At 14:45 CEST, today, 1 October 2009, I submitted my thesis to the print shop. Sarah has kindly agreed to pick it up tomorrow and drop it off at Brian s office, from where it will go to the three examiners. On 30 October at 9:30 IST, I will stand to publicly defend my work at the University of Limerick. I expect to receive a list of changes to be made from the examiners, hopefully minor, such that there won t be much in the way before I submit the final version to the University Board by 3 December. Once they give their green light, I will make it available on my research website, along with the data. I expect this to happen in January 2010. I have many many people to thank and will do so in due time. Right now I just want to thank Brian Fitzgerald and Kieran Conboy for their flexibility. I was supposed to have the thesis done by the end of August to given them a month to read it over, but by then, I only had the first six (of eight) chapters done. We hence spent all of September sending back and forth PDFs and paper comments, working iteratively so that today, I could put the finishing touch on the work and keep the schedule. The next thing on my agenda is the second edition of my book, which we are targetting for Debian squeeze . If you would like to be the first to receive more details, sign up to the announcement mailing list.

There was a recent post by Martin Meredith asking about dotfile management. This inspired me to put together a simple hack which allows several operations to be carried out:

dotfile-manager update [directory]

Update the contents of the named directory to the most recent version, via "hg pull" or HTTP fetch. This could be trivially updated to allow git/subversion/CVS to be used instead. (directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.)

dotfile-manager link [directory]

For each file in the named directory link _foo to ~/.foo. (directory defaults to ~/.dotfiles/ if not specified.) e.g. directory/_screenrc will be linked to from ~/.screenrc. But hostnames count too! So you can create directory/_screenrc.gold and that will be the target of ~/.screenrc on the host gold.my.flat

dotfile-manager tidy

This removes any dangling ~/.* symlinks.

dotfile-manager report

Report on any file ~/.* which isn't a symlink - those files might be added in the future.

Right now that lets me update my own dotfiles via:

dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager update ~/.dotfiles-private
dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles
dotfile-manager link ~/.dotfiles-private

It could be updated a little more, but it already supports profiles - if you assume "profile" means "input directory". To be honest it probably needs to be perlified, rather than being hoky shell script. But otherwise I can see it being useful - much more so than my existing solution which is ~/.dotfiles/fixup.sh inside my dotfiles repository. ObFilm: Forever Knight

Is there a decent dotfile manager packaged in Ubuntu/Debian? I need something that ll let me have a repository of my dotfiles and manage them easily amongst multiple locations. I ve seen a lot of homebrew implementations of something like this, I m just wondering if there s something that s worth using already out there!

Martin rants about the German electoral system. From his rant, I'll pick up only two points And I'll try to connect with Toxicore's excelent (Spanish) blog post, where he quotes political analist Denise Dresser. Dresser has made a great point: Our probably-imposed, legitimacy-impaired president Felipe Calder n has requested the society to talk good about Mexico, to project a positive image of the country. Dresser says, yes, there is a lot of good to talk about the country, and we should emphasize on its richness and beauty, invite people to come and visit, to know what the country is really like. But at the same time, it is our duty to talk bad about the bad areas and decisions of our government, as that is the best (if not the only) thing many of us can do to really get things to happen That is what we can do to push our country's good things forward, to make the country sustainable, to pull attention towards what needs (such as the very very deplorable cases of censorship, human rights violation, ecosystem predation we have seen in the last years). Anyway... What did I want to comment about Martin's post? He criticizes Germany's law requiring a 5% quota for a party to have parliamentary representation. In Mexico, the minimum is 2%. Most people agree, though, that it is too low, and that we should push to increase it. Why? Because the money that is spent in supporting the party system. In Mexico, when a political party fails to get 2% of the vote, it is basically disbanded and it is very hard for it to regroup, to compete again. Many people believe we should aim to a political system with as few political parties as possible (such as the semi-democratic system they have in the USA). I strongly prefer the system found in most European (and even many South American) countries where there is a real wealth of ideological positions represented, and where governments have to be formed by agreeing to form coalitions, as it is almost impossible for them to get full majority. I would much rather see Mexico march towards a parliamentary-based political system, away from the presidential one. Of course, that is almost impossible to expect. With the current political system, we are bound to have forever few monolithic, meaningless political parties. We will likely converge on three blocks, following the current three major blocks (leftoid PRD, centroid PRI, rightoid PAN). They are different in some important senses, yes, but in general they are much the same. I don't hold any hopes to ever see something like the Pirate Party appearing in our system...

This coming Sunday, Germany is voting its parliament for the next four years. I wanted to participate remotely, but they didn t let me. The letter, inviting me to order the voting forms, was sent too late. Instead of ordering and waiting for the voting forms, hoping for them to arrive back in Germany before the municipal agency stops all their work at 16:59 on Friday afternoon, I filled in the fields in a way to give my mother full authority to submit my vote. On the document, it only said that she would need a notary procuration, which she has. When my mother tried to vote in my name, they refused her: the vote has to be confidential, and proxies may only vote for disabled people, or those who cannot read. I can understand half of the motivation behind this it guards against abuse but the bottom line is that I am now unable to cast a vote. Democracy stabbed by bureaucracy. Well, democracy to the limited degree that we have it in Germany. I do not mean to criticise at this time that voting in Germany means to place trust into people you d rather not trust, but once they get majority, they can do whatever they want for four years. The specific shortcoming in our democracy on which I would like to focus is the five percent clause , which states that a party needs to reach 5% of votes before they can enter the parliament; if those 5% are not reached, all votes for the party are basically lost. I suspect that this clause is what s keeping back a lot of people from electing Germany s pirate party, which focuses on the importance of freedom in today s media-centric and interconnected world. It seems doubtful that the Piratenpartei will reach the limit this round, but given all the attention they recently received, as well as their plain cause, I would not be surprised if they did. I think it is important for people to vote the party they want, without letting the 5% limit discourage them. Anything else would be undemocratic. Let s return to the pirates: it s paramount for the government to consider freedom and related issues, and to put clueful people on the job. The Piratenpartei is the only party that approaches the issue properly, all the others are just too happy to succomb to castration of personal freedom for such lofty goals as anti-terrorism, or the containment of child pornography. I don t like terrorists, and I think child pornography is among the most horrific ways to abuse defenceless humans in irrevocable ways that I can imagine. But I also don t like losing my deodorant to airport security, cameras tracking my every move, (diletantic) censorship on the Internet, and lack of control over my own data. Time to put an end to that, and to solve problems without castrating freedom. Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying: they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The Piratenpartei is probably not capable of leadership at this point, for they are young. But they can help the leading party maintain a bearing. That s what the Greens did, successfully albeit slowly, and I appreciate that the pirates are approaching the matter before it will be too late. The media have not missed a chance to try to stomp over them in recent months, but at the end of the day, after all the slander and some obvious mistakes on the side of the party, I still see a group of people prepared to fight for freedom with an open and honest approach. The run-ins with the media are hardly about content, it seems more that the Piratenpartei is simply unable to become part of the sensationalist mash which is our media-politician ensemble. And I think that s good. I appreciate a party communicating not via their PR office, but with new media, like blogs, or e-mail. I appreciate that their people maintain the personality of a human trying to do politics, not a politician trying to come across as human. If my municipality had let me vote, I would have selected the pirates. They may not make the 5% this year, but I would not let that be a reason against them. If one believes in democracy, then it s important to do it right.

Dear Lazyweb, I've been having problems with cron jobs that mail their output, because they always manage to garble non-ASCII characters into some unreadable crap. Upon closer inspection, the real culprit seems to be mailx: no single mailx implementation out there seems to have come to terms with the fact that most contemporary operating systems have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8, rather than in ASCII. I had very high hopes for the Heirloom implementation of mailx, except that it, too, fails at encoding mail headers in UTF-8. I'm thus wondering if there's anything I might have overlooked, perhaps a mailx setting that would enforce encoding of the From, To and Subject lines to UTF-8, or otherwise another mailx implementation that in fact does acknowledge the fact that most operating systems these days have their GECOS information encoded in UTF-8?

The Ubuntu Global Bug Jam is just around the corner, and once again, the kind folks at the Linux Emporium have kindly offered the use of their offices to the Ubuntu UK team. Last time, we focused on bugs, and this time it s only slightly different. Instead of it being a Bug Jam it s just going to be a Jam . There will be people on hand to talk to about Bug Triaging, packaging, translating (and I hope we ll get the whole of Ubuntu translated into English by the end of the Jam), and anything else you can think of. So, if you re interested in helping make Ubuntu a better distro, and live in (or can travel to) the Birmingham Area in the UK, then you re welcome to come along. The Jam is on the 2nd-4th October, and we ll be around on all three days. If you need more info, please feel free to email me on <mez AT ubuntu DOT com>. Last year we had a great time, with refreshments (including beer) provided. Juggling penguins, and one person sleeping underneath the conference room table overnight. Hopefully we ll also have the live Video Streams up and running again for anyone who can t make it (or other Ubuntu Jams) to join in with! You can also find some blog posts about our last bug jam

So, anyone watching the show was actually pretty much told (although indirectly) how it was done. (Potential spoilers see full post for my take) Ok, the image with the flashing and the stuff, pretty noticable. From what I know of the subject, it was meant to be. What noone seems to have mentioned was the fact that as it flashed, there was a brief tone. I believe that the image wasn t meant to actually be subliminal as he mentioned, subliminal images are invisible . It was meant to be noticed, but only to assosciate the tone with the image. I also feel that the video did play a part. From what I can tell, an image (or text) was over/underlayed over the image of the rotating (fuzzy) lines, but had a very high transparency. This meant, that like the UV pen, you couldn t pick up the image conciously, but you could unconciously. (UV pens leave a small residue behind that makes visible light reflect slightly differently. Try it, get a UV pen and write on a shiny surface. (like the back of a playing card). Looking head on at it, you don t notice, but if you tilt the card, you can see the writing at some angles the mind subconciously picks this up). Tie this in with things like the wording used before the video, the trailers, and hidden wording/images throughout the show, and you have your whole thing. No sublimilal messages were used, but there were many uses of whatever that term that he used was (SVP?)

I was really happy a few years back, when Martin announced he'd start working on netconf. Not just because I agreed with his assessment that ifupdown needed replacement; also because I had been thinking about a good way to implement such a thing, and had been planning to start writing 'soon'. With Martin's announcement, I made a few suggestions to give him some input, and then put my plans away I had more important things to take care of, anyway. Unfortunately, netconf did not manage to reach the ambitious goals that Martin set out, mainly due to lack of contributors. I wanted to help out; I really did. But Martin's choice of python to implement a 'prototype' which then had to be reimplemented in C or C++ didn't get me very thrilled. Not just because I have a severe dislike of python; also because implementing something twice is, in my humble opinion, not quite the best way to do something like this. But hey, who am I, if I don't put my code out there. Never the less, I tried helping. I really did. During debconf8 at Mar del Plata, I approached Martin with the suggestion that I start reimplementing those bits that were unlikely to change anymore in C, as a first step toward something that could be in the base system. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. After trying for about two weeks, I just gave up. I thought I could read python code and reimplement that so that it would work the same way, but I couldn't. I thought I could implement python modules in C without knowing python, but as it turns out that's a laughable idea. For several months then, I didn't think about it anymore. In March of this year, however, I got a little bored. And what does one do when they get bored? Right, you find something to do. I my case, that was 'figure out how bison works'. I'd of course known about parser generators for quite a while, but just never had the time to dive in deep and figure out how they work. When I needed to do a config file for nbd, I instead hand-wrote my parser and used a lexer from libglib. But I wanted to learn how to do things properly, so I sat down. Long story short, when I had to choose something somewhat more complex to implement, I thought 'how about a hypothetical config file for a network configuration utility', and I started implementing that. It turned out to be fun, so I didn't stop after I knew enough about bison. And just last week, for the first time I successfully used it to bring up my wired interface using DHCP -- and bring it down again. It can also already manage static interfaces through netlink, though it isn't quite able to the equivalent of 'ip addr flush' yet. Fun. The system is quite flexible. It has a plugin interface (which needed some refinement that I did using some help on IRC just today), which should allow developers to implement extra functionality by just dropping a shared object in the right directory. In fact, I'm working on the wireless support (hence my blog post of last week) as a plugin. Obviously the code isn't remotely ready yet. The wireless code has a long way to go. The firewall module needs to be started. It will probably crash and burn if put to the test. But even so, it already has one feature that ifupdown, in its 10 years of existence, never acquired: it will not try to DHCP off an interface if it finds out that there is no cable connected to it unless you wrote a configuration that asks you to do so. I wanted things to be as simple as possible, and therefore the minimal valid configuration file that will do something useful is the following:

That's right, it's empty. This will cause the system to bring up the 'lo' interface at bootup, and do nothing else. If you say 'ifup eth0', where eth0 is a valid and existing interface, it will first check whether there is a link, and if so, DHCP off of it. There's much to do still, but I have now reached a point where I feel the system is ready to meet all challenges it should be able to meet (or so I hope), and where it might be nice if interested people check it out. The code is in a git repository that's mirrored on git.debian.org, github.com, and my own git.grep.be. The latter is my --mirror repository, but is not available for cloning to anyone else. If you're interested in checking it out, you may want to start with doc/tech.txt, and/or examples/ipcfg.cfg. I updated the former just yesterday, so it's quite up-to-date. On the other hand, while the latter shows the direction I would like the system to take, the code is a far cry from implementing everything shown there, and it has been a while since I last checked that file out, so the comments in there are, in some cases, somewhat outdated. But that's good, because I want to keep the file as a reference of the goals that I originally had, before I'd written this whole corpus of code, so that I can go back at some undefined point in the future and fix things. Comments are (more than) welcome.

I've spent the last couple of months wondering this and could not find an answer on the otherwise excellent PulseAudio wiki, so I thought that I'd ask the Lazy Web: How can I configure /etc/pulse/client.conf to prefer a specific remote audio sink and to automatically fall back to localhost only when that remote sink is not available via Avahi? I'm already aware of the paprefs applet, but it requires me to manually select the remote audio sink, every time I get back home, which is not what I want. Instead, I need the PA daemon on this laptop to always try connecting to audio.lan then to localhost and to dynamically switch back and forth between those two hosts according to info provided by the Avahi PA module: if audio.lan is reachable and an audio sink is found, switch to that; if not, fall back to localhost; if audio.lan re-appears on the Avahi radar, switch back to it. Surely there must be a way to achieve that, but how? PS: audio.lan runs PA in System mode with IP-based ACL, if it makes any difference.

Just thought I should let you all be part of this: I love my awesome girlfriend once for every byte ever pushed onto the Web two-point-oh. One could say that the complexity of this love is (n). NP: Porcupine Tree: The Incident

As I'm trying to better document which Geode models bear which PCI vendor and device ID, I'd need volunteers to e-mail me the output of 'lspci -vvv' for their Geode SC1100, SC1200, SC1400 -based hardware. Please send the result to my iki.fi address. Thanks! PS: the part that interests me is the PCI ID of all Geode CPU and Companion Chips shown by 'lspci'. This requires setting several additional levels of verbosity, because this information is hidden from the normal 'lspci' output.

1.1.14 is definitely worth blogging about. While I was updating the gtk-doc stuff to update the documentation that is available in our website I was thinking that this is probably the release with the largest amount of API addition I have seen in my time as a contributor to the project! Before I start talking about the new APIs, though, let me talk of something that went under the hood: Xan has patched WebKitGTK+ to override libsoup s connection limits, so that our limits match those of other modern browsers - we now allow up to 60 connections total, and 6 per host. People have been reporting load performance improvements for some sites! We have an initial set of APIs to deal with the data that was loaded to render the page, represented by the new DataSource object. This allows you to peek at the source of the HTML that was rendered, for instance. In the near future we will have ways of getting the data and other information for each resource that is downloaded to compose the page. Jan Alonzo has spent quite some time studying, implementing and perfecting this API, with some help from me and Xan. One initial piece of the larger API to control resource loading is already there, as well. The WebView will use the new resource-request-starting signal to let you know that a request is about to be sent, and allow you to modify headers, or even the URI that is going to be fetched. For some, the greatest news here is that this allows a basic implementation of AD blocking, which is now supported in Epiphany with the WebKit backend, as of version 2.27.92, released today! This is something I have been looking at in my Collabora time for some time now, and working along with Xan and Jan, we finally seem to have figure out the API interactions correctly. There s more to come regarding resource loading tracking, in the near future. That would already be a lot, from my point of view, but there s a whole lot more. A new contributor, Martin Robinson, has arrived proposing new API pieces for an important HTML5 tool: web databases, which brings with it the concept of SecurityOrigin. Jan has exposed API to put the WebView in view source mode, Xan has given us undo/redo support for editable content, and Zan Dobersek has done some overall improvement of our HTML5 media player. That s a lot of change for a release, which also goes to show we still have quite a gap to fill, but we are being able to move forward and fill them quite quickly. If you want to help out, pick something in your area of interest, and send us patches!

After long deliberation (a good few months!), I today came to the decision that I no longer felt that I could be part of the Ubuntu IRC Team. I have felt for a long time that the Ubuntu IRC team has become an elitist crowd, with a very cliquey inner circle, and those who are not in the inner circle being treated on multiple levels like second class citizens. There are a lot of things that have pushed me to make this decision, and I ve not made it lightly. I ve voiced my concerns to the IRC Council previously, (via individual emails), and had no response. I don t see the situation getting any better. In fact, more and more, I see it getting worse. I know that I m not the only person who s thinking this way, though I may be one of the only ones that feels that I need to lay down my cinnamon roll. I ve discussed these issues on multiple occassions with various members of the community (both in and out of the team), and with people linked to the Ubuntu IRC community in one way or another (Debian Developers, Freenode Staff, etc etc). There are also other people who ve come out of the woodwork after I posted my resignation. Within minutes of doing so, one member forwarded my mail onto the community council, and another replied with his thoughts and feelings regarding the matter. I m glad to see that there are other people out there who ve seen what I ve seen, and like me, also dislike it. I will however, retain my @ in #ubuntu-uk. This is a channel I participate regularly in, and the ops there are chosen by the LoCo Team, rather than the IRC council.

Ever since X server 1.5 was released, various regressions started affecting our GX2 code in xf86-video-geode. We couldn't figure out what went wrong since our GX2 code hadn't changed in ages and we couldn't think of any ABI or API migration that would cause these regressions. Well, it turns out that someone had quietly rewritten part of the X server core, which broken things from under our feet. In the end, the change required to restore operation was minimal, but it nonetheless caused problems for several thin client users who complained loudly while the xf86-video-geode team scratched their head wondering what went wrong. Still, it essentially meant that GX2 users suffered through Intrepid and Jaunty without a solution in sight, which is of course unacceptable. I'm also aware of at least one startup who lost a fairly lucrative LTSP maintenance contract, simply because their customer's GX2-based thin clients could not be made to work on Ubuntu since Hardy. Ouch! In order to prevent this from ever happening again and to ensure that regressions get noticed before they reach critical mass, I'd like to solicit a hardware donation: something GX2-based with a small hard-disk or CompactFlash socket and 100baseT Ethernet. My contact info can be found on my homepage. Please make sure that you contact me upfront to agree on the delivery method, before sending me any hardware. Thanks!

Listening to Martin Krafft s talk at Debconf (related to his PhD) shed some new light on the idea that I expressed last year I wanted that each maintainer regularly answers a questionnaire so that he has to ask himself whether he does a good enough job with his packages. When thinking of this idea, I only saw the QA side of ensuring good maintenance on all packages, however I believe that the root problem lies further and this project would not be enough: we are interdependent but we are not equipped to deal with this reality. Martin s only merit has been to mention that we are interdependent, but it s worth analyzing a bit. Our organization is centered around individuals acting as package maintainers, and in theory each package maintainer can work on his corner and all goes well. We know that this model doesn t hold any more: transitions to testing require coordination of uploads and timely fixes of RC bugs, keeping up with the work frequently requires several volunteers that have to coordinate, etc. More and more of the work requires a level of availability that a single individual can t offer, yet in our day-to-day work we mainly interact with individuals. Wouldn t it be better if we could immediately know what we can expect from any Debian developer:

• mean time to reply to Debian mail (reading every day or once a week is not the same);
• amount/periods of time spent on Debian (knowing that they spend up to 4 hours mainly on Saturday can be useful);
• current availability for Debian (if they are currently busy with life, we should be able to know it, if they know when it will end, it would also be good to share);
• best way to get in touch for issues (they might have preference between IRC or mail);
• kind of relationship they have with packages where they are listed in Maintainer/Uploaders (an active maintainer that uses the software daily is not the same than a passive maintainer that only packaged the software because it was a build-dependency for some other software that they care about);
• any other information that the maintainer wants to share (about his habits/constraints/values/goals/whatever).

All this information should be shared by all Debian maintainers (some of it is already available but either not publicly or not in any machine-parseable way) and we should actively use it. Here are some examples of use: for each RC bug report, you could look up if at least one maintainer is available and you could ping him explicitly if needed. When you plan an NMU, you could look up if the maintainer is likely to respond in the next day or not, and possibly adjust the number of days spent in the DELAYED queue. When organizing a large-scale transition, you could extract a list of packages whose maintainers are not available and arrange immediate NMUs. Furthermore there are many cases where the project s usual expectation exceed what the maintainer is ready to do. Documenting what part of the job is done (or not) by the maintainer makes it clear for volunteers whether their help is needed and whether they could/would be a better maintainer for a given package. Designing solutions to all these problems is going to be the scope of the DEP2 that I reserved some time ago. It s likely to be some sort of dedicated web interface. I would welcome supplementary drivers for this DEP, so if you re interested, get in touch with me. Partagez cet article / Share This

My latest blog post about PPA Keys has had a few comments already. Having just returned from visiting my parents, I ve noticed an email asking me to approve a Pingback. The pingback was to a Portuguese site which had taken my post and written it into a tutorial. I ve got to say, my portuguese may not be up to scratch, but it s obvious that this is a well written tutorial. I m very impressed by this site, and the way that they ve written, and illustrated this tutorial. All I can say is, great site Claudio! Keep up the good work! Something like this site in English would be an asset to the ubuntu community. It s well thought out, and well written

This question keeps on popping up in many recent newspaper articles, on discussion boards and in seminars debating immigration issues in Finland. At the core of the question is a general impression that, between the enthusiastic supporters of multiculturalism and the pessimistic nationalist rednecks, very little constructive discussion is possible in Finland. At one end, humanitarian help organizations, as well as politicians from the Green Party and the Swedish Folk Party, keep on taking excessively generous initiatives towards refugees and asylum seekers, all while labeling their detractors as racists. At the other end, nationalist candidates in the National Coalition Party and True Finns Party keep on painting every immigrant as a refugee who is abusing social security and label their detractors as turning Finland into the easiest country to abuse social security, at the Finnish taxpayer's expense. In between, candidates from the Christian Democrats and Center Party spread equally among these two camps. Meanwhile, while the Left is currently avoiding discussions on this topic, Social Democrats have previously shown that they tend to side with the nationalists in labeling all immigrants as social security abusing refugees. One interesting point is that, no matter at which end of the political spectrum one looks, the whole Finnish immigration debate keeps on focusing exclusively on refugees and asylum seekers, despite the fact that migrant workers and foreign spouses of Finnish nationals make up for a good 70% of the foreign population residing on Finnish soil. This recalcitrance to discuss immigration from any other perspective than refugees is rather painfully noticeable. Some recent examples:

• At the Maailma Kyl ss ethnic festival, last month, the podium was given to a number of speakers to discuss immigration issues. In once case, Minister of Immigration Mrs.Astrid Thors made an appearance at the tent of Demo, an NGO promoting active participation in the electoral process. Sure enough, Thors repeatedly brought back the issue of refugees, leaving other aspects of immigration completely out. The next day, on the Mekong stage, a panel discussion was introduced by the MC as "discussing issues that affect refugees", despite the fact that the program read "panel discussion on immigration"... In fairness, the organization sponsoring that particular time slot was the Refugee Help Center but, thankfully, issues brought by the panelists clearly discussed a much broader perspective than merely refugees: One Estonian-born researcher said that she'd rather avoid putting all immigrants into the same bag, because there's so many different reasons for coming to Finland and few of those have anything to do with seeking asylum and one cannot make any assumption about an immigrant's motives for coming here. The other panelist, a professor from the university of Turku, astutely said that, if it was up to him, Maailma Kyl ss should not exist, because the actual intent of the event is not to give immigrants a chance to be heard, but rather to entertain Finns with exotic culture and food, which is not the right way to make immigrants feel a part of society, in his opinion.
• Independent member of the Helsinki City Council, Mr.Jussi Halla-Aho, repeatedly makes the headlines because of his blog's rather controversial statements. Probably his most famous stunt was the day he jokingly declared in his blog that, if the women of the Green Party are so keen on getting more immigrants admitted to Finland, they also ought to be enthusiastic at the prospect of becoming rape victims, cynically implying that immigrants all come from 3rd-world countries where women's rights are non-existent and, correspondingly, where the probability of women being raped is greater.
• National Coalition Party candidate at the EU elections, Mr.Kai P ntinen, used as his campaign slogan a decisively nationalist Sosiaalipummien maahantulolle stoppi! (Stop the immigration of social security abusers). Further reading on his homepage shows a rather misinformed statement, alleging that immigrants are systematically taught Swedish in language trainings offered via the Integration Act:

  My s kotouttamispolitiikkamme on mets ss , on t ysin j rjenvastaista ett tulijoille opetetaan ensimm iseksi kotimaiseksi kieleksi ruotsia. Kyll ensiksi on osattava suomea ja sitten muita kieli .

  Reality is that, unless an unemployed immigrant lives in the monolingual Swedish municipality of N rpes or on the land archipelago, the only language they can learn via integration measures is ... Finnish.
• At a recent "Meet the Immigration Department" seminar at cultural center Caisa, it transpired that the vast majority of the audience and of the employees working for the City of Helsinki's Immigrant Services department came to Finland as refugees. The moderator of the event also came to Finland as a refugee. Can anyone guess what issues were given preference by the moderator during that evening? 12 points go to ... those who answered "refugees and asylum seekers." Was there at least meaningful discussion about any aspect of the immigration process? As the former chairman of a particular Finnish political party's English section used to say:

  I will not tolerate this meeting turning into a Wall of Lamentations or a Complaint Choir! Are we here to discuss real issues or what?

What's remarkable about all these examples is how public opinion is so persistently hardwired into thinking that all foreigners living in Finland came here as refugees from 3rd-world countries whose culture is radically different from Finland's and that they all became perpetually unemployed, forever living off social security, to the point that even politicians who ought to know better go along with it. When will we be able to have a balanced and meaningful debate on immigration, you ask? The day both multicultural hippies and nationalist rednecks will have been kicked off the podium. Of course, it would also help if the refugees themselves stopped monopolizing the podium, whenever the opinion of immigrants is solicited. Then again, perhaps these 3 groups benefit so much from the current status quo that they'd rather not see the day when others can participate in this debate on equal footing with them, so that a balanced and meaningful debate can finally take place?

After reading Alan Pope s recent post on installing GPG keys for PPAs easily, I thought I d have a bit of a hack around. Personally, I regularly add PPAs to my system, whether it be for Chromium Daily Builds, Bazaar, Gwibber, or anything else. I ve found the most annoying thing is the installation of the GPG keys. Now, I wouldn t reccomend this for everyone, but, for some, it might be exactly what you ve been looking for. Here s what I did:- Firstly, I saved the Script that Alan linked to as /usr/local/bin/ppakeys and chmod d it to 755. I then created a new file, /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/05ppa containing the following line

APT::Update::Pre-Invoke "if [ -x /usr/local/bin/ppakeys ]; then /usr/local/bin/ppakeys; fi ; ;

Now, every time I do a sudo apt-get update - it ll check for new keys that I need, and install them as neccessary. Magic! <edit> Please make sure the quotes are correct if you copy and paste this!</edit>

The kernel in Debian doesn't have support for the fan control chip on the D-Link DNS-323. Since some people said that their device runs quite hot after installing Debian, I've prepared a 2.6.29 based kernel that includes the fan driver. If you want to install this kernel, edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following line: Now you can install the new kernel: After a reboot, you can control the fan this way: Any values between 0 and 255 will work. According to Anselmo Luginbuhl, you should also be able to use the lm-sensors package to automatically control the fan: "Execute pwmconfig, it will make some tests and generate the fancontrol config file. At the end of the procedure it will ask you to "Select fan output to configure, or other action:", just be sure to pass through choice "1" or it would not fill in the configuration file, save the configuration and start the daemon /etc/init.d/fancontrol. Probably the only thing that needs some attention to get an optimal result is to choose the right parameters for max and min temperature at which the fan should start or stop to minimize the C and the noise." Finally, this kernel also includes some performance patches from Marvell, so you might see some performance increases too.