So there are times that I think of course anyone remotely interested in Free Software, virtual projects, and similar endeavors knows about Debian and its strange rituals. I am pretty mistaken, actually. Recently I have attended various events where it has been made clear to me that there are hordes of folks interested in the politics of openness, access, and free software who have heard about Debian but don t really know what it takes, socially and politically, to manage such a project. Luckily I had the chance to spread some of the esoteric knowledge during a talk at MIT for the Knight News Challenge winners and I have received many emails, excited and some surprised about the governance structures of Debian. If interested, here is a video of my talk, which is quite short, so I don t go into as much detail as I would like. There is a great audio quote from a Debian developer, taken from this class visit for which there is a podcast and which I recommend as well. If you can t play flash, you can download the a video of the talk here (look at the right hand side of the page for download link). update: Interesting blog post on Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way that explores some of the issues I raise in the panel talk. I don t think it always trumps open source but it is certainly a niche form of production that is useful in some cases but all too often confused with expert peer production in quite unproductive and empirically wrong ways.

Currently I own and use an iPhone 3G. I bought it almost two years ago, when the local phone provider LMT started offering the iPhone legally. I had a pretty good experience with it most of the time, but now it is showing its age:

• The two year warranty will run out in September
• The iOS 4 update left out most of the new features my model cann t have multitasking or backgrounds or any of that new cool stuff that is exclusive to the new iPhone 4
• The hardware itself is starting to wear the speaker stopped working a few weeks ago (so I have to use the loudspeaker function or headphones) and also approximately around that time the phone stated to randomly lock up approximately one a week or two it freezes and after a few minutes reboots and demads to be connected to iTunes and restored from backup
• Also the battery does not last as long as it used to

I will try to send my iPhone in for repair hoping to extend its usefulness, but frankly it looks that I might have to get a new phone at or before Debconf. So I am considering my options for a new phone and so far I have 3 main options each with some sub-options. The main options are: iPhone 4, MeeGo and Android. Each choice has its benefits and drawbacks and each also has several sub-options related either to specific phone models or to purchase methods. What I need is a phone with: calling function, contact information synchronised to Google, support for Google Mail/Contacts/Calendar simultaneously with one Exchange account also providing mail/contacts/calendars, music, audiobooks saving my place in the audio book and in the list of books, fully featured Twitter client with Twitpic and location support, encrypted password storage application (preferably open source), GPS with maps, ability to download maps for offline use, Geocaching support with offline cache info and logging, Skype client, ability to write in Latvian, English and Russian in all applications, reliable backup and restore of phones data including settings and data of installed apps. Optional features: last.fm streaming and reporting support, ebook applications with purchasable ebooks, high quality video and photo recording (for a phone), ability for me to write applications on the phone, ssh client, wireless data upload to the phone, ability to change the phones battery without loosing data in the phone (on the go), compass, physical keyboard, confidence in getting software upgrades and developer interest for the next 2 years. I ll try to describe all of the options here to organise my thoughts and maybe also help someone else make the choice. Option 1: iPhone 4 To get the iPhone 4 I have two options: LMT and unlocked. The official arrival of iPhone 4 to Latvia is expected in September and it will likely be sold by LMT for the same prices as iPhone 3GS is now. If I choose this scenario, I will need to survive with my semi-broken iPhone for 2-3 more months. Total price over 2 years (LVL): 131 (purchase price) + 24 * 8 (surcharge) = 323 LVL. Note: the surcharge is the extra cost of the iPhone call plan compared to a comparable regular plan (Vien dais 7 + Internets telefon 5). If I go and purchase an unlocked iPhone 4 in a country where such units are sold (UK is the most easily accessible choice, because a few of my workmates travel weekly to and from UK) then the total price over 2 years would be the purchase price: 499 GBP + 65 GBP (2 year warranty extension) = 505 LVL Now lets go over the general benefits and downsides of the iPhone 4, first the positives:

• It is a simple to use device that I am used to over the two years
• The screen resolution is higher than any other option
• It is smaller and lighter than Nokia N900 and the bigger Android devices
• There is a huge number of free and paid apps as well as accessories for the iPhone docks, headphones, chargers,
• I know that it can do every thing that I need it to do (with apps) and most of the optional features too, except (see drawbacks)

Drawbacks:

• The first thing that I hate about the iPhone is its umbilical cord like link to iTunes. iTunes is the sole purpose I still have a real Windows installation on my main computer (in a Sun VirtualBox, thankfully). iTunes is slow, clumsy and generally unusable piece of dog excrements. It can only do one thing at a time, mostly: if you are adding a folder to your library, you can t switch to another tab and see how the backup of your iPhone is going. The actions do happen in the background, but more often than not you cann t switch away from some actions. If you try to do multiple things in parallel, instead of resolving any process conflicts and queueing the actions iTunes will simply silently fails to do something, often leaving remains of the half-finished actions. It also does not bother to check if the backup or restore of the phone is complete before using it in this way I have many time gotten into a situation where I connect the iPhone to the iTunes, it starts backing it up, then crashes and next time happily offers this half-done backup copy as a valid restore point. Or it crashes during restore and only writes some files and settings to the phone other settings stay at their default values. It is also very cryptic, for example if you have a lot of music it can take hours to import it into iTunes (it spent 2 hours Analysing gapless playback information of 5000 songs) and then you will be puzzled about how to put some of that on the iPhone. If you just tick the checkbox to sync your music you ll get an error stating that there is not enough free space, which is not very helpful. The magic combination was to check Manually manage music and then go to music tab and choose Autofill option. At that point iTunes will spend half an hour choosing which songs to put on the phone, before it even starts copying. And god forbid that you would use that AppStore application on the iPhone to actually install apps sooner or later you will run into a backup bug where creating or restoring a backup of your iPhone might take 2-3 hours instead of more normal 5-15 minutes. Only a factory reset of the phone followed by selective reinstallation of applications (loosing all their settings in the process) can work around this bug currently.
• The closed nature of the iPhone means that I cann t install unapproved software unless I jailbreak the phone and even then it is rather problematic to develop for the phone unless you have a Mac and shell out 99$ a year for participation in the developers program
• The iPhone is a consumption device and not a productivity device. I would like to have a device on which I could be creative as a software developer as well

Option 2: Maemo/MeeGo Some of my colleagues at work (in the Riga office of Accenture) have N900 phones and I have been exposed to people with raw enthusiasm towards the Maemo platform ever since the Debconf in Helsinki, where we saw the first N700 devices in the hands of some lucky Debian/Nokia people using it as an Internet tablet. N900 has been a strong leap forward for the platform, before its head was teleported sideways by the whole MeeGo merger/debackle. Again I have two options here: Get a N900 either here in Latvia for 325 LVL (that would be the total cost over 2 years) or get it from USA during Debconf for 399 USD (+129 USD for 2 year warranty) = 317 LVL. And additional option would be to wait until October/November and then buy the new Nokia MeeGo device, rumoured to be N9-00 and likely to be around the same price as N900 was when it was introduced (around 500 LVL). Benefits:

• A fully open and rooted Debian Linux based device with apt-get, X, pusleaudio, d-bus and Qt as core technologies
• I can install software from anyone and can also write my own software either in Qt/C++ or even in Python
• There is (or was) a significant hacker community that develops applications for N900
• As far as I know most of the features that I need do work on N900, but I am unsure about:
  1. audiobook support how easy it is to put a MP3 on the device and tell it is an audiobbok so that the device would remember position when playing the file and save it even if the player is stopped and the device is rebooted or backed up and restored from backup?
  2. can I have Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar and at the same time also have an Exchange account with mail and contacts and calendar active?
  3. how is the Geocaching.com support is there an app already that makes it easy to geocache while offline?
  4. Multilingual keyboards I ve seen people having to reimplement the on-screen keyboard in their programs, and naturally they do not bother to add support for all language. So support for multilingual keyboard input is an open one.

Drawbacks:

• All the uncertainties above while I could write all the above software, it would be better if I would not have to, so that I could focus on something more productive
• Also the whole position of Nokia on the MeeGo support on the N900 is kinda backwards. I am now used to the Apple way that if I get a device, then it will get software updates for at least next two years and will get the new software features developed in the next two years at least. If Nokia would have said All phone-oriented MeeGo releases will have a version for N900 until at least the end of 2012. Then this drawback would not have been there, but currently it is a mayor sticking stone for me. I don t want to buy a device that will be on a dead-end software platform that will die before the end of this year.
• N900 is the largest and heaviest of all the options

Option 3 Android After looking trough the options for Android phones, I ve narrowed the selection to the ones that are either available from local carriers or can be easily gotten unlocked also the phones need to have announced plans to have at least Android 2.2 version. Currently the choice is limited to HTC Desire (from carrier or unlocked) and Samsung Galaxy S (unlocked). The prices over 2 years break down as follows: HTC Desire (locked to LMT): 69 + 9*24 = 285 LVL
HTC Desire (locked to Bite): 199 + 2*24 = 247 LVL (Note: only 500Mb of data per month available)
HTC Desire (locked to Tele2): 179 + 6*24 = 323 LVL
Note: all the above options would also require me to pay a 45 LVL early termination fee on my current iPhone contract if I choose to do this before September.
HTC Desire (unlocked): 311 LVL
Samsung Galaxy S (unlocked): 350 LVL (import from Germany) Benefits:

• As far as I could find, the features I need are out there in one way or another there usually is an app for that!
• Google looks poised to continue development at a rapid pace
• There is an active hacker community and also an active commercial software community that offers cool applications for a few bucks
• As far as I understand the phone backups onto itself a backup of the phone is created onto a SD card in the phone and you can then copy that off the phone for permanent backup, it is a nice concept
• There are literally thousands of sources for Android applications: from the official Market to Google Code to individual web pages and forums
• The hardware looks solid, powerful and generic enough to last for a couple of years
• It is likely that knowing how to program Android app will be useful for me at work
• It is cheap and simple to start writing Android apps on Linux

Drawbacks:

• Typical usability of Android apps is pretty low compared to iPhone
• The Android environment is very unique and is not like anything else it s not really much of a Linux system from an apps perspective
• I would be relying on HTC to provide OS updates in a timely manner it is quite likely that after a year or so the updates to new version will come slowly or even stop altogether and I will have to use hacked ROMs
• I have a dislike for Java. I wish one could write fully featured Android apps in Python

Please correct me if I am wrong with something!!! And also it would be cool if you expressed your own opinions in the comments. Currently I am very undecided about what I am going to do, but after completing this entry I am leaning towards an unlocked HTC Desire. Update:
Olivier Cr te shares a N900 vs. Nexus One experience Edit 01-07-2010: Handed my iPhone in for a warranty repair, got a dumbphone Nokia as a loaner during repairs. Very surprised about how long a battery can last on a low powered and cheap phone. In the mean time from all the comments here and elsewhere I am starting to see that I am too annoyed with the iPhone platform (mostly iTunes) to stay there and that I am also not convinced in the direction MeeGo is going (a lot of community developers are annoyed and are jumping ship), so N900 is also out. I will need to see 2-3 MeeGo smartphones and also see how Nokia will treat their smartphone users and developers on this platform, in the long term, before I ll be ready to trust them with my money. Therefore, my choice is becoming pretty clear look for the best Android phone (after my iPhone dies). We have this thing at Accenture, where we can get company phones at a discount and HTC Desire is on that list. If I can get that, it would slash 100 LVL (almost a third of the price!) off it, but to get there I either need to get a promotion (rather rare after just one year with the company) or prove the necessity of the phone for the needs of my project (kinda hard currently). Well, the situation will be a bit clearer next week when I get my iPhone back. (Apparently the Latvia s largest holiday Midsummer Festivities or J i/L go with tons of traditional outdoor activities, caused a lot of phones to become broken and there is a backlog of warranty service ) So at this point my plan is: get my iPhone repaired and get a promotion or a project where I can justify a company-paid HTC Desire and then hope that Nokia/Intel really get their stuff together and make MeeGo a great smartphone platform over the next year or two. Update: Got my iPhone 3G back from the warranty . It is in quotes because they just gave me a new iPhone 3G. The battery lasts for 3 days of minimal use and it has not crashed yet. The recovery process was a pain again caused by iTunes: iTunes refused to restore my backup onto the new phone, because my backup was made on a iOS 4.0, while the new phone I got from the warranty has 3.1.3 on it. So I had to set this phone as a new phone, initialise it, make a backup, upgrade to 4.0, restore from the (empty) backup, then reset the phone to factory settings again and only then I could start restoring data from my original (pre-warranty) backup and start copying my data on to the device. All in all it took nearly 3 hours if iTunes doing something and almost a dozen reboots of the phone. Almost half of that time was spent doing completely unnecessary steps to work around the fact that iTunes is braindead. I ll continue using my iPhone for now, keeping my eyes on the newest Android phones and also waiting for the long-promised first MeeGo phone from Nokia.

Hello,
Just to let you know that we sent to you some possible interesting informations, but it seems it has been discarded in undesired mails.
Regards. That was the full content of an email I got today, with my email address in both To: and From: headers. It's certainly undesired email, but I just can't see why somebody would send it out. Verifying an address list to see how many bounces? Just being silly?

check-deps.sh
Phil Hands and I devised a little script which is currently packaged as part of multistrap to check the dependencies of a .deb package before installing it - called check-deps.sh and can be found at /usr/share/multistrap/check-deps.sh. I just thought I'd publicise it a bit because it can help with one of my common test cases - when a binary package changes dependencies but you haven't uploaded it yet.

check-deps.sh takes a .deb to the command line -f --file option and outputs the dependencies of that .deb and whether those dependencies (at the requested versions) exist in your apt-cache policy. Optionally, you can use check-deps.sh to also then install those dependencies (not the dependencies that would come from the current version in the repository) and the package itself.

I've found this to be a much more friendly way of satisfying runtime dependencies of a package. Where things like pbuilder would just force install the .deb and then get apt-get -f install to try and fix things, check-deps.sh will fail if the required dependencies are not available in the first place.

The benefits are two-fold. First you get to see the full list and you can easily see if your work to drop a dependency has just resulted in another package bringing that dependency back in etc. Secondly, you can test whether your .deb is installable without breaking your system and then having to remove it - e.g. against backports or a Debian derivative test chroot. It should be possible to extend the script to read Build-Depends but that means reading the input from the source package, not the built binary. Might be just as easy to have a second script for Build-Depends.

(Comments are still disabled due to spammers and time-wasters, but if you would like to see check-deps.sh more widely used or extended it isn't that hard to find my email address at debian.org.)

xapt
Another new perl script, this time using the multistrap and apt-grip core to replace the apt-cross breakage to install cross-dependencies of a Debian source package. xapt has very few dependencies (dpkg-dev, dpkg-cross, apt, perl) and very simple logic. It doesn't try to second-guess which packages to use as dependencies of cross packages, it just gets them all. As such, it still isn't the tool we need for optimal cross-dependency resolution, but then neither is apt-cross - come to that, Multiarch or sysroot aren't going to provide the right tool any time soon either. So xapt at least gets over the worst of the design problems in apt-cross (by not using the apt perl bindings mainly) and seems to just work within clean chroots which is where apt-cross has the most problems.

xapt will be a new binary package, so it will need to go through NEW but I'm looking at using it as part of pdebuild-cross because it is faster than apt-cross and seems to work much more efficiently than apt-cross inside a clean chroot. xapt does not care about multiarch or sysroot, it just gets the packages and passes them to dpkg-cross. Normally, xapt cleans up after itself but you can choose to leave the built packages in /var/lib/xapt/output if that is useful.

Last weekend (2010-07-02 2010-07-04) nine people met at the FAI developer workshop at Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. If you can t remember: FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. The participants of the FAI meeting: second row from left to right: Michael Goetze, Michael Prokop, Andreas Schuldei
first row from left to right: Sebastian Hetze, Manuel Hachtkemper, Thomas Lange, Mattias Jansson
missing on the picture: Thomas Neumann (left on sunday midday) and Stephan Hermann (only part-time) Friday afternoon started with getting to know each other, continuing with discussions all around FAI. On saturday we started to hack on FAI. Between the hack sessions and discussions the attending people presented their FAI usage and approaches. Some notes from the presentations:

---

FAI Manager webfrontend / Stephan Hermann Stephan \sh Hermann presented his FAI web frontend which should be released under the GPL license in those days. The frontend uses qooxdoo whereas the backend is based on django, rpc4django and python-tftpy. A demo video is available at blip.tv. Currently Stephan is searching for a nice name for his FAI management tool please send suggestions either to him or to the linux-fai-devel mailinglist. Grml / Michael Prokop Grml is a Debian based Linux live system specially made for system administrators. Grml uses grml-live for building the ISOs, whereas grml-live itself uses FAI s dirinstall feature to build the live system. This provides the Grml team with a nice way to autobuild 18 ISOs per day, known as daily.grml.org. Mika also presented Grml s netscript bootoption and the ethdevice bootoption of live-initramfs which is useful for booting Grml/FAI via PXE. Host Europe / Michael Goetze Host Europe uses FAI for installing Debian and Ubuntu (32+64 bit) in the support center. They have ~20 FAI classes and use a Debian lenny NFSROOT as base for all deployed systems. Their main problems with FAI aren t related to FAI itself, but instead e.g. broadcom NICs with lack of support for it in Lenny s kernel. They are not using softupdate (yet) and currently use Kickstart for deploying CentOS but are working on deploying CentOS with FAI as well. LIS AG / Sebastian Hetze Linux Information Systems AG (LIS AG) are using FAI 3.2.17 and provide a luma and PyQt based GUI to their customers. They use DHCP, LDAP and DDNS for inventory, configuration and deployment. Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn / Manuel Hachtkemper The Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn uses FAI 3.1.8 and 3.3.5 for managing ~150 systems. They are automatically running softupdates every day, reporting how many hosts actually did run the softupdate and how many didn t run. The involved failogwatch tool supports two regex files, one for excluding specific hosts and the other one for grepping for known problems in the logs. Spotify / Andreas Schuldei + Mattias Jansson Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming service and the operating people at Spotify use FAI for deploying the systems. Currently they are using FAI 3.3.3 to deploy ~400 bare metal machines and ~150 virtualised machines. They have their class names in DNS using the txt/Text record entry. They are using a self written prepend_class script to manage dependencies between classes. University K ln / Thomas Lange Thomas uses FAI s trunk version (of course ), managing ~25 machines with less than 20 FAI classes. He s not using softupdates as Lenny s aptitude ignores the hold status of packages (this bug should be fixed for Squeeze). $COMPANY One of the big telecommunication providers in Germany uses FAI 3.3.3 for installing their bare-metal and virtual servers, providing Debian, Ubuntu and SLES. They are using Debian NFSROOT as a base for all systems as well and their main problems with FAI wasn t FAI itself but how to manage installation of virtual machines.

---

On Saturday evening we had a nice barbecue which included beer and K lsch *d&r*. On Sunday we continued with discussions and development. Our work-log of the weekend:

• identified important packages for the Debian/squeeze release
• discussed features that should be available (important packages and bugreports, missing features, )
• fixed several bugs (wrong exit codes, error handling, variable handling, )
• discussed FAI packaging for Ubuntu (packages for lucid are available at ppa at launchpad)
• implemented support for grub2 in fai-cd (will be merged soon)
• implemented initial support for retrieving sources with FAI (available in svn s trunk)

Important decisions made:

• next major release will have version number 4.x
• we want to continue to provide a stable version 3.x (no new features, just bugfixes and maintenance) side-by-side with version 4.x
• deprecated setup-harddisk will be dropped, setup-storage is well established, works fine and is properly maintained by FAI developer Michael Tautschnig (who sadly couldn t attend the FAI developer meeting)
• a FAQ section will be created on the FAI homepage

We noticed that many FAI users implement their own way how to handle dependency management between classes, we will re-consider how we could provide such a mechanism through FAI s core. We also noted that it s important that any self-written scripts used within FAI are fully idempotent and users should be aware of this. Last but not least many thanks to the sponsors of the FAI developer workshop 07/2010! The workshop wouldn t have been possible without our generous sponsors, namely being:

• Debian
• Linuxhotel
• Linux Information Systems AG
• Netways
• Spotify
• Thomas-Krenn.AG

Some time ago, someone posted to a development mailing list about a piece of code, Cc:ing some people who had modified the code in recent past. Within hours, the original author replied to complain about not being Cc'd. Several thoughts went through my mind:

• Is this man a walking colostomy bag?
• Why is this clown proud of his code? It is sloppy and riddled with bugs, and half of the changes made to it by other people have been obvious fixes.
• Why did his parents not raise him better? Doesn't he realize that demanding recognition in this way makes him a bad person?

This is Free Software, and people are motivated by all kinds of factors. Some bad reasons include

• Recognition, praise, or other Community ego-stroking
• Gaining a competitive advantage for one's for-profit business
• Line items on one's CV
• Finding a husband
• Accumulating increased influence in other communities

Looking at it through an Open Source lens, all these bad reasons are good reasons. For whatever motives, people are getting work done and accomplishing things. Of course, there are always an irritating number of hangers-on, and people who do not actually achieve much but are filled with such self-importance that they believe they deserve to be highly influential through sheer force of will, and the majority of the Community will concede this influence to them due to a variety of flaws in the Human Condition, but I digress. It would be nice if everyone had motives that were pure and good, especially since at least 90% of problems in Free Software projects are due to ego issues, but when the world works, the world works. So I am happy to get code contributions for whatever reason (assuming there are no strings attached). The problem I have is when people insist that their bad reasons are legitimate and should be catered to and accommodated by others.

I have a lot of papers lying around. I now try to keep them organized, but I haven't got through the back log of when I didn't organize them. Sometimes I come across stuff that I'm happy I had in the pile. The following was my attempt at a valedictorian speech for the 2005 Math class at the University of Waterloo. I was not the valedictorian, but I tried, and thus have a speech.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Doctors and children of all ages. Thank you for spending our last day at Waterloo, here with us. I am one of those people who won't be staying here after day, but somehow I was still chosen to be the valedictorian. So, when I was asked to be the valedictorian by some friends of mine, I was thrilled. I also though I could do a good job, heck, I got my degree in CS, therefore, I can do anything. So, I accepted the nomination. I looked at the nomination form and didn't find any hints on what to talk about. At this point I realized that this speech may be a little underspecified. In fact, there was no specification at all.

I gathered what I could from the form, i.e. a speech had to be written by, and performed on the 18th of June 2005. Skip forward a few weeks, I'd accomplished nothing more than vague thoughts on what to talk about, then I got an email. All potential speeches had to be presented on the 6th of April 2005 (the deadline had moved up, and still no specification). However, a performance objective was given in that email -- each speech must be completed in 5 minutes. Given that I don't have a spec, I can only hope no one else has one.

What follows is my implementation of this unknown specification.

Another cycle in our lives is over. We are finished our latest round of education. This time from the University of Waterloo, in some Math program. Many of us have changed significantly while we've been here, but we are still the same people. We know we are older, we can guess that we are wiser, and we are certainly more educated. So, here is a quick tour of my cycle through Waterloo.

When I got here back in September 2000, I was amazed at how many smart people could be put together in one small place. I am actually still amazed by all the smart people here. I simply happen to know a bit more about some of these people and the amazing things they have done. With all these smart people here, I even had to do homework to keep up.

Skip forward to second year. Second year is when the university decided there is no more room for me in residence. In fact, they do that to almost all second year students. So, I found a sleezy place to live off-campus and started discovering what life is like outside the university bubble. For example, there are stores not in the plaza. There are a couple malls, a bus station, and a train station.

By third year Waterloo had become home despite working in two other cities and growing up on the other side of Toronto. I no longer had to fear being kicked out of CS since I had enough courses with good marks racked up that my cumulative average wouldn't drop too low unless I started failing, which would have been a bad thing to do.

In fourth year, I could see the end in sight. Grad school applications needed to be done pronto and some interesting job prospects lured me away from yet more years of school. Co-op didn't help keep me in school, I enjoyed the working world. I know there are others that used co-op to find that the working world wasn't for them. I expect those people to be in some school for a good long time.

Now we are at the end, and the cycle is complete. I've been across the country, lived over in sunny California, and biked through Scotland, but no where has compared to Waterloo, or the great people that make it such a wonderful place to be. I'm sad to go, as I'm sure many of you are, but I hope you are excited about the next step at the same time.

That was my 5 years, in a non-chronologically accurate order. But it's been even better to help and see people do amazing things. Small things, like getting a group of friends together to go get pints of Bubbletea. To large things like running frosh week for thousands of first year students.

Now that we have looked at the past, what about the future? One of the things I didn't wan to say during this speech is that "We are the future". What does that even mean? Are we useless now? I don't know what it means, it could even be partially true, but we are not useless. In fact our time is now! Among this graduating class are those who are doing cutting edge research. There are those we are already running their own companies. There are those who are already half-way through there plan to rule the world. There are even those of us who are simply going to help others do those things. So, we are not "the future", we are "the now".

Being "the now", (don't I sound like Dubya?) is one thing, but we should always be "the now". We can always make now be our time. We should do this because if we aren't the ones living happily and making the world a better place, in our own ways, then who is going to do it?

If nothing else, I really hope everyone lives happily. For me, I found if I can keep my hat then I can be happy. Well, I can be happy promoting "No Pants Day"!

DOWN WITH PANTS!!

At the end, I finally figured out the specification for this speech. It's simple: Remind people of the awesome things they have done here, the amazing people they shouldn't forget. Lastly, to convince people to keep doing the awesome things despite what might happen or what obstacles appear.

Thank you, I enjoyed being your VD today.

My girlfriend and I were out picking up a cake at the bakery last week, when my phone rang:

• Hello, I'm calling about your application. I just spent the last hour discussing your case with my boss and there's just one thing that bothers us: do you ever intend on paying your residual taxes?
• I received those payment slips right after I became unemployed and, as you know, living off unemployment benefits in this country's most expensive city doesn't exactly leave anyone with money to spare...
• Say no more! Moving to the capital for this job was a real shocker. The rents are so bloody expensive here! Anyhow, do you intend on taking care of those residual taxes as soon as you get a job?
• Yup, just like I said in my application.
• Alright, then I guess that everything is in order. We can start processing your application today. We obviously cannot make any promise about how long that's gonna take, but I would think that the decision should come fairly soon.
• Wow! That's excellent news! Thanks again for your help!
• You're welcome, sir. Have a nice day!

Without knowing, at that moment, I had just become a citizen of the country in which I have been living for the past 12 years. It was only yesterday, upon receiving the decision in the mail and looking at the date on the certificate that I realized that, when I got the phone call, the decision had already been made and the bureaucracy was only looking for reassurances that I fully intend upon acquitting my civic obligations as soon as humanely possible. To say that reading the decision was a highly emotional moment is an understatement. Trying to explain the intensity of this moment to my girlfriend, I compared it to the day when a teenager reaches adulthood. This instant brought a similar feeling: suddenly, the whole EU opens its doors to me and I'm free to decide how to best use the opportunities it offers. What next? For now, completing this government training to become a bureaucrat. Funnily enough, becoming a citizen resolved the whole issue of background checks, which also suddenly triples the number of possible venues for the on-job part of the training. In my case, it looks like I'll be spending the next few months at the Ministry of Employment and Entrepreneurship, working on EU projects that fund R&D efforts and export sales ventures in each member state. After that, I'm not sure. On one hand, I'd like to apply for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' KAVAKU recruitment program for future diplomats. On the other hand, that ministry is extremely picky about whom it accepts and it's not particularly known for favoring naturalized individuals. This being said, our current Minister recently published rather ambitious plans to completely reform the Ministry by bringing in seasoned professionals from the private sector who could efficiently promote Finnish know-how and products abroad, rather than hiring more of the same Public Administration graduates, so, who knows? Maybe the time is right for someone like me to join the ranks of the Finnish diplomacy? An other option that I'm considering is to permanently move to Estonia. When my last job there ended, I was left with the feeling that I could have accomplished a lot more, if only I were in a legal position to move there, rather than commute a couple of times a week. Beyond the pioneering work that myself and my diplomat friends at the Estonian embassy did in Turkey, there was a demand for us to perform the same magic in other countries of interest to Estonia. Unfortunately, not being in a position to be on-site and no longer having a job that paid for me to be there often enough meant that I had to pass on that opportunity. Now, seeing how one of my friends recently left the diplomacy and is open to new challenges, I'm wondering if now might be a good time to resume our operation and prepare our next campaign? Wow... So much to think about, now that a whole continent opened its doors to me. Hienoa! Olen suomalainen.

Like other years, Benimaclet's Neighbour Association has organized a new cycle of film projections for the neighbours, by the neighbours, with the intention to get people out of their homes and share a good time with many others. Like in the other two editions, the selected films try to deliver a message to the viewers, and this year the topics are centered about labour and migration social issues. A change in this year's edition is that there will be one more projection, for a total of 5 films, every Sunday of July, at 22:00 in the Pla a de Benimaclet. Last week, we saw El viaje de Teo, a Mexican film describing the migration dramas going on in the Sonora Desert. This Sunday, we'll see Arcadia, which will be followed by Recursos humanos, Hijos de los hombres and La estrategia del caracol. Before each film, some local artists will perform live for us. Make yourself a sandwich, bring a chair to Benimaclet and enjoy some good cinema with your neighbours every Sunday in July!

Since a few months, I have been playing around with Isabelle, a theorem prover system. I find it very intriguing to have proofs of mathematical statements checked by something as pendantic and comprehensive as a machine. Mathematicians always claim that their statements are true in all eternity, but the proofs are just checked by error-prone human beings. Especially with complex, large proofs that are only read by a handful of people, I doubt that these are always fully correct. Note that this does not imply that I doubt that the results are correct. They probably are. But a bit of doubt remains. A computer-checked proof, in contrast, can not accidentially omit corner cases, leave out seemingly trivial assumtions of used theorems or be misled by slightly differing definition from different sources. I was hoping to check at least parts of my diploma thesis using Isabelle, but it turns out that the standard algebra library shipped with Isabelle is not complete enough. Even free groups were missing. This was motivation enough to try to formalize them and prove the universal property and some isomorphisms (The free group over the empty set is the unit group, the free group over one generator is the additive group of integers and free groups over sets of same cardinality are isomophic). I submitted the resulting theory to the Archive of Formal Proofs and it was accepted. You can view the complete document or the document without proofs. I did not formalize the fact that isomorphic free groups have bases of same cardinality. As far as I know there is no simple argument that works directly with free groups. The proofs I have seen pass to the abelianization of the free group, i.e. the free module over and apply the well known proof from the analogous statement about vector spaces. But if someone knows an elementary proof of this fact, I d like to hear about it.

The inofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	498
Affecting Squeeze:	397
Squeeze only:	72
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	325

Of these 325 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	22
Patched in Squeeze:	50
Duplicates in Squeeze:	51
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	12
Claimed in Squeeze:	4
Delayed in Squeeze:	11
Can fixed in a security Update:	30
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	31

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 166 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, the with the view of the Release Managers, 306 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Recently I have been doing a bit of work on libcsoap (the C library for making SOAP XML calls over http) and the libnanohttp library that it depends on. The most important part of my work on it was making it thread-safe with the technique I described in my post about finding thread unsafe code [1]. But I also did some work to make the code faster, reading data one byte at a time is very inefficient. There has been no upstream release of this software for years, email to one of the maintainers bounced and the other one indicated that they are no longer involved in the project. So I m thinking of taking over upstream development. The previous Debian maintainer for the packages in question has recently resigned so I ve taken over the packaging. But for this one I think I can do better work in an upstream capacity, so I d like to get a co-maintainer for the Debian package and possibly someone who will help with upstream work. I would appreciate any offers of assistance with these things.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/06/14/finding-thread-unsafe-code/

My project. This post assumes that the reader has read my last post. This week I had less time to work on my project than the last ones, because it was kind of the last week of the semester for some disciplines. This was unfortunate from a point of view, but it s good in another, because now I ve finished most of my disciplines and can focus more. This is also the reason why the weekly report is slightly delayed. Most of my work this week was continuing the investigation of the segfault caused by my implementation of allocation in lines. The most interesting thing I discovered came after a suggestion from my menthor: to use +RTS -DS to turn on the sanity checker. I runned the code with my allocation implementation and the sanity checker and got a segfault. I runned again only with the code to free memory in lines and I got also a segfault. Then I runned without all my patches, using sweep, and I got the segfault. So it seems that there is something wrong with sweep, and now I m investigating this new segfault. I m using the bernouilli program from nofib to test, running with 148 as a parameter and, naturally, +RTS -w -DS passed to the RunTime System. The output of gdb:

Current directory is /home/marcot/trabalho/livre/ghc/nofib/imaginary/bernouilli/
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.1-debian
Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-linux-gnu".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /home/marcot/trabalho/livre/ghc/nofib/imaginary/bernouilli/Main...done.
(gdb) r 148 +RTS -w -DS
Starting program: /home/marcot/trabalho/livre/ghc/nofib/imaginary/bernouilli/Main 148 +RTS -w -DS
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00000000006309cb in LOOKS_LIKE_INFO_PTR_NOT_NULL (p=12297829382473034410) at includes/rts/storage/ClosureMacros.h:225
(gdb) where
#0  0x00000000006309cb in LOOKS_LIKE_INFO_PTR_NOT_NULL (p=12297829382473034410) at includes/rts/storage/ClosureMacros.h:225
#1  0x0000000000630a16 in LOOKS_LIKE_INFO_PTR (p=12297829382473034410) at includes/rts/storage/ClosureMacros.h:230
#2  0x0000000000630a4b in LOOKS_LIKE_CLOSURE_PTR (p=0x7ffff6c84062) at includes/rts/storage/ClosureMacros.h:235
#3  0x0000000000631427 in checkClosure (p=0x7ffff6853a08) at rts/sm/Sanity.c:320
#4  0x00000000006319ef in checkHeap (bd=0x7ffff68014c0) at rts/sm/Sanity.c:479
#5  0x000000000063222f in checkSanity (check_heap=rtsTrue) at rts/sm/Sanity.c:686
#6  0x000000000062dfdb in GarbageCollect (force_major_gc=rtsFalse, gc_type=0, cap=0x8d2ec0) at rts/sm/GC.c:768
#7  0x0000000000620431 in scheduleDoGC (cap=0x8d2ec0, task=0x8f5080, force_major=rtsFalse) at rts/Schedule.c:1420
#8  0x000000000061fa2c in schedule (initialCapability=0x8d2ec0, task=0x8f5080) at rts/Schedule.c:539
#9  0x0000000000620c77 in scheduleWaitThread (tso=0x7ffff6c80000, ret=0x0, cap=0x8d2ec0) at rts/Schedule.c:1902
#10 0x000000000065762b in rts_evalLazyIO (cap=0x8d2ec0, p=0x89d8b0, ret=0x0) at rts/RtsAPI.c:495
#11 0x000000000061d3db in real_main () at rts/RtsMain.c:66
#12 0x000000000061d4ca in hs_main (argc=5, argv=0x7fffffffe6d8, main_init=0x406558 <__stginit_ZCMain>, main_closure=0x89d8b0) at rts/RtsMain.c:115
#13 0x00007ffff6fbcabd in __libc_start_main (main=<value optimized out>, argc=<value optimized out>, ubp_av=<value optimized out>, init=<value optimized out>, fini=<value optimized out>, rtld_fini=<value optimized out>, stack_end=0x7fffffffe6c8) at libc-start.c:222
#14 0x0000000000403a69 in _start ()

I started the investigation with the most obvious test: to remove the call to sweep() in rts/sm/GC.c.

  if (major_gc && oldest_gen->mark)  
      if (oldest_gen->compact)
          compact(gct->scavenged_static_objects);
      // else
      //     sweep(oldest_gen);

The result was the same, same segfault in the same place. So I decided to do it a little stronger and avoid the blocks getting the BF_MARKED flag, so that they are not even marked.

                if (!(bd->flags & BF_FRAGMENTED))  
                    // bd->flags  = BF_MARKED;
                 

This one worked. The code in sweep() is not commented, but it s irrelevant, since it ignores blocks that don t have this flag. My third try was to comment the places where the BF_MARKED flag is read, to see each one was causing the segfault. I got a list of places to search with grep, and there weren t a lot of them.

$ grep BF_MARKED rts/sm/*.c
rts/sm/Compact.c:       if (bd->flags & BF_MARKED)
rts/sm/Evac.c:  if ((bd->flags & (BF_LARGE   BF_MARKED   BF_EVACUATED)) != 0)  
rts/sm/Evac.c:        if (bd->flags & BF_MARKED)  
rts/sm/GCAux.c:    if ((bd->flags & BF_MARKED) && is_marked((P_)q,bd))  
rts/sm/GC.c:                    if (!(bd->flags & BF_MARKED))
rts/sm/GC.c:                        // time, so reset the BF_MARKED flags.
rts/sm/GC.c:                        // compact.  (search for BF_MARKED above).
rts/sm/GC.c:                        bd->flags &= ~BF_MARKED;
rts/sm/GC.c:                // Also at this point we set the BF_MARKED flag
rts/sm/GC.c:                // BF_MARKED is always unset, except during GC
rts/sm/GC.c:                    bd->flags  = BF_MARKED;
rts/sm/Sweep.c:        if (!(bd->flags & BF_MARKED))  

The first one is in rts/sm/Compact.c, so it s not relevant to the use with -w. The second one, in rts/sm/Evac.c, is a bit indirect.

  if ((bd->flags & (BF_LARGE   BF_MARKED   BF_EVACUATED)) != 0)  
      // pointer into to-space: just return it.  It might be a pointer
      // into a generation that we aren't collecting (> N), or it
      // might just be a pointer into to-space.  The latter doesn't
      // happen often, but allowing it makes certain things a bit
      // easier; e.g. scavenging an object is idempotent, so it's OK to
      // have an object on the mutable list multiple times.
      if (bd->flags & BF_EVACUATED)  
          // We aren't copying this object, so we have to check
          // whether it is already in the target generation.  (this is
          // the write barrier).
	  if (bd->gen < gct->evac_gen)  
	      gct->failed_to_evac = rtsTrue;
	      TICK_GC_FAILED_PROMOTION();
	   
	  return;
       
      /* evacuate large objects by re-linking them onto a different list.
       */
      if (bd->flags & BF_LARGE)  
	  info = get_itbl(q);
	  if (info->type == TSO &&
	      ((StgTSO *)q)->what_next == ThreadRelocated)  
	      q = (StgClosure *)((StgTSO *)q)->_link;
              *p = q;
	      goto loop;
	   
	  evacuate_large((P_)q);
	  return;
       
      /* If the object is in a gen that we're compacting, then we
       * need to use an alternative evacuate procedure.
       */
      if (!is_marked((P_)q,bd))  
          mark((P_)q,bd);
          push_mark_stack((P_)q);
       
      return;
   

The first if, in line 466, is executed if any of the three flags is present: BF_LARGE, BF_MARKED or BF_EVACUATED. The second if, in line 474, checks for BF_EVACUATED, and returns. The third if, in line 487, checks for BF_LARGE and returns. The code in lines 502-505 is only executed if BF_MARKED is present, and not the other ones. I tried commenting this code, and got an assertion fail in the user code, so I think this is not a good path to follow. The second occurence of BF_MARKED is in the same file.

        if (bd->flags & BF_MARKED)  
            // must call evacuate() to mark this closure if evac==rtsTrue
            *q = (StgClosure *)p;
            if (evac) evacuate(q);
            unchain_thunk_selectors(prev_thunk_selector, (StgClosure *)p);
            return;
         

Commenting it, with or without the call to sweep() commented, causes the same segfault. So, I m tending to think this part of the code is unrelated to the issue. The third occurence is in rts/sm/GCAux.c. I tried commenting it with all the four combinations of the two others commented and not commented, and all resulted in the segfault in the same place. There s another place to check in rts/sm/GC.c. Again, commenting it made no difference. The last one is part of sweep(), so it s avoided anyway when the call to this function is commented.

Another day, another bill Like most countries, the UK has been valiantly trying to force consumers to reduce their paper usage. Let's set aside the fact that most paper is not generated by consumers. And that, it isn't about reduce usage but reducing expenses relating to delivery of this paper. Let's us also leave aside the fact that most airlines want consumers to print out their boarding cards at home. Because it reduces expenses incurred in maintaining staff at airport check-in counters. Anyway, most communications providers have taken up this challenge by making it more expensive to obtain a paper bill. But I don't want a paper bill, per se, what I am really after is a copy of the bill I can keep for my own records. And print if I so need to. Both Vodafone and Talktalk will send you notifications, via email, that you have a bill. But neither of them allow you to obtain a copy of the PDF that would have been printed and sent to you. Instead you have to fart-arse around with their systems to get (at best) a CSV file. Why, oh why, can neither of them just send the PDF that was going to be generated? That have a bill run process anyway, it generates the PDF, sends the emails, and then promptly discards the PDFs. That would mean I have an immediate archive of all my bills from both companies in my email. Just Broken.

From time to time I see people arguing that the wide deployment of IPv6 will force DNSBLs to significantly change their operations and semantics. Usually they have little or no actual experience with IPv6 and the main argument used to justify this view appears to be more or less "OMG so many bits!1!!!". I have no reason to believe that this will really happen. People are already sending mail over IPv6 and I expect that the same reputation mechanisms used for IPv4 will be deployed as soon as they will be needed, with small policy changes to cope with the fact that end users typically get a whole network instead of a single IP address. So I expect that DNSBLs will continue to operate as usual like they currently do for IPv4 addresses, optionally by promoting "single IP" listings to "whole /64" listings when appropriate.

Let's briefly categorize the common types of DNSBL listings:

• spam sources or spam support (e.g. SBL): a human investigator decides that a specific server or network needs to be listed. Nothing will change.
• dynamic or dynamic-like (residential) networks (e.g. PBL): a human investigator decides that a specific network needs to be listed, or the ISP itself provides their relevant ranges. Nothing will change, except that dynamically-assigned networks will be much less common.
• fully automatic behaviour-driven listings (e.g. CBL): the IP addresses of spam sources are automatically listed as soon as they are detected. Are adjustments needed for this case? The only issue I can think about are the randomly-generated "privacy extensions" addresses used by some clients, but since they can be automatically detected the BL operator may also choose to just list the corresponding /64 from start.

If anything, with IPv6 much less guessing is needed to know how large each customer assignment is, so some things will actually be easier for operators. (I have been using IPv6 for at least ten years and I have received email over IPv6 networks for at least five.)

I was asked Can you run SELinux on a XEN guest without any problem? . In a generic sense the answer is of course YES, Xen allows you to run Linux kernels with all the usual range of features and SE Linux isn t a particularly difficult feature to enable. I do most of my SE Linux development and testing on virtual machines and until recently I didn t have any hardware suitable for running KVM, so in the last few years I ve done more SE Linux testing on Xen than on non-virtual machines. My SE Linux Play Machine [1] (which will be online again tomorrow) is one SE Linux system running under Xen. But the question was asked in the context of my blog post comparing the prices of virtual hosting providers [2], which changes things. Both Linode and Slicehost (the two virtual hosting providers that my clients use) provide kernels without SE Linux support, the command grep selinux /proc/filesystems (which is the easiest way to test for SE Linux support) gives no output. I am not aware of any other virtual hosting company that provides SE Linux support. If anyone knows of a virtual hosting company that runs Xen or KVM virtual machines with SE Linux support then please let me know, I ll write a blog post comparing such companies if there are some. For the people who work at ISPs: If your company supports SE Linux virtual machines then I would be happy to review your service, just give me a free DomU for a couple of weeks so I can test it out. If your company is considering offering such virtual machines then I would be happy to have a confidential discussion about the issues that you will face, while I am available for paid consulting work in this area I am more than happy to spend an hour or two helping a company that s going to help support my favorite free software project without expecting to be paid. But I have to note that if a dozen hosting companies happen to want advice I won t be able to provide two hours of free advice to each of them. I think that there is an unsatisfied market demand for SE Linux virtual machines. I don t expect all virtual hosting companies to support it in the near future, but this will make it more profitable for those that do. If for the sake of discussion we assume that 5% of sysadmins who are making purchasing decisions regarding virtual servers really want to have SE Linux support and if 5% of virtual hosting companies were to offer such support, then those hosting companies would almost double their market share as a result of supporting SE Linux. It s the usual economic factors relating to small companies that profit from providing good support for the needs of a minority of customers.

• [1] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/06/22/virtual-hosting-prices/

Folks at last year's Wikimania may remember the presentation I gave there. It was essentially a literature review of Wikipedia and Wikimedia scholarship from the previous year. The idea was to give a bird's-eye-view as well a series of highlights -- all aimed at Wikimedians. Apparently somebody found it useful because I've been asked to do it again! I'm going to be paired up in a longer session with Felipe Ortega -- whose excellent dissertation I summarized as part of my talk last year -- and Mayo Fuster Morell has also agreed to help out. Felipe is program chair for WikiSym this year and will be focusing on providing folks with a summary of the papers published at that conference. It will be held immediately before Wikimania in Gdansk. For my part, I'm going to be focusing more broadly and talking about papers published, well, anywhere else. And this is where you come in! With search engines and all, I've got a pretty good idea of breadth of the work that's out there. I also "just know" stuff from my own areas of interest and study. That said, I don't have as strong of an idea of what's good and what's relevant beyond what I can grok from citation counts. And after one year (or less!), that's clearly not very much information. As a result, I'm looking for suggestions or recommendations from anybody on interesting, useful, important, or otherwise noteworthy scholarly papers on or about Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects published in the last year. Feel free to leave a comment, email mako@atdot.cc, or edit this page.

Since I have started to use Org-mode, I though it was missing something to have appointment locations on a map. Of course, it's easy to get a LOCATION property from an entry, and then browse-url on Google Maps. But it is too easy for me, so once again I said: challenge accepted! I will bring Google Maps into Emacs! After several hours of work, the google-maps-el project shows a map! It fully implements the Google Static Maps API and the Google Maps Geocoding API. You can type M-x google-maps and type some place to see it marked on map. Of course you can do much more, as seen in the screen shot above. I've also completed all of this with a small org-location-google-maps which simply show a Google Maps' map for the location of an event in Org mode by pressing C-c M-l in an Org buffer or in the Org agenda.

Inspired by various Planet Debian postings, I've spent some time recently looking into a few RC bugs to help with the Squeeze release. mpg123-el #581227 A previous commenter on this bug suggested a proposed fix, which I tested and uploaded. I think the bug's severity was inflated to begin with, so I downgraded the bug as well. doclifter #580246 This one had to do with the python2.6 transition. I pointed out a patch against Ubuntu's version of the package that fixes this problem, and someone else made an NMU based on that. (Seemed like a good idea to look in the PTS for Ubuntu patches since Ubuntu always transitions to newer Python before Debian proper.) gnuvd #580110 I checked upstream and a new version that's supposed to fix this bug was released today, so I updated the bug report to make note of this and give the maintainer a chance to look at it. libtommath #583820 This FTBFS bug was caused by a previous NMU that fixed a different FTBFS and also made some unrelated changes. I sent a message to the previous NMUer noting this fact and made a new upload fixing the new FTBFS. fceu #580820 Needs new upstream packaged to fix. The maintainer seems pseudo-MIA but has shown some signs of returning to activity; I sent an email inquiring as to whether he intends to fix the critical issue in this package. op-panel #582377 and #571427 These were not merged when I started out, so I merged them after noticing they were the same. I spent some poking at the bug itself and made a simple patch, only to find out that there was a pending patch in pkg-voip's subversion repo. I hopped onto #debian-voip to prod the person who'd prepared the patch in subversion about the importance of updating the BTS when working on bugs. These bugs are currently blocking on testing the patch. Most all of these bugs I've subscribed to in case of follow-up. (Geez, challenge-response subscription via email is kind of a pain.)