dosfstools is a collection of three utilities for making and checking FAT/MS-DOS filesystems:

• dosfsck (aka fsck.msdos and fsck.vfat)
• dosfslabel
• mkdosfs (aka mkfs.dos and mkfs.vfat)

Unfortunately, dosfstools are without an active upstream maintainer for a couple of years. After I took over the package in Debian in June, I'm now also taking over upstream. Version 3.0.0 includes all accumulated patches from Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Suse together with some reordering of the sources. Packages have been uploaded to Debian sid, source tarballs can be downloaded from its new home.

Thanks to all that donated to the MS society in my name. Thanks to the generous donations and a match from Google I surpassed my goal and I may even get a cool bike jersey from the event. The actual ride was a lot of fun. The ride was very well supported. It felt more like 8 12 mile rides the first day instead of one 100 mile ride. The second day was even better. I managed to tag along with a group of cyclists from Deloitte who I could draft off of, for the second half of the ride, which made it very fast and a good learning experience. I have not had many opportunities to draft on rolling hills before.

The first day route had 7400ft of climbing over the 100 miles. The second day route had only 3500 over the 75 miles. However, by looking at the routes it is obvious that neither day was exactly the most direct route to the destination. Which is ok, I had all day to do the ride on each day and didn't have to turn around and ride home afterwards.

Speaking of afterwards, when I got back to AT&T park to pick up my stuff, I tried to ride back to my house. That was the slowest riding I have done for a very long time. The bright spot was I passed a couple of people starting on the wiggle, who did comment that everyone seems to be passing them :)

For some time now I’ve been wanting to find a window manager that allows me to improve my current “implementation” of my workflow. I currently use KWin. Since I’m a bit overwhelmed by the number of window managers available, some of them being perhaps too flexible, and since what I want is very, very specific, I thought I’d go for a lazy-web post. My workflow is simple: I don’t do tiling, and my sole wish is that a simple key combo (Mod + one letter) can activate the window designated by that combo. Ideally I can statically assign combos to each application (or, in general, window properties) from the configuration file, but I can also use a special combo to change on-the-fly the current keybindings for a particular window. At the moment I’m “faking” this with several methods combined:

• keeping the number of windows in my main virtual desktop low, so that one or two Alt-Tab always bring me to the right window.
• using a terminal emulator with tab support, so that I can switch terminal context on a separate level than Alt-Tab.
• assiging a simple key combo to “next/previous virtual desktop”, and have in that one a number of small applications I only seldomly use.
• minimizing to the system tray applications that support it, so that they are one click away (eg. Akregator).
• using, when available, a global key shortcut to show/hide a window (eg. Minirok, or previously Amarok).

In my new world, I’d be able to just type Mod+M to activate Minirok, Mod+A to activate Akregator, Mod+B for the browser, and several others keybindings for each instance of my terminal emulator (one for my -release work, one for my ongoing Uni work, another for my ongoing programming work). I really, really want that’s it’s just one Mod plus a key, because I’m convinced that’d work out very well for me (though it should offer a way to cycle among all windows as well). As for the rest, ability to display Kicker (KDE’s panel) gracefully would be a plus. Please mail me with your suggestions, but I’d appreciate if you could include pointers to the relevant parts of the documentation, or even examples, of how to accomplish what I want. I’ve tried eg. awesome 3, and I only managed to get lost in Lua-land.

Hey - I usually have a personal policy of not talking about my current employer on my blog. It's why I didn't join Planet Ubuntu until after I'd left Canonical, for instance. This blog isn't theirs. I can promise you that no PR department I've ever worked for has approved the gratuitous overuse of the word "fuck".

But FUCK, this is cool: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/our-position-on-californias-no-on-8.html

My readers might remember that Angie and I spent a bunch of time writing letters to my Member of Parliament back in Canada in support of gay marriage, donated to egale, attended a church that got intervener status in support of gay marriage, and ultimately attended the senate debates where equal marriage became the law of the land.

And then, a year ago, we moved to this place. A place where this is still considered an issue. A place where people are willing to do what would never be considered back at home: They're willing to take away the rights that people have and are exercising to marry their partner of choice. And I don't have a voice. As a non-citizen, I can't sign a petition, I can't donate money to political campaigns, and I have no representative to contact and inform how important this is to me.

I was pleased to learn this afternoon that Google has decided to publicly make a stand for the rights of people in California. It's just one more thing that makes this the coolest job I've ever had.

This week, I sufferred and still suffer from a very painful left shoulder, which handicaps me for most activities. That happened when I falled during one of my regular runs, after hitting a stone on the floor. I probably falled right on my left shoulder and, since then, it is more and more painful. This is indeed an encore of something that happened already in July when I had a very bad fall while running in the woods, because of a stupid low-level fence meant to keep boars outside the forest. I unfortunately suspect a broken shoulder or so. No run for this week-end, then. Sad, as I was indeed on my way back to long distance runs (22km last week) in an attempt to break the 30km barrier until the end of the year. I'm even handicapped for typing on my keyboard which, as my wife says, should be the final argument to bring me to a doctor and have rido exams....(I hate seeing doctors!).

When the Debian installer starts, it will normally ask you what language you want to install in and gives you a really long list of languages to choose from. Unfortunately, that's not how it works when you install on a headless NAS device. The reason for this is that installations on NAS devices are done via SSH and the installer normally brings the network up after asking the user for their language. So we'd simply skip the language question and go with English. When Timo Jyrinki recently mentioned that he couldn't install in Finnish, Frans Pop pointed out that localechooser has changed a lot since etch and that it should now be possible to have the language question after setting up the network. This turned out to be correct and I managed to choose a different language but the installer still showed everything in English. Frans reminded me that the installer drops all translations that are not necessary but unfortunately this happens too early in our case. He pointed me to a variable that determines whether translations will be dropped. So in lenny translations will not be dropped on NAS devices that have enough RAM and users will be asked when they connect to the installer via SSH what language they'd like to install in.

Some people troll free software lists with remarks like:

Linux will never be able to displace MacOS/Windows since the latter are much more pretty/user-friendly. You will lose.

Such people assume that hackers write free software because they "hate Microsoft" or "hate capitalism" or have some other pet hates. However, it should be obvious that such a large creative effort cannot be sustained if it is based on such negative emotions.¹ There are a number of positive reasons why one works on free software. The software that I like to work on is software² that I use or want to use. This has some consequences which are worth underlining:

• Contrary to the views expressed in some articles about free software, the theme of usability (by me!) is uppermost in my mind whenever I approach any task pertaining to software.
• Since the software I work on should be usable long after I have forgotten the ideas behind its implementation, the user interface should be one that confirms to "standard" expections. This means that it should be possible to use the software without reading the code.
• When I look at the code after a long time (for example to extend it in some way) I should be able to read and understand it, which requires clean code with adequate documentation.

Giving others the "four freedoms" results in wider critical examination of these aspects. Bugs must be acknowledged and fixed --- or elevated to features! Moreover, there are parts of the task that are "obvious" to me but I would have to ask others for advice on other parts. So I gain a lot by being part of a larger community. There are other reasons to write free software. For example, someone may pay you to do it. However, this is just deferring the same question to your employer. In most cases, your employer already has a use in mind for the software. The employer has the same concerns as I outlined above except that the job of writing the code is being out-sourced. The usability, portability and long-term maintainability are probably even bigger concerns for your employer. "Last but not the least" (as we always wrote in our school-day essays) free software is fun! You share ideas with people from across the globe and to show them your own clever little tricks. Good code and good themes resonate with people who may not even speak the same language as you do. What could be nicer than that!

This looks kind of interesting: http://wiki.reia-lang.org/wiki/Reia_Programming_Language In short: it's a Ruby/Python type of language on top of Erlang. It has a mishmash of Ruby and Python syntax, and also does objects, implemented as Erlang processes. Funny quote:

Reia uses an indentation-sensitive syntax. This allows Reia to look similar to Erlang without relying on "ant turd" tokens (i.e. , ; and .) to structure relationships between forms.

That made me laugh, and is in all seriousness, something that I do find to be a bit annoying in Erlang, especially when refactoring code. You can't just move a line of code from one place to another; you move it, then change the line endings in both places. My preference would be to do something more Ruby style rather than Python style for the following reason: the indentation thing makes it harder to use straight-up Python for templating purposes, whereas Ruby can be used as-is. Templates are something that I wouldn't particularly want to do in Erlang, either, so doing them with this language might be a very nice alternative. Anyway, it looks to be in its infancy. Unfortunately, it seems to require a more recent version of Erlang than what ships with Ubuntu Hardy. Maybe Intrepid will have something recent enough to run it. It's a little known fact that I originally wrote Hecl in Erlang, although, sadly, I can't find the code any more.

Russell writes about the iphone. I think he's missing a few things.

The open nature of the PC wasn't inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard[1] x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.

Now, let's look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That's really not going to be what determines market success.

Competitive cheapness? When you have a multivendor OS like Android or Windows Mobile, you might expect there to be more opportunity to compete to undercut each other, offering equivalent platforms for less cost. But that's missing something. In the same way that the home computer market has basically consolidated towards PCs, the phone market has already consolidated. Your smartphone has an ARM in, probably along with an off the shelf GSM chip and some 3D core (generally something from Imagination, though in Android's case Qualcomm seem to have come up with their own core - I haven't been able to find out if it's derived from something else). There's no realistic way to make a phone with equivalent hardware functionality and quality to the iphone and sell it for significantly less money. And if you figure out how to, Apple get to take advantage of the same price reductions in their next generation hardware. And, being Apple, they'll probably find some compelling wonderful design feature that costs them nothing extra but makes you want it more anyway. So hardware competition probably isn't going to be what determines market success.

Which leaves two things - advertising and applications. Apple are good at marketing. This is unfortunate, because I'd really rather live in a world where everyone running MacOS was running Linux instead, but we seem to suck in comparison. The good news is that Microsoft also seem to, so maybe we'll have our act together some time between now and Apple crushing us to death. So, assuming current trends continue, Apple's marketing probably isn't going to kill the iphone. Which leaves one thing: applications.

The obvious argument against the iphone's success is that, as a closed software distribution platform, it's less attractive to developers. I don't think that's true. If we look at the console market, the gp2x was hardly a PSP killer. Or a DS killer. You could possibly argue it was a Gizmondo killer, but only if you ignore the Finnish mafia. Being an open platform doesn't immediately result in you killing closed platforms. You need developers, and you need applications. Otherwise nobody's going to buy your hardware, even if it costs $10 less than an iphone and has a few extra bits of plastic. What attracts developers? An attractive development environment and a revenue stream. Android has one real thing going for it here - it's not tied to Objective C, and so there's probably a larger number of potential developers. But let's be realistic. If you're a competent developer, you can move from C++ or Java to Objective C without too much effort. And if you're an incompetent developer, you're not going to be deciding the future of a platform.

Apple have made it easy for people to write applications that share the iphone's delightful[2] UI. There's almost active encouragement to write beautiful programs that integrate well. Sure, the platform limitations bite you in weird ways (like the no background running thing), but Apple have come up with hacks to smooth most of those over. The iphone is a wonderful device to develop for. Sufficiently delightful that there was a huge developer base even before Apple had released the SDK. What does that tell you? Developers actively want to write for the iphone. In fact, they wanted to even before there was a real revenue model. Mindshare means a lot.

What are we going to see in response from Android? To begin with, uglier applications. I'm sure that'll get better over time, but right now the Android UI just isn't as well put together[3]. It's functional, even attractive. But it's not beautiful. And lowering the bar to developer involvement means the potential for more My First Phone Application. Windows Mobile and Symbian have huge numbers of applications. They're mostly dreadful lashups of functionality you'd never want and a UI that's ugly enough to make you want to stab out your eyes, coupled with a nag screen asking for a $10 donation to carry on using it assuming it hasn't crashed before it got that far. To be fair, a lot of iphone stuff isn't much better. But proportionately? Right now the Apple stuff has it. I never want to see another listing of Symbian freeware.

At the moment, Apple wins at providing compelling applications. They may be a gatekeeper between the developer and the user, but right now that's not causing too many problems. Well. It wasn't. The recent fuss about Apple dropping applications because of perceived competition with their own software is an issue. If a developer is going to spend a significant amount of time and money on an application, they want a reasonable reassurance that they're going to be able to ship it. And, right now, Apple's not giving that. It remains to be seen whether this has long term consequences, but there's some danger of Apple alienating their developer base. If those developers move to another platform, and if they create compelling software, Apple might stand some real competition. At the moment? Apple has the hardware, the OS and the applications. They have the potential to take over broad swathes of the market. But they also have the opportunity to throw it away. And that's what's going to decide the success of the iphone - a closed platform is not inherently a problem, but it gives the vendor the option of removing one of their key advantages. If Apple get through this with their developer popularity intact, I don't see the open/closed distinction as having any real-world importance at all.

The relevance to Linux? We're not going to succeed by being philosophically better. We have to be better in the real world as well. Ignoring that in favour of our social benefits doesn't result in us winning.

[1] It's slightly more legacy free than a "genuine" PC - there's no i8042, and things like the gate A20 hack aren't implemented. But it'll boot DOS (given enough effort), so hell, it's a PC

[2] And yes, I genuinely do think that the iphone's UI is better than anything else on the market. There's no reason someone else, including us, couldn't have got there first. But we didn't, and now everyone gets to play catch up. Shit happens

[3] I have no idea where Apple gets its UI engineers from, but someone needs to find the source and start waving huge piles of money to pick them up first.

I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it’s closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch review is interesting - while the built-in keyboard is a nice feature the main thing that stands out is the open platform [2]. TechCrunch says “From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply“. What I want is a phone that I control, and although most people don’t understand the issues enough to say the same, I think that they will agree in practice. In the 80’s the Macintosh offered significant benefits over PCs, but utterly lost in the marketplace because it was closed (less available software and less freedom). Due to being used in Macs and similar machines the Motorolla 68000 CPU family also died out, and while it’s being used in games consoles and some other niche markets the PPC CPU family (the next CPU used by Apple) also has an uncertain future. The IBM PC architecture evolved along with it’s CPU from a 16bit system to a 64bit system and took over the market because it does what users want it to do. I predict that the iPhone will be just as successful as the Macintosh OS and for the same reasons. The Macintosh OS still has a good share of some markets (it has traditionally been well accepted for graphic design and has always provided good hardware and software support for such use), and is by far the most successful closed computer system, but it has a small part of the market. I predict that the iPhone will maintain only a small share of the market. There will be some very low-end phones that have the extremely closed design that currently dominates the market, and the bulk of the market will end up going with Android or some other open phone platform that allows users to choose how their phone works. One issue that I think will drive user demand for control over their own phones is the safety issues related to child use of phones (I’ve written about this previously [3]). Currently phone companies don’t care about such things - the safety of customers does not affect their profits. But programmable phones allows the potential for improvements to be made without involving the phone company - while with iPhone you have Apple as the roadblock. Now having a small share of the mobile phone market could be very profitable, just as the small share of the personal computer market is quite profitable for Apple. But it does mean that I can generally ignore them as they aren’t very relevant in the industry.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/16/mobile-ssh-client/


• [2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/23/touching-the-android-its-no-iphone-but-its-close/


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/safety/mobile-phone-safety/

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First root canal today. There were some interesting parts. I'll spare you. If I seemed a bit annoyed with awesome 3 configuration in the last post, this has put it well in perspective. One nice thing about awesome 3 is that it has good system tray support built in. So I've at least temporarily mainstreamed my laptop, so it's using the gnome power manager, and network manager, instead of hibernate and sleepd and my own scripts.

I was invited to participate at Festival Internacional de Software Libre (FISOL), in Tapchula, Chiapas. The other invited speakers were Sandino Flores (tigrux), Alexandro Colorado (jza), Eric Herrera (crac), John Hall (maddog) and Fernando Romo (pop), all well-known due to very different contributions to the Free Software movement in Mexico and abroad. Several other people also presented tutorials, but I was not involved in that part, and mentioning one while not the rest would be unfair.
The conference was quite massive - Tapachula is a medium-sized city (~200,000 people) in Mexico's Southernmost point - Sadly, due to its geographical location, it is mainly famous for being the region where illegal immigrants from Central America enter Mexico towards the USA, and it is a known spot for all kind of abuses, both from the authorities and from gangs of thieves.
This is the third time I come to this conference. The first two years (2005, 2006) it was organized by the local CUCS university and it was reasonably large, but this year it counted also with many other universities in the region. Attendance was... HUGE. We were told around 1600 students were registered to participate, and I expect at least 1000 to have actually been there. Very amazing and encouraging!
It is, by far, a base-level conference - Most attendees had had no previous contact with Free Software at all, or had at most toyed around with a distro for some hours. Some people, of course, _are_ already working and involved, on various different degrees. All in all, quite encouraging.
But not only I had fun (and got extremely tired!) at the conference, or at the beer sessions afterwards. I also got to push some more publicity (and work, of course!) towards my new favorite pet project: OpenStreetMap.
As many other Debianers, I joined the fever last August, during Debconf. So far, I have been quite busy tracing and mapping; I am quite fortunate to get the OSM addiction while living on the edge of the well-mapped area of Mexico City. So far, I have mostly worked on the Ciudad Universitaria and Coyoac n areas, where some sensible improvement can be felt. Lots yet to do, for sure, but I'm making progress.
Still, mapping Coyoac n sometimes feels a bit futile. Why? Because all of my cycling/tracing/mapping sessions look almost like a little blip on the overall state of my city, which is way better than what I expected - Most of the central city is done (although lots of work is still pending on the very large outskirts - but getting there can be a trip just by itself!)...
But this time, I had the opportunity to do something new, something better and sensible. And, yes, it feels very good. How does the map of Tapachula look for just a weekend of mapping activity? And, yes, I only went out once (morning running) expressely to get some new traces, the rest of it was while being transported by car to the conference-related activities. And I didn't even have to say once "lets go by a different route"! ;-)
Just for comparison: Last week, Tapachula's state was quite similar to what they have today on Google Maps - Just the major highways in the area. Besides, if you look at the satellite map for Tapachula, I estimate I managed to map around between a fifth and a tenth of the city's surface.
So, have you got a GPS? Do you enjoy going out on the street, be it walking, running, cycling on driving? Or even if you don't enjoy it, are you sometimes forced into it? Start contributing to OpenStreetMap now!

Just stumbled over this meme at Adrian (the meme seems to be started by madduck involuntarily), and since I’m fascinated by how people choose hostnames since my early years at university, I can’t resist to add my two cents to this meme. To be exact, I have two schemes, one for servers out there somewhere (Hetzner, xencon, etc.) and they’re all wordplays on their domain name noone.org, e.g. symlink.to.noone.org (short name “sym” :-), gateway.to.noone.org (usually an alias for one of the machines below), virtually.noone.org (always a virtual machine, initially UML, soon a Xen DomU), etc. So nothing for a quiz here. My other scheme is for all my machines at home and my mobile machines. I’ll start this list with the not so obvious hostnames, so the earlier you guess the scheme, the better you are (or the better you know me ;-). One more hint in advance: “(*)” means this attribute or fact made me choose the name for the machine and therefore can be used as hint for the scheme. :-)

azam

My first PC at all, a 386 with 25 MHz and MS-DOS. (Got named retroactively(*). Hadn’t hostnames at that time.)

ak (pronounced as letters)

Got it from my brother after he didn’t need it anymore. It initially was identical to azam, but once was upgraded to a 486. Still have the 386 board, though.

azka

My first self-bought computer, a pure SCSI system with a AMD K5-PR133 and 32 MB RAM. Initially had SuSE 4.4 and Windows 95 on. Still my last machine which had a Windows installed! :-)

m35

Same case and same speed as azka. Used it for experimenting(*) with Sid years ago.

azu

Initially also an AMD K5-PR133, later replaced by a Pentium 90 and used as DSL router.

azl

An HP Vectra 386/25N book size mini desktop I saved from the scrapyard at Y_Plentyn before his (first) move to Munich. The cutest(*) 386 I ever saw.

ayce

A 386 with 387 co-processor(*) and solded 8 MB of RAM.

ayca

A 1992 Toshiba T6400C 486 laptop bought at VCFe 5.0.

bijou

My 1996 ThinkPad 760ED, which is still working and running Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny (I started with Debian 3.0 Woody on it and always dist-upgraded it! :-)

gsa (pronounced as letters)

My long-time desktop after azka. A Pentium II with 400 MHz and 578 MB of RAM at the end. Bought used at LinuxTag 2003, it worked until end of last year when it started to suddenly switch off more and more often and now refuses to boot at all. Hasn’t been replaced yet though. I mostly use my laptops at home since then.

gsx (pronounced as letters)

An AMD K6 with 500 MHz I got from maol and which was used as Symlink test server more than once. (It was the machine initially named symlink.to.noone.org because of that.)

hy

My 32 bit Sparc, a Hamilton Hamstation.

hz (pronounced as letters)

My 64 bit Sparc, an UltraSparc 5.

tub

An HP Apollo 9000 Series 400, model 400t from 1990.

tpv (pronounced as letters, too ;-)

My Zaurus SL-5500G.

tryane

A Unisys Acquanta CP mini desktop with a passively cooled(*) 200 MHz Pemtium MMX. Used as DSL router for while, but the power supply fan was too noisy.

lna (pronounced as letters)

A 233 MHz Alpha

loadrunner

An IBM ThinkPad A31 running Sid. I use it as beside terminal.

pony

A Compaq LTE5100 laptop with a Pentium 90 running Sid.

dagonet

A Sony Vaio laptop which ran Debian GNU/kFreeBSD until it broke.

Those who know me quite good should already have guessed the scheme, even if they can’t assign all the names. For all others, here’s one name which doesn’t exactly fit into the scheme, but still is related in someway, but you need to knowledge of the theme’s subject to know the relation:

colani

A big tower from the early 90s designed by Colani.

Ok, and now the more obvious hostnames:

rosalie

A very compact Toshiba T1000LE 8086 laptop running ELKS and FreeDOS.

amisuper

Also an old Symlink test server from maol. He named it “dual”. 2x(*) Pentium I with 166 MHz. Unfortunately doesn’t boot anymore.

visa

An IBM NetVista workstation running Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. My current IRC host.

nemo

My ASUS EeePC running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

pluriel

My current WLAN router running FreeWRT.

c1

My MicroClient JrSX, an embedded 486SX compatible machine with 300 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c2

My MicroClient Jr, an embedded Pentium MMX compatible machine with 200 Mhz for VESA mountings.

c-crosser

My Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running Debian 5.0 Lenny.

c-cactus and c-metisse

The KVM based virtual(*) machines on c-crosser running Sid and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

jumper

My NAS(*) at home, currently a TheCus N4100. Soon to be replaced by some Mini-ITX box.

Any one who hasn’t guessed the scheme yet? For those understanding German it’s explained at the end of my old hardware page. For all others I suggest either to look at the domain name in my e-mail address (no, it’s usually not noone.org). Still not clear? Well, feel free to ask me for all the gory details or mark the following white box to see the scheme as well as the explanations for nearly all hostnames hidden in there:

All the machines are named after Citroëns. Old machines after old Citroëns, current hardware after current Citroën models or prototypes. Those names starting with “A” are 2CV derivatives since the 2CV was Citroëns “A” model. “AZ” was the 2CV, AZU and AK were 2CV vans and everything starting with AY (e.g. AYA, AYA2, AYB – but those don’t sound that nice ;-) is Dyane based, but I currently only use Méhara names (AYCA is the normal Méhari, AYCE the 4x4 version). Interestingly not everything starting with AYC is a Méhari: AYCD was the Acadiane, the Dyane van. HY and HZ are variants of Citroëns “H van” (HX, HW and H1600 as well, but they don’t sound that nice), TUB was the pre-WWII “H van” prototype and later the nickname of the “H van” in France. TPV was the name of the pre-WWII 2CV prototype and an abbreviation for Toute Petite Voiture (French for “Very Small Car”), hence the Zaurus, my smallest Linux box, got that name. Rosalie was the nickname of a rear-wheel drive pre-WWII Citroën. M35 was a Wankel engine prototype of the Ami 8 and the Ami Super was the 4 cylinder version of the Ami 8. Bijou was a 2CV based coupé build by Citroën UK in the late 50s and early 60s. Visa and LNA were 2CV predecessors which were available with 2CV engines, but were stopped before the 2CV. GSA and GSX are GS late derivatives. C1, C2, (C3) Pluriel, C-Crosser, Jumper and Nemo are current Citroën models and C-Cactus and C-Métisse are recent Citroën prototypes and show cars. The 2CV Dagonet was an aerodynamically optimised 2CVs by Jean Dagonet in the 50s. The Tryane is an aerodynamic and fuel efficient, three wheeled car by Friend Wood based on the 2CV and with a body of wood. And Colani once dressed a 2CV so that it broke several efficiency world records. The Namco Pony was a 2CV based light utility truck (similar to the Méhari, but with steel body) built in Greece under license in many variants. And Loadrunner is the name of some CX six-wheeler conversions.

Some links about the naming items:

• Tryane II
• An original Loadrunner and a just recently built Loadrunner. I even saw the base of exactly that one in RL shortly before it was converted into a Loadrunner.
• Luigi Colani
• Dagonet
• Namco Pony
• C1, C2, C-Crosser, C-Cactus, C-Métisse, Pluriel, Nemo, Visa, LNA, GSA, Ami Super, Rosalie
• AZAM, AZL, AZKA, AZU, AK, AYCD, Bijou, TPV
• HY, HZ, TUB.

Hope you had fun. I had. ;-)

Now playing: Willi Astor — Gwand Anham Ära

For the impatient reader: New lintian in experimental, please test and give feedback. You will miss most changes though unless you read the rest of the post (Hint, Hint ;)) During the past week I've uploaded new lintian versions to experimental which we designated to be release candidates for 2.0.0. Code-wise the changes are not that much more intrusive than for many of our past releases, but they change the way lintian classifies tags in a fundamental way, thanks due to the hard work of Jord Polo in his Google Summer of Code project (mentored by Marc Brockschmidt). Lintian Tag Classification, old and new Previously lintian classified tags only in one dimension, in the categories "Info", "Warning", and "Error". While this worked reasonably well, the difference between the categories was not very well defined. The general idea was that everything violating a "must" in Debian Policy or endangering the building or usage of the package should be an "Error", i.e. something very similar to the definition of RC bugs (except that not all "must"s in Policy are deemed worthy of filing RC bugs). Some errors were downgraded to "Warning" or even "Info" though on the basis that their detection was too prone to false positives. Due to this it was a long existing desire to split the classification of tags into two dimensions, one for the impact/importance of the tag, and one for the certainty of its correct detection. This should make it easier for people to interpret and/or filter the output. At various points in the last few years people began to work on this but quickly gave up, usually overwhelmed by the sheer number of tags (728 in 2.0.0~rc2) to classify anew and to make sure that the old and new categorisation could exist side-by-side (because breaking backwards compatibility was not really feasible). Finally this year Jord Polo decided to tackle this task as a Google Summer of Code project, with great success. Tags are now classified in two dimensions "Severity" (with the possible values wishlist, minor, normal, important, serious, which are intentionally very close to the available severities in the Debian bug tracking system), and "Certainty" (possible values: wild-guess, possible, certain). A third classification by "Source" (i.e. Policy, Developers Reference, ...) is planned but not yet fully implemented. For backwards compatibility there is a mapping of these new classification to the old ones (which lead to a few reclassifications of tags). The default output of lintian is unchanged. The new output formats that support the classification are still experimental (see below). How to use it You can specify exactly which levels of Severity and Certainty you want to have displayed with the new --display-level (-L) option. Please see the manual page for the details, but to give you an idea, the default behaviour (i.e. "show warnings and errors" in the "old" vocabulary) is equivalent to specifying

-L ">=important" -L "+>=normal/possible" -L +minor/certain

And to get a report with only severe tags we're very certain of, you could use

-L ">=important/certain"

which will only display tags that have severity "important" or "serious" and a certainty of certain. There is also the (intentionally undocumented) option --exp-output which allows you to play with some experiments we're doing with the output format. --exp-output format=letterqualifier will give you an output very similar to the "classic" one, but with additional information about severity and certainty. --exp-output format=colons gives you a colon-separated format which includes all the possible information lintian currently has available during tag output and which should be easily machine-consumable. Note that these formats are experimental and might be changed at any point without notice. If you're interested in using alternative formats for lintian output, please join the mailing list and talk to us about it. Etc. Other changes include the usual share of bug fixes and of course: New tags

• description-contains-dh-make-perl-template
• doc-base-uses-applications-section (actually a split of doc-base-unknown-section in two tags)
• embedded-pear-module
• embedded-php-library
• improbable-bug-number-in-closes
• maintainer-also-in-uploaders
• maintainer-script-ignores-errors
• manpage-has-errors-from-pod2man
• ored-build-depends-on-obsolete-package (actually a split of build-depends-on-obsolete-package in two tags)
• package-superseded-by-perl
• versioned-dependency-satisfied-by-perl
• windows-devel-file-in-package

Credits This lintian release is brought to you by (sorted by number of changesets):

• Jord Polo
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Adam D. Barratt
• Raphael Geissert
• Russ Allbery
• Niko Tyni
• Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt

Thanks to pabs's and bubulle's notice on both IRC and planet, I got wind on Tagalog's impending removal from the Debian-Installer translations. Having been quite inactive on my Debian work for a while, this provided me an opportunity to get back to it, even if it were only small stuff (compared to packaging.) In the nick of time, I submitted updates to sublevels 1 (505 translations) and 2 (511 translations) of the d-i tl_PH translations; doing it twice due to my first run missing out the fuzzy translation strings. I was fortunate that the missing and fuzzy string needing translation weren't many; most of the work has already been done by pusakat and the rest of the Debian-TL team. Kudos for them on starting this in the first place! There's still a lot of work to be done, and even in d-i itself there are the other sublevels needing Tagalog translation (3 and 5.) Kung may alam ka sa Tagalog at gusto mong gamitin itong wika sa Debian, wag mahiyang kunin ang mga talakdang kailangang isalin! Others (even fellow Filipinos) may find it impractical, but I think its a worthwhile effort, to make it as accessible as possible to our fellowmen having difficulties in English. All in all, it feels good to contribute again. :)

This is a wonderful day. The various non-free bits of X donated by SGI have, thanks to the efforts of those at the FSF, been relicensed under the MIT/X11 license. Congratulations to the FSF for pushing this very difficult task through. I've been told numerous times whenever I tried to take a stab at the issue that it was "tilting at windmills," but the FSF persevered and made the impossible happen. This should be evidence for the naysayers that the FSF is out there doing the really hard, and all too often thankless, work that helps keep our software Free.

Hectic days... The last l10n teams are waking up and alarming messages seem to be sent in various places after my various blog posts, messages to lists, private messages, etc. (I think that the only place where I haven't yelled out for D-I translations is the street I live in). As of now, 7 languages are still in danger to be de-activated: Amharic, Estonian, Latvian, Macedonian, Northern Sami, Albanian, Tagalog Among these, Latvian and Macedonian should make it: Arangel Angov for Macedonian and Aigars Mahinovs for Latvian will probably complete the required minimum. For others, I'm afraid that Estonian, Albanian and maybe Tagalog will be deactivated. I have to think about it. I will be very sad for all of them if I have to do it. But I haven't got news from these translators for ages and I haven't been able to find any possible backup translator. For Albanian and Tagalog, that's not a surprise. For Estonian, I call this very disappointing. Northern Sami is a special case: this is the language of the Sami people in Norway, teached there in schools and important for DebianEdu...which originated in Norway and has been the pilar of D-I development a few years ago. As finding Sami translators is very difficult, I will probably keep the language (also, because it has a solid backup with Norwegian). Amharic is also special for me. The l10n effort is very specific: the translator works on ships all around the world, from his words, and can only communicate with me when he reaches a harbour. He has also been very committed to reach completeness (which he did) and the translation was only fuzzied by last minute changes in August. I'll probably fight to keep that language in D-I..:-) Still, there's one day left. So if your language is not 100% on D-I statistics for level 1, then try to do something. And, guess what? After the deadline is reached, I'll still have work to do: get as many levels 2-5 translations completed. All of these belong to regular Debian packages so they're not dependent on D-I release schedules!

Within the last couple of days, I've started using xmonad, a tiling window manager, instead of KDE. Tiling window managers automatically position most windows on your screen, freeing you from having to move, rearrange, and resize them all the time. It sounds scary at first, but it turns out to be incredibly nice and efficient. There are some nice videos and testimonials at the xmonad homepage.

I've switched all the devices I use frequently to xmonad. That includes everything from my 9.1" Eee (1024x600) to my 24" workstation at work (1920x1200). I've only been using it for 2 days, but already I feel more productive. Also my wrist feels happier because I have almost completely eliminated the need to use a mouse.

xmonad simultaneously feels shiny and modern, and old school. It is perfectly usable as your main interface. Mod-p brings up a dmenu-based quick program launcher, keyboard-oriented of course. No more opening up terminals to launch programs, or worse, having to use the mouse to navigate a menu for them.

There's a lot of documentation available for xmonad, including an "about xmonad" document, a guided tour, and a step-by-step guide to configuring xmonad that I wrote up.

I've been using KDE for at least 8 years now, if not more. WindowMaker, fvwm2, fvwm, etc. before that. This is my first step with tiling window managers, and I like it. You can, of course, use xmonad with KDE. Or you can go "old school" and set up a status bar and tray yourself, as I've done. KDE seems quite superfluous when xmonad is in use. I think I've replaced a gig of KDE software with a 2MB window manager. Whee!

Take a look at xmonad. If you like the keyboard or the shell, you'll be hooked.

If you are working with Eclipse on a Java project, make sure to try a regular (ant) build from time to time. The eclipse compiler sometimes differs quite a lot in what it accepts (especially when it comes to generics it seems to be a bit more clever) or considers a warning.No, I did not just disable a warning. Eclipse did report some "serialVersionUID" warnings, but it missed lots of them, too. I have the vague impression that the Eclipse java compiler didn't recognize that a class implementing the "Externalizable" interface also should have a serial version UID.And unfortunately I didn't find a way to reach the serial UID generation quickfix without having an eclipse warning... Well, after all there is not much wrong with starting the serial version at 1L.

Why is it that always the seemingly most simple things turn out to be the most annoying? This time I “just” wanted to get rid of one of my last MySQL databases and move it over to PostgreSQL. The Bacula catalog that saves which file I backed up when and to which storage medium. I tried with MySQL’s “mysqldump” and it’s PostgreSQL compatibility option - but apparently MySQL developers know nothing about PostgreSQL. Then I tried with “sqlfairy” - and found myself booting my system hard after it ate 2 GB of swap and died while converting 500 MB of data. So finally I asked in #bacula and was told to try CSV (comma-seperated values) as an intermediate format. Yuck… that satan-spawned format that reminds me of my dark past? Okay. First dump the catalog from MySQL: for table in BaseFiles CDImages Client Counters Device File Filename FileSet Job JobMedia Location LocationLog Log Media MediaType Path Pool Status Storage UnsavedFiles Version ; do mysqldump -u root -pmypassword -T. bacula $table; done (Okay, okay, this is not comma- but tab-seperated. But that’s even better for running the COPY-FROM command later.) This creates an ‘.sql’ (the schema) and a ‘.txt’ (the rows/records) file for each table in the current directory. Just don’t try to apply the schema to PostgreSQL. Instead better create a new schema. Bacula ships with a script for that purpose. Unless you have the PostgreSQL database for Bacula ready you should run something like… /usr/share/bacula-director/make_postgresql_tables -h localhost -U bacula …and… /usr/share/bacula-director/grant_postgresql_privileges -h localhost -U bacula Now on to read the tab-delimited data into PostgreSQL. The importing via the COPY command must be done with administrator privileges! And it’s important to explicitly state which columns correspond to which table columns (see the respective ‘.sql’ files) or otherwise you’ll get chaos. Of course this only has to be done for .txt files larger than 0 bytes. Oh, and the filename has to be absolute. Example:

• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY basefiles (baseid,basejobid,jobid,fileid,fileindex) FROM ‘/var/tmp/BaseFiles.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY cdimages (mediaid,lastburn) FROM ‘/var/tmp/CDImages.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY client (ClientId,Name,Uname,AutoPrune,FileRetention,JobRetention) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Client.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY counters (Counter,MinValue,MaxValue,CurrentValue,WrapCounter) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Counters.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY device (DeviceId, Name, MediaTypeId, StorageId, DevMounts, DevReadBytes, DevWriteBytes, DevReadBytesSinceCleaning ,DevWriteBytesSinceCleaning, DevReadTime,DevWriteTime, DevReadTimeSinceCleaning, DevWriteTimeSinceCleaning, CleaningDate, CleaningPeriod) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Device.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY file (FileId, FileIndex, JobId, PathId, FilenameId, MarkId, LStat, MD5) FROM ‘/var/tmp/File.txt’”
  psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY fileset (FileSetId, FileSet, MD5, CreateTime) FROM ‘/var/tmp/FileSet.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY filename (FilenameId, Name) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Filename.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY jobmedia (JobMediaId, JobId, MediaId, FirstIndex, LastIndex, StartFile, EndFile, StartBlock, EndBlock, VolIndex, Copy) FROM ‘/var/tmp/JobMedia.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY location (LocationId, Location, Cost, Enabled) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Location.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY locationlog (LocLogId, Date, Comment, MediaId, LocationId, NewVolStatus, NewEnabled) FROM ‘/var/tmp/LocationLog.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY log (LogId,JobId,Time,LogText) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Log.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY media (MediaId, VolumeName, Slot, PoolId, MediaType, FirstWritten, LastWritten, LabelDate, VolJobs, VolFiles, VolBlocks, VolMounts, VolBytes, VolErrors, VolWrites, VolCapacityBytes, VolStatus, Recycle, VolRetention, VolUseDuration, MaxVolJobs, MaxVolFiles, MaxVolBytes, InChanger, MediaAddressing, VolReadTime, VolWriteTime, EndFile, EndBlock, LabelType, StorageId, VolParts, MediaTypeId, DeviceId, LocationId, RecycleCount, InitialWrite, ScratchPoolId, RecyclePoolId, Enabled, Comment) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Media.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY mediatype (MediaTypeId, MediaType, ReadOnly) FROM ‘/var/tmp/MediaType.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY path (PathId, Path) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Path.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY pool (PoolId, Name, NumVols, MaxVols, UseOnce, UseCatalog, AcceptAnyVolume, VolRetention, VolUseDuration, MaxVolJobs, MaxVolFiles, MaxVolBytes, AutoPrune, Recycle, PoolType, LabelFormat, Enabled, ScratchPoolId, RecyclePoolId, LabelType, NextPoolId, MigrationHighBytes, MigrationLowBytes, MigrationTime) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Pool.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY storage (StorageId, Name, AutoChanger) FROM ‘/var/tmp/Storage.txt’”
• psql -h localhost bacula admin -c “COPY unsavedfiles (UnsavedId, JobId, PathId, FilenameId) FROM ‘/var/tmp/UnsavedFiles.txt’”

Unfortunately my “Job.txt” and “Media.txt” contained datestamp entries like “0000-00-00 00:00:00″ which are not valid for PostgreSQL. So I went into Vim and replaced it: s/0000-00-00 00:00:00/1970-01-01 00:00:00/g. Clear the table (DELETE FROM job) and import again. And finally it’s important to get the sequence numbers right as described in the Bacula manual. Morale: spend two extra-minutes to start with PostgreSQL right away instead of bothering about conversions later. And never assume converting from one database to another would work - just because both have “SQL” in their names.