BarCamp Montr al 2 is coming up soon. Yup, our second big full-day unconference is happening next Saturday at the SAT. We're bigger and better this time, and we'd love to have you show up. What is BarCamp Montr al? It's an unconference. It's a gathering of active, interesting people who want to get together and share our experiences. It's for individuals and groups, artists and technologists, young and old. Nominally, there's an Internet-technology feel because that's what BarCamps around the world have traditionally done. But because Montr al has such a vibrant arts scene, we've also got talks that are about anything and everything. So how do you participate? Well, you can't just be a spectator. Nope, unabashed consumption is not our way. Show up on Saturday and give a presentation on a project that you've been working on. Or show up a little early and help us set up. Or stay late and clean while chatting with the exciting people you've met. We want you to be part of our community. We've got fifteen-minute presentations ranging on exciting topics like:

• Taking good photographs
• Building Web 2.0 applications
• Online multi-player games
• Lasers
• East-asian culture
• Starting a company

Have you got something to say? Or something to show? I hope so. Now that I have you convinced, you're going to want to know how you (and your interesting friends) can attend BarCamp Montr al 2
Saturday, 28 April 2007
9:30 18:00
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Upcoming Google Maps ) See you there!

I didn't intend to write (ok, rant...) on this topic again, but a few days ago, this "AppArmor FAQ", was posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing list. Again, this is a lot of 'marketing stuff', and doesn't have the facts quite right...Some quotes:

In the traditional UNIX model, files do have names but not labels, and applications only operate in terms of those names.

No. In the traditional UNIX model, filenames point to inodes, and the inodes contain data such as file modification dates and permissions. This is where SELinux stores the labels it uses for access control. In fact, the "unix owner" and "unix group" are pretty much the same thing as SELinux labels. And also work pretty much the same way.

Contrary to popular belief, AppArmor is *not* "Pathnames R Us", but rather "Use native abstractions to mediate stuff": when you mediate something, you should use the native syntax that users normally use to access the object.

Maybe the appropriate term would have been "naive abstractions"?And, no, security systems shouldn't be designed around what a user can easily grasp, because that might just not work... it should be designed around the way resources are handled and how you can successfully restrict access."Contrary to popular belief", SELinux *does* use path names. Actually in a very convenient way for the users. So I wouldn't claim SELinux is really harder to use than AppArmor because of its use of path names.The difference is that SELinux doesn't rely on the path names, but it still gives the user the possibility to use them. In fact, the only way I know to get a proplerly labeled filesystem is based on path names.If I'd for example keep my web stuff in /home/www, I can tell SELinux that the appropriate label is httpd_sys_content_t by doing

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_content_t /home/www
restorecon -R /home/www

In AppArmor, I'd need to modify the policy for several applications to achieve this, because of it's dependency on path names. SELinux also uses an abstraction. One that is very convenient for users actually. SELinux does access control on object classes. What I'm doing in above example is to put these files into the "Web site data files" class. So please stop scaring people of "labels". That is just the technical term for what is an "object class", a concept every developer will be familiar with. (SELinux policy development has a couple of OOP-like features, btw., for example it is possible to give an application access to 'all log files'.)There are, however, some true statements hidden in there:

We also acknowledge that pathname based access control requires a way to perform pathname matching in the kernel, and this comes at a cost higher than comparing object labels [...]

So by providing string matching in the kernel, AppArmor trades run-time performance to grant reduced administrative work. It is however not obvious how large the difference in "reduced administrative work" is between AppArmor testing the filename "run-time" compared to SELinux using filenames to relabel files "on demand" (or, with restorecond, even on creation by using inotify).What I still seriously dislike is the FUD spread by AppArmor people such as

Label-based security (exemplified by SELinux, and its predecessors in MLS systems) attaches security policy to the data. As the data flows through the system, the label sticks to the data, and so security policy with respect to this data stays intact. This is a good approach for ensuring secrecy, the kind of problem that intelligence agencies have.

Why should this only be useful to "intelligence agencies"? Some people live in countries with very strict privacy requirements, and we might want to use these techniques to lessen the risk of leaking data. In AppArmor, I can copy a file with private customer data to the web server directory, and it becomes readable by the web server. In SELinux, the file will still be unreadable by the web server. Does that really sound like "only useful to intelligence agencies" to you?Dear AppArmor people, please stop trying to invoke fear of the NSA, just to make people use AppArmor. That makes you look very untrustworthy, you know...The SELinux kernel code is part of the Linux kernel, AppArmor is not. So in theory, that code has been reviewed much better than yours, and is maybe even less likely to contain a "NSA backdoor" than yours. Changes to SELinux are openly discussed on a mailing list, and go through peer review there. They foolow a very strict coding style, which makes review easier; obfuscated code doesn't have a place there. It's not like we were running a binary blob from the NSA we can't have a look at.

Steven's blog post reminded me that I had to make a note about the two email responses I received to my own. I received one email from Pro Guns Person A quite quickly after my blog post went up. He was quite civil, and had things to say such as:

The truth is, if a few good citizens were armed and nearby, they would have had a chance to stop the killer before he could do any more harm.

and went on to say how if a person really wanted to, they'd break laws to get guns, so gun control doesn't achieve anything, except leaving the good guys unable to defend themselves. Sure, they'd break laws to get guns. You can't stop them if they really want to, but you can make it harder. And you have to make it harder universally. It's no good if one state cracks right down, if people can just pop over to the next state and pick up a firearm instead. I agree with Steven. Leave the gun toting to the people trained in their use (i.e. law enforcement). Frankly, it disturbs me that "defending yourself" equates to being able to shoot the attacker. I think it's Texas where you can legally shoot trespassers. Scary stuff. Pro Guns Person A went on to say:

To close, again without intending offense, please do not call for gun control if you aren't even a citizen of this country. The real problem is the societal issues that drive people to do these things. The truth is, fifty years ago in this country, people could leave loaded guns in their unlocked cars, even in high school parking lots...and nothing like this ever happened. But now, even though we have far more restrictive gun laws, things like this do happen, because of the societal problems.

I have the right to express my opinion, irrespective of my citizenship, as do you, Mr Pro Guns Person A. You don't have to like my opinion, just as I don't have to like yours, but I respect your right to have your opinion. No offense taken, either. You were very polite in putting across your point, I appreciate it. (By the way, I agree. Society's gone to pot.) Pro Guns Person B's email was along a similar theme: the bad people will always get their mitts on a gun, and the good people won't be able to defend themselves.

Think about these figures (I'll write about the US, since that's the nation you wrote about now): In the state of Arizona the gun per person ratio is 2,5 (on average 2,5 guns owned by 1 person, and these are the legally purchased ones). In the state of New York there is an official prohibition on guns. So why is it that New York has the higher armed crime rate among those two? (and one of the highest across the country)

I don't think reverting the entire US to a "wild wild west" scenario is really going to help matters at all. Sarah was saying that she'd found some statistic somewhere, probably saying something like what this page is saying. Now this was done at a Federal level, so that's why it worked, whereas anything done piecemeal, is going to cause a situation like what Pro Gun Person B was describing in his email.

I've started Lenny related work on my tasksel branch, hopefully joeyh will merge some of that, until now the new stuff is:

* Add lamp-server task.
Linux + Apache + Mysql + PHP, Python and Perl (LAMP^3). In other words this th web-server task + mysql-server and phpmyadmin. Keep in mind that our database-server for Etch installs PostgreSQL so you can install lamp-server + database-server and go with a full LAMP stack and both mysql and pgsql.

* Add lightweight-web-server task.
lighttpd with php4 and php5 support, perl and python are side effects due to fastcgi.

* Reintroduce backup-server task.
Bacula and related tools, basically.

* Add ltsp-server task.
This experimental task doesn't install a complete ltsp system yet, you need to run ltsp-build-client manually. Actual work for a fresh install is being done into ltsp-client-builder udeb.

My goal for Lenny is if you select both desktop environment and ltsp server you will end with a system ready to provide GNOME (KDE or Xfce) for thin or fat clients on the LAN. We just need the task ready, polish ltsp-client-builder, and solve some pending stuff in other packages: I think I've sorted out the nfs-kernel-server export issue (thanks Steinar!), we're still missing dhcp and tftp configuration or the possibility to 'preseed' it (wishlist bugs opened) to have all this working out of the box. Once in place you will be able to impress your friends spreading Debian on the LAN using a usb keychain or live cd.

Get ready for some more server related work, but I'll keep up with the desktop stuff also. :-)

So, found glusterfs today, looks quite interesting, may have to play when I've got some spare tuits... Also, I'm about to take over upstream development of xmms-scrobbler, so currently thinking of which revision control system to use... I'm very tempted to use tla because I know it and use it for everything else that I do, but I've been tempted by the evils that are git, hg and bzr... most likely going with tla because it makes the most sense to my often broken little mind, and I like the abrowse command rather too much :) What else? Probably lots of stuff, oh, looking for a nice multiple project group type build daemon - we've got 4 main branches of a piece of software at work, and packages should be auto built for each of the branches on a commit (ish) - we're currently running 4 copies of cruise control to build the debian packages, that's a little bit on the heavy side, though - and all it'd need to make it actually work for me would be to have a project group config option, so you can assign a number of processes per project group... but it doesn't have that - I just discovered CruiseControl.rb, which is a bit lighter, but it's still not quite what I'm after. May end up writting a small python buildd to deal with it instead, and hook it in to the svn repository with some post commit hooks. Also got a whole lot of Nagios configuration to finish off to monitor a bunch of servers. So, that's a small brain dump... more when I remember what the hell it was that I was supposed to be doing - been a hectic day!

Two semi-related things. Firstly, I just got notice that North Somerset Council are going to let North Somerset Housing pointlessly tarmac over a square of grass near us. Planning application 07/P/0464/F claims to provide 3 additional car parking spaces, but it tarmacs 7m width of grass while marking 6m width of current tarmac as no-parking: a net addition of 1m! Not enough for even one additional car! Now they've made this officially-acceptable reasoning, I reckon it will feature in a planning application for building more houses on the village's green spaces. How about: you can build a new house as long as you mark an existing house as uninhabitable? Secondly, Clevedon residents are petitioning the Prime Minister to stop Tesco expansion as reported in the Mercury. Expanding the Tescopoly in Clevedon will harm what already looks to me like an endangered town centre. OK, it's not the PM's responsibility to stop one store expanding in one town, but it is his government's planning policies which are aiding and abetting the continued growth of unsustainable 'big box' stores. I can see Clevedon from my office window. I'd need binoculars to spot Morrisons, but I think Tesco is visible with the naked eye already from the top of Worlebury hill. Every Little Hurts but they just keep on rolling like Renard, not noticing the pain.

I just released new version of Gammu, you can download it from download server. There is quite a lot of changes:

• Work with AT phones which can not write SMS to ME (bug #282).
• Increse limits for SMS backups (this requires dynamic allocation).
• Development switched to Subversion, see README for details.
• Detect Motorola Bluetooth port (Daniel Gimpelevich).
• Fixup AT driver to work with Samsung SGH X160.
• Support for last modified field in vCalendar.
• Adjust vCalendar entries from SE phones on DST (bug #81).
• Fix updating of delivery report date in SMSD (thanks to Peter Stuge).
• Fix format strings for Win32 build.
• Fix crash when no config exists.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with MySQL.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with PostgreSQL.
• MakeTerminatedCall can be now called more times in batch mode.
• Support for MinGW crosscompation with Gettext.

As I can now build full featured Gammu binary for Windows, the download size increased a lot. If you thing it is too big, I can start to produce two sets of binaries.

Aside from Paul Graham's list of reasons not to do a startup on your own (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html), there's another very simple one: pronouns. It's much, much nicer to be able to write "we" on a corporate web site. "We" could be anything from 2 to IBM's zillions, but it implies a real organization, whereas "I" implies some guy off working on his own. Of course, you could lie and write "we", but that will probably catch up with you at an inopportune moment.

Who are the next generation of Debianists? Are they all still coming to us out of different OS backgrounds, or do we now have the significant beginnings of a home grown generation, born and raised in Debian-using families and now making their voices heard? I hope that Debian Jr. will encourage this kind of generational growth of the project. When recently I rewrote the guiding principles of Debian Jr., my vision was a Debian that children would identify as their own. I expect they will be eager to add their own ideas as they grow up with it. It was pointed out to me today that there is some evidence that this is already happening (thanks for the link, Matthew Wilcox). As for my own kids, ages 16, 15, 12, 9 and 5, only the oldest have ever used some system at home other than Debian¹. They all comfortably use our Debian systems daily, discussing regularly with me what they need. This leads to filing bugs and patches on their behalf², and inspires further development of the Debian Jr. project. So, in at least this sense, the children of Debian are already contributing members of Debian, if not voting members. The ideas of families are improving Debian for everyone. As the project grows, I expect the ways in which families will change Debian will be more significant, not only technically but also in Debian’s character.

¹ Before we started using Debian in 1995, the family system was a VT-420 terminal connected to the Solaris system running our community freenet. At that time our kids would sit in my lap and play at typing into pico for their amusement.

² For instance, I was pleased to discover the other day that my egoboo patch was accepted. That was a direct result of my kids asking me to make it work for them.

Update: niq commented:

"Calm down! It only says "may not work", not anything about "enforcing". That reads to me like butt-covering rather than anything more sinister."

I know the public pages don't yet say it, but the report by Kit that I linked wrote about a message on a logged-in screen:

"Just logged into my account today to find that Barclays online intend to support and guarantee to work with only certain browsers and operating systems. Linux is not listed. Seem to be travelling in the opposite direction to Scottish Power whose website appears to have lost all vestiges of its original "no Linux" stance."

Who to believe? A later message from Dave Liquorice reports:

"Had a reply from Barclays, it basic boils down to them insisting on 128 bit encryption."

Surely free software has done 128-bit for a long time, so why isn't it listed?

I've been using GNU a2ps from ancient days. I prefer to print out things prettily and read them on papers (with highlighters at hand) rather than on computer displays. You may safely say I'm a caveman. Unfortunately, the upstream development of GNU a2ps is basically dead. I know there are some promising replacements (most notably Cedilla), but the problem is, I got used to the good ol' GNU a2ps too much. It still works for me. And to make it worse, I'm a Lisp illiterate (do not throw stones at me, please). So, I finally took over the official maintainership of GNU a2ps, and now preparing a new maintenance release. No flashy new features (such as the much needed UTF-8 support), but most of easy bugs are fixed. You can obtain the current tarball: http://people.debian.org/~mhatta/a2ps-4.13c-rc3.tar.gz (I'd like to upload this to alpha.gnu.org, but GNU sysadmins don't give me the needed permission yet). Or, you might want to obtain it through the anonymous CVS:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/a2ps co -r a2ps-4-1x a2ps

Note that specifying the tag "a2ps-4-1x" is important. So, at least you have someone to blame w.r.t. GNU a2ps now. Please give it a try and tell me how you think (Debian packaging is underway). The a2ps mailing list is also revived, it's not yet another spam honeypot anymore. Join there if you want. Or, if you are kind enough, please join the development at Savannah.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!

Just quit my full time job, (hopefully) I'll just work for them keep leading the Sacix (www.sacix.org.br) development and not also in front of a team maintaining our ISP in parallel as I was. Sacix is yet another Debian/Ltsp based distribution but unlike many others from this camp we aren't focused on education. Yes, 0-200 age range! There's GNOME by default and regular apps (including gcompris, but as i wrote, education isn't the primary goal), we're also a custom Debian distribution and we've multiple profiles (artwork and set of packages). In other words almost any community telecenter project or lab can fit over our infrastructure. Sacix has more than 100,000 end users!

Sacix was all over the place during FISL in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Three setups running and the feedback of our upcoming Etch based release called Sagui was great! Arara (Sagui-1) supported only pt_BR, with Sagui we wanted to make sure that we weren't turning the life harder for English and Spanish speakers. Unfortunately, the website is over trac and I would like to hear about sane solutions on how to handle bugs in these three languages and a good plugin to start translating the wiki pages. Comments?

Thanks Paulo for contributing with usbfloppy drivers support (yes, this weird stuff really exists), tons of tests and ideas! We've been working very hard during the last two years releasing minor stuff here and there and nobody seemed to care, when we put the pieces together they finally get it and recognize it as something. ;-) Thanks for the others contributors, you know who you are and 'Sacis' wiki article too.

Btw, I'm just having a break from a 'code merging' session with Vagrant Cascardian. New ltsp package coming soon! It will be on the pile of my recent uploads: python-gdata, pyspf (thanks ScottK) and alacarte.

Dear Lazyweb,

The company I work is going through a merger of sorts and the amount of our php development will probably be up. We have our Java environment working pretty good now with Netbeans and subversion in both Linux and Windows so we'd like the same features for php, specifically:

1) Both Windows and Linux support
2) Debugging
3) Not too ugly an UI ;)

Somehow I figure eclipse may work its way into this but I'm not sure I want that.

So what recommendations do you have?

P.S. I'm gonna do some NVIDIA stuff on the weekend if not sooner.

As mentioned in the past I got a new TV this year. It's an LG 32LCD2DB with a native panel resolution of 1366x768. As well as the usual SCART/component inputs it has VGA and HDMI. Currently my homebrew PVR outputs to the TV via a full featured DVB card with onboard MPEG2 decoder, but this limits me to 720x576 output and a basic OSD. My current box is a PIII-800 with a basic onboard SiS graphics chipset, so it's not got the grunt to drive the TV directly itself. I'm thus on the lookout for an upgrade. Let's start with my constraints. I have a Silverstone LC-02 case. I'd previously planned to upgrade to something bigger, but the discovery that LinITX can provide a variety of riser cards to suit PCI-E/PCI as needed means I don't have to. The LC-02 will take a MicroATX board and provide me with 2 slots, one of which is taken up by the PCI DVB card. This box lives in my living room, so it needs to be quiet - the current incarnation is a bit too loud but I believe that's mainly due to using a standard heatsink+fan assembly, so I'm hoping that something specifically designed to be quiet will be better. An lirc dongle and wireless keyboard/mouse are already sorted. I'd like to expand the use of the PVR to be a more general PC as well; up until now it's just been a PVR, but being able to check email/IRC would be nice, as would the ability to play games. Up until now I've run VDR, which takes full advantage of the MPEG2 decoder, but I'd like to give MythTV a decent try. All of this points to wanting more than just a HD hardware MPEG2/MPEG4 decoder. First lets start with the graphics chipset options. The contenders seem to be ATI, Intel, nVidia and Via. From my reading ATI lack any form of XvMC support in both their Free and binary blob drivers, so we can discount them. nVidia have support, but only in their binary drivers. The Nouveau project have support on their TODO list, but I can't see any sign of it yet. I'd really rather avoid non-free drivers, so that leaves us with just Intel and Via. I really like the look of the Intel G965/X3000. They've opened up their driver development and it seems to be quite active from reading the Xorg mailing lists. However they don't have any XvMC support; Keith Packard on the xorg list in February says "For media purposes, the current drivers aren't taking full advantage of the hardware yet", though later on does say "XvMC is on several of our lists; I don't know when someone will pick it up and implement it". Unfortunately I get the feeling it's not a high priority; I've seen/heard several comments about the fact that any processor that'll get hooked up to this chipset will be more than fast enough to cope without the assistance. That may be true, but I don't want my CPU to be spending all its time trying to decode MPEG2 or MPEG4 at 1920x1080i while the GPU sits mostly unused. I'd much rather the GPU was used to the full giving me spare CPU cycles, or perhaps the ability to clock it a bit slower for common use cases, reducing power and heat. I'm keeping Intel on my list because I hope they do get round to proper support sooner rather than later. They've also talked about the fact the GPU is programmable which would make it perfectly possible to add MPEG4 acceleration to the chipset; that would be pretty sweet. It's a bit odd to end up with Via on the list. I mainly think of them as associated with MiniITX boards, but they do also produce various motherboards for Intel/AMD CPUs with integrated graphics. They managed to shoot themselves in the foot for a period of time by limiting the maximum accelerated resolution to 1024x1024, but recently they've released the CX700M /P4M900 chipsets which appear to do 2048x2048. The OpenChrome project have these up and running to a basic level from what I can tell, but work on XvMC support appears to be progressing with various patches and reports flying about on the list. So currently it looks like Via has the best option (albeit through the Free software community, rather than a concerted effort on their part), while Intel has something that could be very appealing if the driver was more complete. The other factor is the CPU. 3 contenders this time; AMD Intel and Via. My current PIII-800 is rated at 20.8W TDP. Modern processors are in general a lot hotter, but I need to keep in mind that I'm looking for a quiet machine, and that the case doesn't have a huge amount of room for big cooling systems. AMD's dual core chips all start at 89W or more, though some of their single core lower end CPUs are more like 67W. Of course the Intel graphics won't work with it and I'm not 100% sure Via has a suitable Athlon chipset at present either (the 2 I found were for Intel/Via). Intel's P4 offerings aren't much better for power consumption, with many of the highest end chips being over 100W. Core 2 Duo looks promising; 65W, so more than the current CPU, but a lot more grunt. Via come out tops here; 20W for their 2GHz top end processor. However this is only single core and compares poorly to the equivalent clock speed of Core 2 Duo. A MiniITX board with a 2GHz C7 and a CX700M would probably make a fine PVR, but I'm not convinced about there being enough grunt for anything else. The Via chipsets appear to have more active in-progress support for media acceleration, which suggests a P4M900 + Core 2 Duo. That's contrasted with what looks to be the more powerful X3000, that actually has a manufacturer who seems to want to get full Free support out there. I'm probably a couple of months off actually making a decision; partly because I want to watch how it all plays out in the hope that the Intel chipset will get some more support, or that the Via chipset will be proven to be reliable in operation. And assuming I do make a video chipset/CPU decision I then get the joys of trying to find a motherboard with DVI + SP/DIF. I know the G965 can do DVI out with an ADD2 card in the PCI-E slot, but I don't know if the P4M900 supports the same thing. I can't see an Intel MicroATX 965 board with SP/DIF out - there's an HD audio header, but this doesn't seem to be a direct mapping. Can I get a converter?

Following a previous thread on Planet Debian (allowing for kids delaying projects, as usual), I borrowed a power meter to see what the consumption of various computers and electronics around the house was. An interesting and worthwhile exercise. Computers My main gateway system (hosting this blog, mail, etc. on a static IP) is a Pegasos PowerPC; it is on 24 x 7, and pulls approx. 60W. Other computers around the house include a Dell 2.5 GHz P4, which is my main development machine (with multiple disks, etc. onboard) pulling 72W. Downstairs, for family use we have an Intel MacMini pulling approx. 30W. Peripherals add up: on the Pegasos there is an ADSL router and a Linksys Wifi router, pulling approx. 5 W each continuously, and a UPS which consumes around 10W (I'm not sure if this is continuous, or high because its recharging a battery which was drained by pulling power plugs to measure the power usage ...). The LCD monitor upstairs (used by Pegasos and Dell) draws 20W. If I was purchasing again, I'd get a MacMini for the gateway. The current setup costs, I estimate, 7.50 Euro /month, which is probably worth it to have a 24x7 server (I'm not sure if moving to a hosting facility would be worth it, as it has advantages for running bittorrent, etc. that a remote server wouldn't, as well as being able to host content without the legal threat that a hosted server would have: with the current setup, if anyone challenges the content of stuff on my server, my ISP is not legally involved (as I host it), and hence won't (or shouldn't) pull the plug. This is worth something to me, even if I don't spend my days in court defending libel actions). One surprise was the CRT monitor used with the MacMini draws 10W when powered off, not on standby. Turn it off at the mains switch rather than the monitor button. Wall warts (chargers, etc.) draw around 1-2W due to eddies when nothing is connected. Conclusions: Swapping the Pegasos and MacMini are not an option as the family prefer the convenience of the fast start-up OS X. (This has made me think fast booting and suspend-to-disk are good priority goals for Debian.) I might however replace the Pegasos with an old pentium-class laptop, which would, at 25W, drop 40-50W as I would no longer need the UPS for 24x7 use. Put all peripherals, wall warts, etc. on a separate power strip that can be easily turned off together when not in use. TV We have a TV with the growing set of set-top-boxes: a DVD Player, Satellite unit and VCR, along with a SCART switch to connect them all together. Between them, they pull 86W. With the TV turned off, the boxes draw 20W. (TV pulls 10W on standby). I've been looking at getting an "Intelligent" mains lead, which cuts the power to the peripherals when the main item (e.g. the TV) is powered down, either totally or on standby. At nearly 40 Euro, however, it will take over a year to pay for itself. The alternative is just turning them off by hand, but of course as in most houses, the main switch is buried behind the TV cabinet out of reach. I'll swap the power strip with one with a single main switch that can be reached easily at the end of the evening instead. Other Big Users The house was designed with energy-efficiency in mind, and theres not much scope for savings elsewhere. The main users are underfloor electric heating, water heating, washing machine and dryer (condensor type). The water heating we hope to replace / augment with Solar over the summer; ditto the drier, with an outdoor shed /gazebo for drying clothes in the rainy Galway days. While the drier consumes a lot of electricity, at least the hot air is recycled via a heat-exchanger to heat the house in winter when its most used. Its worth keeping an eye on the drier and washing machine, though. We mostly use these at night, using cheaper Night-rate electricity, so while our usage patterns may not change, keep an eye on the energy consumption of these devices: as they grow old the bearings, motor, etc. begin to wear and energy consumption goes up. Look out for when to replace them. The other big niggle I have is a light fitting in the main living room. This is expensive, with 3 x 60 W spotlight bulbs in it. The kitchen, which is approx. half the size of the living room, gets lit by a single 20 W CFL. Swapping the spotlights with CFLs is not an option, and replacing it means replacing a ceiling mounted fitting: as the wires are embedded in the ceiling, moving it is not trivial. Any recommendations ?

As continuation of migration to Subversion, Gammu now also uses Subversion as version control. This is now pretty standard version control system, so you can easily use latest development source. Besides this, using Subversion brings us possibility to use various free services to work with this repository. If you want to follow development, you can use RSS feeds on CIA.vc. For code statistics hungry people, there is Ohloh service, which directly analyses repository. There might be also other useful tools, if you want some integration, just tell me.

It seems that after my last post talking about the abusive position of teosto regarding the songs in the game Frets on Fire, even when the authors of the game and songs were willing to put them under a free (DFSG) license, many people is asking about whether FoF could enter Debian even without songs. I don’t really see any problem with that, in fact the game is already packaged in our subversion server (Debian Games Team). In my opinion the game itself could be into main, and the songs, well, I guess the only possibility would be to put them in non-free. There are free and non-free songs all around the net, and in fact it’s quite easy to make them, so I don’t think the lack of songs would be a problem. The game doesn’t need to depend at all in the original songs. The problem is that most of the songs out there are based in music protected by copyright, and/or they’re not easy enough for beginners. We should need to have at least a replacement of the tutorial, so that people could downoad the game and try it.

We are having a release party on Saturday the 14th of April. We meet at mid-day under the clocks at Flinders Street Station and then go somewhere convenient and not too expensive for lunch.

All welcome.

Update:

The event was moderately successful. There were only six people including me - that was quite a bit smaller than the Debian 10th birthday party we had in Melbourne, but it was still enough to have fun.

Everyone there had a good knowledge of Linux and Debian and many interesting things were discussed. We had lunch at a Japanese stone-grill restaurant - their specialty is serving raw ingredients along with a stone that's at 400C (or so they claim - I would expect a 400C stone to radiate more heat than I experienced on my previous visit). As it was a warm day we skipped the stone grill and ordered from the lunch menu (which was also a lot cheaper). Some of the guys had never tried Sake or Plum Wine before, they seemed to like it. Strangely the waitress always wanted to deliver alcohol to a 15yo in preference to almost anyone else.

One of the topics of discussion was Linux meetings and the ability to attend them. A point was made that if you are 18yo and rely on your parents' permission to do things then a meeting that finishes at 9PM isn't a viable option. It has previously been noted that for people from regional areas an evening meeting is also inconvenient.

Maybe we should have occasional LUG meetings on a Saturday afternoon to cater for the needs of such people?

Waking up at 5am (I know, not a decent hour, though I don't choose when a plane leaves), cycling to the railway station with all my luggage (no buses drive that early...), taking the train (actually 3 trains as there are 2 stops) for 1.5h, arriving at the airport, hearing about some strike, checking in and being told strike will be over when my plane takes off (9am), waiting, plane being delayed till 10am, waiting, plane being delayed till 11am, waiting, plane being delayed to 1pm, eating, waiting, plane being delayed till 3pm, queueing for information (which was going to take ages), plane being cancelled. Apparantly some firemen didn't like that they didn't get food tickets nor paid overhours I should have known that taking a plane to Spain is risky. My previous attempt: ... arriving in the airport, trying to be checked in, being told that tickets have been cancelled, making calls, being told that travel agency forgot to confirm a second time and that new tickets have been booked for 2 days later, going home, night before take off seeing that ticket to Spain has been cancelled (ticket back still valid), going to the airport anyway, being called that everything is ok, arriving at the airport, being told that I have 2 tickets for the same flight... Sorry to the people who expected me to be in Spain, I'm not going to try my luck again tomorrow, though I'll try to be happy on IRC

A lot of people have asked me about the Tim Wu piece in Slate about Wikitravel. I've commented already about the article in Wikitravel's Logbook: 8 April 2007. The upshot: Wu got a lot of things really wrong about Wikitravel (like saying we didn't have any hotel listings for Bangkok). But if our readers get things wrong, that means Wikitravellers need to do some more work to help them get things right. User errors are developer errors writ large; we can do better. But I think Tim Wu missed the main reason Wikitravel guides will always be better than proprietary guides: they are Free Cultural Works. Where I come from, that means a lot. I wrote to Tim about his article, and he responded really kindly. The thing I liked most is that when he got home, he updated Wikitravel with the information he picked up on his trip to Thailand. That is pretty cool. I'm not taking others' responses to the article too seriously. Wikitravel got a Webby Award nomination for Best Travel Site the same week. As Tom Wolfe said, "The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass." And Oscar Wilde: "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." (Thanks to Hugh!) tags: wikitravel travel tim wu slate

Off to San Juan We're getting prepared this morning to head out to Puerto Rico for the first annual World-wide Wikitravel Get-together. Our flight leaves at 2:20PM, so we've got kind of a leisurely morning to get ready. As usual, we're pretty tense: what are we forgetting? And I usually get hung up on unnecessary stuff to deal with. I should probably print out the Spanish phrasebook from Wikitravel, because my Spanish is pretty rusty. And I should download all the WT pages about Puerto Rico destinations to my laptop, just to know where we should fill in. And we can't find the charger for our camera's battery. And I want to bring a certain pair of cargo pants, but there's a button missing. Do I have time to sew on another? Of course, all these anxieties melt once we get out of the house and into a taxi to the airport. Once you can't do things, you stop worrying about what you should do. I think. The more I learn about Puerto Rico, the more fascinated I am. San Juan (Puerto Rico)'s Old Town is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The giant telescope at Arecibo is world-renowned as the SETI site. The islands of Vieques and Culebra are isolated and fun, and Fajardo and Rincon has world-class surfing. My friend Biella Coleman gave me a great list of travel tips for San Juan and Culebra, which have been a big help in our planning. OK, enough blogging: gotta get to work sewing on that button. (I've been stalling long enough for Maj to have found the camera charger under a baseball hat. Yay!) tags: get-together07 wikitravel travel Puerto+Rico biellacoleman