A customer called me a while back. They have a pretty high-end NAS (2U server with external disk enclosure) that they use for most of their needs: both document and other storage for management types, as well as storage for their EDA cluster. People familiar with EDA tools will know that they are pretty disk intensive. They tend to require shitloads of diskspace, preferably at high performance. The problem was that extending the storage space of this high-end NAS device is rather expensive. Supported disks only come at 300G units with prices that are higher than the cheap TB disks available today for the desktop market; and while the price and performance of those disks is worth it for the EDA requirements, the number of people storing documents and similar on the same device is not so high that performance would be an issue. Thus, what they wanted was a cheap solution to augment, rather than replace, their current storage solution, with the focus being on low cost at the possible expense of performance and, since bacula runs well there, reliability. They were quite surprised when I offered them a solution based around a QNAP device; they had expected a price, without hard disks, of about three to four times the price of the QNAP, and therefore were very happy with this suggestion. Unfortunately, the devices produced by this manufacturer that are supported by Lenny, the current Debian stable release, were EOL'd just before we placed the order; however, their replacements will be supported by Squeeze, the next release, and with a bit of help from Martin Michlmayr, we were able to install Lenny with a somewhat more recent kernel. This drove the price up somewhat, both because the newer devices are a few tens of euros more expensive, and because we agreed to pay Martin to prioritize work on the specific device that we'd need, so that we wouldn't have to wait for him to get around to it. As of this Thursday, the device, which had finally arrived after some initial delays, has been installed. Unfortunately, one of the disks that they'd bought was DOA; but they had the foresight to buy five, rather than four, disks, so that was not a major problem. In fact, the only real issues that I ran into were this one arm-specific bug, and the fact that the high-end NAS device is still running etch, which means that rsync --acl won't work. That means I'll have to go back there soon to do an upgrade of the high-end device (which had been planned for a while already); for the arm-specific bug, a workaround is already in place. All in all, a pretty good experience.

It's not that often that I start something from scratch. It's an amazing feeling to start a new project, to start writing something new. I like that. It's creation, it's an artistic part of our computing stuff. I feel like a code artist. And what I like even more is that little feeling that you are going in an unknown land. Some area in this tech world where nobody ever came before you, or only a few pioneers. That the sensation I got starting to using Cython, Python 3 and various other tools. I just spent half of my time trying to fix problems, rather than working on *my* code. Problems in autoconf macro not knowing Python 2.6 or Python 3.1. Problems and limitations in Cython. And problem in Python. That last one was a hard one. I'm still a beginner in the Python world: I barely know anything. And I was trying to use something nobody never did: building an embedded Python with a set of built-in modules. I spent hours trying to find why one type of module importing was badly failing. I finally found the answer thanks to a guy. who has the same problem A guy ? No. A pioneer. What do I say? A hero. He's been my week-hero! Thank you Miguel Lobo because you found the bug I chased for hours and because you even reported it as issue 1644818, including a patch! How not damn wonderful is that? I will not bore you with the technical details of that bug, since nobody cares. Nobody cares, even the Python guys, since that bug has been opened for 3 years, and nobody even reviewed in that time. I found an old thread about that bug where some guys were wanking about how they should do the review, because Miguel pushed for several weeks to have a review, back in 2007. But that bug was in my way. I had to do something. So I prepared my mail reader, mounted my web browser and here I was for a uniq quest: getting a Python bug fixed. At that point, if you did not stop reading earlier, you might get very excited. Don't be, spoiler, it's still not fixed. You'll have to wait the end of the season and see all the episodes I'll have to write to get the end of the story! Let's continue. I had to create an account on the Python bug tracking system. That was a trivial task for a man like me (you bet). Then, I launched a verbal attack, something you rarely see in a bug tracking system. Something I knew would awake any developer caring about their software.

Julien Danjou: Is there any chance to see this *bug* fixed someday?

I had the deep feeling that my quest was starting here. How many days would I have to wait until I get an answer? Time was passing. Minutes were ticking while I was waiting, sat in a comfortable sofa in a softly lighted room. It seemed like all my life was shorter than the delay I had to wait to get an answer. After waiting for hours, suddenly, and only 15 minutes later, I got an answer:

Martin v. L wis: Please ask on python-dev. I may be willing to revive my five-for-one offer.

Martin? Don't know that guy. Who is he? Who is he like? Will he fix that bug? What is this offer? So many question without an answer. But he asked to ask on python-dev, and I said: challenged accepted! I will write a mail to python-dev to get that bug fixed. Which I did. I sent a short (but well written you know, I made efforts) "WTF?" to pyhon-dev. And then the guy asked me to review 5 bugs so he will review and fix this one. And this is how I said that he was pissing me off for blackmailing me to fix a bug that was its "duty". Therefore, this is the end of the story so far. Will that bug be fixed some day? There's a hope, because another guy jumped in and took the bug assignment. To be continued. My conclusion about all that story: that is a little rude to start something new, with new tools, and get quickly into teething troubles. It's even more harsh to enter a community because you just found bugs, and be not very well received when you ask to apply a 10 lines long fix somebody wrote 3 years ago to fix it. I'll probably still use Python :-), but I get a darker image of its community now.

I know, preaching to the choir and all that. But this can't be said often enough (and perhaps the odd non-Debian person stumbles upon this...): Here's another example of how amazingly fast free tech support works: The newest Linux kernel (Debian package version: 2.6.32-1) wouldn't boot on my QNAP TS-419P NAS (see also my earlier posting about the device). Now, since I don't have a serial console cable, I can't really help a lot to debug this (and I am extremely happy that the people at QNAP have thought about recovery: it's trivial to just flash a working kernel or firmware image via DHCP and TFTP), bu still Martin Michlmayr immediately took the time to help me and soon could reproduce it on one of his own machines. The problem has been identified, I got a fixed kernel, and a patch is on his way to the kernel maintainers. All in the after literally just a few days.

After several months of not-too-intensive searching for a KVM-hoster with native IPv6 connectivity, Steve hooked me up with a VPS at Bytemark, and I am very pleased. In addition to a properly virtualised KVM instance, I got access to a console server, which allows me to reset the machine, switch kernels, and log in locally . It s exactly what I wanted, but it was hard to find, as everyone else seems to offer only Xen or Vservers, both of which are nearing end-of-life. Thanks Steve, and Bytemark. NP: Porcupine Tree: Up the Downstair

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If you can t see the video above, click here

It took us a bit longer than planned, but we are happy to announce the schedule for the Distro Summit at the upcoming LCA2010 conference. We focused on cross-distro aspects, and we hope that you are as excited as we are about the result. The schedule is displayed on the Distro Summit homepage and I best refrain from duplicating it here.

Martin, Prague airport used to be (one of) most expensive airport for food and drinks prices. They recently reduced prices quite a lot, but I still think they fully qualify to be in the group of most expensive airports. But it has great advantage that every other airport looks cheap for us. This is almost same as prices for taxi, which is also usually cheaper than in Prague :-).

Dear lazyweb: I am in a dreadful situation! I need to secure e-mail communication between five types of users:

• Outlook 2003 users who receive their mail by POP3 from Exchange,
• Thunderbird users downloading mail with POP3,
• Apple Mail users downloading mail with POP3,
• Webmail users (Squirrelmail and Roundcube),
• and a bunch of Unix folks using proper clients.

To make matters worse: there is no common provider or server infrastructure, so the solution must work across providers and mailboxes.

Requirements

• Human error should be anticipated and prevented.
• Mail between all parties must be encrypted (and signed) automatically. If encryption is not possible, the mail must not be sent. This includes the situation where not all mail recipients keys are known;
• Ideally, one can define rules (using wildcards or regular expressions) to enforce certain policies.
• Mail to other parties may be signed, and it would be good to be able to turn this on and off by default;
• The MIME standard should be employed so that the mail body is not altered, and attachments can be seamlessly encrypted too. Existing MIME parts should be encapsulated as children of a new multipart tree;
• Incoming mail should be automatically and seamlessly decrypted/verified, and the user must be alerted if the verification fails.

Ideally, the solution will be open-source. However, if proprietary software performs better, then we will gladly use that where required.

Previous attempts So far, we ve tried (and were let down by)

• GpgOL, which has very irky and brittle integration with Outlook and can only do inline signing/encryption.
• S/MIME, which seems supported by all involved clients, but Outlook does not really allow you to specify policies. Encryption seems to be opportunistic at best, which is not enough.
• GPGrelay, which is promising because transparent, but apparently messes with MIME, and I am unsure whether it can fit between Outlook and Exchange. I have yet to run real tests though. If you are a GPGrelay user, or you d like to try it (it s Windows-only), please get in touch.
• WinGEAM, but that apparently no longer exists, and neither is the underlying GEAM.

Help! Does anyone have proper suggestions over what to use? In fact, if you are interested in devising a solution, or even deploying it, there s money to pay you for those services. Write in if you are interested.

grr!

Transforming data is hard. When I joined my current company, there were stupendous amounts of Perl/PHP/Bash/<insert random programming language here> scripts that would run on a cron job and do magic things to our data. They d create reports, they d tell the purchasers when we were running out of stock, they d synchronise data between our Frontend and backend databases, they d collect, they d collate, they d do everything and anything. Except, with all these scripts, in all these random languages, written by a multitude of previous developers (at different skill levels), they weren t particularly maintainable (and sometimes, they weren t particularly readable or understandable either imagine a 6000 line perl script that pretty much ran different permutations of the same data over and over again) Enter Pentaho, and specifically it s Kettle project. (since renamed Pentaho Data Integration ), a tool that lets you manipulate your data in pretty much any way you can imagine, in the simplest and easiest way imaginable.

That s right, it s a GUI for data manipulation.

I know a lot of you are probably sceptical right now. The first time I ever saw this was when a previous boss of mine put it forward as a potential solution for one of our problems (getting our orders from the front end database down to the office/warehouse). I saw it, and I thought GUI? Nah, that s not how real programmers do things! , so after the development team put forward another proposal to solve this, and it got accepted, I thought I d never see the thing again.

That was until my current boss started playing with it, trying to work out what it was doing so that he could get these evil GUI based scripts into something manageable, like nice, pretty code. Thing s, when my boss plays with things that he doesn t know about, he tends to read up, research, and, 9 times out of 10, change his mind.

We wiped the previous server (it was rather noisy! We re glad it s no longer switched on!) and set up a new server to house our BI platform . Starting off with a few scripts, my boss learnt to love this tool, and then, as I m his 2nd in command (aka general lackey) started making me learn how to use it.

Again, I was sceptical, I didn t want to learn, and I put up resistance, but my boss was going away for nearly a month, and by this time, a few of our key business processes relied on Kettle, so, grudgingly, I sat down, and started to learn.

You may be wondering now, why I started off this story talking about all those magical and wonderful scripts that no one seemed to know the inner workings of. These scripts, as I ve already mentioned were unwieldy, and at times, god-damned awful. The plan was to move them to the BI system (as my boss had been doing already).

I like to think of Kettle as a bridge between the process-flow diagram, and the code. I started converting these scripts, and I was astonished by the fact that most of the conversions I was doing was converting a long perl script into 3 or 4 Integration steps

I m totally besotted with this program now. Any time I have to do data manipulation, I turn to it. I can t describe how (once you ve got used to it s quirks) easy it is to use, how simple it is, and how much it just makes sense. Best of all, most of those evil scripts are gone now, and replaced with pretty diagrams that do the work for you.

If you have to play with large data sets on a regular basis, I urge you to try it out. You can buy me a beer for reccommending it next time you see me at $conference.

I accompanied Penny to Prague, from where she embarked into the mountains today for a week-long Moodle developer meeting. We froliced in the city a bit, tried to avoid the hordes of anonymous tourists that flooded the city, steered clear of the Christmas kitsch that was all over, sampled Czech food wherever we could, and enjoyed the local beer. On Friday, Petr Baudis took us out to The Pub, an ingenious concept by the Czech brewery Pilsner Urquell: every table has taps from where one can draw beers without waiting or having to get up, guests accumulate a tab measured in litres, and a huge screen shows which The Pub instance has the best beer throughput. Add to that an automated ordering system for salty snacks, and the brewery ensures a ready beer flow with need for no more than two staff members. Penny and I had already decided that Pilsner Urquell was our favourite Czech beer, mostly due to its bitterness. We also sampled the local Staropramen, and the well-known Budvar, and found our preference reinstated. At street prices of 50 CZK per half-litre of Pilsner, it was thus a punch in the face when the bartender at the airport bar asked for 145 CZK for the carelessly tapped beer, offering crap music and uncomfortable seating for the price. I refused the beer, because I prefered to keep only the good memories of the brew. NP: OSI: Blood

Ok, so recently, Richard Johnson and Michael Lustfield blogged about tab completion for SSH hosts. I m an avid user of zsh, and have my own way of doing this (liberally stolen from Daniel Silverstone). Now, this requires a little setup to start with, as some Linux Distributions have a habit of creating hashed known_hosts files. So, what I ve done, is before I ever SSH into a host, I add the following line to my ~/.ssh/config

HashKnownHosts no

From here, I can then add the following line to my ~/.zshrc

zstyle -e ':completion::*:*:*:hosts' hosts 'reply=($ =$ $ (f)"$(cat /etc/ssh_,~/.ssh/known_ hosts( 2)(N) /dev/null)" %%[# ]* //,/ )'

Now, when I try and ssh into a host, I can use tab completion to complete any host I ve previously ssh d into and any new hosts I ssh into get automatically added to the list

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks... First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him! So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

This is it. We know the faces of people who will count in Europe during the 2009-2014 period. And we can count on them to make the EU weigh even less than it did until now. Jos Manuel Dur o Barroso, president of the European Commission. For 5 years, this ultra-liberal brought in his fanatic views of the free market, leading to unprecedented removals of regulations and legislations that could prevent large corporations to extort money from citizens. He holds a non-negligible responsibility on the (still unsolved) bank crisis of 2007. Yet, citizens voted en masse earlier this year for the EPP all across Europe, leading to his renewal. You get the commission you deserve. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. This is no secret that this transparent non-leader was the choice of Sarkozy after Tony Blair turned out to be an unsustainable choice. Yet, none of the 26 other members of the Council dared to raise a single finger against this choice. Sarkozy has completely lost his credit in France, but that doesn t prevent this council of cowards from trusting him, apparently. It s not as if there weren t good candidates, like Jean-Claude Juncker or Vaira V e-Freiberga. But having a competent, Europe-friendly president who actually knows his files and speaks many languages would have cast shadows on those who don t (see below). Catherine Ashton, foreign ministry of the EU. If there was any worse possible choice, I don t know which. This was the only position supposed to be affected to a socialist. And since the Labour party is still member of the PASD, despite their insane liberal economic policy and their full-scale paranoia leading to unprecedented freedom hunting in the UK, the position was given to someone from this party. And among them, they chose a person with a reputation of sloppiness and incompetence, who doesn t speak correctly a single foreign language. It is probable that, just like Van Rompuy s going to be Sarkozy s puppet, she s going to be the UK Foreign Office s servant. And we continentals all love the Foreign Office s policy, which is often in complete opposition to what the rest of Europe feels like. Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament. You don t know him? Neither do I. A weak parliament goes with a weak parliament president. This way, the European Council has its hands free for behind-the-curtains arrangements, rather than letting the citizens representatives take action. Martin Schultz, president of the PASD group at the European Parliament. In order to ensure his place as president of the Parliament for the second half of the period, he betrayed his own people, and accepted any rotten compromise the EPP would propose for the key positions. Socialists have never been so weak in Brussels, and the total absence of leadership has something to do with it. Makes you proud to be European, heh? And of course you already know the real faces of Europe for the next years. Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi, Brown. The main leaders from Western Europe, with their rotten governments who swore to slay any of the remaining personal freedoms in each of their countries. What a great image for EU in the world. What a great example to set. But again, you get the leaders you deserve. That s the whole point of democracy.

Yesterday s RAM mystery was solved after dozens of people have written in with helpful comments. Thank you all. I need to find time to create a proper, commentable blog soon so that you all can get the credit you deserve! I now have the full 4GB of RAM available:

$ free   head -2
            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       4063324    1657440    2405884          0     149080     643732

Yay! The suggestions ranged from timing issues to defective modules, from 64bit OS via south/north bridge limitations to sacrificing chickens to god spongebobs. In the end, several people put their finger on a concept called memory hole remapping , and that turned out to be the ticket. Here is what I learnt: This motherboard and the CPU memory controller supports (which means can address ) 4096MB of RAM. Since extensions cards, such as the graphics card and the network controller, also need addressable slabs of memory for their RAM or registers, ranges in the upper memory regions are mapped to the RAM of those cards. The file /proc/mtrr gives a clue over what s happening:

reg00: base=0x000000000 (    0MB), size= 2048MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x080000000 ( 2048MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size=  256MB, count=2: write-combining
reg03: base=0x0d8000000 ( 3456MB), size=  128MB, count=1: write-combining
reg04: base=0x0e8000000 ( 3712MB), size=   64MB, count=1: write-combining
reg05: base=0x0ec000000 ( 3776MB), size=   64MB, count=1: write-combining

Registers 0 and 1 represent the addressable RAM available to the operating system. At position 3072, we find two slabs of 256MB each, most likely corresponding to the two graphics cards in the system. I think that the 128MB in register 3 is the AGP aperture. Registers 4 and 5 correspond to 64MB slabs each, most likely relating to the two network cards I have installed. The result is that addresses in memory beyond 3072MB are routed to the extension cards, which overshadow the original system RAM and leave it unusable. When I turned on the memory hole remapping feature in the BIOS, I empowered the BIOS to remap the memory space. The way it does this is BIOS-dependent, but most likely, it will remap the overshadowed memory region to the end of the total memory space. This is a software-only remapping, but the effect is that the system appears to have more memory. /proc/mtrr now reads:

reg00: base=0x000000000 (    0MB), size= 4096MB, count=1: write-back
reg01: base=0x100000000 ( 4096MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back
reg02: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: uncachable
reg03: base=0x0c0000000 ( 3072MB), size=  256MB, count=1: write-combining

I am not entirely sure how to interpret this yet, but you can see that there are now an additional 1024MB at position 4096 (register 1), so the system seems to have 5GB of RAM available. Register 2 describes memory between 3072 and 4096 as not cacheable, because it maps to extension cards. I do not know how register 3 fits into the picture. By remapping, we cross the 4096MB mark. To make use of the additional memory, we will need PAE enabled to give you 36 bits, or a 64bit operating system: 2^32 is 4096M, so with only 32 bits available, 4GB is all the memory that can ever be addressed (dirty hacks excluded). Fortunately, this system has been running the Debian amd64 port even before it was officially released, and thus, once the BIOS remapped the memory, I could fully make use of it. Mystery solved, some knowledge acquired, many of you left to thank!

Update: The mystery has been solved. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Despite the 4 1Gb RAM modules I added to the Asus A8V Deluxe mainboard of one of my machines, the BIOS (and Linux) only sees 3072 Mb. The BIOS is up-to-date (version 1018.002). The specs say that memory is

4 184-pin DIMM, Max. 4 GB, DDR 400/333/266 SDRAM, ECC, Non-ECC, Un-buffered
Dual Channel memory architecture

The four slots are labelled A1, A2, B1, and B2. A1 and B1 are blue, the other two are black. All four chips are DDR400 CL3, even though they are by different manufacturers. With all four slots filled, I get 3072 Mb of RAM. If I remove either of a black module, the RAM falls to 1024 Mb. If I remove either of a blue module, the RAM falls to 2048 Mb. Any idea what is going on? How can I get the full 4Gb I want? Please write in if you know.

An older machine of mine previously ran off 7 harddisks, which were added over the years. Initially, there were two 80Gb drives, then one failed and I replaced it with a 160Gb drive, leaving 80Gb of unused space. At some point I had two 120Gb drives, which I also added, and then another 160Gb and a 250Gb drive, and finally I replaced the first 160Gb with a 320Gb one. Between the different RAID1 and RAID5 arrays across these disks, as well as the LVM configuration atop, I had completely lost overview of the assembly. It didn t help that the drives were all IDE (PATA), so you can imagine the cable mess! When two drives started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors, I took the opportunity to replace the mess with the four 250Gb SATA drives I had lying around at home. The problem was that two of the four SATA ports apparently didn t work. Hence I went to try a BIOS upgrade for the plain Asus K8V motherboard (Via VT8237 chipset). I don t remember what floppies look like, and I hate all these DOS-based flasher programs anyway, so this time around I gave flashrom a try (using the outdated version in Debian lenny). I managed to read out the existing ROM image, but even after verifying that it looked very similar to the new one, I was still scared of turning my computer into a brick. While waiting for people on the #flashrom/irc.freenode.org channel to reassure me, I managed to wipe the saved image and essentially had no other way but to move forward. I used flashrom to verify that the image was written and rebooted and the system came back up, this time with support for all four SATA drives. Thank you, flashrom people!

A lot of people seem to think that open source is a magic solution to project management and that open source projects will automatically attract a large and healthy community of contributors and users who will improve the software. This, of course, is not the case. In fact, creating a successful open source project is a really major and difficult effort. You have to deliver an initial promise that people find interesting, attract other people, then facilitate and lead the community, etc. You just have to look at all the failed projects on SourceForge that never delivered any code to see that "open source" is not a guarantee for success. Even though project management is a key element of every open source project, there are only few resources about this topic. That's why I always enjoy reading about the experience from open source project leaders. Jim Hall, the founder of the FreeDOS project, recently posted a series of four articles which I find particularly interesting. Here are links to the articles along with a quick summary:

• Free and Open Source Software: the first article just describes what free software and open source are all about. It also looks at Raymond's model and compares the cathedral and the bazaar style of development.
• Open source software in the real world: this article summarizes a number of key lessons learned: every project needs a clear purpose (i.e. you have to solve an actual problem); initial users of the software should be recruited as developers; releases are important; and every project needs an active coordinator or maintainer.
• Cultivating Open Source Software: you need a web site; making the source code availability in an easy way is important; documentation is often hard to write but is vital; you need a bug tracking system and responding to bug reports is important to attract good feedback.
• Transitions in an open source software project: finally, when you need to hand over the project, make sure to communicate openly, arrange for your replacement and stick around to ensure a successful hand over.

I really like these articles from Jim Hall since they contain a lot of great insights that apply to other projects, so I suggest you check them out! (Originally published on FOSSBazaar)

• Christmas Songs on the Radio
• 64-bit Flash Support (edit: or lack thereof)
• Blog posts discouraging people from contributing to Debian