while reading him.
My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian.
Who are you?
I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my
usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married
for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian
for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the
project).
I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to
23.
I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera
the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about
Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management
services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on
individual computing.
I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of
Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS
users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux
and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I
discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free
software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996).
You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come
to Debian?
I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I
graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years
after my PhD).
However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the
creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself
during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved
playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something
new.
So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to
figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a
logical choice.
Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work
machines for a while, but my home server, kheops,
first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine
to host a news server. That was back in October 1996.
I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of
genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from
this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing.
So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate
person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little
contribution to all this.
This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the
geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy
research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July
2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd
2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain.
Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I
have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even
translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the
way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users.
Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian
Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I
was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess
and his inspiring ideas.
From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around
2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization)
without even noticing 
The text I ve cropped too eagerly says Choosing a secure password is an essential part of protecting your personal information , or thereabouts. I duly chose a complex password that fitted the requirements, and to my surprise it was rejected. I tried another, and it was rejected; then a third and a fourth. By trial and error I worked out what was going on:
1. The password must contain only the listed special characters, not just include one of them.
That s a bit of a problem, because even assuming a basic ASCII set, 15 characters are unavailable to users; 80 are left, so that s about a 15% fall in the available combinations*. Not a good start.
More concerning is the presence of a security question field. It s used for resetting the password in the event losing it, but this technique for recovery has 
Actually the first form, not shown here, initially just asks for a username, giving an error message if it isn t registered, and here s another problem:
3. The password reset process confirms the existence, or non-existence, of a given username half the credentials required to log in to any visitor.
I d be prepared to take a bet that most users will choose What was the name of your first school? as a security question. The first pet you have is often at such a young age you can t remember it clearly; the name of the street you grew up on might change a couple of times if you moved house. But first school I attended? I ll never forget that, so it makes most sense to use as a backup password . It s also the best one for an attacker to try and find out from public sources.
But that aside, as you can see the password is not generated at random and communicated to the real account holder out-of-band, in the manner of many other sites. Instead:
4. A new password is immediately set to a value already known by the attacker.
Once inside, an attacker can also change the security question or answer, or both, so you can t even regain your account by telephoning the company unless you can convince them you re genuine, in which case the security question was a total waste of time anyway. I awarded some marks for notifying the user by email that the password has been changed, but immediately docked them again because bingo! You re now a victim of identity theft!
Let s assume you ve been locked out, the security question has been changed and you want your account back. ALLOW don t let you telephone them; you either have to dig around and find an address to send an email, which we all know can be intercepted, or (and you re encouraged to) contact them through a form on the site. You ll probably include some personal details, because you want to convince them of your real identity; indeed, two of the options on the form are I ve got a question and Something doesn t work . I sent my findings through this very form, under the latter heading, and to my surprise:
5. Despite promises of full encryption of all data at all times, full implementation of secure socket layers , the contact form is transmitted to ALLOW in the clear, with no protection whatsoever.
So now anyone listening in your connection knows all about you too: your ISP, any of the peers along the route, the deep packet inspection advertisers if your ISP is less than reputable, and the neighbour who connects to your wireless and slips you a fiver every month for the privilege. Nice work, privacy specialists.
(For the record:
As mentioned 
I used to maintain a membership with