Friday, I wrote about the train trip Jacob and I were planning to take. Here s the story about it. Friday night, Jacob was super excited. He was running around the house, talking about trains. I had him pack his own backpack with toys this time, which were you guessed it trains. Plus train track. His usual bedtime is around 7. He was still awake in his room at about 11, too excited to sleep. The train was an hour late into Newton, so got up, got ready, and then went into Jacob s room at 3:15AM. I put my arm around him and said his name softly. No response. I said, just a little louder, Jacob, it s time to wake up to go to the train station. There was about a 2-second pause and then he sat bolt upright rubbing his eyes. A couple seconds later, in a very tired but clear voice, OK dad, let s go! That is, I believe, a record for waking up speed for Jacob. We went downstairs, got coats, mittens, hats, etc. on, made sure we had the stuffed butterfly he always sleeps with, and went out the door. As usual, Jacob chattered happily during the entire 15-minute drive to the Amtrak station. One of these days I need to remember to record it because it s unique. He described things to me ranging from the difference between freight and passenger trains, to what the dining car is all about, to tractors and how to ride them safely. Newton has some winter lights , and a few places still had Christmas lights, which were of course big hits. We had to wait a few minutes at the Amtrak station, and Jacob hadn t shown any signs of slowing down yet. He wanted to look at every Amtrak poster, picture, logo, or sign in the building. This generally meant me holding him up high while he leaned over to touch it and make out a few words. Then, of course, he would pick out minute details about the trains, such as how many coach cars he thought they had, and we d visit about that for awhile. We got on at about 4:20. We found our seats, and Jacob showed no signs of calming down, despite having had only 4 hours of sleep (instead of his usual 11) so far. We checked out the buttons for lights. And, of course, he excitedly yelled out, Dad, the train is moving! He spent the next while mostly watching out his window, but also still exploring his space. Finally at about 5, I said, Jacob, I am really tired. I am going to sleep now. Will you sleep too? His response: Oh sure dad, I will sleep with my eyes open! As a result, no sleep was had for Jacob, and only a little for me. The dining car opens for breakfast at 6:30, which is normally a rather foreign time for breakfast on the train for us. But we were both awake so I figured might as well go. So Jacob and I went to the dining car. We sat with a woman going from New Mexico to Lawrence for her grandpa s funeral, though it was expected and she was having a good time on the train. Jacob turned completely shy, and refused to say a word, except maybe a few whispered into my ear. He got his favorite railroad French toast, and had me drizzle some syrup on it. I used the word drizzle for syrup the first time he had French toast on the train, and if I fail to use that word in the dining car, I will hear about it in no uncertain terms from Jacob. He loved his dining car breakfast, but we spent about an hour and a half there. He was really slow at eating because his face was pressed up against the window so much. But that was just fine; we had nowhere else to be, the person eating breakfast with us enjoyed visiting (and, apparently, scaring the dining car staff with tales of bears in the New Mexico mountains). This was what the train trip was all about, after all. We played in the lounge car for awhile. The almost floor-to-ceiling wrap-around windows provided a great view for him, and more opportunities to press his face against a window. We talked about freight trains that he saw, noticed the snow on some of them. Then we found the back of the train and he got to look out the back window. Back at our seat, he played with his toys for about 10 minutes, which was all he used them on the entire trip. There was just too much else to enjoy. When we used the restroom on the train, he d comment on how much he liked the Amtrak soap. It smells SO very very good! He wanted to wash his hands on the train. By late morning, he had decided: Dad, I LOVE this Amtrak soap. It smells like peaches! Shall your hands smell like peaches too? And, when we d get back up to our seats, he d put his hands in my face, saying, Dad, smell that! My hands smell like peaches! It was from the AMTRAK SOAP! At some point, he discovered the airline-style safety brochures in the seat back pockets. These were filled with diagrams of the train car, a few photos, and lots of icons with descriptions. I don t know how many times I read the thing to him, or really how many times he then recited it to me from memory. It was a lot. He spent hours with those brochures. Jacob had already told me that he wanted pizza for lunch, so I got him the kid-sized pizza. It wasn t all that big, and he could have devoured at least half of it when hungry. But he was getting really tired and ate only a few bites of pizza and a few chips. Pretty soon he was leaning up against me, the window, and eventually had his head on the table in some tomato sauce. But he didn t quite fall asleep by the time we went back to our seats, and of course was wide awake by that point. Jacob loves spotting the word Amtrak on things. It was very exciting when he noticed his orange juice at breakfast, and milk at lunch, were Amtrak juice and Amtrak milk due to the logo on the cups. At dinner he noticed we had Amtrak plates, and when I pointed out that his metal fork had the Amtrak logo on it, he got very excited and had to check every piece of silverware within reach. Dad, I have an Amtrak fork too! . And dad, YOU also have an Amtrak fork! We ALL have Amtrak forks! *cackling laughter* I finally insisted that Jacob lay down for some quiet time. I closed the curtains, and he finally did fall asleep less than an hour before our arrival into Galesburg. So by 2:15 he was up to 4.75 hours of sleep, I guess. We stopped in the train station briefly, then started our walk to the Discovery Depot Children s Museum, which was right nearby. Although I made no comment about it, Jacob said, Dad, there is a train museum RIGHT HERE! Yes, you re right Jacob. I can see a steam engine and some cars here. Let s go in! I don t think it s open today. It IS open shall we go check? It wasn t, and that was mighty sad though when he spotted another old caboose sitting outside the children s museum, the day suddenly seemed brighter. He complained of how cold he was, although my suggestion that he stop walking through the big piles of snowdrifts was met with a whiny, But dad, I WANT to do that! We went inside the museum (having to walk right buy the locked caboose thankfully the people at the desk promised to unlock it for us when we were ready) and Jacob started to explore. There was some wooden play trains big enough for children to climb in which he enjoyed, but in general he went from one thing to the next every minute or two as he does when he s really tired or overstimulated. Until, that is, he discovered the giant toy train table. It had a multi-level wooden track setup, and many toy trains with magnetic hitches. It was like what we have at home, only much bigger and fancier. He spent a LONG time with that. We then briefly explored the rest of the museum and went out into the caboose. It wasn t the hit it might have been, possibly because there are several at the Great Plains Transportation Museum that he gets to go in on a somewhat regular basis. After that, he was ready to go back into the museum, but I was feeling rather over-stimulated. On a day when the highs were still well below freezing, it seemed just about every family in Galesburg was crowded into the children s museum, making it loud and crowded which I don t enjoy at all. So I suggested maybe it was snack time instead. A moment s thought, then he started to pull me out of the caboose before I could get my gloves back on Yes dad, I think it IS snack time. Let s go. Let s go NOW! We walked over to Uncle Billy s Bakery (Google link or minimal website). Jacob spotted some sugar cookies shaped like mittens. Despite my reluctance to get him more sugar, he was so excited plus I had barely prevented a meltdown at lunch by promising him that he would get dessert later in the day so he picked two red mitten cookies. I got myself a wonderful peach muffin and a croissant and we sat down at one of the tables by the window. I taught Jacob how to hang his coat on his chair and he lit into those cookies. I spotted a guy at the next table over wearing a BNSF jacket, and asked him if he worked for the railroad. He had retired as an engineer a couple of years ago, and had worked various jobs before that. He grew up in Manhattan, KS and so was interested in our trip and very friendly. While we visited, Jacob devoured his cookies and increasing portions of my snack as well. He told us about a new shop The Stray Cat just two stores down that was having a grand opening event today. They make decorations and art out of basically discarded items, and had some really nifty things that I may have bought had I not been wanting for space in our backpack. Then I spotted Sweets Old-Fashioned Ice Cream, Candy, and Soda Shop across the road. I figured he d love it and I was already in for the sugar so might as well. He picked out some birthday cake flavor ice cream for himself. I got huckleberry ice cream, which he insisted on calling purpleberry and managed to get some tastes of as well. After that, we went to the train station. It was about an hour until our train would be there. I wasn t sure if we d find enough to do, but I shouldn t have worried. Earlier, we had made the happy discovery that the station s restroom featured the Amtrak soap, so there was that. Then there was the model Amtrak train in the ticket window, which Jacob kept wanting to look at while I d hold him. And also, the California Zephyr came in. We watched it arrive from the station window, saw people get off and on, and saw it leave maybe the first time Jacob has witnessed all that in person. And, of course, we looked at the pictures in that train station. The ticketmaster gave Jacob a paper conductor s hat with puzzles and mazes on the back side. And then it was time to get onto our train back home. We ate dinner Jacob again ate little and almost fell asleep and got back to our seats. I let Jacob stay awake until about 8, when he was starting to get a bit fragile. It took him awhile to fall asleep, but he finally did at about 8:30. Today he s still been all excited. He will randomly tell us about bits of the trip, that the man at supper called his grilled cheese sandwich piece little when it was really big, what we did at the ice cream store, etc. And I do think that he is now a train safety expert. All in all, I think that is probably the most excitement he s ever had in 24 hours and it was a lot of fun to be with him for it!

I just registered for the 38th Berlin marathon on September 25th 2011. We (Elizabeth and /me) will of course use this opportunity to visit the city (our first time in Berlin), coming on Thursday 22th and leaving on Monday 26th. I aim for 3h30. We'll see..:-)

Halla Tomasdottir gave an interesting TED talk about her financial services company which uses feminine values and thus survived the Icelandic financial crash [1]. She also has a lot of other interesting ideas about how to run a corporation or a country.Hillary Clinton gave an interesting TED talk about national security and women s rights [2]. The US State Department is now making women s rights a priority due to the fact that places where women are mistreated tend to pose a security threat to the US. Unfortunately this talk can t be viewed without flash.Richard Dawkins reads some of his hate-mail while sitting by the fire [3], it s interesting to know that a loving God wants his minions to send hate-mail to scientists. There are a few cheap laughs here.Emily Pilloton gave an interesting TED talk about fixing some of the problems with the education system in rural USA by incorporating design [4]. Instead of having useless projects in shop class the students will complete real projects for their community which have to be designed, planned, and made. The students who end up going to university will learn some generally useful skills through this and the ones who don t go to university will probably have an immediate opportunity to apply the skills that they learn.Elizabeth Pisani gave an interesting TED talk about rational behavior and HIV [5]. She explains why certain behavior that carries great risk can be rational for the people who do it. One of her interesting points is the fact that the poor health system in the US makes it economically viable for the government to refrain from providing free needles to junkies as they don t pay to treat them when they get sick. She makes a good case for political change.Tony Porter gave an inspiring TED talk titled A Call to Men about the way the macho culture socialises men towards violence against women [6].Fraud Magazine has an interesting Interview with Dr. Robert D. Hare and Dr. Paul Babiak about psychopathic fraudsters [7]. Most of the interview is generally about psychopaths and the cases of psychopaths in business, there isn t much that is specific to financial fraud. It has a good summary of what some psychopaths are like.Barbara Fister wrote a Liberation Bibliography a call for knowledge to be free [8]. Currently universities pay researchers who then pay for corporations to accept copyright for their work and then resell it back to the universities. This is sucking money from the university system and denying access to knowledge to the people who can t pay.Charles Limb gave an interesting TED talk about using an MRI to study the brains of Jazz musicians doing Improv and Rappers doing Freestyle [9].Deborah Rhodes gave an interesting TED talk about her new method of screening for breast cancer for women with dense breast tissue [10].Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about Net Neutrality and it s importance in helping the less famous writers (the majority of writers) earn money [11]. He also makes some interesting points about Google and about the corporate welfare given to telephone companies.Beyond Zero Emissions has an interesting summary of the current situation regarding Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS), among other things the only system that s currently operational is leaking CO2 and killing plants and animals [12].The Brisbane council knew that the flood risks were greater than suggested by published information, they kept this news to themselves to assist property developers in selling low-lying land, and this led to increased problems now that the predicted floods have occurred [13]. Sounds like corruption, we could probably do with a Royal Commission into this.Psychology Today has an interesting article titled Wise Words From Fellow Introverts which is a collection of blog comments from introverts [14].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/halla_tomasdottir.html
• [2] http://blog.ted.com/2010/12/10/ted-blog-exclusive-hillary-rodham-clinton-at-tedwomen/
• [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZuowNcuGsc
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/emily_pilloton_teaching_design_for_change.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_pisani_sex_drugs_and_hiv_let_s_get_rational_1.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men.html
• [7] http://www.fraud-magazine.com/article.aspx?id=404
• [8] http://www.nea.org/assets/img/PubThoughtAndAction/A10Fister1.pdf
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/deborah_rhodes.html
• [11] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2011/01/cory-doctorow-net-neutrality-for-writers-its-all-about-the-leverage/
• [12] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/next-revelation-ccs-carbon-leaks
• [13] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/alarming-report-on-risks-covered-up/story-e6frg6nf-1225986634328
• [14] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-introverts-corner/201012/wise-words-fellow-introverts

Last night was the last time I came back from a pub with my clothes stinking due to tobacco smoke. The Spanish congress has finally approved a real anti-smoking law which will ban smoking on public areas, with no exceptions or ways to workaround the ban. Starting on January 2nd, the Spanish state will be a smoke-free region (or mostly, it seems it'll be permitted in open-air events like football stadiums or bullrings, and I don't think that will be a great problem for me, specially the latter). For years, my intolerance to smoke has been increasing and I'm really expectant to see the benefits of this law in my habits. After more than 30 years dealing with smoke around us, it's our turn now. I've been speaking to a few barmans. In general they seem worried this will affect their business, but I can't see how it will. Spain has a big culture for having mid-morning almuerzos in bars, and people are not going to give that up due to not being able to smoke. They will just do it after they get out, not during the coffee, and that's it. The barmans of the two bars I visit most are non-smokers, but have to breath the smoke of hundreds of cigarretes every day, and can't do anything about it. Until tomorrow, when this will end and everyone will have a right to breath better air. I hope this kind of legislation continues to be adopted throughout Europe, because the FOSDEM welcome party is probably the next smoke horror I'll have to face soonish. :)

I knew walking all over the Pyrenees during a whole month would come with some side effects. I could imagine having a few muscular issues in my legs and some back pain for a while after getting back; after all we did over 7 hours of exercise every single day during a month. What I got after our hike was totally unexpected... I should have run a half marathon in Gandia on the 21st, and instead I stayed at home doing some assignments. When we came back, I was in a really good condition, and wanted to keep the good shape we had built the month before. Given I haven't been able to swim for nearly a year now, due to the Misterious Shoulder Injury and I don't have enough time to go out cycling regularly, I centered my efforts in running, with the idea of starting to get prepared for cross/mountain races this season. Training had to wait a little because some days after getting back, I got a sudden pain on both knees, which even made climbing stairs difficult. It stuck for a while, and when it finally went away, more or less, I went ahead and tried going out for a run. I haven't been training for over two years, so I indended to increase the distances proggressively. The first day I went out, I ran really nicely for the first 25 minutes, and suddenly I started getting an intense pain in the outer side of my right knee, to the point I could barely walk back home. I've tried letting them rest for weeks, and every time I try them, the pain comes back. My physiotherapist says my body has developed quite a few asymmetries, probably caused by the many days I had to walk crippled by a big blister in my right foot. As time passes, I feel I'm losing all the physical improvements I had developed during the summer, and I can't do anything about it. The new approach to tackle this is yoga. I know my body isn't too elastic, and the lack of stretching during the walk made it even worse, so I'll try to forget about real traning during some time and focus on healing my muscles. Hopefully, this will help me resolve the nastiest physical problem I've ever come across.

Yet another Ubuntu anecdote Some posts on planet made me remember of a little Canonical-related story of mine. Many years ago I shortly contracted for Canonical. It was interesting and fun. At the time I didn't have any experience of being temporarily hired by a foreign company, so I rang my labour union to get an appointment, to make sure with them that everything was allright. The phone call went more or less like this: Me:

Hello. I have received this contract for temporary employment by a foreign company and I wondered if I could book an appointment to come show it to you to see if it's all ok.

Their answer rather cut me short:

Hi. Be careful! People get temporary employment from obscure companies with the headquarters, like, in the Isle of Man, they do the job, the company disappears and they never get paid. There's bad stuff out there!

I looked at the contract, the heading said something like "Canonical ltd, Douglas, Isle of Man". I was certain that the union people would have never understood what was going on. I politely thanked them for their time and hung up. However, to this day I still regret that I didn't insist:

Uh, yes, the company is indeed in the Isle of Man. But what if I told you that it's owned by an astronaut?

I just signed the contract and had a good time.

Reading Scott's recent announcement on his move to Google was both surprising and a pleasure. Surprising, because it'll take time to stop associating his name to Ubuntu, Canonical, and the nice experiences I had while I worked with them. A pleasure, because his blog post was full of reminiscences of the very early days of a project that ended up being way more successful in just a few years than probably anyone in the Oxford conference could imagine. Scott, best of luck for this new adventure! Scott's write-up includes a sentence that made me remember I had been wanting to write a blog post related to all of this, but was pending Mark Shuttleworth's permission for posting:

Ok, Mark wasn t really a Nigerian 419 scammer, but some people did discard his e-mail as spam! Scott James Remnant

Many know the story of how I ended not being part of the Super-Secret-Debian-Startup Scott mentions. I even wrote about it in a blog post, 3 years ago:

[...] nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life.

From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000
[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]

I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought WTF?! Dude on crack or I just forgot I need to reply to this email , but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2 years, but that's another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email. During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this", and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot. I wonder if I should reply to his email today...

When the usual suspects in the secret Spanish Debian Cabal channel read this blog post, they decided Mark deserved a reply, even if it would hit his inbox more than three and a half years late. :) With great care, we crafted an email that would look genuinely stupid in late 2007, but just arrogant and idiotic in 2004, when Ubuntu was just an African word, and the GNU/Linux distribution landscape was quickly evolving at the time, Gentoo Linux had the posh distribution crown, that Debian had held for quite a few years. I even took enough care to forge the X-Operating-System and User-Agent headers so they matched whatever was current in Debian in February 2004, and of course, top-posting seemed most appropriate. So Mark woke up that Monday, fired up his email client, and got... this:

Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:47:55 +0100
From: Jordi Mallach <jordi@sindominio.net>
To: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: Re: New project to discuss
Organization: SinDominio
X-Operating-System: Debian GNU/Linux sid (Linux 2.6.3 i686)
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your email. I nearly deleted this e-mail because for some
reason I thought it was targetted spam.
Your project looks very interesting, almost like a dream come true.
However, I feel a bit uneasy about your proposal. Something just doesn't
fit.
Why would someone start a company to work on /yet another/ Debian
derivative? Have you heard about Progeny's sad story? I think it's a
great example to show that Debian users don't want Debian-based distros,
they want people to work on the "real thing". Besides, I don't think
there's much more place for successful commercial distros, with Red Hat
and SuSE having well-established niches in the US and Europe.
Also, why focus on Debian specifically, Why not, for example, Gentoo,
which has a lot of buzz these days, and looks poised to be the next big
distribution?
To be honest, I think only a few people have the stamina or financial
stability to undertake a project like this, so I'd like to know
a bit more about you, and details on how you plan to sustain the
expenses.
Those are the main issues that worry me about your project. Other than
that, I would be interested in taking part in it, as I'm currently
unemployed and working on something Debian-based would be just too good
to miss.
You can reach me at +34 123 45 67 89, or if you feel like flying people
around Europe, I probably can be in the UK whenever it fits you.
Thanks, and hoping to hear from you again,
Jordi
On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 06:33:51PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Hi Jordi
>
> We haven't met, but both Jeff Waugh and Martin Michelmayr recommended that
> I get in touch with you in connection with a new project that I'm starting.
>
> I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
> distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
> focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
> it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
>
> Would you be available to discuss it by telephone? I'm in the UK, so we
> could probably find a good timezoine easily enough ;-) Let me knof if
> you're keen to discuss it, when and what number to call.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> --
> Try Debian GNU/Linux. Software freedom for the bold, at www.debian.org
> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

As you can imagine, his reaction was immediate:

Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:13:54 +0100
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@sindominio.net>
Subject: Re: New project to discuss
Jordi! I just got this now! Did you recently flush an old mail queue?

With thanks to all the Spanish Cabal members who were involved!

Not for the first time, I ve seen the suggestion in the echo chamber that Mono packages should be moved from Debian into the non-free repository, which is not formally part of Debian. The reason, as it so often is, is patents specifically this time, the searing risk posed to Debian and its users that Mono s packaging does not (and technically could not without forking from upstream) provide base class libraries which implement only the content of ECMA-335 4th Edition. As I understand it, this implies three things about the suggestion/demand: firstly, that the individual in question believes that Mono end users are at risk from patent litigation from Microsoft Corp because Mono s implementation of Microsoft.NET beyond the content of ECMA 334/335 infringes on Microsoft patents; secondly, that the Microsoft Community Promise which promises not to assert legal claims over third party implementations of ECMA-335 4th Edition (and ECMA-334 4th Edition which defines the C# language) would render a pure ECMA-only runtime safe if it existed (which it does not); thirdly that without the protection offered by the Microsoft Community Promise, the source code licenses of Mono are irrelevant the patent risk renders the software non-Free. It appears, unfortunately, that the community of Free Software Advocates don t actually understand what Free Software actually IS. That explains an awful lot, but should surprise nobody. So here s a lesson on what, exactly, is being advocated for. The Free Software Foundation defines four Software Freedoms these are the minimum criteria required for something to be considered Free Software by the FSF:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Other groups have their own variants on these, but those are really just clarifications on the FSF definition - for example, the Debian Free Software Guidelines mostly line up, but have some additional clauses such as clause 4 which allows software to be considered Free if source code may be redistributed without modifications, as long as patches may be shipped alongside. These four freedoms are offered to you by the software s copyright holders only, and apply regardless of their choice of license any Free license, from a lengthy legal tome like the MPL to the completely-Free WTFPL, will offer you these four basic freedoms as a minimum, and any additional clauses in their licenses cannot seek to restrict these freedoms. These four freedoms represent the beginning, and end, of whether a piece of software is Free or not. Software does not need to be developed in the open, in a community-responsive way, in order to qualify as Free projects such as Google s Android, which are developed under a throw a final release over the wall, bugs and all, and expect people to thank you for it model, are still free, even if contribution is difficult. Actually, on a related note, software does not need to solicit upstream contribution of any kind in order to qualify as Free as long as you personally can redistribute the code with changes, then that s enough. Software does not need to serve a fully or even partially legal purpose in order to qualify as Free the favoured tool for causing distributed denial of service attacks, Low Orbit Ion Cannon, is Free Software, even though realistically it serves no legal purpose. DeCSS, the code initially used to allow DVD media to play on Linux (by breaking the CSS encryption mechanism) is Free Software. Software does not need to be useful or tasteful in order to qualify as Free the Last Measure Operating System, a minimalist OS primarily designed to loudly display the famous shock site images from goatse and related, is Free Software. Even in somewhat less clear-cut cases of taste, your personal opinion of software has no bearing on whether it is Free Software, as long as the four freedoms are guaranteed by the author(s). Software does not need to have only Free dependencies to qualify as Free Software it is entirely permissible to write software which relies upon a non-Free framework or library, and release your code under a Free license. It is the downstream recipient s problem to provide the dependencies, including their choice to craft a Free replacement for any non-Free code you make use of. Debian has a special repository called contrib, where Free software which only works with non-Free data, lives for example, Free game engines which require the insertion of proprietary game data in order to operate. You could write Free addons for expensive proprietary software such as Matlab, and as long as your code is Free, your responsibilities are met. Software does not need to avoid patents software, algorithmic, or otherwise in order to qualify as Free. The Freetype font library was still entirely Free Software when Apple were slinging threats around regarding font hinting data. FFmpeg, the Swiss Army knife of media codec libraries, is Free Software regardless of the number of codec patents it breaks. Software does not need any third party approval to be Free Software the rights of Free Software can only be offered by the copyright holders, and the opinion of third parties is an irrelevance as to whether software is Free. The GPL d clone of Blizzard Entertainment s Battle.net servers, bnetd, is Free Software, regardless of legal takedown notices. Third parties cannot influence whether or not a piece of software is Free. They can influence tangentially related topics, such as whether the software can be legally used, but that s the limit. And even within a given piece of software, where copyright is shared by contributors, the author of one component has no say on other components. And you can t make code which is already released as Free, suddenly un-Free you can, if you hold all the copyrights, close up future versions, but your existing code remains Free forever. Reasonably, you can opt to avoid using a piece of software because you have requirements beyond it merely being Free Software Cdrtools has been avoided in Debian for a long time due to the upstream author s legal threats and rambling but that is a side issue as to the question of whether or not the software is Free. Patents are simply not involved in the question of whether or not something is Free Software, except for one narrow case: where Free Software is released by somebody who also holds related patents, and uses a license such as Ms-PL or Apache 2.0 or GPLv3 which requires them to also release those patents to those using/distributing the software. Outside that narrow situation, patents do not relate to the question of whether something is Free Software even if a company releases some source code under a license like BSD then demands patent fees from end users. So, on to the original topic of Mono. Every piece of Mono s source code is released by its authors under a license which guarantees the FSF s Four Freedoms. Whether or not you find Mono useful or tasteful does not affect that Free status. Whether or not Mono infringes upon any laws or patents does not affect that Free status. That Mono contains some libraries whose upstream author is Microsoft does not give Microsoft even the remotest claim to a single line of code outside the code they wrote and even then, it wouldn t be an issue, since the licenses they use are Free. In fact, both the licenses used in the Microsoft portions of the source base make patent grants to all users, in addition to guaranteeing the FSF s Four Freedoms and any license contamination would decrease, not increase, any risk of legal attack from Microsoft. There s even plenty of Microsoft code available for re-use at a lower level than the currently re-used libraries: The Microsoft.NET Micro Framework (for use on embedded platforms direct to the metal) is under the Free Software Apache 2.0 license, and would provide access to some of Microsoft s runtime and class library code, complete with a patent grant, if it were desired. Please try to keep your thought processes straight. If you want to argue that you re all for Free Software, please remember that there s plenty of Free Software you might not approve of and don t claim to be a Free Software advocate then use bogus arguments to claim that Free Software is not Free. Free Software includes LMOS and LOIC and Mono, whether you like it or not.

I'm working on improving various bits of Apple hardware support, which includes trying to make EFI booting on Macs more sensible. One of my test machines is an 11" Macbook Air, which is a beautiful piece of hardware. If you want something small and light that's approximately a proper computer rather than a netbook, there's nothing else in the x86 market to touch it. Nothing.

So it's a shame that while Apple employs hardware designers who are absolutely the best in their field, their firmware developers are utterly incompetent. The EFI spec describes a protocol called GOP (Graphics Output Protocol) which allows the operating system to find out things like the screen resolution, framebuffer location and stride. This machine kindly passes everything back correctly, except for stride being wrong. Like, utterly wrong. Implausibly wrong. Obviously, terrifyingly wrong. So wrong that if you trust it, your screen image looks like it's been involved in some sort of awful pasta making accident. But never mind, that's a single line workaround.

But there's far, far worse. EFI has three modes of operation - boot services, runtime services, and runtime services with a virtual memory map. Boot services are, as the name implies, intended to be used by the bootloader. They're contained within memory marked with a type of either BOOT_SERVICES_CODE or BOOT_SERVICES_DATA. Once the bootloader has loaded the OS, just before handing over to it, it calls ExitBootServices() and the firmware is then at liberty to clear those areas of memory. The OS never executes boot services code and can use the memory that was allocated to them.

So then we have runtime services. EFI is, depending on how you want to look at it, either saner or much less sane than traditional BIOS access. The firmware gives you a bunch of function pointers and you then simply call them with native calling convention (this, incidentally, is why it's pretty much impossible to run a 32-bit OS on 64-bit EFI, or a 64-bit OS on a 64-bit system that happens to have 32-bit EFI). To begin with the firmware assumes flat physical mapping, which isn't entirely ideal when you're an OS with virtual address space - so there's a SetVirtualAddressMap() call which lets the OS pass a memory map to the firmware, and from then on everything just works.

Except on this machine. On this machine, you call SetVirtualAddressMap() and the kernel faults because it's just tried to execute code from a region of address space that's marked as non-executable. Closer examination revealed that, yes, this area of address space is marked as RAM and so the kernel's doing the right thing. Except, obviously, the right thing generally doesn't involve crashing the machine at boot time, so there was something else up.

That something else turned out to be SetVirtualAddressMap() calling into boot services code. The boot services code that's not supposed to be touched after ExitBootServices() has been called. The boot services code that's flagged as BOOT_SERVICES_CODE and was therefore mapped as RAM by us because, well, nothing's there any more. The boot services code that we're ignoring exactly as the spec says we should.

So, a quick change to the bootloader to pass us an e820 map[1] that marks the boot services regions as reserved, a quick change to the kernel to mark BOOT_SERVICES_CODE regions as executable and we're in business. Except that when we call SetVariable() to configure the bootloader, the firmware tries to read from an address that's approximately 54TB above anything else.

BlApple.

[1] Oh, yes, despite E820 being an x86 BIOS-specific thing, we use it for the in-kernel representation of the address map under EFI as well. So despite the EFI memory map being available to the kernel, the bootloader has to construct something that looks like an E820 map, losing information in the process. So even though it's been given the E820 map, the kernel has to look through the EFI memory map in order to find the EFI runtime services section in order to mark it executable. This is, arguably, insane, but so is the entirety of EFI so that's ok then.

X11R7.6 got released on the 20th of December 2010. There were several status updates about XServer 1.9 in experimental on this blog previously, but here s a more thorough review of this katamari. Terminology: that s how upstream calls a badged annual rollup release. In other words, the server, drivers, client libraries, protocols, fonts, and basic applications are all individually released, and a rollup of all those is released from time to time, with a version for all of those components. The term comes from a series of video games. (Explanations taken from a message by Alan Coopersmith.) Katamaris are released with a consolidated changelog, where all components and versions are listed. There s also a git shortlog available for each component, pointing back to freedesktop s git web interface for each and every commit. I modified the table of versions to get the following table, dropping the X11R7.5 column, and adding a distribution one, so as to mention where each component for X11R7.6 can be found. It boils down mostly to:

• almost all drivers are available in experimental, built against XServer 1.9.
• libraries with heavy changes went to experimental while those with fixes and low-impact changes went to unstable.
• protocols went to unstable, they can t really break anything.
• applications don t matter too much anyway, most of them could be considered like toys. Some went to experimental, others went to unstable.
• fonts were skipped in this table, they are pretty much boring.

So there s the summary:

Type	Component	Version	Distribution
	xserver	1.9.3	experimental
app	bdftopcf	1.0.3	unstable
app	iceauth	1.0.4	experimental
app	luit	1.1.0	experimental
app	mkfontdir	1.0.6	unstable
app	mkfontscale	1.0.8	unstable
app	sessreg	1.0.6	unstable
app	setxkbmap	1.2.0	experimental
app	smproxy	1.0.4	experimental
app	x11perf	1.5.2	experimental
app	xauth	1.0.5	unstable
app	xbacklight	1.1.2	will be dropped
app	xcmsdb	1.0.3	experimental
app	xcursorgen	1.0.4	experimental
app	xdpyinfo	1.2.0	experimental
app	xdriinfo	1.0.4	experimental
app	xev	1.1.0	experimental
app	xgamma	1.0.4	experimental
app	xhost	1.0.4	experimental
app	xinput	1.5.3	unstable
app	xkbcomp	1.2.0	experimental
app	xkbevd	1.1.2	experimental
app	xkbutils	1.0.3	experimental
app	xkill	1.0.3	experimental
app	xlsatoms	1.1.0	unstable
app	xlsclients	1.1.1	experimental
app	xmodmap	1.0.5	experimental
app	xpr	1.0.3	will be dropped
app	xprop	1.2.0	experimental
app	xrandr	1.3.4	experimental
app	xrdb	1.0.7	experimental
app	xrefresh	1.0.4	experimental
app	xset	1.2.1	experimental
app	xsetroot	1.1.0	experimental
app	xvinfo	1.1.1	experimental
app	xwd	1.0.4	experimental
app	xwininfo	1.1.1	experimental
app	xwud	1.0.3	experimental
data	bitmaps	1.1.1	unstable
data	cursors	1.0.3	unstable
doc	xorg-docs	1.6	unstable
doc	xorg-sgml-doctools	1.6	unstable
driver	xf86-input-acecad	1.4.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-aiptek	1.3.1	experimental
driver	xf86-input-evdev	2.5.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-joystick	1.5.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-keyboard	1.5.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-mouse	1.6.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-synaptics	1.3.0	experimental
driver	xf86-input-vmmouse	12.6.10	experimental
driver	xf86-input-void	1.3.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-apm	1.2.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-ark	0.7.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-ast	0.91.10	dropped
driver	xf86-video-ati	6.13.2	experimental
driver	xf86-video-chips	1.2.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-cirrus	1.3.2	experimental
driver	xf86-video-dummy	0.3.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-fbdev	0.4.2	experimental
driver	xf86-video-geode	2.11.10	todo: needs upload
driver	xf86-video-glide	1.1.0	experimental
driver	xf86-video-glint	1.2.5	experimental
driver	xf86-video-i128	1.3.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-i740	1.3.2	experimental
driver	xf86-video-intel	2.13.0	experimental
driver	xf86-video-mach64	6.8.2	experimental
driver	xf86-video-mga	1.4.13	experimental
driver	xf86-video-neomagic	1.2.5	experimental
driver	xf86-video-newport	0.2.3	todo: needs upload
driver	xf86-video-nv	2.1.18	will be dropped
driver	xf86-video-r128	6.8.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-rendition	4.2.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-s3	0.6.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-s3virge	1.10.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-savage	2.3.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-siliconmotion	1.7.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-sis	0.10.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-sisusb	0.9.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-suncg14	1.1.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-suncg3	1.1.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-suncg6	1.1.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-sunffb	1.2.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-sunleo	1.2.0	experimental
driver	xf86-video-suntcx	1.1.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-tdfx	1.4.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-tga	1.2.1	experimental
driver	xf86-video-trident	1.3.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-tseng	1.2.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-v4l	0.2.0	dropped
driver	xf86-video-vesa	2.3.0	experimental
driver	xf86-video-vmware	11.0.3	experimental
driver	xf86-video-voodoo	1.2.4	experimental
driver	xf86-video-wsfb	0.3.0	dropped
driver	xf86-video-xgi	1.6.0	dropped
driver	xf86-video-xgixp	1.8.0	dropped
font	fonts skipped
lib	libAppleWM	1.4.0	not for us
lib	libFS	1.0.3	unstable
lib	libICE	1.0.7	unstable
lib	libSM	1.2.0	unstable
lib	libWindowsWM	1.0.1	not for us
lib	libX11	1.4.0	experimental
lib	libXScrnSaver	1.2.1	unstable
lib	libXau	1.0.6	unstable
lib	libXaw	1.0.8	unstable
lib	libXcomposite	0.4.3	unstable
lib	libXcursor	1.1.11	unstable
lib	libXdamage	1.1.3	unstable
lib	libXdmcp	1.1.0	unstable
lib	libXext	1.2.0	experimental
lib	libXfixes	4.0.5	unstable
lib	libXfont	1.4.3	experimental
lib	libXft	2.2.0	experimental
lib	libXi	1.4.0	experimental
lib	libXinerama	1.1.1	unstable
lib	libXmu	1.1.0	unstable
lib	libXpm	3.5.9	unstable
lib	libXrandr	1.3.1	unstable
lib	libXrender	0.9.6	unstable
lib	libXRes	1.0.5	unstable
lib	libXt	1.0.9	experimental
lib	libXtst	1.2.0	unstable
lib	libXv	1.0.6	unstable
lib	libXvMC	1.0.6	unstable
lib	libXxf86dga	1.1.2	unstable
lib	libXxf86vm	1.1.1	unstable
lib	libdmx	1.1.1	unstable
lib	libfontenc	1.1.0	unstable
lib	libpciaccess	0.12.0	unstable
lib	libxkbfile	1.0.7	unstable
lib	libxtrans	1.2.6	unstable
proto	applewmproto	1.4.1	not for us
proto	bigreqsproto	1.1.1	unstable
proto	compositeproto	0.4.2	unstable
proto	damageproto	1.2.1	unstable
proto	dmxproto	2.3	unstable
proto	dri2proto	2.3	unstable
proto	fixesproto	4.1.2	unstable
proto	fontsproto	2.1.1	unstable
proto	glproto	1.4.12	unstable
proto	inputproto	2.0.1	unstable
proto	kbproto	1.0.5	unstable
proto	randrproto	1.3.2	unstable
proto	recordproto	1.14.1	unstable
proto	renderproto	0.11.1	unstable
proto	resourceproto	1.1.1	unstable
proto	scrnsaverproto	1.2.1	unstable
proto	videoproto	2.3.1	unstable
proto	windowswmproto	1.0.4	not for us
proto	xcmiscproto	1.2.1	unstable
proto	xextproto	7.1.2	unstable
proto	xf86bigfontproto	1.2.0	unstable
proto	xf86dgaproto	2.1	unstable
proto	xf86driproto	2.1.0	unstable
proto	xf86vidmodeproto	2.3	unstable
proto	xineramaproto	1.2	unstable
proto	x11proto	7.0.20	unstable
util	makedepend	1.0.3	unstable
util	macros	1.11.0	unstable
xcb	pthread-stubs	0.3	unstable
xcb	libxcb	1.7	experimental
xcb	proto	1.6	unstable

see you there?!

Today I discovered via digi.no that the Chrome developers, in a surprising announcement, yesterday announced plans to drop H.264 support for HTML5 <video> in the browser. The argument used is that H.264 is not a "completely open" codec technology. If you believe H.264 was free for everyone to use, I recommend having a look at the essay "H.264 Not The Kind Of Free That Matters". It is not free of cost for creators of video tools, nor those of us that want to publish on the Internet, and the terms provided by MPEG-LA excludes free software projects from licensing the patents needed for H.264. Some background information on the Google announcement is available from OSnews. A good read. :) Personally, I believe it is great that Google is taking a stand to promote equal terms for everyone when it comes to video publishing on the Internet. This can only be done by publishing using free and open standards, which is only possible if the web browsers provide support for these free and open standards. At the moment there seem to be two camps in the web browser world when it come to video support. Some browsers support H.264, and others support Ogg Theora and WebM (Dirac is not really an option yet), forcing those of us that want to publish video on the Internet and which can not accept the terms of use presented by MPEG-LA for H.264 to not reach all potential viewers. Wikipedia keep an updated summary of the current browser support. Not surprising, several people would prefer Google to keep promoting H.264, and John Gruber presents the mind set of these people quite well. His rhetorical questions provoked a reply from Thom Holwerda with another set of questions presenting the issues with H.264. Both are worth a read. Some argue that if Google is dropping H.264 because it isn't free, they should also drop support for the Adobe Flash plugin. This argument was covered by Simon Phipps in todays blog post, which I find to put the issue in context. To me it make perfect sense to drop native H.264 support for HTML5 in the browser while still allowing plugins. I suspect the reason this announcement make so many people protest, is that all the users and promoters of H.264 suddenly get an uneasy feeling that they might be backing the wrong horse. A lot of TV broadcasters have been moving to H.264 the last few years, and a lot of money has been invested in hardware based on the belief that they could use the same video format for both broadcasting and web publishing. Suddenly this belief is shaken. An interesting question is why Google is doing this. While the presented argument might be true enough, I believe Google would only present the argument if the change make sense from a business perspective. One reason might be that they are currently negotiating with MPEG-LA over royalties or usage terms, and giving MPEG-LA the feeling that dropping H.264 completely from Chroome, Youtube and Google Video would improve the negotiation position of Google. Another reason might be that Google want to save money by not having to pay the video tax to MPEG-LA at all, and thus want to move to a video format not requiring royalties at all. A third reason might be that the Chrome development team simply want to avoid the Chrome/Chromium split to get more help with the development of Chrome. I guess time will tell. Update 2011-01-15: The Google Chrome team provided more background and information on the move it a blog post yesterday.

I ve just been playing with icmptx, a system for tunneling IP over ICMP Echo which could be handy if I ever find myself blocked by firewalls. Unfortunately the documentation is lacking. Below is a sample configuration that works for me, all you have to do is to put the correct IP address in for SERVERIP in both scripts and it should work. I m not sure what the ideal value for the MTU is, 65535 is the largest possible. For transmission it usually won t make any difference as the occasions when I need such things will usually be download-only sessions and the ACK packets will be quite small. For receiving data the server has an MTU of 1500 on the Ethernet port so nothing bigger than that will come in. Presumably when downloading data the packets will be transmitted in two ICMP fragments.One interesting feature of the program is that it doesn t match requests and replies. I presume this is because any firewall that only allows one reply per echo request will probably ensure that the reply contents match the request contents, so they just assume that a firewall will let all ICMP echo/reply traffic through. The upside of this is that it should give lower round trip times than any tunneling system that polls for return data.I ve filed some Debian bug reports about it, bug #609413 is a request for it to set icmp_echo_ignore_all when it s running and also emulate the regular PING functionality. Bug #609412 is a request for it to assign the IP address to the tun0 interface. Bug #609414 is a request for the server side of it to call daemon(0,0).I won t leave this running. Having to run a virtual server with the regular ICMP functionality disabled is too much effort for the small benefit that using ICMP tunneling may offer over DNS tunneling.My configuration scripts (with the IP address removed) are below.ConfigurationServer#!/bin/sh
set -e
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
icmptx -s SERVERIP &
sleep 0.5
ifconfig tun0 mtu 65535 10.10.10.1 netmask 255.255.255.0Client#!/bin/sh
set -e
killall icmptx true
icmptx -c SERVERIP &
sleep 0.5
ifconfig tun0 mtu 65535 10.10.10.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
wait

As some of my readers may now, I'm a regular user of public transport. Even though I'm living in an area (far suburbs of Paris) where the use of cars for nearly everything is common, I managed up to now to not use my car for my daily commute. I was using the public bus line of our town, that starts close from our house and ends up at the local train station where I can commute to U line of Paris transport system (then C line, then another bus ride). You can compare this complicated 1h30 travel to the 35 minutes drive I would have if I was using my car. I *was*. I'll stop from tomorrow. The reason is simple: my U train start hour is 6h57. The bus formerly started at 6h36, then reached the train station at 6h51, which was a quite good commute. That made me leave our house at about 6h25, considering a 10min walk from the house to the bus stop. That's 32 minutes for....3 kilometers. Already needs some motivation, right? This changed today (with minimal notice). To catch the same train, I should have a bus at 6h31, thus leave 5 minutes earlier, so *nearly 40 minutes before the train schedule*. Considering that driving from our place to the train station is about 12 minutes, the deal is now made. I'll stop being the only non captive person using the bus in our neighbourhood (all others are people who can't use a car). So much for environment, etc. This is an 'interesting' way to understand why it is so easy to discourage proper use of public transport and minimize the impact on environment. A small change can lead to such effects. Of course, as you may expect, I won't stop there. Letters to the (public-funded) bus company and people in charge of public transport in our city (the bus line deficit is funded by the city), will follow very soon. Tehre are indeed many other reasons why people don't use our local buses that much. One being that, even though there are 2 trains every 15 minutes leaving the station (U and N lines), both alternated with a 7.5 minutes interval....there is only one bus every 15 minutes....on each bus line. Sometimes, even, you don't know why, there's a 23 minutes gap. Imagine waiting for your bus for more than 20 minutes at night in winter...when you're about 2-3 kilometers away from your home... Sure, that would need a lot of funding to have a really convenient system. But how about spending the billions of euros spent in super-highways, toll tunnels, etc., in public transport infrastructure? Funding my local bus line to have 2 buses every 15 minutes at peak hours would cost about the price of 100m of a 3-lane highway, for one year. Make the deal. (All that will indeed reinforce my backup system : run from my house to the train station, for 3km and 15 minutes...which involves another run at the end of my train ride, for 4km and 20 minutes. That, however, involves some "logistics" organization to be sure that I don't spend the day working in my stinking running suit. That also means up to 56km run every week, which I can't always do, particularly if I plan a race for the next week-end!) Another side effect: I will have less time for Debian as my bus commutes were used for hacking, while it will be much more difficult when driving my car to the train station, isn't it?

Older versions of Psi jabber client required manual changing status to online to leave auto-offline state. It was very handy for me: I connect to my jabber account from two locations (from home and from office), so after I left one of these locations, auto-offline soon happened, and Psi at that location did not return online until I returned and manually instructed it to re-login. Unfortunately newer versions of Psi (I guess, starting from commit 4a54500c on git://git.psi-im.org/psi.git, which was between 0.11 and 0.12 releases), and also Psi+, behave differently: if user activity is detected on the desktop, auto-offline state is left, and status becomes online again similar to leaving auto-away and auto-xa states. This change is not good for me, at least in two situations:

• vnc connection to home from office or to office from home I use this fairy often,
• occasional use of my home session by my wife for quick web browsing or similar.

In both these situations, Psi client not at my current location becomes online, which can cause routing incoming messages to wrong location. I don t state that new behaviour is somehow worse than old behaviour. But for my use cases, I want to get old behaviour back. I ve done some code reading. I think that point to fix is near the bottom of PsiAccount::secondsIdle() method, where any auto status is disabled if no timeout condition currently exists. This should be changed so that auto-offline state won t be left if some config key is set. I will try to implement this change soon (or at least I hope I will try ) P.S.
To make things even better, a check of some external condition could be performed to decide if client should return online from auto-offline or not. Then fancy things could be set up, e.g. return to online at office only if my mobile phone is currently registered in the office wifi network not really required but cool.

WordPress has many alternate built-in feeds: per category, per tag, per author, per search-keyword. But in some cases, you want feeds built with some more advanced logic. Let s look at the available options. WordPress advanced built-in feeds You can create feeds for unions or intersections of tags, you just have to use a URL like /tag/foo,bar/feed/ (all articles tagged with foo or bar) or /tag/foo+bar/feed/ (all articles tagged with foo and bar). You can also have feeds excluding a category, although that requires you to know the category identifier (and hardcode it in the URL like this: /?feed=rss2&cat=-123 where 123 is the category id that you want to exclude). But there s no simple way to have a feed that excludes articles with a given tag. The best solution found involves creating a custom feed. I ll show you a variation of this below. Creating a custom feed

1. First of, install the Feed Wrangler plugin, it will take care of registering our custom feeds with wordpress.
2. Go to Settings > Feed Wrangler in your WordPress administrative interface and create a new feed, let s call it myfeed .
3. You should now create a feed-myfeed.php file and put it in your current theme s directory. The initial content of that file should be this:

   <?php
   include('wp-includes/feed-rss2.php');
   ?>

4. At this point, you already have a new feed that you can access at /feed/myfeed/ (or /?feed=myfeed). It s a complete feed like the main one.

Now, we re going to look at ways to customize this feed. We re going to do this by changing/overriding the default query that feed-rss2.php s loop will use. A feed excluding articles with a tag If you want to create a feed that excludes the tag foo , you could use this: That was relatively easy, thanks to the tag__not_in query parameter. Now you can further customize the feed by adding supplementary query parameters to the $args array. The documentation of query_posts details the various parameters that you can use. A feed excluding articles with a custom field (meta-data) I went further because I did not want to use a tag to exclude some posts: that tag would have been public even if it was only meaningful to me. So I decided to use a custom field to mark the posts to exclude from my new feed. I named the field no_syndication and I always give it the value 1 . This time it s not so easy because we have no query parameter that can be used to exclude posts based on custom fields. We re going to use the post__not_in parameter that can be used to exclude a list of posts. But we must first generate the list of posts that we want to exclude. Here we go: A feed with modified content You might want to add a footer to the articles that are syndicated. I use the Ozh Better Feed plugin for this but it applies to all your feeds. You could do that sort of transformation only in your customized feed by using the WordPress filter named the_content_feed. Here s a simple example: I ll stop here but obviously you have lots of options and many ways to tweak all the snippets above. They have been tested with WordPress 3.0.4. Note that in all those examples, I took care to not duplicate the code from feed-rss2.php, instead I used include() to execute it. That way my custom feeds will automatically benefit from all the future enhancements and fixes made by the WordPress developers. But if you have to modify the XML structure of your custom feeds, you can paste the content of feed-rss2.php in your file and change it like you want

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At work we run a pair of ISC DHCP servers running Debian Lenny in a classical ISC DHCP failover setup which provide DHCP service to several subnets, some only with static IPs (e.g. for printers) and some with half static and half dynamic IPs. Today I got a call from a user that her laptop doesn t get an IP despite it s correctly registered in our MAC address database from which we generate the group sections of the dhcpd.conf. Everything looked fine, but every DHCPDISCOVER package got logged in the syslog on both servers like this:

Jan  7 14:34:39 dhcp1 dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 01:23:45:67:89:ab via eth2: peer holds all free leases
Jan  7 14:34:39 dhcp2 dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 01:23:45:67:89:ab via eth2: peer holds all free leases

Searching the web for this error message mostly results in mails which say If have this on one server but not the other, you soon run out of IP addresses , but none which mentions what happens if you got them on both sides. Following a coworker s idea of adding both servers to the search term, I found Debian bug #563449 (dhcp3-server: Incorrect peer holds all free leases log entries) which turned out as configuration error or at least unexpected configuration (machine was blocked from getting an IP on purpose) and misleading error messages. So I checked under which circumstances this computer would not get an IP despite it had a static IP configured:

  host somehost  
    hardware ethernet 01:23:45:67:89:ab;
    fixed-address 192.0.2.123;
   

That computer would not get an IP address in any subnet which has different IP range and no dynamic IP addresses. And even if I comment out the fixed-address setting, it wouldn t get an IP in any static-IPs-only subnet either. And *bingo*, that computer was plugged into the printer subnet which has only static IPs, e.g. in the 198.51.100.x range. So if you get the peer holds all free leases error message from both your DHCP servers, chances are very high that the mentioned MAC address should really not get an IP address on this network (as it does :-). The error messages are just somewhat misleading. Hope, this saves someone some time. :-)

You might be aware of GRUB s loopback option for booting an ISO, I wrote about it in Boot an ISO via Grub2 more than a year ago. A few months ago Goswin von Brederlow came up with this idea:

grml functions great as rescue system. So it would be nice to have a boot entry for it in grub instead of having to go look for the CD when needed. To make installing and updating simple it would be great if one could install this as a normal debian package which would register itself in grub (and maybe lilo too).

What a lovely idea: no need for a CD or USB stick as long as the bootloader and the harddisk are still working. Minimal manual intervention needed to keep it up2date and working sounds like the perfect rescue system. Now since end of 2010 a new stable version of sysadmin s favorite live system (AKA Grml 2010.12) is available and the great news is that we came up with two independent solutions known as grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot. Having shipped them to one of my customers already I d like to write some words about it and why you should also consider using it on all your systems where GRUB2 is available. grml-rescueboot uses GRUB2 and its loopback feature for booting. Grml as well as Ubuntu provide all what s needed out-of-the-box. If you re interested in the details check out Jordan Uggla s excellent Loopback.cfg webpage in the supergrubdisk wiki. The best about it: you can provide custom bootoptions automatically when booting Grml. For example just set CUSTOM_BOOTOPTIONS= ssh=grml2011 in /etc/default/grml-rescueboot and the Grml rescue system will automatically start the OpenSSH server with the specified argument as password for user grml. Of course you can use all the other nifty bootoptions like scripts/netscript/ to further customize your Grml rescue system. [A note to other distributions like Ubuntu: I'd be interested to establish a mechanism to pass kernel options for loopback boot in a standardized way, drop me a note if you're interested in this.] grub-imageboot uses GRUB2 and syslinux memdisk to boot ISOs and floppy images. It doesn t rely on the loopback feature but instead maps the ISO into the memory directly. This is great for Linux ISOs that can t and won t support the the loopback feature (and have everything inside their initrd so the ISO doesn t have to find itself during booting), like BIOS or firmware updates. Also for example FreeDOS and Alpharev are known to work just fine. But sadly memdisk ISO emulation doesn t work with all Linux systems, as documented in the syslinux wiki. The good news is that Grml supports the memdiskfind/phram/mtdblock approach out-of-the-box. As far as I know therefore Grml is the first Debian based live system supporting memdisk ISO boot, though my patches already went to the Debian-Live project so if you re using live-boot >=2.0.14-1 or >=2.0.12-1+grml.04 your live system should be able to boot via memdisk ISO emulation as well. Summary: If you want to boot a Linux system which supports loopback.cfg use grml-rescueboot as its a more powerful tool to boot Linux live systems like Grml and Ubuntu. If you want to boot non-Linux systems (BIOS-/Firmware-Updates/FreeDOS/ .) use grub-imageboot. Alright how do you deploy this solution? Just grab and install grml-rescueboot and/or grub-imageboot. To deploy grml-rescueboot (adjust $VERSION if you want to use another flavour):

# choose Grml version:
VERSION=grml64-medium_2010.12
# create directory
mkdir -p /boot/grml
# download and verify ISO
cd /boot/grml
wget download.grml.org/$ VERSION .iso ,.md5 
md5sum -c $ VERSION .iso.md5

To deploy grub-imageboot:

# choose Grml version:
VERSION=grml64-medium_2010.12
# create directory
mkdir -p /boot/images
# download and verify ISO
cd /boot/images
wget download.grml.org/$ VERSION .iso ,.md5 
md5sum -c $ VERSION .iso.md5

That s it! Now when running update-grub you should get something like:

# update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.36-grml64
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-2.6.36-grml64
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found memtest86+ multiboot image: /boot/memtest86+_multiboot.bin
  No volume groups found
Found Grml ISO image: /boot/grml/grml64-medium_2010.12.iso
Found memdisk: /boot/memdisk
Found iso image: /boot/images/grml64-medium_2010.12.iso
done

Voil , when rebooting your system you should see something like: The Grml Rescue System entry is what grml-rescueboot provides and Bootable ISO Image is what s provided by grub-imageboot. Just select the entry you d like to use, press enter and and you should get the bootsplash of the according ISO. BTW: I ve tested this with Ubuntu 10.10 too, grml-rescueboot works out-of-the-box with the Ubuntu ISO as well, it just doesn t support the memdisk ISO boot by grub-imageboot (yet). Tip: if you want to use grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot with the same ISOs without having them twice on the disk just point the configuration option IMAGES in /etc/default/grub-imageboot to the according directory (like /boot/grml). Note: if you re using the ext 2,3,4 filesystem on the partition that s being used for /boot please be aware that you need GRUB >=1.98+20100804-12 (newer version is already available in Debian/unstable and hopefully migrates to squeeze in time) or GRUB >=1.99~20101122-1 because of the INDIRECT_BLOCKS support, see #543924 for the details. PS: We think about providing grml-rescueboot and grub-imageboot within official Debian. If you re interested in seeing integration support for other distributions as well please help and drop us a note.

So, 2010 ended and it's now time for me to make a small summary for my running activities. At first, it's more and more obvious that running became an increasing part of my life. Sometimes eating the free time I was using for Debian work....and sometimes just filling holes in my daily activities, where I was just doing nothing..:-) According to my running watch(es) records, I ran for 2172km this year in about 196 hours (8.25 days) at an average speed of 11.1km/h. Indeed, the speed ranges from 10km/h in the hardest trail runs up to 13.5km/h in the fastest (and shortest) asphalt runs. I actually never run at "slow" paces, which is probably not the best for training as all official training plans do include slow runs. But, eh, this is how it works for me..:) I ran 12 official or semi official races, ranging from 5km cross-country races up to marathons. More proeminently speaking, I ran 3 half-marathons, 2 marathons and one long distance trail race (33km) that is worth being counted as a marathon..:). I also broke my personal best times for 10km (48'05", ran alone), half-marathon (1h37') and marathon (3h40'). Quite a good year, indeed..:-) I'm currently busy building my plans for 2011. Some are already decided:

• first half-marathon at Bullion on Feb 20th. This is the first organized in the Paris area and I like this race.
• first peak in late March/early April: I'll run the Paris Eco-trail 50km race that starts from Versailles Castle and reaches Eiffel Tower....through woods in the South and South-West neighbourhood, with 1000m positive slope. The plan is running is at a very slow pace, targeting 5h30 or even 6h...because two weeks later, I'll run my now yearly Paris marathon. There, I'll target 3h35 or 3h40...but that will mostly depend on how the Eco Trail went on.
• In May, I might be running the 35km race of "Trail des Cerfs" in my neighbourhood (Rambouillet forest, west of Paris area). Nice and "not too hard" trail race with "only" 500 to 600m positive slope.
• Later on is a bit more vague but the second peak should be either the Saint lyon night trail from St-Etienne to Lyon (69km, 1300m positive slope, 1700m negative) or a much smaller night raid, namely Le Puy-Firminy, still in the area of St-Etienne, my birth town (67km, 1600m positive slope, 1700m negative). Two very different races as Saint lyon, in early December, is THE mythical trail in France, with up to 10,000 starters (but only 3,900 finishers this year because of snow) while Le Puy-Firminy, mid-November, is a much smaller local race (200-250 runners and walkers) with less trails and more small country/mountain roads.
• I'll add to this a marathon "somewhere" around September/October. It could be the Berlin marathon if I manage to organize the trip as well as succeed in getting registered.

In general, I'll probably put more focus on trail and ultra (above martahon) runs. 2012 could then be the year of my first 100km race..:-) What will be fun will be reading this in January 2012 and see what I have completed among all these goals..:-)

Once again, a polemic regarding how to properly integrate the Ruby language and libraries with the Debian distribution has been ignited. Similar arguments were presented in November and December 2008 and September 2010 And excuse me for just refering to my own blog, but there are links to some other posts from there... and there will surely be many others I just missed. There were even nice collaboration attempts (such as DebGem, announced in January 2009... But which apparently never stuck on, as it is still listed as in its public Beta period and lists only support for Debian 4.0 and Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10). Some days ago, while I was on vacation, I received a mail from Lucas Nussbaum expressing the burnout he had been suffering from this situation. Some days after that, he posted a corresponding blog post - Giving up on Ruby packaging. The comments following his post are most interesting The one comment I'd like to highlight (noting I skimmed a whole deal of them) is by Paul Brannan, one of the original RubyGems authors. Yes, possibly the design criteria for Gems included some mutually-conflicting goals, and they cover some of Debian's goals. Unfortunately, this conflicting criteria... Was resolved to the opposite way we would have wanted (specifically, that a sysadmin should be able to install software with the same tools he was already familiar with). And of course, there are deeper disagreements, which are rightly stemmed from different priorities: Debian (+derivatives) is meant to make user's and sysadmin's lifes simpler. Gems are meant to make developers' lifes simpler. And while all developers are some sort of users, and sysadminsthe reverse is (obviously) not so. A developer maintaining several different codebases will surely suffer (well, this particular developer has surely suffered) if he has to maintain them all using coherent versions of system libraries. When a system is programmed, its developers want to use the greatest, latest tools to offer the best experience and functionality. And it's natural for libraries to evolve over time. However, any sysadmin will grind their teeth at the prospect of having many different versions of libraries, as the Gem model proposes. Why? Well, I was bitten by a minor example of it Bug fixes do not get backported. Of course, if simple bugs are not backported, security and stability of the system as a whole suffers. Often, new software versions will not only add functionality, but improve on how things are done. Not only bugs get corrected, but we get better response times, better memory handling, etc. It might sound harsh to say this, and even more, as a developer it feels I am talking against myself But while development time should be minimized during the system design/implementation, once systems are in production, it should be used to allow for friendlier sysadmin relations. I have to wear both hats at my real-life job. So, what is my take on this? Of course, blaming myself for choosing the wrong version is a no-go. When evaluating a library before using it in my projects, I try to look at its history and API-stability. APIs that change often speak about immature libraries which are still trying to get the right way to implement their functionality; just-started projects might be great and revolutionary, but they do not yet show any kind of long-term committment... And can lead (and have often led me) to painful rewrites when the Next Big Thing is reached. As for the users: Even if your favorite language has the best and friendliest distribution method, users just do not care about what language was a particular piece of software implemented in. Users want to be able to install and uninstall with their system's usual tools. Directly using Gems, CPAN, PEAR and whatnot is just unnatural for users, however convenient they are for developers. Distributions offer a non-technical advantage in this regard as well: A human filter. As an example, as I write this there are 19392 Ruby Gems and 19092 Perl modules in CPAN (note that CPAN stores some older versions but discourages authors from keeping too many - So no, they are still very different in size). Debian has around 30,000 packages. Why is that? Because all Debian packages _must_ be human-generated, human-reviewed, human-submitted. This means, a person must think each packaged piece of code is worth packaging, is stable enough and provides value to users as it is, and is fit for being part of a stable release. I am not saying with this that 90% of CPAN and Gems are crap I am saying that they are probably early implementations, to be installed, tested and improved by developers, and still not apt for general public use. Or maybe not interesting enough to be packaged as a service for the non-techie public at large. Oh, and one last point: Ruby is not a new language anymore. It is a mature, powerful language with different implementations, every time more stable... But it is a language deeply affected by the (not so new anymore either) the appearance of Rails. Why do I say this? Because although the language is in no way tied to Web development, many of its strongest uses are Web-oriented. How does this affect the current discussion? Well, because many people argue that users are no longer needed to install the software. Web systems are installed by sysadmins and used via a Web browser, and sysadmins are expected be more skilled than casual users. Still, in Debian (and in other distributions, surely) we try to make sysadmin's lives simpler I have (again, talking out of personal experience) installed several webapps (and system tools, and whatnot) for which I never followed any instructions besides aptitude install foo Using different languages, frameworks, and so on. Can I troubleshoot their installs? Probably, as there is a common logic for how the distribution I have chosen and specialized in works. Can I find causes for bugs in them? Possibly, although there are some languages and frameworks I dare not touch. Can I get help on getting them out of a tight spot? Surely, as there is a central bug tracking system for my distribution And one of the maintainer's tasks is to separate the problems related to the distribution (packaging, installing, simple user questions and misconceptions) to those derived from real bugs upstream. Anyway I am not saying that our way is the best way. No, by a long shot. Again, developers should have an easy, convenient way for installing whatever they want to play with. And to publish it without jumping through hoops. With this post, I'm only trying to express again why Debian works the way it does. And hope for better cooperation in the future. And as for several comments of what I read in Lucas' post, I think that there is interest for this synergy among some of the most committed Ruby people.