It's been a little wet around here recently. Enough so that I bought an umbrella yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn't take it out on my walk today. So on my way back from Golden Gate Heights, I felt more soaked than when I went out to walk all of Broderick in the pouring rain.

On the getting things done front, I have finally put up my disco ball. It's been 9 hours and it is still up so I think it will hold over night.

After my entry yesterday about MySQL truncating data, several people have pointed out that MySQL 4.1 or later gives you a warning. Yes, this is true. You can even see it in the example I gave:

Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

I ignored mentioning this, but perhaps should have said something about it. I reason I didn't mention it was because I didn't feel that a warning really helped anyone. Developers have enough problems remembering to check for errors, let along remembering to check in case there was a warning as well. Plus, they'd then have to work out if the warning was something serious or something they could ignore. There's also the question of how well the language bindings present this information. Take for example, PHP. The mysqli extension gained support for checking for warnings in PHP5 and gives the following code as an example of getting warnings:

mysqli_query($link, $query);
if (mysqli_warning_count($link))  
   if ($result = mysqli_query($link, "SHOW WARNINGS"))  
      $row = mysqli_fetch_row($result);
      printf("%s (%d): %s\n", $row[0], $row[1], $row[2]);
      mysqli_free_result($result);
    
 

Hardly concise code. As of 5.1.0, there is also mysqli_get_warnings(), but is undocumented beyond noting its existence. The MySQL extension does not support getting warning information. The PDO wrapper doesn't provide any way to get this information. In perl, DBD::mysql has a mysql_warning_count() function, but presumably would have to call "SHOW WARNINGS" like in the PHP example. Seems Python's MYSQLdb module will raise an exception on warnings in certain cases. Mostly using the Cursor object. In java, you can set the jdbcCompliantTruncation connection parameter to make the driver throw java.sql.DataTruncation exceptions, as per the JDBC spec, which makes you wonder why this isn't set by default. Unfortunately this setting is usually outside the programmer's control. There is also the java.sql.Statement.getWarnings(), but once again, you need to check this after every statement. Not sure if ORM tools like Hibernate check this or not. So, yes MySQL does give you a warning, but in practice is useless.

No, Debian folks, not our former DPL...:-) My, by far, favourite skipper in the greatest race around the world (alone on a 60-feet boat without assistance), the Vend e Globe, arrived last night. I mean Samantha Davies, 34 y.o. female british skipper, who finished 3rd (or 4th, depending on Marc Guillemot's arrival time), who illuminated these weeks with her videos and messages always full of positive attitude and happiness....which is certainly harder to do when surfing in the southern latitudes over 20 knots and thousands of miles away from any land. I recommend those of you who never went on the VG web site to just navigate around the videos and spot those sent by Sam, to understand. She made it with a 9-year old boat (that completes its third VG), keeping up with performance while preserving the boat (probably the one in the best condition after arrival). and all Vend e Globe fans will always remember her constant smile. All this explains why I have even more admiration for Sam's performance than I have for Michel Desjoyaux (the winner) or Armel Le Cl ac'h (2nd), both among the world's top skippers (along with Lo ck Peyron, imho). The race is not over, far from this. Eight skippers still have to arrive. Three of them (Marc Guillemot, Brian Thompson and Dee Caffari) will arrive on Monday or so, while Arnaud Boissi res and Steve White wtill need one or two weeks and Rich Wilson, Rapha l Dinelli and Norbert Sedlacek still are in the southern Atlantic ocean. And kudos also have to go to the 21 skippers who couldn't complete the race, certainly the most difficult Vend e Globe ever. I wish I would live close to Sables d'Olonne to have a chance to see a VG arrival some day. Great race, great adventure. Sad that it happes only every 4 years..:-)

I just finished packing up the signature collection for dedication-5.0.txt. Hopefully I didn't miss any signatures, saving about 400 attachments is tedious. Fortunately most people got the filenames right. On the down side, there were about 80 signatures that I couldn't verify because the corresponding key could not be found on the key servers. I've mailed the owners, and about 20 have uploaded their key until now. There are 355 valid signatures. Thanks to all for such a huge participation, that's about twice the number (185) we got for dedicating Potato to Espy in 2000. (These were DD-only, though.) Comparing to the various Debian keyrings, 207 active DDs participated, 3 former DDs, 12 Debian maintainers, and 133 other contributors. Let's hope Lenny will be as great as Thiemo would have liked it.

If you would have been disappointed if Lenny would ve shipped without libpam-krb5_3.11-4_armel.deb, you must know we were this >< close to doing precisely that, thanks to a debatable behavior of the britney implementation in use and some rather unfortunate circumstances. (You can read this #debian-release backlog if you re interested in the details.) If we noticed it, it was thanks to the britney2 implementation by Fabio Tranchitella. We ve been running an instance of it in a separate server for some time, to see if it was ready for production by comparing results between the two britneys. Truth be told, I ve ignored all those mails since about the freeze started, and today after the last britney run for Lenny I thought: hey, let s see what britney2 thinks . And that s what happened.

I've been doing some work on LangPop.com, and one of the things I'd like to do is update the chart software. What I have now, Plotr seems to work ok, but being the tinkering type, I want to fix things, even if they're not broke. Truth be told, my worry is that Plotr isn't maintained any more, so it would be a good idea to find something that's receiving a bit of attention. The candidates:

• Flot
• Flotr
• ProtoChart

These seem to be fairly up to date in the sense that someone worked on them recently. There are some older ones like PlotKit, that do not appear to be maintained any more. It is entirely possible that I missed a good one. Another possibility would be to use Google's chart API, but I'd rather be a little bit more in control of things than to farm that out, and I also am planning on doing some interactive features in the near(ish) future. So let's have a look: Flot Based on JQuery, this one looks fairly complete, and has a lot of different, nice looking charts. Since I don't really care what library it's based on JQuery seems as good as any other, being quite popular these days. Installation is pretty simple, and, having good defaults, it's easy to get nice looking data up on the screen in short order. Flotr Modeled after Flot, Flotr uses Prototype (the Rails default) instead of JQuery, and is the follow up to Plotr. I'm not quite sure what the motivation was behind the name/project change, but this seems to be where the guy is spending his time. Since he did a good job with Plotr, this one seemed worth a look too. ProtoChart This one is based on Prototype too. It immediately annoyed me by uncompressing from the .zip file in the current directory, scattering files around. I've always found this behavior a bit antisocial. This code claims to be "motivated by Flot, Flotr and PlotKit libraries", which indicate that it's fairly recent. However, my feeling is that the problem is not necessarily how old code is in these projects, but how quickly they spring up, bloom, and then stagnate. I'd like to use something that's got some staying power... But anyway, ProtoChart looks like pretty good code, even if the distribution is a bit minimal, and doesn't come with examples. If you look at LangPop.com, you'll notice something that's very important for my choice: I need a barchart that has horizontal bars, rather than the more traditional vertical bars. This is because it would be quite difficult to squeeze so many languages across the screen horizontally. This ended up being the deciding factor: like Plotr, Flotr supports horizontally oriented bar charts, making it the obvious choice. The other two libraries looked pretty good too - Flot, in particular, looks like quite solid code. So, there you have it - very brief reviews of an incomplete selection of libraries! In my defense, the goal is to attempt to dominate my maximizing nature, pick one, and get on with doing some cool stuff with LangPop. I do, however, welcome comments and suggestions.

I have been trying to make a script that should put my laptop into hibernate, run automatically from cron, so it forces me to get to sleep.

I had managed to make it work from a console (tty1), but it seemed as if it refused to work from cron.

During the tests my local mailbox was getting the output of the command, and I stood and watched at this error message for more than an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I couldn't understand what was wrong:


This option is not available. Please see --help for all possible usages.

This was from zenity and I was starting to suspect that it was failing to expad properly the text variable since it worked with a fixed text.

This was failing:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "'$NOTIFICATION$XMSG'"

And this was working:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD!"


I couldn't figure it out. Until I tried this:

(...) /usr/bin/zenity --progress --auto-close --text "OH!MY!GOD! "


And it failed.


God damn! Setting LANG in the script fixed the issue right away!


So, if you ever want zenity to show up from cron dont forget to:

• set DISPLAY
• set LANG

zenity is a pice of shit when it doesn't work. It could have printed the "option which wasn't available".

We recently bought a Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. The HG20 records in AVCHD format (MPEG-4 h.264) at up to 1920 1080. To get from the camcorder to a DVD (or something we can upload to the web), I need some sort of video editing software. This lets me trim out the boring bits, encode the video for DVD, etc. Background In addition to DVD creation and web uploading, I want the ability to burn high-definition video discs. 1920 1080 is significantly higher resolution than you get from a DVD. There are two main ways to go: a blu-ray format disc, or an AVCHD disc. A blu-ray disc has to be burned onto BD-R media, which costs about $5 each, using a blu-ray burner, which costs about $200. AVCHD discs use the same h.264 encoding that the camcorder does, meaning they have better compression and can be burned onto regular DVD+R media, fitting about 30 minutes onto a DVD. Moreover, it is possible to move AVCHD files directly from a camcorder to an AVCHD disc without re-encoding, resulting in higher quality and lower playing time. The nicer blu-ray players, such as the PS3, can play AVCHD discs. AVCHD seems pretty clearly the direction the industry is moving. Compared to the tape-based HDV, ACVHD has higher quality with lower bitrates, better resolution, and much greater convenience. Hard disk or SD-based AVCHD camcorders are pretty competitive in terms of price by now too, often cheaper than tape-based ones. The downside of AVCHD is that it takes more CPU power to process. Though as video tasks are often done in batch, that wouldn t have to be a huge downside. The bigger problem is that, though all the major video editing software claims to support AVCHD, nobody really supports it well yet. The Contenders Back when I got my first camcorder in about 2001 the one that I m replacing now you pretty much had to have a Mac to do any sort of reasonable consumer or prosumer-level video editing. We bought our first iMac back then to work with that, and it did work well with the MiniDV camera. Today, there s a lot more competition out there. The Mac software stack has not really maintained its lead some would even say that it s regressed and the extremely high cost of buying a Mac capable of working with AVCHD, plus Final Cut Express, makes that option completely out of the question for me. It would be roughly $2500. Nobody really supports AVCHD well yet, even on the Mac. Although most programs advertise support of smart rendering a technique that lets the software merely copy unchanged footage when outputting to the same format as the input none of them have smart rendering that actually works with AVCHD source material. Though this fact is never documented, though discussed on forums. Another annoyance, having used Final Cut Express in the past, is that with these programs you can t just go to the timeline and say delete everything between 1:35 and 3:52 ; you have to go in and split up clips, then select and delete them. They seem to be way too concerned about dealing with individual clips. I briefly used Cinelerra on Linux to do some video editing. It s a very powerful program, but geared at people that are far more immersed in video editing than I. For my needs, it didn t have enough automation and crashed too much and that was with MiniDV footage. It apparently does support AVCHD, but I haven t tried it. I ve tried three programs and considered trying a fourth. Here are my experiences: Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2 Commonly referenced as the go to program for video editing on Windows, I started with downloading the Free Trial of it from Corel. Corel claims that the free trial is full-featured all over on their website, but I could tell almost instantly that it wasn t. I wound up buying the full version, which came to about $65 after various discounts. I wanted to like this program. Its output options include AVCHD disc, Blu-ray disc, DVD+R, and the like. Its input options include MiniDV, AVCHD, ripping from DVD, ripping from Bluray, and just about every other format you can think of. And it heavily advertised proxy editing , designed to let you edit a scaled-down version of AVCHD video with a low-CPU machine, but refer back to the original high-quality footage for the output. It didn t pan out that way. The biggest problem was the constant crashing. I really do mean constant. It probably crashed on me two dozen times in an hour. If you are thinking that means that it crashes pretty much as soon as I can get it re-opened, you d be correct. Click the Play button and it hangs. Click a clip and it hangs. Do anything and it hangs. It did seem to work better with the parts of the source that had been converted to a low-res version with Smart Proxy, though it didn t eliminate the hangs, just reduced them. And every time I d have to End Task, it would forget what it had already converted via Smart Proxy even if I had recently saved the project and have to start over from scratch. I spent some time trying to figure out why it always thought my project was 720 480 even when it was 1920 1080, and why the project properties box didn t even have an option for 1920 1080. After some forum searching, it turns out that the project properties box is totally irrelevant to the program. Yay for good design, anyone? VideoStudio Pro X2 does have good output options, allowing combination of multiple source files onto a single DVD or AVCHD disc as separate titles. Unfortunately, its DVD/AVCHD rendering process also yes hangs more often than not. The documentation for VideoStudio Pro X2 is of the useless variety. It s the sort of thing that feels like it s saying The trim tool is for trimming your clips without telling you what trimming your clips means, or making it obvious how to remove material from the middle of a clip. The proxy editing feature isn t what it should be either. Instead of being something that just automatically happens and Works in the background, you have to manage its queue in the foreground and it forgets what it was doing whenever the program hangs. On the rare occasion when pressing Play did not cause a hang, the AVCHD footage played back at about 0.5fps far, far worse than PowerDirector manages on the same machine. Bits that had been rendered for proxy editing did appear to play at full framerate. I have applied for a refund for this purchase from Corel under their 30-day return policy, and have already uninstalled it from my disk. What a waste. CyberLink PowerDirector 7 Ultra This was the second program I tried, and the one I eventually bought. Its feature set is not quite as nice as Corel s, especially when it comes to versatility of output options. On the other hand, it feels done. It only crashed two or three times on me apparently that s GOOD on Windows? Things just worked. It appears to have proxy editing support, but it is completely transparent and plays back with a decent framerate even without it. It can output to AVCHD, Bluray, and DVD, though smart rendering doesn t work with AVCHD source material. Its weakness compared to the Corel package is that it doesn t have as many options for formatting these discs. You can have only one title on a disc, though you can have many chapters. You have some, but not much, control over compression parameters. The same goes for exporting files for upload to the web or saving on your disk. The documentation is polished and useful for the basics, though not extensive. Overall, this package works, supports all the basics I wanted from it, so I m using it for now. Adobe Premiere Elements 7 I downloaded the trial of this one too. I opened it up, and up popped a dialog box asking what resolution my project would be, interlacing settings, etc. I thought YES now that s the kind of program I want. As I tried out the interface, I kept thinking the same. This was a program not just for newbies, but for people that wanted a bit more control. Until it came to the question of output. Premiere Elements 7 was the only package I looked at that had no option to burn an AVCHD disc. DVD or Blu-ray only. That s a deal-breaker for me. There s no excuse for a program in this price range to not support the only affordable HD disc option out there. So I didn t investigate very much farther. Another annoying thing is that Adobe seems to treat all of their software as a commercial. I m a user, not an audience, dammit. I do not want to buy some photoshop.net subscription when I buy a video editing program. I do not want to see ads for stuff when I m reading PDFs. LEAVE ME ALONE, ADOBE. I just felt sleazy even giving them my email address, let alone installing the program on my system. I think I will feel like a better person once I reboot into Windows and wipe it off my system. Pinnacle Studio 12 Another program that comes highly rated. But I never installed it because its minimum system requirements state that it needs an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz or higher for 1920 1080 AVCHD editing. And I have only a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz half the computing horsepower that it wants. And since they offer no free trial, I didn t bother even trying it, especially since PowerDirector got by fine with my CPU. Conclusions This seems to be a field where we can say all video editing software sucks; some just suck a little less. I m using PowerDirector for now, but all of the above programs should have new versions coming out this year, and I will be keeping a close eye to see if any of them stop being so bad.

Today is Monday, what means it is time for Gammu release. Main improvements are this time in DBI driver and dummy phone driver. This allowed increasing number of test cases and they revealed number of bugs in code, which were fixed. The good thing is that we now have covered 30% of code by testcases. There is still place to improve, but I think this is good milestone, because most of untested code lies in drivers for different phones, which are hard to test automatically without having real phone connected to test server. Other thing I would like to highlight is DBI backend in SMSD. It is still new, but you should consider using it instead of old MYSQL or PGSQL backends, because it behaves much more nicely to your database and won't ruin system performance that easily (though there are still things to improve). Unfortunately it is not available on Windows right now, but I hope this will change in future. Full list of changes follows:

• Fix some memory leaks found by cppcheck.
• Implemented reconnecting/retrying in DBI driver.
• Fix memory leaks in SMSD found by valgrind.
• Fix decoding of another Nokia message type.
• Support for passing received message ID in DBI.
• Dummy phone now supports phonebook, calendar, todo, filesystem.
• Experimental SMSD monitor support on Windows.
• Added ID for Nokia 2680 (bug #813).
• Number of retries of message send in SMSD can be configured.
• Updated SQL files to new version (mostly added useful indexes).
• Dropped own logic for generating IDs for SMS and rely on SQL server (only in DBI driver for now).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon, SUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can check experimental repository in OpenSuse Build Service.

In case anyone's interested, here are some notes on the ASUS Eee Box, more specifically the b202 model, Linux edition:

• I use the box as a media center, so I initially wanted to connect it to my 720p HDTV using a DVI/HDMI cable. Unfortunately it's apparently impossible to use the TV's native screen resolution (1360x768) via HDMI, the best you can get is 1280x720, which results in a somewhat blurry image. Worst yet, the HDMI input has an overscan problem, approximately 50 pixels on each side are missing... which means that your GNOME panels will be invisible. I'm not sure if this is caused by the Eee Box or by my TV set but if you absolutely want HDMI, waiting for the b204/b206 model with its built-in HDMI might be a good idea. (In the end, I used my TV's VGA input.)
• It's more powerful than I thought. The Linux version ships with a 160GB SATA hard drive and 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB for the Windows version) and the Atom N270 CPU is pretty fast. It plays 720p MPEG4 video (such as this file) with lots of CPU to spare, and the quality is really great.
• The optical S/PDIF audio output doesn't work under Linux, as far as I can tell.
• It's extremely silent despite the fan and hard drive.
• The Gigabit Ethernet controller is a nice touch, netperf reports a speed of 611 MBits/s. In practice the drive's speed will be the bottleneck, of course.
• To avoid tearing issues when playing video with Xv, use the Intel Video Overlay adaptor instead of the (default) Textured Video adaptor. (Use xvinfo to get the port number.)
• OpenGL performance isn't great; Compiz with basic effects will run fine, mplayer can play most video files using the gl/gl2 output without frameloss, but games will be slow. (Not that I expected much from the Intel GMA950 anyway...)

All in all I'm pretty happy with the Eee Box. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

In August I got a very nice HP 2510p notebook which is now my main system for development. This took a while for two reasons. First of all the system did not resume 100% reliably. This has now been solved, although the final patches needed for that will only be in 2.6.29, but that's no problem as I run upstream kernels anyway (I do quite a bit of kernel testing). Kudos have to go to Rafael J. Wysocki who has been doing a huge amount of work to improve the suspend/resume code in the kernel. Second of all I wanted a docking station so I could continue to use my 19" monitor, with the laptop's LCD as second display. I bought the docking station in December. The challenge then was to automatically (de)activate the external display when the notebook is (un)docked. Unfortunately there are no ACPI events, but the hp-wmi module (written by Mattew Garrett) sends docking events to the input subsystem. I wrote a small program to catch these events and a script that uses xrandr to switch displays. There were two issues with that setup. The first docking event was getting lost, but I managed to fix that. And the X server would crash when starting some applications (einstein and virtualbox) after undocking, but there's a patch for that too now. The notebook is now really well supported and stable.

• suspend/resume works completely reliably
• the docking station works nicely and so does the dual display setup
• wireless works nicely
• the SD card reader works (was used to develop support for MMC/SD cards in Debian Installer)
• the accelerometer works (so I can play Tux Racer and Neverball by tilting the notebook) using the lis3lv02d module, and Pavel Machek recently even added freefall detection, including example code to park the hard disk (targeted for 2.6.30)
• the fingerprint reader works, though I'm not sure I actually want to use that for logging on to the system

The system is currently running Debian/lenny with a KDE desktop and a 2.6.29-rc3 kernel. Working with upstream developers to get this far has really been worthwhile, and fun.

In order to have pretty highlighted oz code in HTML and TeX, I defined a simple language definition "oz.lang"

keyword = "andthen at attr case catch choice class cond",
          "declare define dis div do else elsecase ",
          "elseif elseof end fail false feat finally for",
          "from fun functor if import in local lock meth",
          "mod not of or orelse prepare proc prop raise",
          "require self skip then thread true try unit"
meta delim "<" ">"
cbracket = " "
comment start "%"
symbol = "~","*","(",")","-","+","=","[","]","#",":",
       ",",".","/","?","&","<",">","\ "
atom delim "'" "'"  escape "\\"
atom = '[a-z][[:alpha:][:digit:]]*'
variable delim " " " "  escape "\\"
variable = '[A-Z][[:alpha:][:digit:]]*'
string delim "\"" "\"" escape "\\"

The meta tags are so I can intersperse EBNF notation in with oz code. Unfortunately source-highlight seems a little braindead about e.g. environment variables, so I had to wrap the invocation in a script

#!/bin/sh
HLDIR=$HOME/config/source-highlight
source-highlight --style-file=$HLDIR/default.style --lang-map=$HLDIR/lang.map $*

The final pieces of the puzzle is a customized lang.map file that tells source-highlight to use "oz.lang" for "foo.oz" and a default.style file that defines highlighting for "meta" text.

Welcome back for the last part of the reviews. You may want to look at the previous parts : part 1 and part 2. Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client Presentation Debian CDs and DVDs take up a huge mount of space on download servers. Using jigdo to download those images can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and space needed on the central servers. Unfortunately, jigdo currently needs special client software to be downloaded/installed first. Adding support directly into a browser-based application could potentially make a very big difference for first-time users here. Jigdo was created in 2001. It allowed to create ISOs from .debs grabbed from regular mirrors. It eliminated the need to duplicate the entire contents of the package repository into ISO files for each release, or even more importantly, for weekly snapshots of testing/unstable/whatever. You may find the complete proposal from the student here. The original idea originated from the Debian-CD people, who wanted to explore ideas about creating a light web client. The project was mentored by Steve McIntyre, who developed a new version of the Jigdo tools, jigit, which is much more efficient. Student Dustin Rayner was a 5th year senior undergraduate student at the Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I studied Computer Engineering for 3 years as a Computer Engineering student before deciding to pursue a Mathematics and Computer Science degree. Result This project was unsuccessful due to numerous issues. First, because of an inadequate technical preparation of the original proposal. The Debian-CD people were too optimistic with the possibilities of Javascript. In the end, the copying and checksumming part of the Jigdo process were implemented but the checksumming (with a Javascript implementation of md5) was so slow that it was unusable (think 50kb/s on a regular laptop at full CPU charge). The student did the right thing to investigate Java and ActiveX but it was too late unfortunately and he ultimately lacked the experience and knowledge in the relevant technologies. If the proposal is tried again, the student would be requested to have much more experience with Java (and possibly ActiveX). Those would be much more efficient for the task, as they are the most used technologies among on-line anti-virus scanners, which have a workload somewhat similar to Jigdo. I could not find further public involvement of Dustin Rayner within Debian. Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager Presentation A GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality. Debian currently supports multiple non-command-line package managers, the most used being Synaptic and Aptitude. Synaptic uses a GTK+ interface but offers no command-line mode. Aptitude offers a command-line mode but no X interface, although it offers a ncurses interface.
Comparing the interfaces of Synaptic and Aptitude reveal many design differences. Although Synaptic may be more accessible to beginners, Aptitude offers many interface behaviors and functions that are useful to the regular to advanced users : fully hyperlinked tabbed navigation between packages and versions of packages, mostly modeless interface, interactive dependency conflict resolver The proposal was introduced by the student in coordination with Daniel Burrows, the mentor and developer of Aptitude. Student Obey Arthur Liu was a 22 year old french student of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Grenoble Institute of Technology - ENSIMAG, in France. Did I mention that he s also yours truly ? If you want to know more, you might be interested in my previous post. Result This project was successful. The interface was mostly done and functional by the end of the summer. Daniel merged the code into the main post-lenny branch. Development is still ongoing and packages are released into Experimental. For further information, just read the rest of my blog. I could find some further public involvements of Obey Arthur Liu within Debian. Doh! Lintian for fuller automated setups Presentation lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can t be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity). This project would make lintian errors much more fine-grained and help in maintaining pertinent quantitative analysis of package quality. The project was mentored by Marc Brockschmidt. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the Lintian team. Student UPDATED: Jord Polo Bard s has done a lot of work with translation in Catalan, his native tongue. He can usually be found on #debian-catalan. He also maintains a few packages as a DM. Result This project was successful. The classification was entirely done. Jord also helped with the new lintian.debian.org website. The Lintian team was very satisfied with the revamped errors list and new website. They have an immediate impact on packages quality reporting. Jord is still active within Debian, helping package a few games. Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository Presentation mentors.debian.net is currently a very specialized web-based repository that allows everybody to contribute software packages to Debian without the need to be a Debian Developer (or Debian Maintainer). It has successfully helped simplifying the sponsoring process in the last years. However it needs to be refactored and in the process should be turned into a generic piece of software that can be used for other Debian source/binary package repositories, too. Mentors is a very good initiative to recruit new packages maintainers (and needs your help!) and the software underlying it could be reused for many different purposes (think PPA). The project was mentored by Christoph Haas. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the mentors team. Student Jonny Lamb was a Computer Science student in the United Kingdom. He was already quite involved within Debian, maintaining a lot of significant packages. Result This project was successful. The whole proposal was perfectly executed. Jonny now continues to develop debexpo, with the mailing-lists and commit logs showing interesting activity. Of course, help for debexpo is appreciated to get it into full shape. Jonny has since become a Debian Developer (here is his AM report). Congratulations to him. It s nice to end on a nice note isn t it ? Now that we re done with the individual reports, I m going to write down my recommendations report. Hopefully it will help with next year s Summer of Code.

I recently ate a bag of potato chips made by FoodShouldTasteGood, Inc.. Their motto (as printed on that bag under their name) was, "It's our name. It's our brand. It's our motto." Now, either the antecedents for those three it's are different -- which seems implausible -- or their motto is lying in its final sentence. It's all very complicated. Seth Schoen reminded me of a somewhat similar issue with the United States' national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. The final stanza includes the line, "And this be our motto 'In God is our trust.'" This is not and has never been the U.S. motto. In fact, the U.S. had no motto at all until 1956 when "In God We Trust" -- which is very similar, but not quite the same -- became official. It seems that nobody is quite sure where "In God We Trust" came from but there is some speculation that it originated in the anthem itself. Presumably, it became the motto because lawmakers thought it sounded good in the song and not because the U.S. government failed while trying to "correct" the embarrassing incorrect line in its anthem.

Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1]. He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable - it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability. I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don t expect anything different this time around. Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn t know what OS is running). I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away. Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks . I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength). As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010. One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012. Predicting that technological developments won t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won t break frequently) won t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years. One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won t be for at least five years. I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced. I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.

• [1] http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/09/technology-predictions/


• [2] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [3] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/11/09/technology-predictions


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport

There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect marriage , such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage. I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage. By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:

1. Don t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).


2. Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.


3. Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.


4. Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.


5. Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans - I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known. Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage. The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly conservative Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates). A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system. Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the war on drugs . If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_test_dummy

Last Friday, I wrote I m not going to FOSDEM again because there are better value-for-money events around now right near the start of an article on here. But on Wednesday, I was surprised to learn from another website that I find it necessary to not only whine, but also boycott a conference, because [I] believe that FOSDEM should not take money from [Novell], just because they also happen to be a company, and as such make business deals with Microsoft. That s just plain false. I also found a link from the Boycott Novell website holding it up as an example of the boycott working - huh? Firstly, my wording wasn t perfect (by not going to FOSDEM again , I meant I didn t go last year either, not that I ll never go), but I feel it was pretty clear that I m not boycotting FOSDEM due to Novell. Both schestowitz (on the boycottnovell site) and Wouter Verhelst (quoted above from his personal website) were naughty to suggest otherwise! Secondly, Novell didn t do a deal with Microsoft just because they happen to be a company . Lots of companies haven t done deals with Microsoft. Novell did it to make a net profit from the deal and so I have some admiration for campaigners who aim to make the deal a huge liability for Novell. That s just influencing corporations as they were designed to work, so don t blame the campaigners for trying. So, I feel that both No-Novell-ers and company-blinders should try to find some compromise instead of flaming each other from twenty paces. It looks to me like the No-Novell-er s request (roughly: tell us how much to donate to get rid of them) was a reasonable suggestion. If the organisers are so open-minded, why not make a counter-offer instead of simple they still deserve a place defence? To close, I repeat: if you re going to FOSDEM, I hope you have a safe journey and a fun time and why not tell them what you think of the Novell-MS deal. If you re helping run FOSDEM, thank you!

Recently there has been increasing attention paid to thermal issues. The power used by computers not only impacts the electricity bill (and battery life for a portable device) but is a cooling problem. The waste heat from desktop systems and servers costs energy (and therefore money) to remove by the air-conditioning system and the heat produced by small devices can impact where they may be used. It seems that a temperature of 40C can cause burns if applied to the human body for any period of time. As it doesn t immediately hurt this can happen without people noticing. A friend recently reported getting a large blister on his arm after drinking a moderate amount of alcohol and falling asleep next to his EeePC. I have noticed that my EeePC 701 has an unpleasant pattern of heat dissipation. It appears to use only one small vent in the side to vent most of the heat (with some vents in the base for air intake) and the base is all plastic. Apparently such a machine draws 14W from the wall when in active use compared to my measurements of 20W for a Thinkpad T41p. The Thinkpad however has a significantly greater size, this means bigger vents (and therefore lower temperatures of the vented air). Also the fan inside the Thinkpad makes much less noise so I guess it s larger. If I am working in the loungue and leave my Thinkpad on the couch it doesn t seem to have any thermal issues. But if I leave my EeePC sitting in a normal manner the vents on the base are partially blocked and it becomes unpleasantly hot. If I leave my EeePC upside-down with the lid closed so that the vents in the base are exposed to the air) then the screen gets very hot, I am not sure whether this is heat from the CPU going through the keyboard to the screen and then being prevented from going further by the insulating cushion or whether heat is generated in the screen (although it is supposed to be powered down when the lid is closed). One suggestion I have received is to place a laptop on a metal baking tray. The flat tray preserves the airflow underneath it and the metal conducts heat reasonably well. Baking trays seem to be made of aluminium or thin steel, they don t conduct heat well - but a lot better than a cushion. It seems to me that one factor which will limit the development of NetBook class machines is the ratio of heat dissipation to either area or volume (I m not sure which is more important). For use similar to mine providing the same compute power as an EeePC 701 with less heat dissipation would be ideal - and technically shouold not be difficult to achieve. Unfortunately I think that people will want to run Windows on NetBook class machines so we will see the development of machines with faster CPUs and GPUs which have worse ratios of heat to heat dissipation potential which will lead to more heat induced shutdowns and low temperature burns. It s a pity that no-one makes a netbook with the CPU power of an iPaQ. A 400MHz ARM CPU is all I need for my portable computing and my iPaQs don t have cooling vents.

The downloads amount for Gammu and Wammu is still increasing and when Ben Waymark offered me possibility to make an mirror, I happily accepted it. So from now, you can choose alternate download location for all downloads on my site! The mirror is placed in UK, so if you have for whatever reason problems with connectivity to Czech Republic (where the primary site lives), it can be also good benefit for you to use alternate download location.

Sarah was discharged today. I decided to scrap trying to go to work, as I'd just have to leave at some point to pick her up. The hospital had to ensure that the nurse from Critical Care Systems was able to come to our home before they could discharge her, so that the IV antibiotics could be continued. We left the hospital at about 11:30am, and he got to our place just after 1pm. He whizzed through the whole process, as she was due for more antibiotics at midday and he wanted to get the IV started. She's on a four hourly course. Fortunately, that doesn't mean we have to change the IV every four hours. The way it works is the bag has enough antibiotics in a (presumably saline) solution to last six infusions on a four hourly frequency, and it's hooked up to a pump (that'll cost us $5000 if we don't give it back at the end), which takes care of everything. So once a day at around noon, Sarah has to disconnect the old bag, flush the line with saline, do something with some Heparin to prevent clots in the line, and hook up a new bag. The bag and the pump fit into a carry bag that can be worn like a bum bag or slung from her shoulder and looped through a belt. It'll be her permanent companion for the next (hopefully only) two weeks. The PICC has two ports (and I don't think that's the correct term) on it, and the IV is only hooked up to one, so the other one should be flushed and "Heparinised" regularly as well. The nurse comes back in a week with more supplies and to do some maintenance on site where the PICC line enters her arm. Critical Care Systems seems pretty impressive. They provide all the gear, fill the prescription, and bring it all out to you (by a nurse). They provide a 24 hour hotline to call if there's any problems, questions or concerns, and can dispatch somebody to us if necessary. We've got syringes preloaded with saline and Heparinised saline, more alcohol swabs than you can poke a stick at, and the fridge is full of IV bags. It's awesome that medical technology has progressed to this point, where Sarah can go about her business almost as normal, instead of being stuck in a hospital for another two weeks just because she has to have a tube in her arm. To prove this, the little trooper was back at her CNA course this evening, and starts clinical training tomorrow night.