I ve been noticing a number of odd things happening surrounding my blog lately, and I thought it s about time to figure out what s going on and how to stop it. The first problem is that people are illegally copying my posts, probably using RSS scraping, and putting them up on their own ad-infested sites. It is trivial to find them using Google for any somewhat unique word or phrase in one of my posts. Lately one of them, linux-support.com, actually sends me pingbacks announcing the fact that they ve scraped me! Most of these sites seem to be nothing but content farms for selling ad impressions, and almost none of them have any identifiable names for the owners. (There is an exception: I have specifically set up sites like Planet Debian and Goodreads to copy my blog posts.) I m obviously an advocate of open content, but I do not feel it right that others should be profiting by putting photos and stories about Free Software, or photos of my family, on their ad farms. While I release a great deal of content under GPL or Creative Commons licenses, I have never done so with my blog an intentional decision. What should I do about this? Is it worth fighting a battle over, or is it about as useless as trying to block every spam follower on my twitter account? So that s the first weird thing. The second weird thing just started within the last few weeks. I have been getting a surprising amount (a few a week) of email addressed to me. It does not bear the appearance of being 100% automated spam, though it is possible that it is. It s taken a few forms:

• Someone wanting to buy an ad on my blog
• Someone wanting to send me a story hyping their product (and intending me to pretend that I wrote the story)
• Someone wanting me to write a story about their website and link to it

The profit motive in all of these is high, and in at least the second and third, so is the sleaze factor. I ve gotten two emails lately of this form:

Hi John, I am curious if you are the administrator for this site: changelog.complete.org/archives/174-house-outlaws-fast-forwarding-senate-pres-next I am a researcher / writer involved with a new project whose mission it is to provide accurate and useful information for those interested in the practice of law, whether as a lawyer or paralegal. I recently produced an article detailing the complex relationship between law and technology and the legal implications on personal privacy and free speech. I would love to share this resource with those who might find it useful and am curious of you are the correct person to contact about such a request? Thank you! All my best,

The details vary the URLs appear to be random (the one cited above was little more than a link to an article), the topics the website claims to discuss range from law to schizophrenia (that one actually came with a link to the site, which again seemed to be a content farm). I am slightly tempted to reply to one of these and ask where the heck people are getting my name. It seems as if somebody has put me into a mailing list they sell containing sleazebag bloggers. Frankly, I am puzzled at this attention. I guess I haven t checked, but I can t imagine that my blog has anything even remotely resembling a high PageRank or anything else. It s not high-traffic, not Slashdot, etc. Either people are desperate, naive, failing to be selective, or maybe working some scam on me that I don t know yet. In any case, I m interested if others have seen this, or any advice you might have.

This year, the annual Debian conference will be held in Managua, Nicaragua. And I'll be lucky enough to spend two weeks visiting the country after Debconf, along with Elisabeth. Yes, I'll arrive in Nicarague on July 2nd, spend nearly the entire Debcamp, then Debconf, then we'll spend 16 days around the western part of Nicaragua, trying to discover the magic of this country. So, this post is about sharing our plans with my readers. Of course, I do not know the country so we may have made mistakes and bad choices. We'll see. Immediately after Debconf, Elisabeth will join in Managua. She'll be landing on July 15th. We'll then spend a night in an hotel near the airport and immediately leave the day after for Matagalpa, in North Nicaragua. We rented a car for the entire trip indeed, and will be on our own on wild Nicaragua roads..:-) We'll spend two nights in Matagalpa. We plan to visit some coffee or cigar plants, probably have a trip to Lake Apanas and Jinotega. Then, we'll have a short road trip to Esteli where we spend again two nights. We'll be visiting a coffee growing place (beneficio seco de caf ). A full day visit is planned at Miraflor natural reserve to enjoy te beauties of hundreds orchids and some local natural marvels. The next move will be to Leon, where we'll spend 4 nights, visiting a cigar factory (tabacaleras de puros?) on the way, as well as San Jacinto, a place with hydrothermal sources and "Hervideros" (geysers). Four nights in Leon leaves plenty of time for several activities *and* enjoying the colonial city. We'll have a full day at Juan Venado Island reserve with boat trip from Las Penitas (on a fisherman's boat from what the travel agency mentioned), then another full day climbing on the Cerro Negro volcano. Indeed, I was originally considering climbing the Momotombo, but our travel agency warned about the high difficulty. I would have loved that myself but maybe not the two of us...and this is a trip for both of us! So, we played the safe option..:-) After these 4 nights in Leon, we'll move to Granada for 3 nights, through Leon Viejo (the former site of Leon). From Granada, one day will there be used for a visit in the Masaya National Park and see the beauties of Masaya volcano (this is indeed something that could be done for Debconf day trip, IMHO, as it doesn't seem that far from Managua). Another day will be spent to Las Isletas on lake Nicaragua and others visiting the colonial city of Granada. Or, of course, whatever things we don't even known about now..:-) Then we'll move to what I personnally consider the peak of the trip: 3 nights on Ometepe island on lake Nicaragua. Just check Wikipedia to see why Ometepe is, in my opinion, THE place to go in Nicaragua. Here, I'll have my volcano..:-). Indeed, Elizabeth "authorized" me to book a local guide and then climb Concepcion Volcan, if the weather allows for it. 1600m height, that doesn' seem to be a big issue....except when starting from a little bit above sea level and are climbing a volcano that looks like s postcard volcano : nearly a perfect cone shape. So, let's cross fingers for having good weather that day. I promise myself I'll record the GPS track of that one and, even if I'll probably be walking most of the climbing (except if I have a very trained guide...), I'll add it to my run tracks! We might also be going to climb Ometepe's other volcano (Maderas) the day after so that Elizabeth also enjoys these beauties. There also seems to be great places around Maderas such as San Ramon Cascade, Finca el Porvenir, etc. Then, at the end of all this, it will be time to come back to Managua in the final day and fly back to Paris in the early morning of July 31st. All over, I'll be in Nicaragua from July 2nd until July 31st! Full month away, yay! Hurrah for the crazy number of holidays those lazy French people have..:-) During this trip, we might find it interesting some local geeks (not too many as Elizabeth is not that deeply interested in beersigning!) and share a few nice things in local places which are only known by locals. In case you're interested, out (very clever) travel agency is named Nicaragua Adventures and they're definitely worth contacting if you want to travel around .ni, particularly if we prefer booking things in advance as we do. They speak Spanish (of course!), English and French. They're very responsive to e-mail as well.

This always flashes by too quickly for me to read... I'm preserving it here for next time.

Press the spacebar to pause...
KEY MAPPING FOR CONSOLE REDIRECTION:
Use the <ESC><0> key sequence for <F10>
Use the <ESC><!> key sequence for <F11>
Use the <ESC><@> key sequence for <F12>
Use the <ESC><Ctrl><M> key sequence for <Ctrl><M>
Use the <ESC><Ctrl><H> key sequence for <Ctrl><H>
Use the <ESC><Ctrl><I> key sequence for <Ctrl><I>
Use the <ESC><Ctrl><J> key sequence for <Ctrl><J>
Use the <ESC><X><X> key sequence for <Alt><x>, where x is any letter
key, and X is the upper case of that key
Use the <ESC><R><ESC><r><ESC><R> key sequence for <Ctrl><Alt><Del>

Sparkleshare is a file sharing utility that keeps folders in sync on multiple computers in a similar fashion to the commercial and proprietary Dropbox. Sparkleshare recently released a Windows client, finally allowing me to start switching my co-workers at the Progressive Technology Project away from Dropbox. Overall, I'm very impressed. In particular, I appreciate the Sparkleshare authors' decision to build on top of existing tools (git for storage and revision control, ssh for transport, and ssh public key infrastructure for authorization and authentication). That means I don't have to learn new tools and protocols to debug and it means Sparkleshare can focus on the file sharing pieces. Despite my overall enthusiasm, I do have some serious concerns. Protecting your credentials A researcher found a startling security flaw in Dropbox - if you can copy a particular file from a user's computer to your own computer, you can impersonate them flawlessly, accessing all their Dropbox files without having to know the user's password. Unfortunately, Sparkleshare suffers from this same vulnerability if you use the default configuration. When you first install Sparkleshare, it creates a password-less ssh private/public key pair and then makes the public part easily accessible to you so you can add it to your server (or gitorious account, etc). Very convenient. But it also means that all an attacker needs to do is copy your private key (and your Sparkleshare configuration file) and they get complete control over your files. This problem is easily avoided. If you are running Linux or Mac OS X and you have your own key loaded in your ssh agent, Sparkleshare will happily use that key. So - simply by using your existing (presumably password-protected key) on your remote Sparkleshare servers, you can mitigate this problem. Sparkleshare will still load your Sparkleshare generated key, but if you don't provide that key with access to anything, no harm is done. Confirming each use of your key However... that leads to a new problem. If you are like me, your ssh agent is configured to ask for a confirmation every time your key is used. And, Sparkleshare regularly polls the remote git repository for changes. At best repeatedly clicking to confirm is tedious. At worst, it prevents you from intelligently rejecting malicious requests, thus defeating the whole purpose of the check. It is possible to launch Sparkleshare via ssh-agent in an environment in which you are not requiring the confirmation when Sparkleshare uses your key, but still requiring it for all other uses. However, given the trade offs, I've decided to add a password to my Sparkleshare provided ssh key rather than using my existing key: ssh-keygen -p -f ~/.config/sparkleshare/sparkleshare.jamie@progressivetech.org.key Now, I am prompted to enter my passphrase when I start Sparkleshare and don't have to confirm every use of the key. And, I continue to confirm each use of my main key. git was designed to store code, not documents Just because something is designed for one purpose doesn't mean it can't be used for another. However, there are a few limitations. Large files are one. git can handle files over 100MB, but may run into memory problems. I had to alter the git windowMemory setting, raising it higher than the size of the largest file. Another problem is disk space. Since git keeps full revision history on every machine, you have to download more data than just the files that are checked out. The more edits you make to a repository, the more disk space beyond what is checked out is needed (and deleting files won't help). Lastly, you can't use file modification times. With git, the file modification time will depend on when you checkout the files. With some fancy hook writing, you could tweak things so that the file modification date is the same as the commit date, but that still won't help you if you add an existing directory to Sparkleshare because all the files will have the same commit time. This "bug" has been reported to git and it has been rejected because mucking with the modification time of files can have bad results when you are using make to compile code. As Linus colorfully put it:

I'm sorry. If you don't see how it's WRONG to set a datestamp back to something that will make a simple "make" miscompile your source tree, 
I don't know what definition of "wrong" you are talking about.
It's WRONG.
It's STUPID.
And it's totally INFEASIBLE to implement.

Well, did I mention that git was designed for source code? No server validation Of all the problems I encountered, this one is by far the most serious. Perusing ~/.config/sparkleshare/debug.log is very informative. On a default installation, after you have added a project, you'll see:

19:32:27 [Fetcher][/home/jamie/SparkleShare/.tmp/bar] Fetching folder: ssh://foo@bar.org/foo/bar
19:32:27 [Fetcher] Disabled host key checking for bar.org

Wah. Once the project is added, whatever key fingerprint is given is stuffed into your ~/.ssh/known_hosts file. Host key checking is only disabled when you initially create the project, so if you connect to the proper server the first time, you are protected from subsequent man-in-the-middle attacks. However... if the initial fingerprint is wrong, your personal ssh configuration is now poisoned. This seems like a very bad idea. I've opened a debian bug to address it.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to publish another interview with the people behind Debian Edu and Skolelinux. This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor details get right before release. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is J rgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year I will manage the department of technical documentation at a manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering. My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at home since 2006. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu project? Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old computers in use. I answered: "Yes". Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in Bielefeld in December of 2006. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu? When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages for me as today. In the past there were advantages like:

• I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as they had little money to spent for computers and software.
• It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without cost.
• It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a server
• I was able to configure the server to the needs of the school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones came up in this way:

• Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software now.
• They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.
• With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa for management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the interfaces used in the past.
• It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the different needs.
• The documentation is usable and gets better every day.
• More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the world and so the community, which is an very important part I think, is sharing knowledge and minds.
• Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu?

• There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even whole municipality areas.
• Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to politicians.
• Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily? I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel, KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt, screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools. My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS, rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me and the whole family. I probably forgot something. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different countries and areas all over the world.

Last year I was able to switch tasksel to using metapackages, instead of the weird non-package task things that had been used before Debian supported Recommends fields well. An unanticipated result of the new task packages is that I have this nice popcon data available for them, so can get graphs like these. For new installs of testing, KDE and Xfce are neck and neck. With Gnome being the default, it's hard to say which desktop users really prefer. My feeling is that it's probably nearly evenly split now. (I installed Xfce on my sister's laptop last week, and anticipate moving all my family to it, rather than Gnome 3.) The above graph also shows a surprisingly large number of ssh server task installs. In fact, it's the most often manually installed task. Probably many of those are server machines, and so I'm considering having tasksel automatically select ssh on systems where it doesn't automatically select a desktop. Language data is also available. Taskel uses language tasks internally, without exposing an interface, so this will be almost entirely users who did an install of testing localised to their language. Interesting data can be teased out of this too. For example there seem more installs in Catalan than Chinese ... and at least 10 Esperanto users. (As with any popcon number, this is a lower bound, to be multiplied by the scaling guesstimate of your choice.)

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By the way, I've got a new vanity domain for my blog and wiki: http://joeyh.name/ The old http://kitenet.net/~joey/ will continue to work, like it has since 1997. But the new is easier to type. And it let me move my site to Branchable, at last.

Today, it must have been exactly 10 years that I started using Debian. The story of how I came to Debian shows some of its strengths, so I ll use this occasion to share it. I spent the first half of 2002 as an high-school exchange student in Wenatchee, USA. I was already a user of Linux at that time: I made my first contact roughly in 1996 and did my first installation at home two years later, but all that time I was dual-booting and my main system was a well-arranged Windows 98. The machine was a regular tower PC, but nevertheless I put the computer into my trunk when I flew to the US. It took away most of the space, and I had to put some of my cloths inside the case. So I was there, happily using my Windows and my manually set up Linux From Scratch until one day the inevitable happened; inevitable at least until you start doing backups: On April 30th, my hard drive crashed, and took the two systems together with 4 years of personal data with it. Two weeks later I had a new hard drive and was pondering my options. I did plan to install Windows again; at that time Windows XP was just released. But I wanted a German version of Windows, which would be hard to get there. Also, I did not want to use Linux from Scratch any more, and wanted to make a well-founded choice of a distribution. On the other hand, I really wanted to get my machine up and running quickly, to be able to read my mail more comfortably. I had heard that Debian had good support for network installations (downloading a full 700MB CD was something to avoid at that time), so I grabbed some netinst images, burned a CD, and quickly installed Debian. I was planning to use the system for about two weeks. I did not pay any particular attention to the setup. Heck, I even picked from my Simpsons sidekick machine naming scheme one that I would not miss being used up ( barney ). Nevertheless, I was using this installation for many years (and many upgrades), until I eventually switched to using laptops. In fact, that very installation is still on the machine somewhere and works. I did install Windows XP a few weeks later as well, but hardly used it. So May 12th of 2002 was when I turned into a full-time Linux and Debian user. I soon became interested in Debian the project and started to contribute. But that is another story for another ten year anniversary blog post, most likely on October 21, 2013...

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• Slovenian is now fully complete. 23rd language to reach full 100%
• Danish, Basque and Punjabi complete level 1
• Vietnamese and Traditional Chinese complete level 3
• Progress for Traditional Chinese, Basque, Vietnamese in level 2

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 48 languages 100%: ar ast be bg bn bs ca cs da de el eo es et eu fa fr gu he hi id it ja kk km kn ko lo mr nb nl pa pl pt pt_BR ru si sk sl sr sv te th tr uk vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 1 languages 99%: ta
• 3 languages 97%: fi ga hu
• 4 languages 95%: dz is mk ro
• 1 language 92%: ml
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 30 languages 100%: ast be bg ca cs da de eo es fa fr gu he id is it ja kk km nl pl pt ru si sk sl sv tr uk zh_CN
• 6 languages 99%: eu hr nb th vi zh_TW
• 3 languages 98%: dz pt_BR ro
• 1 language 97%: ta
• 2 languages 95%: el fi
• 2 languages 94%: ar gl
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko mr ne sr
• 5 languages 91%: ga ka lt mk te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 38 languages 100%: ast be bg bs ca cs da de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl he hr id is it ja kk km nb nl pl pt ru sk sl sr sv th tr vi zh_CN zh_TW
• 2 languages 98%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

Full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for 23 languages: Asturian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, German, Esperanto, Spanish, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Khmer, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Simplified Chinese

Recently an ex-colleague of mine changed jobs and suggested that I write something about the pros and cons of working from home. I've thought about this subject, off and on, for a few years and frustratingly I think most of the pros and the cons are the same:

• When you work from home you're working from home.

I live in a two-bedroom flat in Edinburgh. (Having just spent thousands on a new bathroom I don't expect I'll be moving any time soon. A rough budget of 40-50,000 would let me convert my attic into two/three rooms. So there is growth potential!) In my flat I have made one of the bedrooms an office. The office contains:

• A huge desk with two PCs, and two telephones on it.
• Several book-cases.
• A wall-mounted fan.
• Very little else.

One PC is for work. One PC is for me. One phone is for work. One phone is my own. Every working day I switch on the work router, the work phone, the work PC around 09:30. I then work, taking a lunch-break between either 12:00-13:00 or 13:00-14:00, until 18:00 at which point I switch off the work toys. I ignore my personal PC during the working day with the exception that it is the source of my music. I can reach across and hit the appropriate multi-media keys to select Play/Pause/Next Track/Previous Track/Volume Up/Volume Down. (When thenever the work-phone rings the first ring is ignored as I scramble to hit "Mute" or "Pause"..!) So what are some of the advantages/drawbacks? Well I'm at home. So the environment is one that I've made myself, and enjoy. The music is mine. The colour-scheme is mine. The pictures on the walls are mine. I have a Steve-loving chair. There is no soulless air-conditioning, no horrible cubicles, and no noisy people talking. The downside? No people talking. If I didn't leave my house at lunchtime I'd speak to zero people face to face in an average working day. That took a while for me to notice, but it is not nice. Since I work from home "the commute" takes seconds. I tend to get out of bed and wander straight to the desk. I'll work non-stop, then get dressed around lunchtime so that I can go out for lunch. Hail, Rain, Snow, or Sunshine I leave the house for lunch every single day (unless waiting for an atypical delivery). Because if I didn't I'd have no human contact. In the afternoon if it is a nice day I'll get undressed again, because I can, so why the hell not? Providing you're focussed working from home has several advantages that I can think of - I've no qualms about setting the washing machine going before I start work knowing that I can "spare" five minutes to empty it later in the day. Similarly I've no concern about ordering (even large) items, because I know what time the postman comes, and I know I'm never going to be out and miss a delivery. When I first started working from home I had a laptop instead of a PC and there were mornings when I worked, lazily, from my bed, or from my sofa whilst watching TV. That didn't last for long because I just didn't do a good job. I think I got away with it in the sense that I don't think people noticed, but I expect if it had lasted for longer it would have been quickly apparent. I stopped because the line was blurring between "home life" and "work life". Having a dedicated working area is essential in keeping me focussed. I don't do "home things" when I'm in "work time" - with very rare exceptions. Yes I wander around and pace if I'm thinking, yes I make more tea and coffee than I would in a real office, and yes I might open windows, phone a friend, read my gas meter, washup dishes, or similar as I'm "making coffee". But on the whole it only works if I work when I'm working. I could save money by using my work-internet instead of paying for personal-internet, but keeping the two links separate is another way of being focussed. I don't do "dodgy" things on the internet, on the whole (haha), but if I do I'd want to be damn sure that that was via my link and not the work-link - and having two PCs and two network links I know that is the case. There have been times when the work link has broken and I've used my personal link + openvpn to continue working, or at the very least re-join our internal chatroom and say "Internet down, brb". As a system administrator there are times when I have to do things either early in the morning, late at night, or even during a weekend. I guess a final advantage is that this is not a struggle - providing I don't schedule such operations at times when I'm in the pub, meeting friends, or taking pictures of cute strangers, it isn't a struggle to say "I'll do this after 8pm tonight", or set the alarm early. No long walk to an office, and if I've already got food cooking for my tea I can eat it nearby whilst still configuring things and testing sites/services/machines. So pros: I'm in my own environment, I don't worry about receiving parcels, meter-readings, and have wonderfully pleasant music all day. Ancillory bonuses are really side-effects of being in my environment: I have my good coffee, my nice cups, I can eat food I enjoy. etc, etc. Cons: You must be dedicated. You must be focussed lest you give in to temptation and cease working for minutes/hours at a time. You lose part of your home space - I can't turn this room into a childrens bedroom, for example. Nothing earth-shattering. I've done this for five years now, and although I was a little skeptical initially I thought "Why not?" It has worked out well and I think if I ever did need to leave my current position I'd have no hesitation about working from home in the future. Finally it has to be said that when I've had partners in my life they've traditionally been the type to wake up later than me. I get significant brownie points for being able to wake them up around 10/11AM with a cup of hot coffee & breakfast in bed every morning. By virtue of having a separate space I can close the door and not be disturbed by them walking around. I'm sure I've forgotten things - but as an initial pass the benefits and disadvantages of working from home are the same: You're in your own house. ObQuote: "Explorers in the further regions of experience." - HellRaiser

I've just released version 0.28 of Obnam, my backup application. The relevant part of NEWS:

• force-lock should now remove all locks.
• Out-of-space errors in the repository now terminate the backup process. Previously, Obnam would continue, ignoring the failure to write. If you make space in the repository and restart Obnam, it will continue from the previous checkpoint.
• The convert5to6 black box test now works even if run by other people than liw.
• "obnam backup" now uses a single SFTP connection to the backup repository, rather than opening a new one after each checkpoint generation. Thanks to weinzwang for reporting the problem.
• "obnam verify" now obeys the --quiet option.
• "obnam backup" no longer counts chunks already in the repository in the uploaded amount of data.

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since the day of its release was the HP Pre 3, running WebOS and whilst I still have a soft spot for the OS, the Pre 3 was simply too buggy for me to use full time. The main issue is that I use my phone as an MP3 player in the car but the Pre 3 would pause playback at the end of a track every half dozen tracks or so making it impossible to drive the 85 miles to work without needing to root around in the armrest and poke a touchscreen. Not something I really want to do whilst moving and ultimately too big a papercut to deal with. So, come the new year, I moved on to my next device, a Nokia N9 running MeeGo Harmattan. Ultimately, this was an even bigger failure for me than the Pre 3 was, and I lasted maybe two weeks with it before giving up and going back to the HP. Beyond massive usability errors in the software (especially the braindead unkillable pop-up demanding Internet access, even when none is available), the worst for me was how it handled the MP3 player task. My usual way of working is to have the phone hooked up to the stereo with a 3.5mm jack, and the car switches to headset Bluetooth profile to handle calls this is pretty common on cars too old to support A2DP profile (Stereo music-capable headphones). WebOS and Android are fine with this but not the N9. The N9, instead, will output all audio through the last connected audio device, regardless of how much that might not be helpful. Get in car, start music playing, plug in cable, start engine and it plays audio for about three seconds before the Bluetooth connects, and it switches to outputting music via the Headset bluetooth profile (not something that my car can do). Unplug and replug the cable, and music works but incoming calls are silent until I disconnect the 3.5mm jack, as it outputs the headset audio through the headphone socket. I just couldn t deal with this big a step back from WebOS as far as my workflow goes, and gave up. So, where next? Well, a funny thing happened a co-worker with generally very good instincts regarding consumer electronics usability told me that his housemate had just bought a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (the WP7-based cousin to the N9) and loved it. Enough that said co-worker was considering getting one himself. This was a very strange thing to hear, especially from an iPhone owner, about a Microsoft product. I d been generally interested in WP7 on an academic level for a while, but to hear that degree of praise of the actual product was interesting. Also interesting, and roughly simultaneous, was seeing Sajid Anwar s reverse engineering of the proprietary Zune file transfer protocol go from theory into an actual set of libmtp patches. So if the capability to use Banshee to transfer music on is here or near and it can t be as braindead as Harmattan when it comes to headphone/bluetooth behaviour, then why not jump ship and squeeze a handset out of Orange? About a week after my co-worker replaced his iPhone with a Lumia 800, I bought one too. So where to begin? Well, I ll begin at the start: WP7 is a joy to use. It really just is. It s the first mobile OS to try something radically different in the UI department for years. Everyone else these days (especially Android) builds iPhone rip-offs to varying degrees, and even the iPhone interface has a lot in common with the old old OLD interfaces found on the dumb Nokia phones of the 1990s. WP7 has an interface which provides just the right level of passively visible information and interactivity, and manages to do it with an elegance that no Android home screen filled with widgets will ever manage. The uncluttered screens are easy to read, and the Metro usability paradigms are trivial to pick up and learn. Without a doubt I d recommend WP7 to friends and family from a usability perspective, and the Microsoft engineers and designers responsible for cooking up the WP7 interface are worthy of praise. And I m not the only one saying this Apple co-founder Steve Woz Wozniak recently came out with a similar line. That s the good. There s also some bad, make no mistake. I m going to cover all the reasons WP7 sucks over several paragraphs. But overall, a smartphone is a device which I expect to suck the question is how bad the suck is, and whether it gets in the way of me using the device for what I need at the time. Moreso than MeeGo, moreso than Android, and even WebOS (and I m still a big WebOS fan), WP7 has more good points than bad points. But there s still some room for improvement, and some room for caution and since I know there are a few Microsoft folks following me on Twitter, I m going to go over my prescription for continued platform success. Oh, one more thing before I start: I know WP7 isn t Free Software. As an end user, I really don t care about that. I just want something that works something I didn t get from WebOS and Harmattan, both of which are primarily Free Software stacks. I m not saying there s a causal relationship there, or that a mobile OS can t be both Free Software and good just that as an end user, my favourite platform right now is non-Free. Take from that whatever you like. It s also vitally important, as Free Software folks, never to lose sight of what the other players in the market are up to. If you can t objectively assess why people are using a proprietary option by using it & recognising its good points (i.e. what to steal & what to improve) then you can t hope to win over users. So. WP7 s downsides in detail. In-place updates. Seriously guys, even Apple can manage this now. Why can t Windows Phone? I understand that making backups is smart and all updates come with a mandatory backup but I really shouldn t be tied to a PC to update a post-PC device. Also, those backups are useless, since they cannot be restored onto replacement devices in the case of failure or theft, so fix that too. Update all the things. An iPhone sold in June 2009 still has access to the latest iOS releases. Android phones are notorious for shipping with an outdated version of the OS, then getting at most one major update over the phone s lifetime (usually the device is abandoned by its manufacturer within months of release). Which camp does Microsoft want to align with, there? Every Windows phone 7 device released should receive Windows Phone 8, even with some features disabled. Anything less is punishing every existing customer, in the hope that you ll attract new ones not a winning strategy for a fringe platform whose biggest evangelists are its users. Fix IMAP. IMAP isn t hard. Yet WP7 never seems to work properly with a subset of my mail, never showing the message body & just saying Downloading forever. Fix it. Bing sucks. Bing s search results are terrible. Either do something to make them bearable, or allow me to pick which search engine I get when I hit the search button. A Google live tile isn t the same thing. Make killing apps easier. I know you stole the WebOS card view for multitasking (hold the back button) please also steal the WebOS ability to close apps. I don t want to have to go into an app and bash back repeatedly until it quits. This is particularly annoying for Internet Explorer. Make reinstalling apps easier. If I want to install every app I previously had installed on a new device, without restoring a backup, this should be easy. There are third party apps which try to plug this gap. Find a way to support copyleft. I d like to port a few C# apps to WP7, but because they re LGPL, I can t. The code s copyright holders would have no issue with their code being on WP7, as long as end users have a mechanism to replace the libraries, so why not find a way to allow this? e.g. when compiling an app, let me mark a library as user-replaceable , then allow for some mechanism where an end user can replace those assemblies with their own version. Let me use multiple Google calendars. WP7 only lets me add/see appointments on my default Google calendar. I want to add/see things on my wife s calendar, which is shared with me. WebOS can do this. MTP-Z is the devil. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my camera device, to transfer a photo off. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my MP3 player to transfer a photo on. Let s be honest, the only reason for MTP-Z is to enforce DRM on Zune-rented music tracks and honestly, there s no good reason to require MTP-Z for *all* communications if all you want to do is protect one folder or file extension. Now, since MTP-Z theoretically forces me to use Zune for many tasks better handled by other apps, now I get to write multiple criticisms of Zune s desktop app and as long as MTP-Z is enforced, every Zune failing is a Windows Phone failing too. Zune: Support Windows codec infrastructure, and transcode where needed. Windows Media Player can play Ogg Vorbis files. No, not out of the box, but if one installs the required codecs. Zune should support the same files as WMP if you want to ensure people don t try to copy files to a portable device which are not supported on that device, then you should have an API in place to allow for pluggable seamless transcoding of files as required Banshee allows me to do this (e.g. to copy files I have as .flac to devices which do not support it). Zune: Search my tracks, not the web. Zune s searching is terrible it doesn t do as-you-type searches, and when I hit enter, matches from my collection are given a tiny little space compared to matches from the Zune music store. Let me easily pick the track I feel like listening to, don t make it a chore Zune: Let s solve metadata together. I absolutely love how nicely the Zune app on desktop and on phone shifts as appropriate to the currently playing artist (e.g. changing the lock screen to an image of the artist in question). However, Zune doesn t make it obvious how to set an album s metadata to support this, and it s particularly frustrating when it s a minor difference of spelling causing a track not to get the nice treatment e.g. UNKLE versus U.N.K.L.E. . Either start making heavy use of audio fingerprinting services like MusicBrainz to fill in metadata, or allow me to search for fully supported artists when filling in track metadata Zune: Random playlists are useless on devices. I like smart playlists. In Banshee, I have one to pick 12GB of random tracks, which I can sync to my phone. I can t do this with Zune. If I try to just sync all my random music to my phone, it errors out due to lack of space. If I have a random playlist, the random selection changes multiple times during a sync resetting the sync, wiping out half the tracks that were transferred on, and starting again. As a result, the sync goes on for literally hours, never ending up with more than a gig or so of tracks on the phone. Random playlists should be freezable, so I can transfer them to my device in peace, then get a new random selection when I want. So, that s my list of miserable failure and it s still a less painful list than any other mobile OS I ve used. Perhaps one day Android will approach being usable, perhaps Blackberry s BBX will actually appeal to human beings rather than corporate IT managers, and perhaps Mozilla s delightfully named Boot to Gecko will get some traction. Who knows. All I know is, My Lumia 800 is the best phone I think I ve ever owned, and it s important for anyone working in the mobile space to understand why.

After few weeks of heavy testing, Weblate 1.0 has been released today. Compared to 0.9 there are just minor changes and bug fixes. The most important thing is that Weblate should be now really ready to use :-). Full list of changes for 1.0:

• Improved validation while adding/saving subproject.
• Experimental support for Android resource files (needs patched ttkit).
• Updates from hooks are run in background.
• Improved installation instructions.
• Improved navigation in dictionary.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Ready to run appliances can be found in SUSE Studio Gallery. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you (this will be decided case by case as my hosting space is limited).

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DebConf12 is drawing closer and closer! Have you ever been to a DebConf? You will surely agree with us: It s a life-changing event! It s one of the greatest geek gatherings in the world! It s something you can t afford on missing out! It s wait.. Oh, sorry, I had my spam mode set to highest. But still, that does not make it any less true. And one third of May has already passed. This means that the first deadlines are just around the corner: next Tuesday (15-may), sponsored registration will close, so make sure to register before it s too late. But wait wasn t this about the call for papers? Right, that s not the point of my post, I wandered off again. I m sorry, I just visited Managua last weekend (Holger will soon tell you about our visit), and it s impossible to keep the mind off the excitement. I wanted to ask you to share your greatest, latest ideas or projects. DebConf is about many things But one of its most important features is its rich set of talks, usually with very high and interesting contents in the technical, social, organizational levels Or several of them at once. As always, you will be able to submit talks until a day before you present it. However, it s best for your intended audience to know bits about your proposed topic, possibly even to share some information beforehand, so that the exposition can be as smooth as possible and the interaction during the talk even more And this is specially true for BoF sessions. However, we do have one advertised deadline: Talks submitted up to June 1st will be considered to be pre-scheduled. This means, to be part of the officially announced program, and have guaranteed coverage of our (always great) video team. DebConf Tracks But maybe you don t feel comfortable presenting a topic. Or you are, but you think it would be important to have several thematically related talks be grouped together. And if you are interested in this group of talks, you will probably know who would be more interesting to invite to present the topics - And will be able to prod them to do so. You can request to coordinate a track. That will ensure you get a contiguous block of timeslots for the talks you schedule, and do a great contribution to DebConf. To add your track, please mail talks@debconf.org. Please, specially if you do so in the few days following May 9, send me a copy to gwolf@gwolf.org, as it seems the alias is not yet set up. Tutorials and mentoring This year, we will have a high number of very motivated attendees from the many countries in the Central American region who want to get started in helping Debian, but have not yet found how to do it. Usually we would see local communities as prime material for DebianDay However, many of them are more interested in getting hands-on tutorials and be mentored into contributing to Debian. So, if you are part of a team working on a given aspect of Debian, or want to get people involved into your project, register it in the Tutorials and mentoring track. See you all soon, very soon, in tropical Managua for the hottest DebConf ever! (oh For those who remember days long past in Helsinki: There is even a sauna! ;-) And it s GREAT)

Some debts are merely financial and some easily repaid but some require repayment in kind . Few debts are more important to me personally than a favour earned by a good friend.

Several years ago, before I started this blog, I replaced the kitchen in my house. Finances were tight at the time and I had to do the entire refit with only limited professional help. Because of this I imposed upon Mark Hymers and Steve Gran to come and assist me. They worked tirelessly for three days over a bank holiday for no immediate reward.

Mark and Steve with a drill

This weekend I had the opportunity to assist Mark with his own kitchen refit and reply my debt.

Although the challenges have been different on this build they were, nonetheless present, including walls which were most definitely not square and affixing cabinets 10mm too high so the doors could not close.

We also got to make a hole for a 125mm extractor which was physically demanding and not a little tiring (Steve actually wielding the drill had a fabulous aim)

I took some photos to document the process which has resulted in an image which is positively threatening, though the two of them are nice people really!

All in all a pleasant weekend with friends, the whole favour thing was really moot, I would have done it for a friend anyway.

I must say that I do like free groups. At least whenever I play around with some theorem provers, I find myself formalizing free groups in them. For Isabelle, my development of free groups is already part of the Archive of Formal Proofs. Now I became interested in the theorem prover/programming language Agda,so I did it there as well. I was curious how well Agda is suited for doing math, and how comfortable with intuitionalistic logic I d be.
At first I wanted to follow the same path again and tried to define the free group on the set of fully reduced words. This is the natural way in Isabelle, where the existing setup for groups expects you to define the carrier as a subset of an existing type (the type here being lists of generators and their inverses). But I did not get far, and also I had to start using stuff like DecidableEquivalence, an indication that this might not go well with the intuitionalistic logic. So I changed my approach and defined the free group on all words as elements of the group, with a suitable equivalence relation. This allowed me define the free group construction and show its group properties without any smell of classical logic. The agda files can be found in my darcs repository, and the HTML export can be browsed: Generators.agda defines the sets-of-generators-and-inverses and FreeGroups.agda (parametrized by the Setoid it is defined over) the reduction relation and the group axioms. Here are some observations I (disclaimer: Agda-beginer) made:

• Fun fact: Free groups exist not only in classical logic.
  
• Without any automation as in Isabelle, even simple things get quite complicated. A simple substitution of an equality with subst requires me to specify not only the equality and the term I want it to apply, but also to repeat the common part of the terms. Or when using the associativity of list concatenation, I have to pass all three sublists to the lemma. Maybe I am a bit spoiled by Isabelle, but I d be worried that this would prevent large proofs.
• The levels are also annoying. Although my theory stays within one level, I have to annotate it everywhere. I d expect the type inference to figure this out for me.
• Equality reasoning with begin ... is quite nice and surprisingly well readable.
• Besides the additional work, it is nice to be able to do the proof in almost all detail. There is a limitation, though, as some steps are done automatically (if they happen to occur when evaluating/normalizing a term) and the others, even if similar-looking, are not.
  
• It d be great if one would be free in the choice of editor, but vim users generally have a hard time in the field of theorem provers.
  

If I were to extend this theory, there are two important facts to be shown: That there is a unique reduced word in every equivalence class (norm_form_uniq), and the universal property of the free group. For the former (started in NormalForm.agda) I m missing some general lemmas about relations (e.g. that local confluence implies global confluence, and even the reflexive, symmetric, transitive hull is missing in the standard library). For the latter, some general notions such as a group homomorphism need to be developed first. I planned to compare the two developments, Isabelle and Agda. But as they turned out to show quite things in different orders, this is not really possible any more. One motivation to look at Agda was to see if a dependently typed language frees me from doing lots of set-element-checking (see the mems lemma in the Isabelle proof of the Ping-Pong-Lemma). So far I had no such problems, but I did not get far enough yet to actually tell. Thanks to Helmut Grohne for an educating evening of Agda hacking!

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The Online Photographer has a meta-article on some discussion in the photography world. Summary: someone wrote an opinion piece on one site, and people on the discussion forum of another site got his name wrong, possibly repeatedly. And the quality of the discussion went down from there. The quality of the discourse of free software development is frequently of some concern. Debian has a reputation as being a host to, er, particularly vigorous discussions. That reputation is not unwarranted, but, I think, we've improved a lot since 2005. The problem is hardly restricted to Debian, however. How can we improve this? I don't know. As a community, I'm not even sure we agree what the problems are. Here's my list.

• unshakeable, dogmatic opinions; an unwillingness to consider others' points of view or their justifications; willful ignorance of anything that contradicts with the way one wants things to be; an uncompromising, winner-takes-all, last-poster-wins attitude to debates; in short, a lack of respect for anyone who isn't on one's own side
• an (unintended?) emphasis on discussion speed, leading to short missives, written quickly, without much thought, and without giving even a glimpse of how the conclusion or opinion was formed; this further leads to discussions that are hard to follow, because there are so many messages to read (the total word count would probably be about the same if everyone only wrote one or two essays)
• few good ways of dealing with bad behavior, unless it fits into some clear categories of bad behavior; no clear community consensus of what is acceptable behavior, outside of a small core that is obvious (there's probably several PhD's worth of reasons for this, and it's not just because of "geeks don't understand social interaction" or "everyone is from a different cultural background")

Insults, personal attacks, and other such outrageously bad behavior is uncommon. It crosses the line so clearly it becomes easy to deal with; I don't think handling this needs much attention. What can we do about this? I'm not sure. I have, for the time being, abandonded Debian mailing lists as a way to influence what goes on in the project, but that's just a way for me to clear some space in my head and time in my day to actually do things. My pet hypothetical solution of the day is that mailing lists might raise the quality of the debates by limiting the number of messages written by each person per day in each thread. This might, I think, induce people to write with more thought and put more effort into making each message count.

Just posted to d-d-a, here is the monthly report about my DPL activities.

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Dear project members,
last bits of the past DPL term and first bits of the current term, all in one. Here is a report of what has happened in DPL land last April. Highlight: call for DPL helpers Before the report, though, let me point out that your friendly neighborhood DPL could use some help. As discussed during campaign, there are some intrinsic transparency and scalability limits in the DPL institution, when run by a single person. Before trying something new to fix that, I'd like to give a last try to an old "tactic": calling for help. If you're considering running for DPL or if you're simply interested in the job the DPL does and willing to help with that, please let me know. Ideally, if I find a group of people I'm happy to work with, I'd like to set up periodic IRC meetings with all "DPL helpers" to publicly discuss items in the DPL agenda and share the work-load. Ongoing discussions A big topic of last month has been the proposal by Francesca Ciceri to publish a diversity statement for the Debian Project. After a lively discussion on -project, we reached consensus on a text, and I've been happy to help with that. To finalize statement publication we now need to vote on it with a GR. I've helped drafting a corresponding GR proposal that has already been posted to -vote by Francesca. A final one, looking for seconds, will be posted there soon. Wrapping up March discussions on a revenue sharing agreement with DuckDuckGo, I've announced my intention to finalize the agreement and have done so shortly thereafter. The Iceweasel maintainer has deployed the corresponding search engine query string and other web browser maintainers could do the same, if they want to. In April I've also spent some time to move forward the long running conflict on Python maintenance, reported to the tech-ctte more than 2 years ago. With the help of people on the -python mailing list, I've now submitted to the tech-ctte an up to date list of potential maintenance teams. I hope the tech-ctte now have all the information needed to come to a decision. Speaking of which, I'm also discussing with tech-ctte members the possibility of having periodic ctte meetings; the idea is to ensure that outstanding issues are periodically reassessed, improving the reliability of tech-ctte decision times. I've also discussed at length with members of the pkg-multimedia-maintainers team the relationships with the unofficial debian-multimedia.org (d-m.o) repository, that have been a cause of tension for Debian multimedia users and maintainers for quite some time. On behalf of the team and of the Project I've now reached out to the d-m.o maintainer, hoping to come to some sort of amicable agreement on which packages belong where. Hardware replacement As anticipated in last report, I've started approving hardware purchases to implement the yearly hardware replacement plan prepared by DSA. During April I've approved requests to buy servers to replace the machines running the bugs-master, bugs-mirror, and UDD services. The total expected expenditure is about 15'000 USD. Communication I've delivered my classic Debian "18^W 19 years" talk at UNIVPM, a polytechnic university in center Italy; slides are available. I've then been contacted by people from the European Synchrotoron in Grenoble who, beside having recently migrated their infrastructure to Debian, are looking into organizing a workshop on Debian usage for large science facilities. I've been happy to help out providing a list of potential topics and speakers for the event. Also as anticipated last month, the Debian Project has been present at the OpenStack summit. Loic Dachary has represented Debian at the event and provided a nice report about his experience there. Speaking of which, I've also coordinated a news release about the availability of cloud technologies in Wheezy, taking the chance to point out the relationships between what Debian stands for and the ability to deploy your own private cloud. Sprints April has been a rather calm month on the sprint front, with the notable exception of the I18n team who is organizing a sprint for June in Paris. Miscellanea

• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now started and for Debian is already quite a success. Wrt last year we doubled the number of student applications and we jumped from 9 to 15 approved projects. More details about Debian in GSoC have been posted by Ana. I encourage all of you to take the chance of GSoC to bond with students and show them how nice is the Debian community to work with: that's the prime trait we need to exhibit to make sure we'll always have enough volunteers to run the Debian Project.
• The one month notice before opening up LDAP dnsZoneEntry has expired and the field has now been opened by DSA. Practically, this means that the full listing of *.debian.net entries can now be queried publicly via LDAP. If anyone would be so kind to provide a script that does so and produce a nice looking HTML index, we can now publish it somewhere and replace the perennially out of date wiki index

Thanks for reading thus far,
HDH! (Happy Debian Hacking)

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PS the boring day-to-day activity log for April is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201204

A client just lent me a new Mac Mini with OS/X Lion to play with. I think it s interesting to compare it with regular PCs running Linux. Hardware The Mac Mini is tiny. It s volume can be compared to that of a laptop. The entire outside apart from the base is made from aluminium which helps dissipate heat, it s not as effective as copper but a lot better than plastic. The ports on the system are sound input/output, 4*USB, Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt (replacement for Firewire), SDXC, and HDMI. It ships with a HDMI to DVI-D adapter which is convenient if you have an older monitor (or if you have a recent monitor but no HDMI cable as I do). To open the case you unscrew the bottom, this is much like opening a watch. Also like opening a watch it s not particularly easy to screw it back on tightly, I will probably return the Mac Mini without managing to completely screw the base in. The hardware is very stylish and intricately designed, what we expect from Apple. It s also quiet. In every way it s a much better system than the workstation I m using to write this blog post. The difference of course is that this workstation was free and the Mac Mini cost just over $1000 including the RAM upgrade. A Mac Mini could be a decent Linux workstation and if I see one about to be recycled I ll be sure to grab it! Installation The Mac OS comes pre-installed so I didn t get to do a full installation. When I first booted it up it asked me if I wanted to migrate the configuration from an existing server, I don t know how well this works as I don t have a second Mac system but the concept is a good one. Maybe having full support for such a migration process would be a good release goal for a Linux distribution. After determining that the installation is a fresh one I was asked for a mac.com email address or other form of registration. I skipped this step as I don t have such an email address, but it could be useful. Red Hat has Kickstart to allow configuration of an OS install based on a file from a server (via NFS or HTTP). Debian supports preseeding to take OS configuration options from a file at install time [1] and the same option can be used for later stages of OS autoconfiguration. One thing that would be really useful is to allow the user to enter a URL for configuration data for an individual account or for all accounts, so someone with an account on one workstation could upload the configuration (which would be either encrypted or sanitised to not have secret data) and then download it when first logging in to a new system. I can easily take a tar archive of my home directory to a new system, but people like my parents don t have the skill to do that. One of the final stages of system configuration was to identify the keyboard. The system asked me to press the key to the right of the left shift key and then the key to the left of the right shift key and then offered me three choices of keyboard. That was an interesting way of reducing the list of possible keyboards offered to the user and thus preventing the user from selecting one that is grossly incorrect. Cloud Storage When first logging in I was asked for an iCloud [2] login. iCloud doesn t seem like a service that should be trusted, it s based in the US and has been designed to facilitate access by government agencies. Ubuntu One [3] is a similar service that is run by a more reputable organisation, but the data is still stored by Amazon (a US corporation) which seems like a security risk. Ubuntu One isn t in Debian (which is strange as Ubuntu is based on Debian) so it was too much effort for me to determine whether it encrypts data in a way that protects the users against US surveillance. The cost of Ubuntu One storage is $4 per month with music streaming. A better option is to use a self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [4]. A cheap server from someone like Hetzner (E49 per month for 3TB of RAID-1 storage) [5] is a good option for OwnCloud hosting. A cheap Hetzner server is about $US64 per month (at current conversion rates) which is equivalent to about 16 users of Ubuntu One for music streaming. So if 20 people shared a Hetzner server they could save money when compared to Ubuntu One while also getting a lot more storage. I ve got about 300G of unused disk space on the Hetzner server that hosts my blog and when the system is migrated to a newer Hetzner server with 3TB disks it will have 2.5TB of unused space, I could store a lot of cloud data in that! The main features of iCloud and Ubuntu One seem to be distribution of random data files (anything you wish), streaming music to various playing systems, and copying pictures from phones as soon as they are taken. These are all great features but it s a pity that they don t appear to support distributed document storage. Apple Pages apparently allows documents to be immediately saved to the cloud. I d like to be able to save a file with Libre Office at home and then access it from my netbook using the cloud, of course that would require encryption for secret files but that s not so hard to do. One advantage with such distributed storage is that when combined with offline-IMAP for email it would almost entirely remove the need for backups of the desktop systems I maintain for my relatives. I could have all their pictures and documents go to the cloud and all their email stay on the server so if their desktop PC dies I could just give them a new PC and get it all back from the cloud! OwnCloud supports replication, so if I got two servers I would be covered against a server failure. But I think that for a small server with less than a dozen users it s probably better to just take some down-time when things go wrong and do regular backups to an array of cheap SATA disks. App Store Apple has an App Store in the OS. The use of such a store on a desktop OS is a new thing for me. It s basically the same as the Android Market (Google Play) but on the desktop. I think that there is a real scope for an organisation such as Canonical to provide such a market service for Linux. I think that there is a lot of potential for apps to be sold for less than $10 to a reasonable number of Linux users. A small payment would be inconvenient for the seller if they have to interact with the customer in any way and also inconvenient for the buyer if they are entering all their credit card details into a web site for the sale. But for repeat sales with one company being an intermediary it would be convenient for everyone. A market program for a desktop Linux system could provide a friendly interface to selecting free apps from repositories (for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or other distributions) and also have the same interface used for selecting paid applications. Conclusion This isn t much of a review of Apple OS/X or the Mac Mini. Thinking about ways of implementing the best features of Lion on Linux is a lot more interesting. I admire Apple in the same way that I admire sharks, they are really good at what they do but they don t care about my best interests any more than a hungry shark cares about me. Update I got the currency conversion wrong in the first version of this article. It seems that to save money via a shared Hetzner server instead of Ubuntu One about 20 users would be needed instead of 10. But that s still not too many and would still give a lot more storage. It would be a little more difficult to arrange though, probably anyone who is seriously into computers knows 10 people who would want to share such a service (including people like their parents who want things to just work and don t understand what s happening). But getting 20 people would be more difficult.

• [1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icloud
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_One
• [4] https://owncloud.com/
• [5] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-produktmatrix-ex

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I attended a hackfest for the alleged purpose of furthering data transparency and other such entertainment. I expected a full-blown circus of idiocy based on the lead-up: instructions to sign up to websites for the purpose of Centralizing things, downloading iPhone SDKs, and other blatant evidence of Not Actually Getting It At All. Imagine my surprise when I get to the registration desk and they offer me a photography opt-out. Now everyone knows that privacy opt-outs don't work; either they're ineffective or they are effective at a cost far greater than anyone should pay, but I appreciated the gesture anyway. So I received a badge advertising my first name and the fact that I was unwilling to be photographed. Spoiler alert: I was photographed at least six times. I have now cleverly changed my hairstyle so that no one can recognize me. After people had arrived and rubbed elbows and consumed things, the grand dignitaries took the stage for spectacles of egoism so great that relativity made Dan Kaminsky look almost like a humble and reasonable human being. This was succeeded by some organizing, coding, and ridiculousness. The group I landed in contained two employees of the advertising industry and one of the U.S. government. There was also someone I refer to as "ultracompetent astronut". Some things that were apparent: people

• really don't understand the issues
• don't care about or understand licensing
• are prone to insistent on the necessity of Github even when they don't know how to use it
• don't see why opt-outs are inherently flawed
• are perfectly willing to trade in their privacy for minimal return
• are sometimes willing to trade their privacy for different privacy
• insist that I should write in Python even when it turns out that I could have been using a real language
• still think that the threat model is only about what information you leak or choose to divulge about yourself, and not about other people informing on you.

I own two mobile phones at the moment, I use a Samsung Galaxy S running Cyanogenmod [1] (Android 2.3.7) for most things, and I have a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 running Android 2.1 that I use for taking photos, some occasional Wifi web browsing, and using some applications. Comparing Android Hardware The hardware for the Xperia X10 is better than that of the Galaxy S in many ways. It has a slightly higher resolution (480*854 vs 480*800), a significantly better camera (8.1MP with a flash vs 5MP without), and a status LED which I find really handy (although some people don t care about it). The only benefit of the Galaxy S hardware is that it has 16G of internal storage (of which about 2G can be used for applications) and 512M of RAM while the Xperia X10 has 1G of internal storage and 384M of RAM. These are significant issues, I have had applications run out of RAM on the Xperia X10 and I have been forced to uninstall applications to make space. Overall I consider the Xperia X10 to be a significantly better piece of hardware as I am willing to trade off some RAM and internal storage to get a better resolution screen and a better camera. The problem is that Sony Ericsson have locked down their phones as much as possible and they don t even give users the option of making a useful backup they inspired my post about 5 principles of backups [2]. The fact that the Galaxy S allows installing CyanogenMod which then gives me the liberty to do whatever I want with my phone is a massive feature. It outweighs the hardware benefits of the Sony Ericsson phones over Samsung phones prior to the Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy Note. For an individual user the ability to control their own hardware is a feature. Such an ability wouldn t be much use if there wasn t a community of software developers, so if you buy an Android phone that isn t supported by CyanogenMod or another free Android distribution then whether it is locked probably won t matter to you. But for any popular Android phone that s sold on the mass market it seems that if it s not locked then it will get a binary distribution of Android in a reasonable amount of time. Comparing with Apple It seems that Apple is the benchmark for non-free computing at the moment. The iPhone is locked down and Apple takes steps to re-lock phones that can be rooted as opposed to the Android vendors who ship phones and then don t bother to update the firmware for any reason. The Apple app market is more expensive and difficult to enter and if an app isn t in the market then you have to pay if you want to install it on a small number of development/test phones. This compares to Android where the Google market is cheaper and easier to enter and anyone can distribute an app outside the market and have people use it. But for an individual this doesn t necessarily cause any problems. I have friends and clients who use iPhones and are very happy with them. In terms of software development it s a real benefit to have a large number of systems running the same software. As Apple seems to have higher margins and larger volume than any other phone vendor as well as shipping only one phone at any time (compared to every other phone vendor which seems to ship at least 3 different products for different use cases) they are in a much better economic position to get the software development right. As far as I can tell the hardware and software of the iPhone is of very high quality. The iPad (which has a similar market position) is also a quality product. The fact that the Apple app market is more difficult to enter (both in terms of Apple liking the application and the cost of entry) also has it s advantages, I get the impression that the general quality of iPhone apps is quite high as opposed to Android where there are a lot of low quality apps and many more fraudulent apps than there should be. The lack of choice in Apple hardware (one phone and one tablet) is a disadvantage for the user. There is no option for a phone with a slide-out keyboard, a large screen (for the elderly and people with fat fingers), or any of the other features that some Android phones have. The lack of a range of sizes for the iPad is also a disadvantage. But it seems that Apple has produced hardware that is good enough for most users so there aren t many complaints about a lack of choice. It seems to me that the biggest disadvantage of the closed Apple ecosystem is for society in general. Anyone who wants to write a mobile app to do something which might be considered controversial would probably think twice about whether to develop for the iPhone/iPad as Apple could remove the app at a whim which would waste all the software development work that was invested in writing the app. Google seem to have much less interest in removing apps from their store and if they do remove an app then with some inconvenience it can be distributed on the web without involving them so the work won t be wasted. How Much Freedom Should a Vendor Provide? The Apple approach of locking everything down is clearly working for them at the moment. The Samsung approach of taking the Google prescribed code and allowing users to replace it is good for the users and works well. The Sony Ericsson approach of taking the Google code, adding some proprietary code, and then locking the phone down is bad for the users and I think it will be bad for Sony Ericsson. People are more likely to tell others about negative experiences and negative reviews are more likely to be noticed than positive reviews. So while many people are reasonably happy with Sony Ericsson products (until they find themselves unable to restore from a backup) it s still not a good situation for Sony Ericsson marketing. It seems that there are benefits to hardware vendors for being really open and for locking their users in properly. But being somewhat open isn t a good choice, particularly for a vendor that ships poor quality proprietary apps such as the Sony Ericsson ones. In terms of application distribution Google isn t as nice as they appear. The Skyhook case revealed that Google will do whatever it takes to prevent apps that compete with Google apps from being installed by default [3]. Google is also trying to make money from DRM sales via Youtube which it denies to rooted phones [4]. Again it seems to me that the best options here are being more open than Google is and being as closed as Apple. Google might gain some useful benefits from applying DRM (even though everyone with technical knowledge knows that it doesn t work) but the Skyhook shenanigans have got to be costing Google more than it s worth. How to make Android devices more Free The F-droid market is an alternative to the Google App market which only has free software [5]. On it s web site there are links to download the source for the applications, including the source and binaries for old versions. In the Google App market if an upgrade breaks your system then you just lose, with F-droid you can revert to the old version. A self-hosted OwnCloud installation for a private or semi-private cloud [6] can be used as an alternative to the Google Music store as well as for hosting any other data that you want to store online. The Open Street Map for Android (Osmand) project provides an alternative to the Google Map service [7]. Osmand allows you to download all the vector data for the regions you will ever visit so it can run without Internet access. But it doesn t have the ability to search for businesses and the search for an address functionality is clunky and doesn t accept plain text, which among other things precludes pasting data that s copied from email or SMS. While Osmand provides some important features that Google Maps will probably never provide, it doesn t provide some of the most used features of Google Maps so uninstalling Google Maps isn t a good option at the moment. The K9mail project provides a nice IMAP client for Android [8]. Use K9 with a mail server that you run and you won t need to use Gmail. There are alternatives to all the Google applications. It seems that apart from the lack of commercial data and search ability in Osmand an Android device that is used for many serious purposes wouldn t lack much if it had no Google apps. Google seems to be going too far in controlling Android. Escaping from their control and helping others to do the same seems to be good for society and good for the users who don t need apps which are only available in proprietary form.

• [1] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/07/5-principles-backup/
• [3] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-lawsuit-motorola-samsung/
• [4] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/05/google-blocks-android-movie-rentals-from-rooted-devices.ars
• [5] http://f-droid.org/
• [6] https://owncloud.com/
• [7] http://osmand.net/
• [8] http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

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