• #595396 - probably fixable with a binNMU, but I also changed debian/rules to catch regressions
• #596646 - downgraded; no justification given for 'serious' severity
• #597059 - closed as not a bug
• #599262 - reassigned to the kernel (linux-2.6) and downgraded as not RC there
• #599709 - applied the upstream fix
• #599711 - backported the upstream fix; downgraded as it's only a denial of service and may not even affect Debian

Story I bought Xperia X10i this summer during DebConf10 in NYC, I loved this phone from very beginning however what bothered me was that it was still stuck on outdated Android 1.6. To get your own custom Android on it, wasn t quite possible because no one managed to hack bootloader even though some of the guys at XDA where getting pretty close. Long story made short, Sony Ericsson has finally release their Android 2.1 update, but made it available only for Nordic region, they explained it all on their blog where they also sent a message for paranoid users as they called them. I thought, if I gave it all this time I can wait a little bit longer, but then one of my friends (@sahinovic) gave me a good pointer to go in right direction with using custom ROM, Nordic for example? So this is where I got my idea. I want 2.1 update now! Please note steps below will get you Android 2.1 update, but AFAIK you ll also lose your warranty 1. Root your phone If you don t have your phone rooted, this can now be done in single click. Get X10 Root and follow instructions on screen. 2. Edit system/default.prop Get Root Explorer, mount r/w (upper right corner), edit system/default.prop Lines you re concentrating on are 1 and 3 Let s say they are:

ro.semc.version.cust=1237-0333
ro.product.name=X10_1237-0333

Edit them to look like:

ro.semc.version.cust=1234-8465
ro.product.name=X10_1234-8465

Save the file and it s gonna create automatic backup of original file. 3. Get the updates using SEUS Turn off your phone, launch SEUS, plugin in the USB cable while holding back button, SEUS is going to tell you have updates for your phone Follow on screen instructions. Enjoy the update Conclusion X10 is a pretty sweet phone, but with it being so closed, it also closes a lot of doors to hacking it and playing with it, great example would be this update itself, since right now Android 2.1 update is an outdated one. However 2.1 update brings new life into it, just as it s a brand new phone, it s more responsive and much much faster. And do take a backup before this update, because I lost everything from my contacts to internet settings, but all files on my sd card remained intact. If you want to discuss anything regarding this topic please do so in comment area below or find me on Twitter.

The AEIOU Foundation The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support and advocacy organisation for people on the Autism Spectrum, note that they clearly say Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on their About page, some of what they write would be less wrong if it was claimed to apply to only non-verbal Autistics or people claimed to be Low Functioning Autistic (LFA). But in regard to the Autism Spectrum they just don t seem to know much about it, a lot of their web pages seem to be based on the assumption that anyone who is on the Spectrum will be lucky if they can ever live independently. However it seems that most people who can be diagnosed with an ASD have typical social skills by the standards of the IT industry and can get by without any special assistance. The entire site seems to be written about people on the Spectrum by people who know little of their experiences and contains hardly any information that matches what I ve read from various people on the Spectrum (of course there are a wide range of experiences that differ greatly). They have a link to Autism Related Sites which starts with Autism Speaks (the Wikipedia page about Autism Speaks is worth reading note the section about immunisation research which has been repeatedly debunked and the section about legal action against a young autistic blogger). There are many good reasons why Autism Speaks is so widely hated among people on the Spectrum. I think that recommending Autism Speaks is a sign of willful ignorance of almost everything related to Autism. In their page about describing Autism to NTs they say Imagine if you suddenly woke up in a foreign country, did not speak the language and had no way of effectively communicating with the people around you . I ve been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by a psychologist who considers that to be the same as High Functioning Autism (HFA) and I ve visited more than a few countries. I find the comparison of the Autistic experience to visiting another country to be so strange that I don t even know where I would begin if I was to comment on where it went wrong. Finally they have a scrolling bar listing their advertisers at the bottom of ever single page on their site. If someone was going to design a web site specifically to annoy people on the Spectrum then such a scrolling banner would be a good place to start. Now they probably do some good things to help families with children on the Spectrum. But their ability to do good is really hindered by the lack of input from people on the spectrum, Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg (leader of the Vermont Chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) wrote an interesting post about AEIOU and noted that none of the people who run AEIOU are Autistic [2]. The Communication Shutdown Someone got the idea that Neuro-Typical people (NTs) should try and understand what it s like to be on the Spectrum which is a reasonable idea. But they decided that the way to do so is to have them refrain from Internet based socialisation and not use Facebook and Twitter for one day. It seems to me that most people on the Spectrum primarily socialise via the Internet, so ceasing Internet based socialisation is likely to make their experience less like that of people on the Spectrum. I m getting a mental image of a bunch of NTs deciding to go to a night-club for their Internet free evening and then imagining that they are somehow empathising with the experience of people who can never enjoy a night-club. As an aside, a web site which has anything at all related to disabilities shouldn t rely on Flash the Communication Shutdown site totally fails in this regard. No Stereotypes Here has an interesting analysis of this situation, among other things they comment on the irony of having someone ask them to stop using twitter as part of this campaign [3]. One thing that they suggest is for NTs to have a day without any communication at all. Some Suggestions for People who Want to Understand As a communication exercise, try going shopping without speaking, just use hand gestures. For bonus points try doing so in a foreign country where you don t know the language so you need bidirectional non-verbal communication with some luck you can complete a transaction without the shopkeeper realising that you are a foreigner. This won t actually give you much of the Autistic experience, but it s a good exercise in understanding how communication works. Someone who wanted to know the down-side of being on the Spectrum could find a sports bar where most patrons support one team and then enter the bar while wearing a jersey indicating support for an opposing team. I don t recommend doing this because it really wouldn t be fun, but for a quick approximation of the experience it would probably work well. It seems to me that paying $5 to a charity and then boasting about doing so on your Facebook page for a day is an easy thing to do. A harder task would be to spend a day reading about the experiences of the people in question and then giving $5 to a charity that is well regarded by the target group. Another possible way of gaining some understanding would be to have a party where everyone brings their laptop and uses only electronic communication no speaking at all. This is in fact fairly close to what some of the Geekier (possibly Autistic) members of the IT community do.

• [1] http://aeiou.org.au/
• [2] http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2010/10/22/speak-up-on-november-1st/
• [3] http://nostereotypeshere.blogspot.com/2010/10/real-communication-shutdown.html

So, I m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition. I met lots of people, and it was great to be able to finally put faces on names from the french free software community. I gave two talk there, the first one on Debian and Ubuntu (slides), the second one on Debian Quality Assurance (slides), which both went well (I think). I also hacked a bit:

• I added tags and claimed by to UDD Bugs Search.
• I worked on my piuparts replacement (which really needs a sexy name ; I m open to suggestions), processing the results, making some improvements to the script, and filing 16 RC bugs.

If you want to help me, here are some easy tasks that need takers (it s unlikely that I ll be able to tackle them anytime soon):

• One missing thing in UDD Bugs Search is information about the deferred/delayed queue. Unfortunately, the ftp-masters status information is not available in a machine-parseable format.
  • Improve dak code to also export the data in a machine-parseable format (JSON, YAML). I was told the changes are to be done in dak/show_deferred.py.
  • Write the corresponding UDD importer (actually, that s a 30 mins job for me, so I could easily find time to do it if the data was available).
  Update: done!
• Another missing thing is comments (as on bts.turzimmer.net). I don t really have good ideas about how to implement them, so if you want to tackle that with your own idea, go ahead. (It s probably easy to setup a copy of bugs.cgi on alioth if you are not a DD). The CGI is in Ruby.
• Help me process the logs of my piuparts replacement, and file the bugs. I don t have any good scripts to automate bug filings yet. You need a good understanding of packages dependencies and maintainers scripts, but it s a good way to learn, too. (I would need to regenerate the full results first, so talk to me if you are interested)

One of the other things I d like to do is discuss ways to improve the synchronization of UDD (currently, it s synchronized at arbitrary times, while we could sync Sources+Packages just after dinstall, for example).

I m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l grep xen grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated . until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.

A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [<c1184d4c>] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0 189/0 221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] [ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver pcspkr is already registered, aborting
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k The dom0 is there hanging in some way I don t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I ve also reported this via #602109.

Today I forgetfully left my USB drive at home when I took off for a night at the yurt. This has happened before and generally involves staring at an scp for rather too long, probably getting low on battery power in the process, and is followed by not quite having files in the places I expect and forgetting to delete them from my small laptop SSD later. With git-annex those annoyances can go away. So I wanted a couple of gigabytes of files that were left at home behind a slightly slow link. Rather than scp them to my laptop for several hours, I just did a quick ssh into a server, and browsed through my stuff there, running git annex get $foo & on files and directories I wanted. Then went to eat dinner and play board games while the content was scped across the slow link from home. Now I can quickly download it all to my laptop from that fast server (named "finch"), like this:

git pull
git annex move . --from finch

That removes the data from the server too, freeing its space back up for next time. And the files are in their regular places on my laptop, automatically. And I can simply git annex drop . when I need that space back without worrying about losing any data. (Hmm, this feels a little bit like it did to switch from doing everything by hand with dpkg to using apt-get..)

After having looked back at the first months of this blog, I also want to look forward and see how I can improve its content. If you re a Debian/Ubuntu user and/or contributor, I want this blog to be a truly useful resource for you. What kind of articles would you like me to write? I have lots of ideas but I can t do everything. I ll share some of them so that you can discuss them:

• New in Debian testing: a regular column covering changes affecting testing users.
• Short presentations of software available in Debian/Ubuntu (like debaday.debian.net used to do).
• Articles covering wishlist bugs on developers-reference so that they can be easily reused to improve the documentation!
• Interviews of Debian contributors.
• Description of small tasks that one can do to start contributing.

Pleases discuss and share your ideas in the comments. Don t limit yourself to the above list, you know better than me what you need: tell me what kind of documentation was lacking in your daily usage of Debian/Ubuntu, or what could have been better explained while you tried to contribute to Debian/Ubuntu. While I set no limits on Debian/Ubuntu topics that I accept to cover, my main focus is around documentation for end-users and/or contributors. If you prefer you can also send your feedback with Identi.ca, Twitter or leave a comment in the entry for this article in my facebook page.

11 comments Support my work

OK, I still have to load my photos of Debconf10 somewhere. Shame on me. My gallery is broken (no longer allows uploads, even local ones!). Still, do you remember that we somehow mentioned that a small bunch of geeks did run together a local race at Debconf10? Indeed, a dozen of Debconf10 attendees did participate to the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series run of Thursday August 5th. And all of us completed this 5km cross-country run in Van Cortland Park, in Bronx, turning it into the most international attendance of this local race. We now have the official results.. So please congratulate No l K the for finishing 17th scratch, 2nd in his category...or Gaudenz Steinlin being 32th only 41 seconds after No l. Or Iustin 107th, Gregory, 113th, Luca (and kilt) 140th, Maxy 163th, Marga 167th. Even /me though I finished 5 minutes after that Kevin british guy who I ran with the week-end before, dammit. Or whoever I'm forgetting (we were more than this, IIRC). Geeks can run. Fast, for some of them (I still need to have No l telling me about his last marathon).

I'm thinking about getting a Kindle, and I thought I'd write down some thoughts, even if they're a bit jumbled, and invite commentary. Good: One thing I really like, living here in Italy, is that I would be able to get English language books instantaniously, and not pay shipping or import duties on them. Whatever disadvantages there may be, that is a huge advantage. Closely tied to that: if we ever move back to the US, shipping all our books will be very expensive. Having some of them in an electronic format would lighten that load considerably. It's fairly cheap. At $180, it's not something I'd want to treat carelessly, but it's significantly less expensive than various existing tables. Long battery life means it's not something you have to worry much about. E-ink looks like it's easier on the eyes than LCD screens. I'm not sure, but also its slow update speed might be a "feature not a bug" in the sense that you're not so easily distracted by the internet being just one click away. Bad: I love having real, physical books in my house. I grew up in a house full of books, and I want the same thing for my daughter. I like being able ot look through them, pick one up, and read about something. Real books are very convenient, as long as you're not lugging around hundreds of them. I like not having to worry too much about dropping them, about getting a bit of water on one or that sort of thing. You can cart them around in a backpack with little worry, take them to the beach, and so on. As far as I can tell, Knuth's books are not available for, nor would appear like they do on paper. That's the golden standard for me: once "The Art of Computer Programming" looks good on an e-reader, it will be really and truly ready. We're not there yet. It's not general purpose. Like I said above, maybe this is good for reading, but there are also times when it'd be nice to have a general purpose device, with email, maps, applications, and so on. A while back, Amazon announced some sort of beta program for a kindle SDK. I haven't heard much of anything since. So it looks like it's not really possible to code for it, which is a bit disappointing. I like to have that option available, even if I don't always exercise it. Unknown: The pricing: sometimes Kindle versions are cheaper (especially, in my case, considering shipping, and, potentially, import duties), but sometimes they aren't, which seems a bit unfair, given that you cannot sell the book if you don't like it. I'm not sure how it would work out for me in the aggregate. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, means you can't, say, sell someone a "used" ebook. This is, in some ways, understandeable, because it's not like an e-book degrades with time as a physical one might. Were it possible to sell on your old books, that might radically change the market. I could see that having both good consequences (cheaper books), but also negative ones for authors (less money). I suppose this topic merits a post or two, or even an entire book of its own, because it's a complicated subject without, in my opinion, "easy" answers. Suffice it to say, though, that there are some drawbacks, but I suppose it's also nice that Amazon "knows" which books I have, so even if I switch to a different reader, I still have my books. And it's good that authors can get paid to work on a book. Not having actually bought it yet, I have no idea how it actually 'feels' to read a book with one. I love curling up with a good book, something I certainly can't do with my laptop. The Kindle looks light and small enough that it could work, but maybe it's just too high tech and sleek to provide that same comfortable coziness. Or maybe I'm just a luddite where books are concerned?
Do you have one? Do you use it? For all kinds of books or just certain kinds (technical books, cheap 'fun' reads, whatever...)? What's the experience like?

For people who do not follow the Merkaartor mailing list: Regulary updated development snapshots are available in experimental again. Please report bugs, either in the Debian BTS or in the upstream bugtracker. Latest addition to Merkaartor is a plugin to support the French Cadastre peoject.

I launched raphaelhertzog.com this summer (taking over the English content of my former multi-lingual blog), when I decided that I would be more serious about blogging on Debian/Ubuntu related topics. On September, I decided to write 2 articles per week and up to now I managed to keep the schedule. Two of my articles were published by Linux Weekly News, those are much more researched than the average blog article (they are tagged with [LWN] in the list below). The most popular articles Most people read my blog through the RSS feed which happens to be syndicated on Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu. According to the feedburner s statistics, the top-5 articles are:

1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (32700 views)
2. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (31700 views)
3. Social Micropayment Can Foster Free Software, Discover Flattr (30100 views)
4. Everything you need to know about conffiles: configuration files managed by dpkg (29900 views)
5. How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr (29400 views)

But I also have occasional readers visiting my blog because my articles are announced on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook (and they circulate on social networks, thanks to those who are sharing them!). The top-5 articles according to the statistics of my website are:

1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (6000 views)
2. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (5000 views)
3. Understanding Debian s release process (1500 views)
4. Flattr FOSS (1400 views, not an article but I regularly blog about this project)
5. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (1100 views)

The most flattered Since I am using Flattr on my blog, it can be interesting to see the articles which generated lots of flattr micro-donations. The top-3 articles are my articles about Flattr (1, 2, 3). Excluding articles related to Flattr, the top-5 is:

1. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (12 flattr)
2. The secret plan behind the 3.0 (quilt) Debian source package format (10 flattr)
3. How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages? (5 flattr)
4. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (4 flattr)
5. Do You Want a Free Debian Book? Read on. (4 flattr)

Most articles get 2 to 3 flattr clicks. The most commented I usually get 4-5 comments on most articles but some generate much more feedback:

1. [LWN] Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution? (40 comments)
2. 5 reasons why I still contribute to Debian after 12 years (22 comments)
3. Can Debian achieve world domination without being on Facebook? (15 comments)
4. How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package (14 comments)
5. [LWN] Understanding Membership Structures in Debian and Ubuntu (12 comments)

Factoids Here are my conclusions based on the above figures:

• Writing about your Debian/Ubuntu work and your long term involvement makes for highly popular content that spreads well.
• In-depth and well researched articles (like those written for LWN) do not generate more flattr revenues than the average article even if they take 4 to 8 times as long to write.
• People are more likely to flattr you for your free software contribution than for the value they get out of your article.
• People care a lot about the Debian release process, and like to discuss the topic.

If you also appreciate the above-linked articles, you should click here to subscribe to my email newsletter.

4 comments Support my work

gregoa writes he squashed only 5 bugs in two weeks, and I think he still deserves a huge kudos too, as he squashes them for a long time now :)
And while at it, kudos to everyone who does not post their stats to planet, actually find those bugs, etc etc. Thanks that we have such a community!Now to the usual list of (pseudo) squashed bugs:

• #600782 pyca is NOT compatible with the default python version 2.6
  actually pyca IS compatible with python2.6, it just throws some DeprecationWarnings
  after discussion with maintainer, upstream and submitter, bug downgraded to wishlist, as pyca should be ported to the new libraries to be compatible with later python versions (2.7 is still fine according to upstream, though)
• #600670 libhpmud0 installs /usr/lib/libhpmud.so.0 /usr/lib/libhpmud.so.0.0.6 but sane needs /usr/lib/libhpmud.so that is in libhpmud-dev, not needed to scan
  shipping the .so in libhpmud0 instead of libhpmud-dev seems wrong, patch sent to make the sane backend look for libhpmud.so AND libhpmud.so.0, submitter confirms patch works as expected. NMU not uploaded yet.
• #600530 madplay needs rebuild, currently uninstallable due to dependency
  madplay installs just fine in sid, as it depends libesd-alsa0 libesd0, closed as invalid by the submitter after short discussion
• #601070 python-django: FTBFS in squeeze: test_correct_url_value_passes failed
  some tests need network connection patch that disables these sent
• #599523 update-manager-gnome: wants to downgrade packages without any notice
  this one is old, got updates from the submitter, reproduced the bug in a VM. This is an old known bug in apt :(
• #601186 horde3: only shows php deprecations and a warning no actual operational parts
  why does php again pollute the output with useless warnings? my approach to disable the warnings wasn t succesfull, but a patch created by sed was. However I m not confident with it (OpenSSL anyone?) and want some more eyes to look over it.

Sunday. A good day to take some time to myself, and get some much needed excercise. And the pseudo-meditation that comes with it: That's one of the factors I love the most about cycling. It's possibly my favorite way of just idling, of allowing for the time to pass without me noticing, just watching the movie of life, watching the world go around me with very little effort. I just love cycling. I have posted here several mentions of the Ciclot n: Every month, the last Sunday, our city government closes a ~32Km circuit to make it for cycling (and skating, and walking, and jogging, and other human-powered locomotion) use. Whenever I am in the city and have the possibility, I do the Ciclot n. Two months ago, I even did it twice in a row, for a total of almost 70Km. But this Sunday was not the last Sunday of the month! So, why am I writing this? Well, because when I left home today at ~10AM, I thought it was. Only when I reached Circuito Interior and had a this is full of cars moment, I remembered October has 31 days. And next Sunday I'll very probably be in Oaxaca city (for the Hackmitin 04h4ck4 2010). And I didn't want to miss the fun of a nice Sunday ride! I don't care if streets are closed just for bikes I am used to riding in traffic. Of course, this meant I would not take the central lanes in Circuito Interior on the way back, taking the ~10 bridges (which are quite tiring, to be honest!). It also meant I was free to make my own route. So, I thought, a nice small ~20-30Km ride will do. I'll just get to Eje 2 Sur or so, and back by another route (i.e. Plutarco E. Calles or so). But as I got closer to Reforma, I realized that every Sunday (independent of a Ciclot n), Reforma is closed for the "Paseos Dominicales" - Shorter than a Ciclot n, but still a nice way to share the streets with other cyclists. So I headed for Reforma. Part of Reforma (from the ngel roundabout westward) was closed due to a precisely cyclist race. But from there eastwards we had the street for us. Good, lets head downtown. The surprise came when I saw that it was not only towards downtown, but passing Av. Ju rez, Reforma continued to be closed just for cyclist use northwards. Great! Lets see how far does it go. The first surprise there: A couple of days ago, it was the "Noche de los Alebrijes". The alebrijes are a beautiful and very elaborated Mexican typical handicraft, depicting psychodelic dragons or dragonic representations of animals. Of course, alebrijes are usually ~30cm long... But here we had huge ones! And verrrry elaborated! How much so? You tell me. And as I started off... A nice thing about cycling is that you get to meditate. My body continued cycling, taking care not to run over the kids that are not so proficient, stoping at each red light... At some point, my mind entered back the body, and I realized we were passing by Tlatelolco (ok, to be honest, the picture was taken when crossing southwards, on my way back), about to cross Circuito Interior on the North, in that symbolically very strange place where Paseo de la Reforma (a long, beautiful avenue named after the war that marked the complete separation between church and Mexican state, in 1860) becomes two streets... Calzada de los Misterios and Calzada de Guadalupe. And, yes, it is among the greatest peregrination routes in the world. On December 12, the Holiday of the Guadalupe Virgin, up to 7 million people go visit her temple. And also around here, when my mind was busy inside my body, I noticed a pair from the Un paseo a ciegas (roughly translated, a blind ride) program was riding just by me. I knew about this program, but had never seen them before So I took the opportunity to get to know this program. Basically: Two people ride a tandem bike. The one in front, as always, drives and steers. The one in the back is a blind person, who gets the amazing sensation of freedom and enjoyment that only a bike gives you. Un paseo a ciegas is held every Sunday at 9AM except for the last Sunday every month. And I definitively want to be part of it! They told me the program has been adopted as well in Puebla, and if I recall correctly, it will soon be started in Quer taro and Guadalajara. Anyway, by then I realized the ride was probably going to reach the Bas lica, a very impressive church I had just visited for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago. And yes we went all the way up Guadalupe until the place where the street gets impossible to bike on, then left along a small street, and back to the South by Misterios. Then, all the way along Reforma again, saying goodbye to Cuitlahuac, Jos de San Mart n, Sim n Bol var, El Caballito, Cristobal Col n, Cuauhtemoc, La Palmera, El ngel... And back home. Of course, not without the sight of some bizarre signs we enjoy so much to find, point at and laugh. Have I ever told you, my nameless reader, that I love this city? I love getting surprised with so many great things. I love the distances I can safely ride on my bike without ever being far from a bike repair shop (which are only needed when they are far away). I love being surrounded by people breathing their freedom to take the streets. I love the safety of our wide, long streets (and no, I'm not joking here Mexico City is among the safest places for cyclists I have been to). I love its weather, that allows me to go out and enjoy the street at any time of year. And I love biking in it, one of the best ways to get to know so many bits of the city I would have never ventured into otherwise.

it seems I was a bit busy & lazy in the last two weeks. luckily diocles & evgeni were more active than me kudos!

here are my small contributions:

• #594860 src:hmmer: "hmmer: FTBFS (powerpc): altivec and cast errors"
  sent debdiff to the BTS, later uploaded by maintainer
• #598958 src:doodle: "doodle: FTBFS: configure: error: Doodle requires libextractor."
  add a patch to the bug (no upload, only experimental affected), later fixed by maintainer
• #600015 gextractwinicons: "gextractwinicons: Fails to extract resources"
  manually close a bug (syntax error in changelog)
• #600806 libxml-rsslite-perl: "libxml-rsslite-perl: Test data does not have license"
  help in the coordination/decision about removal from testing, upload new package to unstable (pkg-perl)
• #601116 liburi-perl: "liburi-perl: FTBFS in squeeze: test failed"
  draft a preliminary patch (pkg-perl)

I brought my cat Leo to the house in the hollow a week ago. He settled in quickly; this was his 7th move. He seems both more kittenish, and more predatory out here. This was a trial run, I'll bring him back to town soon for a few weeks. Since early August, I've for one reason and another been away every other week, and I got tired of worrying about the cat home alone. With a cat, and with electricity seemingly sorted, it's getting homelike here. As the days shorten, I'm being power wasteful with computers and radio and lights, and the batteries still never drop below 13.5 volts. Bodes well for winter. All that remains to be done is refrigeration that does not involve hauling ice, and more water. Winter will help with both. Still remains to be seen if I will continue bouncing back and forth, or if there will be an inflection point. I've regained a tranquility that had been eluding me for ages. It's been a lot of work, but it seems worth it. (git-annex announcement soon!)

I've just fnished another step for new Gammu manual - it includes also documentation for gammu utility. IIt includes all content from the man page, reformatted and improved in some sections. So now the documentation does cover all important parts and can contain correct cross references. The only problematic thing was to handle non dash starting commands in Sphinx. Unfortunately it does not seem to like this idea, so I had to invent some ugly hacks, which workaround that (just changing the regexps which sphinx.domains.std uses). The man page will be from now on generated from this source as well.

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Buying a ThinkPad? Don't buy one with this wireless chipset. "ThinkPad wireless" is apparently code for "poorly supported RealTek chip". If you do end up with one of these chips (perhaps you failed to notice the addition of a new option on the website before the time you spec'ed out your new laptop and the time you ordered it; perhaps you assumed it was iwlagn by default; who can say?), you may be treated to such issues as a lack of rfkill interface support, a driver that needs to be hard reset about once an hour to continue to be able to see APs, a kernel panic if you try to run powertop... or maybe a mysterious bug that prevents the wireless card from transmitting packets to a VoIP server, with 100% reliability. And after you wear yourself out from laughing at the Lenovo sales rep's suggestion that you could pay a 15% restocking fee and reorder another laptop that costs $40 more to get the Intel Centrino option when that same Centrino card can be found on-line for $40 by itself, you might decide to order an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 from a third party, the same card that's advertised on Lenovo's website as an option for the X201, and install it yourself. And that's when the fun would start. Did you know that it's common practice for laptop OEMs to hard-code a whitelist of authorized wifi (and 3G) cards in the BIOS, and refuse to boot with an unrecognized card - nominally to ensure no one can combine a wireless adapter with their hardware antennas to create a transmission device that violates FCC regulations? And that these same OEMs may have different PCI subsystem IDs for the cards they ship than are used for the ones you can buy retail from third parties? I did not know that. Apparently some people knew that because they had tried this before, but I missed that memo, having never before needed to combine a laptop and a wifi card from different vendors. Here, gentle reader, is a memo. You're welcome. Hacking the ThinkPad BIOS So although this feature was news to me, it was not news to the Internet at large. A quick search on the BIOS error message quickly turned up a relevant description of the problem, as well as pointers to some options for fixing (in the veterinary sense) the whitelist checking in the ThinkPad BIOS. It's great to be part of such a large community of ThinkPad-using Free Software hackers looking out for each other (and not taking "no" for an answer from their BIOS)! But wait, none of the methods described on that page for modifying your BIOS (or bypassing the check by moving the card to a different slot, or taping over one of the pins, or...) work on the X201! As Matthew summarized it, things are more difficult for "anything with three digits or starting with a six". Fortunately, another hint from Matthew took me to the website of a guy who's been providing fixes for this BIOS issue for the past couple of years. Hmm, but the X201 is a bleeding-edge new model and isn't on his list of models that he's patched the BIOS for. Well, fortunately there's a step-by-step howto here that I can follow here to do it myself... grab the latest BIOS image from the vendor's website; decompress the image with phcomp.exe (oh Wine, you pair well with more than cheese); unpack the individual BIOS modules with phnxsplit; run phnxpatch to apply the binary patches, finding that the only one that applies is "wwan1a" when the issue is not with a WWAN card at all, so hand-hack the whitelist in the binary instead; use the fi.exe and fp.exe tools to add the necessary header back onto the BIOS module (after deciphering the example batch script accompanying the BIOS update and translating it into a reusable script in a real scripting language); use phnxmod to inject the newly-packaged BIOS module into the original image; call phnxcksm to update the BIOS's internal checksum; ... Uh? Phnxcksum fails, saying that there's no extended checksum field. Just how deep is this rabbit hole? How much was that restocking fee again, and how much is my time worth? But no; now it's a matter of principle. Besides, I'd rather spend my time fighting with a BIOS than having to reinstall the OS on another new machine. Which is to say that I'd rather beg the local reverse engineering experts for their time fighting with a BIOS. So now we have a BIOS image whose code we're confident has been correctly patched to bypass the whitelist, but we can't find the checksum field that our patching tools expect. Maybe we can flash this to the BIOS as is? No such luck; sure enough, we get a checksum error. Ah, but WinPhlash gives us a logfile, and shows that the failure is a per-module checksum mismatch. So where is that checksum? Oh, there it is; it's the byte labeled "data_checksum" in the module header description in phnxsplit.h, which phnxmod doesn't copy when it splices an updated module into the BIOS image. Well, could it really be as easy as updating a single byte? Yes, the BIOS utility takes it and flashes it without complaint... and the system boots afterwards! Thanks to Paul and Matthew for their great work documenting this problem in general; Zender, for tools that provide a 99% solution; and Kees and Jesse for a dazzling display of impromptu reverse-engineering. Now, to figure out how to get these tools packaged and into Debian and Ubuntu. Posted from my Centrino-wireless-using Lenovo X201 laptop.

The PSAS team planned to have their LV2.3 airframe updates ready for BALLS this year, but RL interfered and they weren t ready to go on time. A quick bit of rescheduling and we decided to fly over the weekend of the 16-17 of October. Tsolo and family welcomed us warmly as we arrived on Saturday afternoon after driving over from Portland. They ve got a new puppy who is also cute and friendly. We managed to get the launch tower and flight operations set up before dark, cooked dinner and spent the evening prepping the airframe. It was cold overnight, but the light cloud cover that had been there when we arrived was nearly gone by morning. I called in to open the waiver and was asked to hold until noon, which suited us just fine. The rocket finally made it onto the rail around 1:30 and we managed to convince the launch controller to actually light the motor at 2:44:39 (according to the GPS data). Flying on a CTI N2850 blue-streak, LV2.3 hit about 380m/s and reached 4851m. This was the first flight with the new fin system, you can see how that works in the video here: <iframe frameborder="0" height="480" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/15972443" width="640"></iframe>Portland State Aerospace LV2.3 flight with roll control from Keith Packard on Vimeo. The roll control system worked as designed, executing a programmed sequence of maneuvers during ascent. You can see the canard fins moving back and forth in the video, controlling the roll of the airframe. Yes, the fins really do spin separately from the airframe. You can see how that was constructed here: PSAS LV2.3 Spin Can Live telemetry and stored flight data, consisting of GPS coordinates along with barometry altimeter and accelerometer information, was collected using the TeleMetrum flight computer. The airframe was recovered about 800m downrange. Thanks to Portland State University for their support in hosting PSAS and Oregon Rocketry for letting us fly at their launch site.

State of X Server 1.9 The push of X Server 1.9 mentioned previously continued past weekend, with an upload of 1.9.1 rc2 this time, which is likely to become 1.9.1 in a few days. To keep it company in experimental, almost all X video drivers were uploaded as well, with a few exceptions:

• intel: We would like the current version in sid to migrate to squeeze now that a suitable kernel ( 2.6.32-24) is available there. Additional patches from experimental or from upstream might be added to sid then. For now, I kept 2.13 (built against X Server 1.7) in experimental, since I asked users a couple of times to try 2.13 from there.
• nouveau and openchrome: There were entirely new codebases in experimental for both of them, so I didn t touch anything there.
• nv: We plan to drop it entirely in favor of nouveau.

If my package manager isn t lying, the xserver-xorg-video-all meta package pulling everything could almost be installed, if one were to ignore those drivers. The same goes for xserver-xorg-input-all: almost alright, except for xserver-xorg-input-wacom, which is maintained outside debian-x. Autobuilding X packages So we have mostly this situation: 1.7 in sid, 1.9 in experimental. But we may want to build experimental packages (new upstream releases, or packages with patches cherry-picked from upstream) against either of them, without interfering with what is in the archive. We could ask users to try some patches. Actually, we do that already, and while many of them are usually responsive and willing to do so, not everyone knows how to build a package, or has time to. That s why I spent some time setting up http://autobuild.ikibiki.org/, where I can push source packages in the autobuild-unstable or autobuild-experimental suites, so that they get built on amd64 and on i386. It supports multiple versions in a given suite, which may help narrowing down when a fix appeared. That s part of a let s try to stick as closely as possible to upstream plan. We regularly get blamed for not doing so, but there are several reasons (or excuses? You decide.) for that:

• Spending time stabilizing stuff is the established standard in Debian, with that stuff called freeze. This means that rushing for the very last upstream releases isn t usually a good idea.
• X is some kind of a beast. Many libraries, many drivers, and a server. That means plenty of time to spend. And we re only a handful (and that includes Ubuntu folks who are helping us preparing stuff in git, thanks guys).

So if anyone thinks we re willingly holding back any kind of move towards newer upstream releases or the like, rest assured that s not the case. There s just too few of us to closely track upstream (which we do by reporting bugs and trying to cherry-pick patches anyway) in addition to preparing stuff for the next stable release. Now that things are settling down, that sounds feasible somehow, but remember: your help is more than welcome. Speaking of those Ubuntu guys, Robert Hooker is currently updating a bunch of drivers in experimental, yay.

When talking about free culture or free software, many people suggest that they would love to support free models, but that they don't see how to make it all work. Until they have an alternate model in front of them, they cannot bring themselves to argue for a more ethical alternative. I disagree with this approach. Instead, I say, "this is the world I want to live in and, even though I don't know exactly how to get to there from here, I'm going to refuse to settle for anything short of this ideal." Most people dismiss such thinking as "impractical" and "unrealistic." I think most people are being unimaginative. Robot jockeys are one recent illustrative reason, among many, that I feel comfortable taking this position. Some background is necessary for those that are unfamiliar with the example. A decade ago, several Gulf emirates used thousands of young boys from Sudan and South Asia as jockeys for camel racing. Human rights groups campaigned against the practice and suggested that these boys were at sometimes held as slaves and intentionally underfed to keep their weight low. Despite criticism, camel racers resisted moving away from young boys as jockeys. If they moved to heavier adults instead of young boys, they reasoned, the camels would be much slower. Of course, they were right. But they were being unimaginative in the alternatives they were considering. As the young jockeys became a increasingly unjustifiable public relations disaster for the states that supported it, law-makers in several Gulf states gave in to calls from UNICEF and others and created laws to outlaw the practice. Within three years of UAE passing strict laws against child jockeys, Swiss engineers, funded by racers desperate for an alternative, had created the first robotic camel jockey. Within several years these jockeys were lighter, cheaper, more responsive to the owner, and well on their way to being more effective than any young boy. When forced, by law and by an ethical prerogative, to come up with an alternative to young boys, racers created a solution that was superior, along nearly every axis, to the system they had fought to keep. Although the costs to society of proprietary software cannot be compared to slavery and abuse, the basic same pattern of solution-seeking can be seen in the example of free software. Early free software advocates suggested that most programmers would likely need to take a paycut. As it turned out, vibrant and successful economic models to support free software have supported a large and growing free software industry. But we have free software business models only because a small group of principled individuals refused to settle for what they knew, came up with creative ethical business models that "just might work," and put their own paychecks on the line to try them out. As open source has shown, some of these creative solutions offered models superior to what we had before. In the world of software development, free software redefined "practical" and "realistic." One can think of solving human problems as like searching for the highest point in hilly terrain in thick fog. It's easy to get stuck on the top of the first little hill you walk up (i.e., a local maximum) and then conclude you can never do better. If we refuse to compromise and force ourselves to leave that first little hill, chances are pretty good we'll find a "higher" peak. Of course, it is also possible that we will find the global maximum or the best possible solution to a given problem. In those cases, any change will mean a sacrifice. But when dealing with most most social and legal dilemmas, there are enough variables involved that this seems very unlikely. Indeed, most big problems can be thought of as having many interacting dimensions -- and only some of these will be ethical concerns. In other words, most social problems are more like the problem of child camel jockeys than they are like trying to transcend the laws of physics. Business models and laws for the regulation of technology and knowledge are extremely complicated human creations. Do we really think we cannot create ethical systems to compensate cultural creators that are at least as good as what we have now? If we never force ourselves to be "impractical" and "unrealistic", we will never find out.