I've decided to take over the maintenance of the unofficial emacs-snapshot Debian packages that were maintained by Romain Francoise. They are available on a dedicated page.

Having found Gammu usage in proprietary software and finding somebody who is actually having the source code, the only remaining (and the hardest) step was to make them publish it. I started with explaining what actually GPL means, giving them links to useful documentation what they should do, but I'm probably not good enough in explaining the things. All I was given is source of some parts of Gammu code they have used (it is available in our git repository since then). Any attempts on explaining them that they should publish full source code of the thing to comply with GPL have simply failed. The problem with the sources they have given is that it is hardly to reuse in Gammu - it is hard to find on which version they based and more importantly, it really does not include much code which would be useful in Gammu these days.

Filed under: English Gammu Gpl 5 comments Flattr this!

Otavio Salvador requested early testers for squeeze debian-installer rc1. (This paragraph will be edited once the official announcement is published.) Graphical installer snapshots A few snapshots follow, using various non-Latin languages to make sure rendering was doing fine.

• Sinhala, prompting for the root password:
• Thai, prompting for popularity-contest configuration:
• Traditional Chinese, prompting for the non-privileged user s name:
• Japanese, loading d-i components from the CD-ROM:
• Hindi, prompting for a hostname:

To avoid any manual drawing, tiny imagemagick magick for the snapshots cropped to 800x300:

convert cropped-snap.png -fill none -stroke black -draw \
    "stroke-dasharray 10 10 path 'M 0,299 L 800,299'" dashed-cropped-snap.png

X/experimental + g-i = ? Premises:

• Fetch libxfont1-udeb, xserver-xorg-core-udeb, xserver-xorg-input-evdev-udeb, xserver-xorg-video-fbdev-udeb from experimental.
• Store them under localudebs/ in a d-i build tree.
• Build a netboot-gtk image with: make rebuild_netboot-gtk
• [Optional: Be amused by the not so tiny CD image that boots the graphical netboot installer parameter to the update-manifest command.]

Result:

X/experimental + g-i = Win

Proof: Comments:

• It looks like we managed not to break the X-related udebs in experimental, even by jumping directly from 1.7 to 1.9. \o/
• Yes, Christian, I managed to highlight French in some way in this blog post. ;)

Hardly anything ruins a glorious day of coding like fat-fingering the commit message late at night as you doze off, and then pushing it out for the world to see. To prevent that, I have equipped my Emacs configuration with a few little tools now.

First, I found the git-commit-mode, a special mode for Git commit messages. This helps you format the commit messages according to convention, and will use ugly colors if, for example, you write lines that are too long or you do not keep the second line blank. It also allows the use of things like M-q without shredding the whole file template.

Second, I integrated on-the-fly spell checking into the git-commit-mode. It won't stop you from writing nonsense, but it will catch the silly mistakes.

Here's a simple configuration snippet:

(require 'git-commit)
(add-hook 'git-commit-mode-hook 'turn-on-flyspell)
(add-hook 'git-commit-mode-hook (lambda () (toggle-save-place 0)))

The last line is handy if you have save-place on by default. When you make a new commit, it would then normally place the cursor where a previously edited commit message was finished, because to the save-place functionality, it looks as though it's the same file.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	613
Affecting Squeeze:	93
Squeeze only:	33
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	60

Of these 60 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	3
Patched in Squeeze:	13
Duplicates in Squeeze:	13
Can be fixed in a security Update:	1
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	2
Claimed in Squeeze:	0
Delayed in Squeeze:	0
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	12

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 25 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 68 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

It has been almost a full year since my last log entry. It has been a busy work year, I attended some nice conferences and did minimal FLOSS stuff. On the work side of things I was a third of an Australian VoIP startup that came and went. I setup Debian servers, installed OpenSIPS and associated software, wrote OpenSIPS scripts, wrote peripheral software and did customer support. We had a good thing going there for a while, some fans on the Whirlpool forums but in the end there wasn't enough money for the requisite marketing and local market circumstances were squeezing Australian VoIP providers anyway. On the conference side of things I went to LCA 2010, the Thai Mini-DebCamp 2010, DebConf10 and FOSSASIA 2010. Had a great time at all of them. At LCA 2010 in windy Wellington, New Zealand the distributions summit organised by Martin Krafft was one of the highlights. It was dominated by Debian/Ubuntu talks but there were some other interesting ones, especially the one on GoboLinux's integration of domain-specific package managers. Also excellent were the keynotes given by Gabriella Coleman (Best & worst of times), Mako Hill (Antifeatures) and others, which I felt gave LCA an improved and very welcome focus on software freedom. There were quite a few Debian folks at LCA, it was great to hang out with them during the week and afterwards. Monopedal sumo with mako and others was hilarious fun. At the Thailand Mini-DebCamp 2010 in Khon Kaen, I was glad to see Andrew Lee (Taiwan) and Christian Perrier (France) again and meet Yukiharu YABUKI (Japan) and Daiki Ueno (Japan). In addition to the five international folks, there were quite a few locals, including Thailand's currently sole Debian member, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan. The event was hosted at Khon Kaen University and opened with my talk about the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This was followed by a number of talks about Debian package building, a 3-day BSP where we touched 57 bugs, a great day of sightseeing and talks about i18n, derivative distros, keysigning, mirrors, contribution and a discussion about DebConf. During the week there was also the usual beersigning, combined with eating of unfamiliar and "interesting" Thai snacks. After the conference Andrew and I roamed some markets in Bangkok and got Thai massages. Beforehand I also visited a friend from my travels on the RV Heraclitus in Chiang Mai, once again experiencing the awesomeness of trains in Asia, unfortunately during the dry season this time. I took a lot of photos during my time in Thailand and ate a lot of great and spicy food. As a vegetarian I especially appreciated the organiser's efforts to accommodate this during the conference. At DebConf10 in New York City, by far the highlight was Eben Moglen's vision of the FreedomBox. Negotiating the hot rickety subways was fun, the party at the NYC Resistor space was most excellent, Coney Island was hot and the water a bit yuck, zack threw a ball, the food and campus was really nice. Really enjoyed the lintian BoF, ARM discussions, shy folks, GPLv3 question time, paulproteus' comments & insights, wiki BoF, puppet BoF, derivatives BoF, Sita, astronomy rooftop, cheese, virt BoF, Libravatar, DebConf11, Brave new Multimedia World, bagels for breakfast, CUT, OpenStreetMap & lightning talks. Having my power supply die was not fun at all. Afterwards I hung out with a couple of the exhausted organisers, ate awesome vegan food and fell asleep watching a movie about dreams. One weird thing about DebConf10 was that relatively few folks used the DebConf gallery to host their photos, months later only myself and Aigars Mahinovs posted any photos there. At FOSSASIA 2010 in H Ch Minh City (HCMC) was a mini-DebConf. I arrived at the HCMC airport and was greeted by Huyen (thanks!!), one of FOSSASIA's numerous volunteers, who bundled me into a taxi bound for the speakers accommodation and pre-event meetup at The Spotted Cow Bar. The next day the conference opened at the Raffles International College and after looking at the schedule I noticed that I was to give a talk about Debian that day. Since I didn't volunteer for such a talk and had nothing prepared, the schedule took me by surprise. So shortly after an awesome lunch of Vietnamese pancakes we gathered some Debian folks and a random Fedora dude and prepared a short intro to Debian. The rest of the day the highlights were the intro, video greetings and the fonts, YaCy and HTML5 talks. The next day the Debian MiniConf began with Arne Goetje and everyone trying to get Debian Live LXDE USB keys booted on as many machines in the classroom as possible (many didn't boot). Once people started showing up we kicked off with Thomas Goirand's introduction to the breadth of Debian. Others talked about Debian pure blends, Gnuk and building community and packages. The second last session was about showing the Vietnamese folks in the room how to do l10n and translation since Debian had only one Vietnamese translator (Clytie Siddall). After manually switching keyboard layouts (seems LXDE doesn't have a GUI for that) on the English LXDE installs, the two Cambodian folks were able to do some Khmer translation too. This was a great session and it resulted in two extra Vietnamese translators joining Debian. It went over time so I didn't end up doing my presentation about package reviewing. We rushed off to a university where the random Fedora ch^Wambassador was hosting a Fedora 14 release party in a huge packed classroom. There were a lot of excited faces, interesting and advanced questions and it was in general a success. Afterwards we had some food, joined up with some other speakers and ended up in a bar in the gross tourist zone. On the final day we hung around in the Debian room, went downstairs for the group photo and final goodbyes. Later we found a place with baked goods, coffee and juices and navigated the crazy traffic to a nice local restaurant. The next morning Arne & I went to the airport, others went on a Mekong Delta tour and Jonas hung out with the organisers. I took less photos than at other events but got a few interesting ones. I avoided doing a lot of FLOSS stuff over the last year, I hope to work on some things in the coming months;

• revive various (semi-)abandoned upstream projects
• do some more work on the Debian wiki
• contribute to RC bug squashing efforts
• push the VoIP company patches upstream
• contribute to debexpo/debshots/lintian/qa
• contribute to the Debian multimedia/FSO teams
• promote/organise/rejuvenate the Debian games team
• announce the Debian derivatives census more widely
• finish writing a SANE driver for my scanner
• finish the removal of defoma from Debian
• watch some videos from LCA and DebConf

I'm also planning some interesting travel and acquiring some new technological goods, more on those in some later posts.

Streaming JSON objects with python Dear Lazyweb, Suppose I'd like to create an HTTP service that gives you a looong list of JSON objects. For example, one JSON object for every package in Debian. One way I could do that is to just transfer a big, dozens of megabytes JSON array with one element per package. With the standard json module in python, this requires the client to buffer all the data in memory for decoding, as the JSON result would be something like this:

[
    info for package 1  ,
    info for package 2  ,
  ...dozens of megabytes...
    info for package 30000  ,
  ...
]

However, it would be reasonable to engineer things so that the client can process packages one at a time, as they are produced. This can dramatically reduce client memory usage, as well as remove a large latency between the start of the request and the start of processing. One trivial idea would be to just send JSON objects one after the other, and sort of call load multiple times. It doesn't work:

import json
from cStringIO import StringIO
a = StringIO()
json.dump( 1:3 , a)
json.dump( 2:4 , a)
a.reset()
print a.getvalue()
print json.load(a)

gives:

$ python z1.py 
 "1": 3 "2": 4 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "z1.py", line 8, in <module>
    print json.load(a)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/__init__.py", line 267, in load
    parse_constant=parse_constant, **kw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/__init__.py", line 307, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/json/decoder.py", line 322, in decode
    raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 1 column 8 - line 1 column 16 (char 8 - 16)

And the json module documentation does not provide any way of telling the "stream" decoder to just stop parsing after the first valid object. An alternative can be to use chunked transfer encoding and transfer each JSON object in a separate HTTP chunk. It would add the overhead of a little HTTP header per JSON object, which could be significant when generating lots of small JSON objects, but it would be an implementation that strictly follows HTTP and JSON standards to the letter in a clean way. Except:

1. How do you stream HTTP chunks in WSGI? The WSGI specification's only mention of chunks is that if you produce a result as a generator of "chunks", they are just sent one after the other (effectively, concatenated) in the response stream.
2. How do you read and process one chunk at a time with urllib/urllib2? I searched on Google but I only found people in tears.

Another alternative is to wrap the JSON objects in some custom container protocol, but then we are not talking standards anymore. Is this all you can do with the standard python library? Can this only be done by adding a dependency on a C library with two obscure separately maintained bindings, or by writing my own JSON parser? Ideas? Please mail enrico@enricozini.org and I'll add them here. Updates Wouter van Heyst mentions that he heard of ijson, which indeed has my exact use case in the synopsis, but after some research looks like a third binding for yajl. Aigars Mahinovs suggests using YAML instead of JSON. Indeed YAML supports streaming very well (it's even already supported in DDE, but last time I tried to do anything serious with it, PyYaml was slooow. Of course, this being the Python ecosystem, There Are Lots Other Ways To Do It And You Shall Be Patronised For Not Chosing The Proper One, but Debian only has PyYaml. Another itch with YAML is that there is no YAML parser in the standard python library, which requires clients to add an extra dependency. Jyrki Pulliainen has so far mailed my favourite solution: disable formatting in the encoder and separate JSON objects with newlines:

we built a streaming JSON app as a part of our platform. However, we
didn't stream a single JSON object as that was a bit cumbersome. When
having syntax like:
[
  <json-obj1>,
  <json-obj2>,
  ....
  <json-objN>
]
The reader has some problems. Should it read the whole stream to find
the closing bracket ] even if the stream would me tens of megabytes?
Should it try to split on , and parse single objects? What if the
objects contain , so should there be some regexp magic?
We ended up streaming separate JSON objects separated by newlines
(\n). This way the reader can read until hitting \n or end of stream
and then split the result on newlines. The new stream looked like
this:
<json-obj1>\n
<json-obj2>\n
...
<json-objN>\n
This way we could efficiently stream hundreds of thousands of JSON
objects from server to client without reserving a load of memory. For
the WSGI part how to do this, the best would probably to do a
generator that would yield a single JSON object with the newline (we
didn't use WSGI back then). Reading can be done using any reader
capable of handling streams. We used pycurl for reading, but I can't
really recommend it as it is way too complicated for a simple task
like this :p
Hopefully this helps!

This means that if the client has no access to a JSON reader that supports a stream of concatenated toplevel objects, they can still trivially code it on top of any JSON library. This means that working clients can be written based just on Squeeze's python standard library. That's what I'm going to do; I'll probably implement it as a separate 'jsons' output format for DDE, because producing a JSON response with multiple toplevel obejcts somehow breaks the JSON standard. Thanks to all who provided this excellent information!

2.6.37, which was released today, has been a very big release for ASoC about 40,000 lines of changes covering every single file within the subsystem plus a bunch of new drivers. The highlights are:

• Overhaul of the core APIs for registration of all kinds of devices from my co-maintainer Liam Girdwood, reducing the level of direct coupling between machine drivers and their CODEC and CPU drivers allowing ASoC machines to have multiple CODEC devices and multiple instances of the same CODEC device within a system.
• New CODEC drivers for 88PM860x CODEC, MAX98088/9, WL1273, WM8962, WM8804, and WM8985.
• New CPU drivers for EP93xx AC 97 controllers, MPC 85xx SSI ports, and SH HDMI controllers.
• Machine support for Freescale P1022 DS, Marvell Tavor and Saarb and Simplemachines Sim.One

A couple of days ago, an email arrived in which I am kindly asked to provide my PayPal coordinates. And before you dear reader start to laugh, it was actually perfectly genuine and came from a very happy user of the Finance::YahooQuote Perl module. DJ Padzensky wrote this well over a decade ago, and I first introduced and then maintained it as a package in Debian for what is now almost twelve years. I have also been acting as upstream maintainer for the last eight or so years providing the occassional patch to keep up with changes at the Yahoo! server side. After a short reflection, I decided to keep it simple. I undusted a wishlist I had once created over at Amazon, yet never publicised. And amazingly, within minutes of minutes of passing the URL on, I received a cheerful email stating that three books are their merry way. Appropriately enough, two were from Springer's useR! series and another one was a brand new GPU programming title. And they all arrived yesterday. I am still stunned. So with that, my time to say thanks! This was a genuinely nice gesture, and I really appreciate it. I have been doing open source work for over fifteen years now, and I would not still be doing it if I did not enjoy it myself. I continue to learn a lot in the process, and have had a chance to meet lot interesting folks. Yet it is also nice to get a little Thanks every now and them.

These days, I've been used to a very specific $EDITOR usage. I use my (Xfce) workspaces as context switch. Basically, each time I need to start a new activity I open a new workspace, open some terminals, maybe a browser, an editor (gvim) window etc. Then when I'm done, I delete that workspace. I can have multiple activities at once, and switch from one to another depending on various stuff. On those workspaces, I'd like to be able to have only one editor window, even when I open new files using gvim foo.c . But I'd like to have one editor window per workspace, not one global editor, since I'd like the editor to be context-specific too. I recently heard about the gvim remote stuff, and I've came with the following gvim function (zsh syntax):

function gvim()
desktop=$(xprop -root -notype -f _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP 0c '$0+\n' _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP)
if [ "$#" -ge "1" ];
then
gvimargs="--remote-tab-silent"
fi
=gvim --servername $desktop $gvimargs $*
The xprop trick is a hackish way to stick one gvim window per workspace, it might need to be adjusted if one has a two monitors setup and want to be able to have one editor per monitor per workspace. Basically, that snippet checks if a gvim server already exists with the current workspace name. If yes, it opens the file(s) in it, if not it run a new gvim server and opens the file there. It works more or less fine, but it has one problem: it fails badly when one needs to give args to the gvim call. Those args are usually placed *before* filenames, so in my case it won't work. One way to fix this would be to loop on all the args, check if the arg is an existing file, in case add it to $files. If not, add it to $args, then call gvim with the correct order. Works, except when you want to edit a new file, where you're back to point one. All in all, it'd work, but it's not really a nice way to do it, imho. So I'm calling for help, in case anyone has an idea about that. Basically, is there a way to say to gvim always open files in a remote server, run it if it's not already running using the config file and not an argument (so I don't mess with the command line). I do need the servername to be desktop specific though, so it's still a difficulty. NOTE: I know that emacs has some kind of remote server habilities too, but I'm not sure how it works and if it'd be possible to do that in emacs, and I'm not really an emacs user and don't really intend to switch. If you have any idea, feel free to comment (by mail), I might do a later post when I have an enhanced solution.

On a lark, I signed up for the pilot program of the Google Cr-48 about a week ago. To my surprise, I found the distinctive box on my doorstep a week later. After initially mistaking it for an overpacked, late-model OLPC XO-1 I would have to repair, I sort of did a double-take as I realized what I had received. Using Chrome OS Wow, they weren t kidding about the boot time. Chrome OS responds (to suspend / resume and boot / power-off) very quickly. Responsiveness elsewhere in the OS of course varies on system load and other factors. On the terms page, there is a system security setting which tells me I have a Trusted Platform Module, and that my TPM has a randomly generated password. The dialog could use some rewording; I m pretty familiar with the idea of a TPM, but I m still not sure what I m to do with that information. Cloud print is really a problem for me, right now. I use school printers for the majority of my work, which I was previously able to use by adding them by IP address. Unless there s some magic I m missing here, I can t do that with Chrome OS, and such a feature will not be supported. (except by connectors on Windows and Mac computers) General thoughts I can t imagine using a system running Chrome OS as a primary computer. The biggest missing feature is PGP (or any sort of encryption) support for email. This is probably not terribly difficult to implement as an extension, but the idea of my cryptographic software being automatically updated is rather unsettling. I think I ll have to agree with Paul Buchheit that ChromeOS will have to merge with Android; there is a utility for local apps, even if they re becoming less and less critical.

the release team has started to usertag [0] the remaining RC bugs yeah, another step towards the release!

here are my small contributions around RC bugs:

• #544310 xsidplay: "xsidplay: FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD (alsa is linux-specific)"
  add [linux-any] to libasound2-dev, upload to DELAYED/2, later integrated into maintainer upload
• #551543 muttprint: "cannot remove path when cwd is /tmp/muttprint*"
  add a patch for the second incarnation of the bug report
• #604234 emacspeak-ss: "emacspeak-ss: dpkg hangs while preconfiguring packages"
  update bug info
• #605240 tenshi: "tenshi: fails to upgrade from lenny"
  update bug info
• #605793 src:libclass-dbi-asform-perl: "libclass-dbi-asform-perl: FTBFS: failed tests"
  add patch and tighten build dependency (pkg-perl)
• #606000 libmail-spf-query-perl: "libmail-spf-query-perl: Incorrect query results with IPv6 addresses; should warn about missing IPv6 support and/or fail graciously"
  update bug info and clone to qpsmtpd (#607472), package removed later (#608335)
• #606777 sendfile: "sendfile: package fails to upgrade properly from lenny"
  update bug info, later upload chris' patch to DELAYED/2
• #606779 openswan: "openswan: package fails to upgrade properly from lenny"
  update bug info
• #606785 common-lisp-controller: "stumpwm: package fails to upgrade properly from lenny"
  reassign and update bug info, later sponsor maintainer upload
• #606802 bacula-director-pgsql: "bacula-director-pgsql: make_catalog_backup is broken"
  investigate further and make proposals, later upload to DELAYED/2
• #607472 qpsmtpd: "qpsmtpd: Switch from Mail::SPF::Query to Mail::SPF"
  propose patch, later closed by maintainer

[0] if I got it right:

• squeeze-will-remove
• squeeze-is-blocker
• squeeze-can-defer

update: all tags combined: http://tinyurl.com/squeeze-sort (thanks to the RT for the URL & to zack for the pointer)

As I have been getting involved with amateur radio this year, I ve been taking notes on what I m learning about certain things: tips from people on rigging up a bicycle antenna to achieve a 40-mile range, setting up packet radio in Linux, etc. I have long run a personal, private wiki where I put such things. But I really wanted a convenient place to put this stuff in public. There was no reason to keep it private. In fact, I wanted to share with others what I ve learned. And, as I wanted to let others add their tips if they wish, I set up a public MoinMoin instance on . So far, most of my attention has focused on the amateur radio section of it This has worked out pretty well for me. Sometimes I will cut and paste tips from emails into there, and then after trying them out, edit them into a more coherent summary based on my experiences. Now then, on to packet radio and Debian. Packet radio is a digital communications mode that runs on the amateur radio bands. It is a routable, networking protocol that typically runs at 300bps, 1200bps, and 9600bps. My packet radio page gives a better background on it, but essentially AX.25 the packet protocol is similar to a scaled-down TCP/IP. One interesting thing about packet is that, since it can use the HF bands, can have direct transcontinental wireless links. More common are links spanning 30-50 miles on VHF and UHF, as well as those going across a continent on HF. Linux is the only operating system I know of that has AX.25 integrated as a first-class protocol in the kernel. You can create AX.25 sockets and use them with the APIs you re familiar with already. Not only that, but the Linux AX.25 stack is probably the best there is, and it interfaces easily with TCP/IP there are global standards for encapsulating TCP/IP within AX.25 and AX.25 within UDP, and both are supported on Linux. Yes, I have telnetted to a machine to work on it over VHF. Of Linux distributions, Debian appears to have the best AX.25 stack built-in. The AX.25 support in Linux is great, but it s rather under-documented. So I set up a page for packet radio on Linux. I ve had a great deal of fun with this. It s amazing what you can do running a real networking protocol at 300bps over long-distance radio. I ve had real-time conversations with people, connected to their personal BBS and sent them mail, and even use AX.25 nodes (think of them as a kind of router or bridge; you can connect in to them and the connect back out on the same or different frequencies to extend your reach) to connect out to systems that I can t reach directly. MoinMoin has worked out well for this. It has an inviting theme and newbie-friendly interface (I want to encourage drive-by contributions).

This week:

• #607958 (apt): replied and tagged moreinfo ; jmm later downgraded it to normal
• #606951 (nsca): agreed with the submitter and reverted the change, uploaded straight to unstable
• #605784 (nagios-statd): thanks to the great debugging work of the submitter, uploaded a fix to DELAYED/2 (giving the maintainer time to make his own planned upload)
• #598588 (json-glib): cannot reproduce; reduced severity and emailed the submitter

The remaining bugs are either removal candidates or no longer low-hanging-fruit, so I don t expect to keep squashing very many more before Squeeze is released.

It's new year (for almost 18 hours here) and it's time to balance a bit what has happened in year 2010. I'm not going to expose details from my personal life and anything related to work, so all what remains are open source projects where I am active. For phpMyAdmin it was year of quite big changes, most of them beeing agreed on Fosdem 2010. We have migrated to git from svn, what was great step forward and I really like the change. It was also decided to use gettext (or rather php-gettext) for translations in upcoming release. I can see this move (together with online translation service) has definitely attracted more contributors (hey, but there are still many languages not translated, you're welcome!). Also we've participated in Google Summer of Code 2010, what lead to several big projects being merged into our code base (see my summary for more details). All in all, we're heading to 3.4 release in first months of 2011, which will be quite major step and hopefully heading in right direction. In Gammu and Wammu, there were lot of code improvements, most of them probably going into Gammu SMS Daemon (the latest one being unified SQL backend removing lot of code duplication). Another major improvement is The Gammu Manual covering everything from Gammu command line, through SMSD up to python and C API. On the other side I've bought me a Symbian based phone, which does not work with Gammu and I use Series60-Remote for that, so my interest in Gammu has declined a bit. Even though I've started adopting some packages in Debian, so it looked like I will end up with much more than last year, but at the end I've decided I'm too overloaded with some of them (and don't use them anymore), so I've given some for adoption and got rid of nanoblogger (and nanoblogger-extra) and looking for somebody to pick up gpointing-device-settings. Maybe all mpd related packages will follow soon, because I currently do not use mpd, so it limits quite a bit my ability to test them. And of course: Happy New Year 2011!

Filed under: Debian Gammu Phpmyadmin English 0 comments Flattr this!

It would be really neat if there were some tool which recorded which dotfiles an application read, used, or created. As an example emacs uses .emacs, but won't create it. However firefox will create and fill ~/.mozilla if it isn't present, and links will create ~/.links2. What would we do with that data? I'm not sure off the top of my head, but I think it is interesting to collect regardless. Perhaps a simple tool such as apt-file to download the data and let you search:

who-creates ~/.covers
who-creates ~/.dia

Obviously the simple use is to purge user-data when matching packages are removed - e.g. dpkg-posttrigger hook. But that's a potentially dangerous thing to do. Anyway I'm just pondering - I expect that over time applications will start switching to using "centralised" settings such as ~/.gconf2 etc. In the menatime I've started cleaning up ~/ on my own machines - things like ~/.spectemurc, ~/.grip, etc. ObQuote: What a long sword. I like that in a man - Blood of the Samurai (Don't be tempted; awful film.)

One week ago, I sent the updated announcement below to the r-sig-finance list; this was kindly blogged about by fellow committee member Josh and by our pal Dave @ REvo. By now. I also updated the R / Finance conference website. So to round things off, a quick post here is in order as well. It may even get a few of the esteemed reader to make a New Year's resolution about submitting a paper :) Dear R / Finance community, The preparations for R/Finance 2011 are progressing, and due to favourable responses from the different sponsors we contacted, we are now able to offer

1. a competition for best paper, which given the focus of the conference will award for both an 'academic' paper and an 'industry' paper
2. availability of travel grants for up to two graduate students provided suitable papers were accepted for presentations

More details are below in the updated Call for Papers. Please feel free to re-circulate this Call for Papers with collegues, students and other associations. Cheers, and Season's Greeting, Dirk (on behalf of the organizing / program committee) Call for Papers: R/Finance 2011: Applied Finance with R April 29 and 30, 2011 Chicago, IL, USA The third annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on April 29 and 30, 2011. The two-day conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. Complete papers or one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) are invited to be submitted for consideration. Academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. We welcome submissions for full talks, abbreviated lightning talks, and for a limited number of pre-conference (longer) seminar sessions. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the presentation/paper. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. The conference will award two $1000 prizes for best paper: one for best practitioner-oriented paper and one for best academic-oriented paper. Further, to defray costs for graduate students, two travel and expense grants of up to $500 each will be awarded to graduate students whose papers are accepted. To be eligible, a submission must be a full paper; extended abstracts are not eligible. Please send submissions to: committee at RinFinance.com The submission deadline is February 15th, 2011. Early submissions may receive early acceptance and scheduling. The graduate student grant winners will be notified by February 23rd, 2011. Submissions will be evaluated and submitters notified via email on a rolling basis. Determination of whether a presentation will be a long presentation or a lightning talk will be made once the full list of presenters is known. R/Finance 2009 and 2010 included attendees from around the world and featured keynote presentations from prominent academics and practitioners. 2009-2010 presenters names and presentations are online at the conference website. We anticipate another exciting line-up for 2011---including keynote presentations from John Bollinger, Mebane Faber, Stefano Iacus, and Louis Kates. Additional details will be announced via the conference website as they become available. For the program committee:

Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	608
Affecting Squeeze:	115
Squeeze only:	37
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	78

Of these 78 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	3
Patched in Squeeze:	19
Duplicates in Squeeze:	12
Can be fixed in a security Update:	3
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	4
Claimed in Squeeze:	0
Delayed in Squeeze:	3
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	11

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 41 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 85 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Dear Lazyweb, Today I bought me a Canon IXUS 130 and was quite disappointed to see that it couldn t properly connect to my Debian/Sid machine via USB. Apparenty the camera is not recognized as a USB Mass Storage Device but utilizes PTP. I upgraded to libgphoto2 (2.4.10.1-3) from experimental and added a proper udev rule with vendor- and product-id but it did not help. Is there anything more I can try? Update: Accessing the camera actually works, even with ligbphoto2 (2.4.6) from unstable. I can access the camera with gphoto2 and download pictures (but not with KDE s filemanager). My problem was that I had rhythmbox running and the camera was automatically mounted by it as a media device. When KDE s filemanager or gphoto2 tried to access the camera I got an error like: ( Could not lock the device ): Camera is already in use., which is probably also a bug. Closing rhythmbox solved the issue and I was able to download images with gphoto2.