I'm about to release debhelper 6.0.0. But this blog is really about CDBS, and why it's entirely unlike debhelper despite being based on it.

---

With CDBS you're building a ship in a bottle. You have all the same tools available, but there's this bottle in the way, which doesn't let you bring any of them fully to bear, and requires all your techniques be changed around to fit its limited interface. This is a beautiful example of the kind of fun you're setting yourself up for by chosing CDBS. With debhelper, two commands can be easily reordered. With CDBS, you need three magic environment variables and either a hardcoded package name or some grody Makefile code: http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2008/01/msg00039.html

MythTV's commercial skipping really spoils us, and we practically never watch anything live (we don't watch a lot of TV at all, really, more DVDs, thanks to Netflix), so we're totally insulated from all the commercials except when we're staying in a hotel, or, as is the case right now, having a stay in hospital. It seems all of the commercials during the news programs are pharma-related. The majority are prescription drugs to "ask your doctor about", with the rest being health-related. Today's exciting product I learned about was Might Putty (you can watch the ad on their site). I just wish I had something to use it for. The other thing that piqued my curiosity was the Takara Patch. It sounds like a bit of a gimmick, but I've always liked gimmicks that look like they're doing something. The Biore Pore Strips for example. I'll have to do some more research.

I received a number of comments on my previous blog post, with people stating that my example code wasn't right, either. For reference, here's my code snippet again:

#include <stdio.h>
void* f();
int main()  
	long* a;
	a=(long*)f();
	printf("%Ld\n", *a);
	return 0;
 
void* f()  
	static long a=84;
	printf("%Ld\n", a);
	return &a;
 

First, let me make one thing perfectly clear: the "a" variable is not on the stack. It is a locally-scoped variable, but it is also declared as static, meaning that it's valid for the entire run of the process; if it were on the stack, then this variable would vanish when the function would end. Yes, it's wrong to return a pointer to a variable on the stack, since there's no guarantee that the stack value will still be valid; but I'm not doing that. Alternative implementations could've used a global variable, or could've malloc()'ed a pointer; but the compiled assembly code for my C code will only differ from a version with a global variable in the used label for the variable's location, and in the lack of an extra function call from a version that uses malloc(). Second, no, using A0 as a return value for pointers is not a bug in the compiler, and has not been since 1990, when this interesting book entitled "System V ABI Motorola 68000 Processor Family Supplement" was written. Allow me to quote a snippet from page 3-14 of that book:

%a0	Pointer return values appear in %a0. When calling a function that returns a structure or union, the caller allocates space for the return value and sets %a0 to its address. A function that returns a structure or union value places the same address in %a0 before it returns.

To this day, ELF-conforming implementations do it this way. Really. Go look it up, if you wish; the ISBN is 0-13-877663-6.

A few weeks back, someone asked on debian-68k about an unexpected result of some piece of software when it was compiled on ARAnyM, an m68k emulator that can run Linux. His initial idea was that this could perhaps be a bug in ARAnyM, since it only occurred to him inside ARAnyM, and not on any of the other architectures he tried. In fact, it was a bug in his code. Let's have a look at what's going on here. The example program which Sergei provided and which exhibits the problematic behaviour is spread over two files. The first file contains this:

#include <stdio.h>
void *f();
main()  
	void *a;
	a = f();
	printf("%d\n", (long)a);
 

while the second contains this:

#include <stdio.h>
long f();
long f()  
	long a = 84;
	printf("%d\n", a);
	return a;
 

Many people familiar with the C programming language will intuitively expect that this program, when run, will output the following:

84
84

When in fact, when compiled and ran on an m68k machine, the output is as follows:

84
-1072577264

What's going on here? In order to understand that, we have to take a look at the assembly code. This is done by use of "objdump -d", and gives (amongst others) the following output:

800004c4 <main>:
800004c4:	4e56 0000	linkw %fp,#0
800004c8:	61ff 0000 001a	bsrl 800004e4 <f>
800004ce:	2f08		movel %a0,%sp@-
800004d0:	4879 8000 05aa	pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4>
800004d6:	61ff ffff feec	bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt>
800004dc:	508f		addql #8,%sp
800004de:	4e5e		unlk %fp
800004e0:	4e75		rts
800004e2:	4e75		rts
800004e4 <f>:
800004e4:	4e56 0000	linkw %fp,#0
800004e8:	4878 0054	pea 54 <_init-0x800002f0>
800004ec:	4879 8000 05aa	pea 800005aa <_IO_stdin_used+0x4>
800004f2:	61ff ffff fed0	bsrl 800003c4 <printf@plt>
800004f8:	7054		moveq #84,%d0
800004fa:	4e5e		unlk %fp
800004fc:	4e75		rts
800004fe:	4e75		rts

So what's happening here?

• main acquires some stack space, and then (0x800004c8) immediately jumps to a subroutine 26 bytes ahead; our function f.
• f also acquires stack space (0x800004e4), then pushes two addresses on the stack (...4e8 and 4ec), and jumps to the printf function. The first of these two addresses is the constant 84 that is hardcoded in the binary; the second address is our format string.
• f then moves the constant value 84 to the D0 register (...4f8), frees its stack space (4fa), and returns (4fc; the second rts can be ignored, that's a harmless quirk in the compiler).
• main now copies whatever is in the A0 register to the stack (4ce), pushes the exact same format string to the stack (4d0), and again jumps to the printf function (4d6; the difference in hexadecimal values is due to the fact that the bsr opcode uses processor-indirect addressing).
• Finally, main clears up what it's been doing, and exits

The difference should be clear: the f function stores its result value in the D0 register, but main goes looking for it in A0. The reason for this discrepancy very simple. The m68k processors has three sets of registers: one set is for integer values (D0 through D7), one set is for address values (A0 through A7), and one is for floating-point values (FP0 through FP7). The m68k ABI specifies that integer return values should be stored in integer registers, that address return values should be stored in address registers, and that floating-point return values should be stored in floating-point registers. This makes sense, since register-indirect addressing modes require the address to be stored in an address register; and calculating values requires the value to be stored in either a floating-point or integer register. When main, then, tried to look for a return value in A0, it found something, but obviously not what it should have found... This issue would have been a non-issue had this function been written the way it should have, like so:

#include <stdio.h>
void* f();
int main()  
	long* a;
	a=(long*)f();
	printf("%Ld\n", *a);
	return 0;
 
void* f()  
	static long a=84;
	printf("%Ld\n", a);
	return &a;
 

To close up: there's a reason why compilers emit warnings if you do something strange or "clever". In this particular case, the warning was suppressed, since both files contained a declaration of an f() function, even if the declaration was different. This is a horrible hack that tries to work around those warnings, rendering them utterly useless. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top: don't do something like that. If you write C code, please compile it with -Wall -Werror, and make sure it compiles that way. If you want to access a function in a different file, create a common header file that both will #include, so that the compiler can notice differences between declaration and definition of a function; and don't expect that something will work because you fixed it for a common and well-known case, because there will often still be other places where your bug will still trigger. In this case, by declaring the function as one returning a long value, they made sure it could not break on 64-bit architectures. However, as shown above, that doesn't make the bug go away...) Writing clean and portable code is way more fun. Trust me.

Assume for a moment that you have 148 hosts logging, via syslog-ng, to a central host. That host is recording all log entries into an MySQL database. Assume that each of these machines is producing a total of 4698816 lines per day. (Crazy random numbers pulled from thin air; globviously). Now the question: How do you process, read, or pay attention to those logs? Here is what we've done so far:

syslog-ng

All the syslog-ng client machines are logging to a central machine, which inserts the records into a database. This database may be queried using the php-syslog-ng script. Unfortunately this search is relatively slow, and also the user-interface is appallingly bad. Allowing only searches, not a view of most recent logs, auto-refreshing via AJAX etc.

rss feeds

To remedy the slowness, and poor usability of the PHP front-end to the database I wrote a quick hack which produces RSS feeds via queries, against that same database, accessed via URIs such as:

• http://example.com/feeds/DriveReady
• http://example.com/feeds/host/host1

The first query returns and RSS feed of log entries containing the given term. The second shows all recent entries from the machine host1. That works nicely for a fixed set of patterns, but the problem with this approach, and that of php-syslog-ng in general, is that it will only show you things that you look for - it won't volunteer trends, patterns, or news.

The fundamental problem is a lack of notion in either system of "recent messages worth reading" (on a global or per-machine basis). To put that into perspective given a logfile from one host containing, say, 3740 lines there are only approximately 814 unique lines if you ignore the date + timestamp. Reducing logentries by that amount (78% decrease) is a significant saving, but even so you wouldn't want to read 22% of our original 4698816 lines of logs as that is still over a million log-entries. I guess we could trim the results down further via a pipe through logcheck or similar, but I can't help thinking that still isn't going to give us enough interesting things to view. To reiterate I would like to see:

• per-machine anomolies.
• global anomolies.

To that end I've been working on something, but I'm not too sure yet if it will go anywhere... In brief you take the logfiles and tokenize, then you record the token frequencies as groups within a given host's prior records. Unique pairings == logs you want to see. (i.e. token frequency analysis on things like "<auth.info> yuling.example.com sshd[28427]: Did not receive identification string from 1.3.3.4" What do other people do? There must be a huge market for this? Even amongst people who don't have more than 20 machines!

According to this test, sympycore is from 2.5x to 5x faster than Maxima. This is an absolutely fantastic result and also a perfect certificate for Python in scientific computing. Considering that we compare pure Python to LISP.

Ok, this made us excited, so we dugg deeper and ran more benchmarks. But first, let me say a few general remarks. I want a fast CAS (Computer Algebra System) in Python. General CAS, that people use, that is useful, that is easily extensible (!), that is not missing anything, that is comparable to Mathematica and Maple -- and most importantly -- I want it now and I don't care about 30 years horizons (I won't be able to do any serious programming in 30 years anyway). All right. How to do that? Well, many people tried... And failed. The only opensource CAS system, that has any chance of becoming the opensource CAS, in my own opinion, is Sage. You can read more about my impressions form Sage here. I am actually only interested in mathematical physics, so basically Sage.calculus. Currently Sage uses Maxima, because Maxima is old, proven, working system and it's reasonably fast and quite reliable, but written in LISP. Some people like LISP. I don't and I find it extremely difficult to extend Maxima. Also even though Maxima is in LISP, it uses it's own language for interacting with the user (well, that's not the way). I like python, so I want to use Python. Sage has written Python wrappers to Maxima, so Sage can do almost everything that Maxima can, plus many other things. Now. But the Sage.calculus has issues.

First, I don't know how to extend the wrappers with some new things, see my post in the sage-devel for details, it's almost 2 months old with no reaction, which shows that it's a difficult issue (or nonsense:)).

And second, it's slow. For some examples that Sage users have found out, even SymPy, as it is now, is 7x faster than Sage and sympycore 23x faster and with the recent speed improvements 40x faster than Sage.

So let's improve Sage.calculus. How? Well, no one knows for sure, but
I believe in my original idea of pure Python CAS (SymPy), possibly with some parts rewritten in C. Fortunately, quite a lot of us believe that this is the way.

What is this sympycore thing? In sympy, we wanted to have something now, instead of tomorrow, so we were adding a lot of features, not looking too much on speed. But then Pearu Peterson came and said, guys, we need speed too. So he rewrote the core (resulting in 10x to 100x speedup) and we moved to the new core. But first, the speed isn't sufficient, and second it destabilized SymPy a lot (there are still some problems with caching and assumptions half a year later). So with the next package of speed improvements, we decided to either port them to the current sympy, or wait until the new core stabilizes enough. So the new new core is called sympycore now, currently it only has the very basic arithmetics (and derivatives and simple integrals), but it's very fast. It's mainly done by Pearu. But for example the latest speed improvement using sexpressions was invented by Fredrik Johansson, another SymPy developer and the author of mpmath.

OK, let's go back to the benchmarks. First thing we realized is that Pearu was using CLISP 2.41 (2006-10-13) and compiled Maxima by hand in the above timings, but when I tried Maxima in Debian (which is compiled with GNU Common Lisp (GCL) GCL 2.6.8), I got different results, Maxima did beat sympycore.

SymPyCore:

In [5]: %time e=((x+y+z)**100).expand()
CPU times: user 0.57 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.57 s
Wall time: 0.57

In [6]: %time e=((x+y+z)**20 * (y+x)**19).expand()
CPU times: user 0.25 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.25 s
Wall time: 0.25

Maxima:

(%i7) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x+y+z)^100)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o9)                                0.41
(%i16) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x + y+z)^20*(x+z)^19)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o18)                         0.080000000000005

So when expanding, Maxima is comparable to sympycore (0.41 vs 0.57), but for general arithmetics, Maxima is 3.5x faster. We also compared GiNaC (resp. swiginac):

>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**20 * (y+x)**19).expand()
CPU times: user 0.03 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.03 s
Wall time: 0.03

Then we compared just the (x+y+z)**200:

sympycore:
>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**200).expand()
CPU times: user 1.80 s, sys: 0.06 s, total: 1.86 s
Wall time: 1.92
swiginac:
>>> %time e=((x+y+z)**200).expand()
CPU times: user 0.52 s, sys: 0.02 s, total: 0.53 s
maxima:
(%i41) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand ((x + y+z)^200)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
(%o43)                         2.220000000000027

Where GiNaC still wins, but sympycore beats Maxima, but the timings really depend on the algorithm used, sympycore uses Millers algorithm which is the most efficient.

So then we tried a fair comparison: compare expanding x * y where x and y are expanded powers (to make more terms):

 sympycore:
 >>> from sympy import *
 >>> x,y,z=map(Symbol,'xyz')
 >>> xx=((x+y+z)**20).expand()
 >>> yy=((x+y+z)**21).expand()
 >>> %time e=(xx*yy).expand()
 CPU times: user 2.21 s, sys: 0.10 s, total: 2.32 s
 Wall time: 2.31
 swiginac:
 >>> xx=((x+y+z)**20).expand()
 >>> yy=((x+y+z)**21).expand()
 >>> %time e=(xx*yy).expand()
 CPU times: user 0.30 s, sys: 0.00 s, total: 0.30 s
 Wall time: 0.30
 maxima:
 (%i44) xx:expand((x+y+z)^20)$
 (%i45) yy:expand((x+y+z)^21)$
 (%i46) t0:elapsed_real_time ()$ expand (xx*yy)$ elapsed_real_time ()-t0;
 (%o48)                         0.57999999999993

So, sympycore is 7x slower than swiginac and 3x slower than maxima. We are still using pure Python, so that's very promising.

When using sexpr functions directly then 3*(a*x+..) is 4-5x faster than Maxima in Debian/Ubuntu. So, the headline of this post is justified. :)

Conclusion

Let's build the car. Sage has the most features and it is the most complete car. It has issues, some wheels need to be improved (Sage.calculus). Let's change them then. Maybe SymPy could be the new wheel, maybe not, we'll see. SymPy is quite a reasonable car for calculus (it has plotting, it has exports to latex, nice, simple but powerfull command line with ipython and all those bells and whistles and it can also be used as a regular python library). But it also has issues, one wheel should be improved. That's the sympycore project.

All those smaller and smaller wheels show, that this is indeed the way to go, but very important thing is to put them back in the car. I.e. sympycore back to sympy and sympy back to Sage and integrate them well. While also leaving them as separate modules, so that users, that only need one particular wheel, can use them.

Sometimes, it is nearly as frustrating to use Debian than it is to use commercial software. For example, when one sees a simple bug completely unreacted on for more than one year. #405040 has passed its first anniversary since it was reported and touched for the last time. Visible reaction of the package maintainer: Nil. It’s a small thing, but an annoying one. And I still consider it unacceptable to let bugs rot for a year without the slightest trace of action.

Actually, they were out a few weeks ago, but I've been on vacation at the in-laws' near Monselice, Italy. The release announcement is here: http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/8.5.tml It's worth writing about, because it's been a long time in the making, and contains a number of improvements. Particularly noteworthy in my opinion are 'real' hash tables (dicts), an even better sandbox model (Tcl and Java have the best sandboxes that I know of), and a theme engine for Tk that, in the right hands, significantly improves how it looks. In the fickle world of language fads, Tcl doesn't get the respect that it should these days. Like anything, it has problems, but what doesn't, when examined up close? It's ironic that for years it has gotten things right like Unicode support, and OS-level threading, that are currently being worked on in Ruby. Hecl obviously owes a great deal to Tcl, but since it's a new language (more or less necessitated by cell phone limitations), we're free to take a stab at improving things that Tcl doesn't get right. In any case, Tcl is worth a look if you want to play with something that's fundamentally different from a lot of popular languages, and the core team has put a lot of work into the latest release, so give it a whirl (perhaps using tkcon instead of the readline-less tclsh executable) with an open mind, and see if you don't learn something new.

For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog. A recent post concerns a new desktop machine billed as “our greenest desktop ever” [3]. The post has some interesting information on recycling plastic etc, and the fact that the machine in question is physically small (a volume of 4.5L and no PCI expansion slots) means that less petro-chemicals are used in manufacture (and some of the resins used are recycled). However the electricity use is 47W when idle!!! On my documents blog I have a post about the power use of computers I own(ed) [4] which includes my current Thinkpad (idles at 23W) and an IBM P3 desktop system which idles at 38W. Both machines in question were manufactured before Lenovo bought Thinkpad and IBM’s desktop PC business (so they technically aren’t Lenovo machines) and they weren’t manufactured with recycled resins. But the claim that the new machine is the greenest ever is at best misguided and could be regarded as deceptive. I think that the machine is quite decent, but it’s obvious that they can do a lot better. There’s no reason that a low-power desktop machine (which uses some laptop technology) should take more than twice the power of what was a high-end laptop a few years ago. Also comparing power use with P3 machines (which are still quite useful now, my IBM P3 desktop runs 24*7 as a server) is quite relevant - and we should keep in mind that before the Pentium was released no system which an individual could afford had anything other than a simple heat-sink to cool it’s CPU. This is largely a failing of Intel and AMD to make power efficient CPUs and chipsets. It’s also unfortunate that asymmetric multi-processing has not been implemented in recent times. A system with a 64bit CPU core of P3 performance as well as some Opteron class cores that could be suspended independently would be very good for power use with correct OS support. For example when reading documents and email my system will spend most of it’s time idling (apart from when I use Firefox which is a CPU hog) and the CPU use will be minimal for scrolling - a P3 performing core would be more than adequate for that task (which comprises a significant portion of my computer use). Then when I launch a CPU intensive task (composing a blog post in Wordpress or compiling) the more powerful CPU cores could start. It would be good if Intel would release a Pentium-M CPU (32bit) with the latest technology (smaller tracks on the silicon means less power use as well as higher clock speeds). A Pentium-M running at 2GHz produced with the latest Intel fabrication technology would probably use significantly less power than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is in my Thinkpad. Put that in a desktop machine and you would have all the compute power you need for most tasks other than playing games and running vista and you could get an idle power less than 23W. The new Lenovo machine in question does sound like a nice machine, I wouldn’t mind having one for testing and running demos. But the claims made about it seem poorly justified if you know the history.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/09/a-long-laptop-lifetime/


• [3] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/

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It seems like Google broke something in their search. For example, searching for "iTunes-library-xml Python" (I've just written a parser which will turn Apple PropertyList Pseudo-XML into a useable Python object consisting of hashes, arrays, integers etc. btw.) actually gives me results (at least the one around #4) that don't contain "iTunes" (and I'm pretty sure also never contained).OUCH:Looking at the cached version of the result when searching for "iTunes library xml python" contains the notice "The word iTunes is only found on pages linking to this page". Google knows two pages linking there, neither contained the word iTunes.This is not what I understand as an "exact phrase match".

You may remember that, short before the release, Aj had a HTML page for packages in NEW, living in his ~/ajt/new/ on our ftp-master host. It was based on a patch from Thomas Viehmann and got lost with the ries crash. Today I reimplemented it, putting it directly into dak and the ftp-master codebase and webtree. My work is also based on Thomas patch, but I reworked the whole thing a bit. I’ve written a new dak command, show-new, which is based on process-new, the command I always use when I process NEW packages. Obviously not with all that functionality, it doesn’t need any reject capability, but it still has some nice parts. Like

• it only runs on packages and their versions if no html output had been generated in the past
• Automatically removes html files of packages no longer in NEW
• It runs right after generating the NEW overview page, hourly. So it should be similar up-to-date (or outdated) as that page is.

To not duplicate code too much this also meant that various code blocks had to be moved into daklib/ files. If you want to look at it - the NEW Overview, something that I wrote long ago, has links to the per-package-version files. Just click on the version number. I have plans to enhance it even more, like having the lintian output use colors too. To make that easy I filed a bug against lintian asking for it. For the other changes - well. I think the layout can be enhanced, possibly going a bit in the direction of the removals summary page, but that will take some time, as I need to talk to my CSS-masters for it. And while I was changing dak code I did some more changes to it. One patchset already got applied from James, removing the obsolete non-US support. I have a large number of other changes, but have to redo them, much more using bzr branches, so James can more easily pick single changes out of them. The changelog for those applied changes is pretty impressive with its length, I think…

2007-12-30  Joerg Jaspert  joerg@debian.org>
        * dak/dak.py (init): add show-new. This is based on a patch
        submitted by Thomas Viehmann in Bug #408318, but large parts of
        handling it are rewritten and show-new is done by me.
        * dak/queue_report.py (table_row): Add link to generated html page
        for NEW package.
        * dak/show_new.py: new file, generates html overview for NEW
        packages, similar to what we see with examine-package.
        * config/debian/cron.hourly: Add show-new call
        * config/debian/dak.conf: Add HTMLPath for Show-New
        * dak/examine_package.py (print_copyright): ignore stderr when
        finding copyright file.
        (main): add html option
        (html_escape): new function
        (escape_if_needed): ditto
        (headline): ditto
        (colour_output): ditto
        (print_escaped_text): ditto
        (print_formatted_text): ditto
        - use those functions everywhere where we generate output, as they
        easily know if we want html or not and just DTRT
        (do_lintian): new function
        (check_deb): use it
        (output_deb_info): Use print_escaped_text, not print_formatted_text.
        Also import daklib.queue, determine_new now lives there
        Also add a variable to see if we want html output. Default is
        disabled, show_new enables it for its use.
        Most of html, besides header/footer are in examine_package instead
        of show_new, as it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with it at
        the point the info is generated.
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): Moved out of here.
        (check_valid): Moved out of here.
        (get_type): Moved out of here.
        * daklib/queue.py (determine_new): Moved here.
        (check_valid): Moved here.
        (get_type): Moved here.
        * dak/init_db.py (do_section): Remove non-US code
        * dak/make_overrides.py (main): ditto
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): ditto
        * daklib/queue.py (Upload.in_override_p),
        (Upload.check_override): ditto
        * daklib/utils.py (extract_component_from_section):,
        (poolify): ditto
        * dak/import_archive.py (update_section): ditto
        * dak/symlink_dists.py (fix_component_section): ditto
        * scripts/debian/mkmaintainers: ditto
        * scripts/debian/update-mirrorlists (masterlist): ditto
        * config/debian-non-US/*: Remove subdir
        * scripts/debian/update-readmenonus: Removed.

In the recent past I did some more dak changes. Just to list them here, they are

• Fixing daks handling of keys that have expired subkeys together with non-expired subkeys (or non-expired “master” key). That created silent rejects (only sent to ftpmaster, not to the maintainer) in the past. Now it works, iff the signature is valid. (We check other reject reasons like unknown or revoked key, badsig and some other things that can go wrong before that).
• Internal for the NEW queue I adjusted the lintian call to also show what lintian warnings/errors maintainers try to override - and to have its display in color. lintian now also runs on the .dsc file, not only on the individual changes, which also helps me to spot some more errors in NEW which I previously may have missed
• The script to look at the packages in NEW also had a bug that disallowed to look at copyright files from packages using bzip2 compression in their binary tarballs. It did use some ar p tar xz pipeline, which I changed to using dpkg-deb -x and —fsys-tarfile.
• I removed a check for a dpkg pre-depends for bzip2 using binaries, as the dpkg version from sarge knows how to deal with them.

(Most patches applied by James. Can’t remember if someone else applied one. If so that would be Aj). And - at the end of all this - I will finally update my dak package again. Im not sure I get it uploaded this year, as I’m away tomorrow, but it will get an update fairly soon! Ha.

Meet the EeePC Being in Taiwan, we swiftly got hold of an Eeepc. Instead of installing Debian into it, we decided to keep the original system and see how it works. It's a Debian derivative, and the feeling inside a terminal window is quite familiar. The boot is very fast. Two seconds after the video bios quickly shows on the screen, the X cursor appears. It's definitely worth having a look at how this devil boots. The "Asus Launcher" is worth a look. IMHO it's nicer and more useful than the usual launcher menu that we get in Gnome or KDE 3, although it probably only makes sense on a small display. It replaces the desktop background, has tabs, no clutter and allows to launch applications. Turns out it's customisable as well. What's on the system KDE 3.4.2, with some applications renamed so that their names are more human. For example, konsole became console. vim! \o/ But not emacs :) mc! Someone out there wanted to make my life easier. fbreader. I had never heard of it, but it's a very good discovery that I've now started to use it on my laptop as well. Little howtos To get to a terminal, hit Ctrl+T in the file manager, or Ctrl+Alt+T elsewhere. The root password is the same as the user password. To change the system language, I managed with a simple dpkg-reconfigure locales. Ways they simplified the unix system It's single user: I didn't find a way to create multiple users besides the terminal, and the login program does not ask for a username, only for the password. The "win" key has a house painted on it, and it's used as "hide/show all applications" key. When all applications are minimised, the Asus launcher is visible instead of the X background: this behaviour basically turns the key into a sort of "run application" key. The key still works as a kind of shift, although it probably was not intended to. The repository management is interesting. /etc/apt/sources.list contains:

deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701 p701 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/tw p701 main

which means they have a repository per eepc model and a subrepository per localised version. The "Internet" group of applications has a Wikipedia toplevel application: it's nice to see the ecosystem of free software / free culture coming together to provide a nice user experience. An extra link to the SD card mount point (besides the one in /mount) appears in the home directory automatically when the SD card is inserted. This means that when you do "save as" from all sorts of applications, the SD card is there, easy to reach. This helps if one decides not to use the internal flash for data, and just save everything in the SD card: I like doing this, as it allows me to quickly move the SD card with all the data between the EeePC and other computers. Changes I made so far Activate en_GB.UTF-8 via dpkg-reconfigure locales. Add en_GB.UTF-8 to /etc/scim/global, to get SCIM input methods to work. Little flaws Virtual screens are enabled, so W+arrow switches virtual screen. The feeling you get if you hit W+arrow is that all your applications disappeared. This could be improved by having the vm keep the asus launcher at the bottom of the current virtual screen, instead of just at the bottom of the first screen. Or, to disable virtual screens by default. It is possible to drag the lower panel around, maybe accidentally: that's another of our fancy default "features" that should be disabled by default. It is also possible to remove applets from the applet bar by mistake: for example I wanted to disconenct the wireless, and I instead ended up quitting the wireless applet. Luckily, the next time I started the computer it magically came back. ~/.xsession-errors is continuously getting the useless stdout/stderr debugging flood of GUI apps. Noone bothers usually, except that in this case the file is on flash, where unneeded writes are also very much unwanted. I'm considering symlinking it to /dev/null, but ideally we should get GUI apps to only write out what is really important. Battery charging doesn't show how long it is going to take until the battery is fully charged. No capslock or numlock leds. This probably calls for disabling or remapping of capslock. Numlock is very hard to hit by accident, but capslock is. Random thoughts If you buy an eeepc, I really suggest you think of it a mass consumption appliance and stay on the original OS for a while. Most of what's in here is what we use everyday, just on a different context. Try to use it as an appliance and see if it is perfect, and if it isn't, try to find out what is missing. It is a fantastic way to find out important bits that are missing in Debian as well. Also, if you're used to tailoring everything to yourself before starting to use a Linux system, this is a great way to try the usage experience that we can offer by default. The Firefox welcome page the first time you connect, for example, is surprisingly nice. Everything we know as doable comes a bit as as a surprise because this time someone has done it for us. I wish that that someone can be invited to talk at the next Debconf: the possibility of having a look at the work that has been done in bending Debian to this nice little device is to me one of the most valuable things so far about the eeepc. Help/About KDE/Credits It's reachable by most applications, and says:

The development team would like to thank the following people and organizations for their contributions:

• the Debian Project,
• the GNU Project,
• the KDE Project,
• the Mozilla Project,
• the OpenOffice.org Project,
• the SAMBA Project,
• the X.Org Foundation,

Linus Torvalds and the other Linux kernel developers, and Free software developers around the world.

I'm using an appliance that is thanking me, and others like me: priceless!

I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1]. It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I want to live in a society where everyone can contribute as equals and where all voters have the possibility of becoming well informed about the issues that affect their vote. If literacy declines far enough then fascism seems to be the inevitable result. I’m not sure whether that makes me a humanist according to the author. Below in the second part of this post (not included in the feed) I include my dictionary definition of the word, #4 is the definition most commonly used today (which is a reasonable match for my beliefs). There is some interesting information regarding basic research on the mental abilities of literate and illiterate people which suggests that people who an read are better at handling abstract concepts and hypothetical situations. The article notes that spending time on the net increases academic scores for children. It also makes the interesting claim that visiting pr0n sites increases grades, I find that difficult to believe. I wonder whether there is a difference between readers and writers in this regard. Does the typical serious net user who averages writing more than 3650 messages a year for fun (in addition to whatever email may need to be written for work) plus some blog posts and writing other web pages have different mental abilities to someone who just reads what others write? Does blogging (and other writing on your choice of topic) change your brain? What about programmers, does spending 8 hours a day writing formal rules for hypothetical mathematical situations (which is essentially what programming is about) change your brain? Are programmers going to have greater abilities for managing abstract concepts and hypothetical situations than people who have not had such experience? NB It will be difficult to determine this as people who have such skills will find programming easier and more fun so therefore a career in programming computers is self-selecting for people with such abilities. Another interesting fact is the results of research into the comprehension of a PowerPoint presentation. People who read it without an audio-visual accompanying it learned more and rated it as more interesting. Based on this my plan is that in future when attending conferences I will try and read papers which are presented BEFORE attending the lectures. Unfortunately most conferences which have papers presented seem based on the idea that you give a lecture about a topic as a teaser for your paper and assume that the audience knows nothing about it (conferences which don’t have papers outnumber the ones that do). Most Linux conferences seem based on the idea that almost no-one reads papers at all, they attend lectures and visit web sites and IRC channels afterwards. NB this comment is based on talking to people who attend conferences and my observations on attending conferences - it is not a criticism of any conferences merely an observation on cultural attitudes. Based on this information it seems reasonable to provide copies of lecture notes to the audience before the lecture. For example for a typical talk that I give to a LUG I could blog the lecture notes before the meeting and email the LUG mailing-list with the URL, people who really want to learn would hear me talk AFTER reading the notes and hopefully get the best of both forms of learning. I had been considering producing some YouTube [2] videos with instructions on how to use SE Linux. But it seems that might not be such a good idea (at least not a good enough idea to justify the amount of effort I would have to spend). The author seems to misunderstand YouTube, it is NOT about making the Internet resemble TV (where millions of mindless drones watch content created for the lowest common denominator in the audience). The AtGoogleTalks on YouTube [3] and www.ted.com are examples of high-quality free content (comparable to the best TV documentaries - the type of content which is cited as increasing the academic results of children) and the culture of creation and discussion must be a good thing. Most TV is bad because it’s one-way communication and the quality of the content is low. YouTube videos are widely discussed in email, blogs, and other written forums. The creation of the best (and often most viewed) videos would surely involve some writing. I wonder whether the benefits attributed to reading can be obtained without reading fiction. The nature of work is changing to require an increasing amount of reading and writing. The most menial work requires reading instruction manuals. Most of the best paid jobs involve a lot of reading and writing. If reading fiction isn’t required then it seems that there is little risk in the immediate future.

• [1] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=all


• [2] http://www.youtube.com


• [3] http://au.youtube.com/profile?user=AtGoogleTalks

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Trolltech has released Qt4.4.0 technical preview (tp1). This release introduces new features like phonon (multimedia framework) with the gstreamer plugin, webkit (web browser engine), xmlpatterns (XQuery and XPath engine), help system with QtClucene (Qt wrapper around clucene), etc … and some enhancements to current modules. It comes with new demos (browser using webkit, mediaplayer using phonon and embeddeddialogs) and new examples (help, ipc, phonon, qtconcurrent and xmlpatterns). It’s worth to take a look closer from a packager point of view:

• phonon can be found in KDE svn and webkit can be found on WebKit svn.

=> It means different release schedule and sources not always synced. It seems we need to choose which branch we want to package (TT/KDE and TT/WebKit).

• xmlpatterns module depends on exceptions support.

=> So far, we build Qt without exceptions support. If you want the xmlpatterns module, you need to enable exceptions support

• a change on Qt4.4.0 breaks ABI on mips architecture.

=> nobody is perfect… If you want to play with this release, you can find packages for Debian (sources and amd64 build at the moment) on: http://people.debian.org/~fabo/debian/qt4-x11_4.4.0~tp1-1/ the regular snaphot of the QWebView (done in 3s): As far as i can see, Qt4.4.0 will rock !

As I wrote earlier, I bought an Eee PC to use on the bus. Initially, I only used it offline to do some Debian packaging and blogging, but I soon discovered that I could do a few things online on the many open networks on my daily commute. While the connections are normally brief in good traffic conditions, even a few seconds here and there is enough to participate in irc discussions. Manually connecting to each got old very quickly. So, to automate those connections I settled on wpa_supplicant, (wpasupplicant is the Debian package name,) which is quite easy to set up in roaming mode, as outlined in /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz. All you need is the following in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-hotplug ath0
iface ath0 inet manual
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Then create your wpa_supplicant.conf as follows:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network= 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 

That’s it. You can now roam from one open network to the next and the supplicant will connect you to each one in turn. I have used this to reconnect to my screen session each time the bus slows down for a stop or gets stuck in traffic to carry on conversations on irc for the whole length of the commute. If you also connect to networks requiring authentication, you’ll need to add a “network” clause for each network. See /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/ for help with that, particularly the annotated conf file, README.wpa_supplicant.conf.gz. For finer control over the process, I use sudo wpa_cli so i can:

• keep an eye on what networks are around: scan, then scan_results,
• disconnect from a network once I know it’s out of range
• and reassociate as needed.

The only things that I haven’t figured out how to do yet are to make the process of switching from one network to the next a bit faster (it normally takes about a minute; precious seconds of online time are lost when the bus is in motion,) and to blacklist certain essids, e.g. commercial hotspots that make you pay before they’ll route your packets to the Internet. For the first problem, I have already tweaked my dhcp settings, which helps a bit. For the second, I tried adding network blocks for specific networks and setting them to a lower priority, but that doesn’t work because then the ‘catch all’ open network block kicks in and picks them up anyway.

One great thing about kids — especially kids who have not been overexposed to TV media — is how easily entertained they are. We recently showed Esther some Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1940’s (on a real TV, no less!) and she couldn’t stop laughing. It is refreshing to see someone spellbound by animated content that didn’t require a rendering farm to create. I’m sure she’ll be jaded soon enough, but we’re trying to drag it out as long as possible by providing only very occasional small doses. This piece on the end of reading as a cultural activity is chock full of interesting statistics. This excerpt, in particular, is relevant here:

In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily. A 2005 study in Northern California found that a television in the bedroom lowered the standardized-test scores of third graders. And the conflict continues throughout a child s development. In 2001, after analyzing data on more than a million students around the world, the researcher Micha Razel found little room for doubt that television worsened performance in reading, science, and math. The relationship wasn t a straight line but an inverted check mark : a small amount of television seemed to benefit children; more hurt. For nine-year-olds, the optimum was two hours a day; for seventeen-year-olds, half an hour. Razel guessed that the younger children were watching educational shows, and, indeed, researchers have shown that a five-year-old boy who watches Sesame Street is likely to have higher grades even in high school. Razel noted, however, that fifty-five per cent of students were exceeding their optimal viewing time by three hours a day, thereby lowering their academic achievement by roughly one grade level.

It certainly doesn’t surprise me that television–even educational TV–is generally not good for kids. The “inverted check mark” bit was a surprise, though. Who would guess that two hours a day is optimal for the nine-year-old brain? On a related note, Kiddie Records Weekly (recommended by about.com here) is an astonishingly extensive source of free children’s books in MP3 format. It’s also an excellent example of the increasing relevance of bittorent in enabling wide economical distribution of legitimate content. The content is primarily (exclusively?) digitized vinyl records from the 1930’s and 1940’s. Fortunately, Alice in Wonderland gets no worse with age. To complete the nostalgia circuit, who can forget “loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter” (via sketchelement, quite a while ago): These are good times to be a kid. Or maybe just to be a parent. Technorati Tags: Looney Tunes, Alice in Wonderland, Reading, TV, Cartoons, Sesame Street, Bittorrent

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Thursday evening, I joined the inhabitants of the twin town of Valga-Valka, sitting smack on the Estonian-Latvian border, to celebrate their entry into the Schengen treaty. Ever since I first crossed the border there on a roadtrip from Tallinn to Fallingbostel, in year 2001, I knew I would have to return and, sure enough, I briefly passed through during last summer with an Estonian friend, on our way to an acquaintance's birthday party. Still, that told me nothing of the town's life and left me wanting for more. Upon hearing that year 2004 EU accession countries would join Schengen in December 2007, I immediately promised myself to show up and join the crowd. As it turns out, I missed Aleks Tapin of the All About Latvia blog by very little, having I caught his last-minute e-mail the next afternoon. Aleks blogged a great article depicting the Latvian side of life and providing some background info on the town, if you're curious. I arrived late-evening on Thursday via the Tallinn-Viljandi-Valga bus and checked into my hotel, then proceeded to checkpoint Valga II around 23:30, with the intention of grabbing a drink on the Latvian side and returning just before midnight for the celebrations. Hardly anyone was in sight, except for Latvian officer abana who was completing the inspection of a Russian car with three noisy passengers. Upon presenting her with my passport, officer abana cheerfully lead me to the office and slid my passport through a slot to officer Bukss, who was visibly surprised to have any tourist show up on the last day of his job to get their passport stamped. Upon explaining to him the reasons for my presence, he pointed me to a nearby bar where I could have a drink, visibly amused by the situation. I spent the next few minutes in a local casino in the company of three hilarious Latvian truck drivers, Zintars and Aivars, two Latvians with limited English language skills and Yuri, an ethnic Russian living in Ireland who was born stateless on the Latvian side of the town and who later acquired Estonian citizenship by claiming ancestral land on the Estonian side. Upon returning to the border, just minutes before midnight, I found myself in the middle of a huge crowd of villagers, police officers, border guards and politicians from both countries - barely getting noticed by anyone. I handed my passport to an Estonian border guard who emotionally commented to a civilian friend of his nearby that, "Wow! That was the last one!", handing me my passport back just as the midnight bells rang and the mayor of the Estonian side started his speech amidst pyrotechnics lining the road. I then had a chance to chat with the Estonian mayor, who promptly handed me a bilingual certificate, signed by the mayors of both towns, attesting that I was the first to cross the open border, while introducing me to his two young daughters with whom he was about to take a stroll on the Latvian side. The next morning, an even bigger and more symbolic event took place: the demolition of the fence that had been cutting the S prus/Rai a street in half. You can see a picture of what the street looked like before on Aleks' blog article [edit: or on Jens-Olaf's blog article]. After the fence was removed, it instead looked like this: The crowd then proceeded to checkpoint Valga III, where a stage had been setup for the politicians to make their speeches. An interesting fact is that, because of the way the border was drawn, along a creek leading to Pedeli river, an Estonian main road was technically on the Latvian border and thus aptly named "Raja" (border) street. The Estonian mayor commented in his speech that the the brand new supermarket standing behind us was also technically on borderland and could not have possibly been built earlier, weren't it for the Schengen treaty matter-of-factedly eliminating borders between participating EU countries. The speeches were closed by a youth group whose choreography featured six break-dancing boys, dressed as Estonian and Latvian border guards and as border posts. The choreography ended with the teenage border guards carrying away the human posts on their shoulders, just as a choir of young girls replaced them with songs in either languages. Before catching my bus back to Tallinn, I dropped by the Valga tourist info, only to face a nervous-looking Kapo officer in plain clothes. Upon mumbling something about the tourist info and wanting to grab maps, I noticed that a press conference was taking place behind. As he finally let me pass to the tourist info side of the building, a familiar voice said to me, "Hey! Weren't you at our place last summer with Martin Ranna?" Yup, the wife of the acquaintance whose birthday party I had attended last summer is working there and greeted with me refreshments and munchies she had cooked in prevision for the presidential visit! As was my luck, she had one of the commemorative plaques that had been given to the politicians at Valga III on hand: I was glad to see the town becoming one again, even though it is ethnically divided. There are already signs of people on both sides learning one another's languages and shopping on either side of town, not to mention plans of merging the municipal bus operations of the Estonian and Latvian halves of the town, so I'm sure that they'll get there in due course. For me, Schengen brought a much more practical and quite welcome change: the end of messy border crossing stamps that were rapidly filling my almost new passport, every time I visited the head office of our company in Tallinn. While Estonian border guards mostly stamp passports in an orderly fashion, being careful to fit exactly 8 stamps in a single page and to put entry and exit stamps side-by-side, Finnish border guards apparently are incapable of doing so, instead systematically wasting pages by either stamping sloppily in a way that makes it impossible for more than 4 stamps to appear on a given page or by flipping to a brand new page, every time I had to cross the border. In case anyone ever wondered why I'm currently representing Estonian interests abroad, despite living in Finland, this example is one of the many reasons: Finnish authorities routinely display arrogant carelessness towards the population and doubly so towards immigrants. It amounts to an accumulation of idiocy that has costly consequences on people's lives. For some, it's about being denied the public institutions' support when they need it the most and their life forever going downhill thereafter. For me, it has been about countless missed opportunities (jobs, love affairs, travel plans), plus very costly passport and residence permit renewals. Given this, I simply don't see myself ever representing Finnish interests ever again. Faith no more. Besides, the Estonians are fun and easy-going people. Siski ma m tlen, kas ma peaksen n d Eestisse kolima v i?

In a comment on my post about Bad Project Management [1] Don Marti [2] says “the more money you charge, the less of your time people waste, and the more seriously they take you” and “you can affect the client more, whether you’re peddling idiocy or wisdom“. That’s a nice theory, however I don’t recall seeing an example of it anywhere that I have worked. There are two broad categories of employers, large and small. Large companies have HR departments etc who decide on rough pay scales. Once the budget is approved (by senior management and HR) for someone’s contract fees or salary the amount of money seems to be of little concern to the line manager. They have a group of N people reporting to them who are all paid by money that comes from some mysterious place (with no direct connection to the quality or quantity of work done) and therefore the amount of money paid is not very relevant. Often team-leaders don’t even know how much the people who report to them are being paid! Note that this applies to people who have a similar job title, if I am paid twice as much as another sys-admin in a corporate environment I don’t expect to get more attention, but someone who has a more senior job title (or in the case of the UK has been to a more prestigious school or has a better accent) may get more attention. Small companies are rarely in a position to be silly in this way. This doesn’t mean that the most highly paid person gets the most attention, it’s more a matter of making a logical case. Most of the small companies I have worked for have been run in a sensible manner, and my ideas have often received more attention than those of others because I have had a better technical background than my colleagues. However in some cases my suggestions have received less attention because I was receiving a higher pay rate. The reason is that I was being paid a rate that the company could not afford in the long-term and therefore the people who would work there in future years would have to maintain the systems in question which meant that their ability to do such maintenance was often considered to be more important than my ideas about the best way to design the system. I have worked for a small company that had no financial pressure to do sensible things (they had some sweet deals going with major corporations which essentially gave them money for nothing). They had chaotic management which they could get away with because there were no immediate consequences for doing silly things (such as not forcing their clients to have a method of backing up servers that they installed). I can’t claim that Don’s advice in this regard never applies, but my observations of situations where it didn’t apply lead me to believe that it’s applicable to some situations in limited areas and is not a general rule. Don also refers to “a high number that you would quote to a client you didn’t want in order to get them to go away“. This is an issue that causes a lot of disagreement. One consultant I respect advises people to never make such quotes, if you don’t want a job then say that you are not available - one reason is that if a position is so bad that you want the potential client to go away then you don’t want to be tempted to reconsider if they agree to pay you a silly amount of money, another is that it may be considered ethically wrong to make an offer is not genuine. Another consultant I respect claims that his greatest career success was when he turned up to an interview in casual clothes, explained to the potential client that he would never wear a suit and demanded an excessive amount of money. The client agreed to such terms and he then went on to charge other clients similar amounts of money and continued to refuse to wear a suit. I won’t claim that it’s wrong to demand excessive amounts of money to make an unwanted potential client go away and I will not rule out the possibility of doing so at some future time. But I think it should be noted that the practice is controversial and not referred to as something that anyone might do. It is something that I don’t recall doing at any previous time in my career (so I haven’t done it in a formal manner at least - I may have done so at the informal discussion phase and forgotten). Please note that I encourage you to read my previous post with Don’s comment in it’s original context to avoid any risk of misinterpretation. The purpose of this post is not to disagree with Don (I agree with him almost all of the time) but to disagree with some very commonly held beliefs which Don represented in his comment.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/12/19/bad-project-management/


• [2] http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=blog/6

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Liferea’s upstream has decided to stop puting Debian Planet as a default example feed for new installs. I agree with that change for the upstream distribution, but I’m still going to revert it for the Debian package. And, of course, that gives us the chance to do even better. I’ve added Planeta Debian to the Spanish default feed list and Planet Debian-FR to the French one. I wanted to add Debian Brasil to pt_BR, but their feed returns a 404. So, do you know about Debian planets in other languages? Please open a wishlist bug against liferea with the name, URL, the URL of the feed, the language it’s in, as well as some way I can verify the site is “official”, where that means it’s mostly published to by developers and heavy users. The languages which currently have a customized list are bg, es, nl, pt_BR, sk, ca, eu, pt, sv, de, fr, pl, ru and tr. If your language is not one of those, you’d do better to start by contributing a non-Debian specific feed list for your language, directly to upstream (and maybe translating the whole program, while you’re at it ).

The current method of carrying young children (less than 4-6 years old) in cars is to have a special car seat fitted in the back seat. This has several significant problems:

• It takes significant space in the back seat. The child seat is going to add at least 10cm to the length required in the back seat and often drives the purchase of larger cars (including SUV and 4WD vehicles that are known for being unsafe - especially for children). Having child passengers in a car is a great distraction for the driver, driving a large vehicle increases the difficulty in avoiding accidents - especially when parking.


• The seat belts of the rear seats are used as part of the mechanism of attaching the child seat to the car. Seat belts are designed to stretch in a crash. It’s recommended that after a crash all seat belts that were used to secure people or objects be replaced as they will have stretched. Seat-belts that don’t stretch will cause more serious injuries. It seems likely to me that a seat belt used to tightly secure a child seat for a long period of time will stretch without a collision. Therefore if an older child is seated where they (or another child) used to have a child-seat then they may be at greater risk in the case of a collision.


• Child seats should be fitted by specially trained experts if they are to be safe. The majority of seats are not correctly fitted and put children at needless risk (the cost of getting an expert to do the installation is small).

Some car companies are offering child “booster seats” that are an optional attachment to the rear seat (I first noticed this when reviewing the specs of the latest version of the car I drive - the VW Passat [1]). This is a good idea, but it doesn’t go far enough. The best thing to do would be to provide a selection of back-seat assemblies as factory fitted options which have built-in baby and child seats. The combinations that would be most desired are:

1. Standard car back-seat for three adults (or two adults for a small car).


2. A regular seat (for an adult) at the road side of the car combined with a baby (backward facing) seat at the kerb side.


3. A regular seat (for an adult) at the road side with a young child (forward facing) seat at the kerb side.


4. A baby seat at the road side with a young child seat at the kerb side.


5. Two young child seats.

It would be quite possible to have all five of these options available from the factory. Of course there are corner cases that this doesn’t cover such as twins or parents who have two children so close together that they need two baby seats. For those cases option 2 combined with one of the current off-the-shelf baby seats would do. The number of different supported options would need to be kept reasonably small to reduce manufacture cost and to allow a reasonable market for second-hand seats. One thing to note is that it’s recommended that the first forward-facing seat a child uses is smaller than the later one. Having options for three different built-in baby/child seats (rear-facing and two sizes of forward-facing) would significantly expand the number of combinations (and thus the expense). I suspect that the safety benefits of having an ideal method of securing a forward-facing child seat would compensate for the disadvantage of having it be too large for the child when they are first placed in it. Another possibility would be to replace the rear seat with a more solid bench with bolt holes for baby and child seats. Securing a child or baby seat to a hard surface with bolts would be a much less technically demanding task than using a seat belt (and thus could be done correctly without expert assistance). Child and baby seats would have to be redesigned for this (I suspect that the safety of them relies on being attached to a soft surface), but after that I expect that safety would improve. For this option the rear seat could bold on to a hard surface that’s suitable for attaching child/baby seats so it would simply be a matter of removing the rear seat and installing the child/baby seat(s). The most common car design in Australia includes a 60/40 split rear seat (meaning that if you have a large item to store in the boot/trunk then you can fold down 40% or 60% of the back of the rear seat to allow the luggage to extend into the passenger compartment). This split could be extended to allow removing the base of the rear seat for 60% or 40% to bolt on child/baby seats. Once a car model had been designed for replacing the rear seat there would be other options available. For example replacing the rear seat with luggage storage space. While almost all cars allow folding down the backs of the rear seats to store extra luggage the option of removing seats that you don’t need to give even more space is not common at all (I’ve only seen it advertised as a feature in vehicles with 6 or more seats). I expect that if this idea was implemented it would allow a small car such as a Toyota Corolla to give an equal or greater amount of usable space for children in the rear as a larger vehicle such as a Toyota Camry. While better options for luggage storage would allow people who don’t have children to use a small car while still being able to carry the luggage that they desire. This would allow considerable savings on car purchase prices and fuel use. I expect that a reduction in fuel use world-wide could be achieved by removing the pressure on parents to buy large cars! The poor support for child seats in cars is really surprising. One of the features that could be introduced is both top and bottom mounts for such seats. There is apparently a standard for this, some (not all) cars support it, but most baby seats apparently don’t. So baby and child seats are secured at the top (to a hook that’s bolted securely to the car frame and which was designed specifically for the purpose) and at the bottom to the seat-belt which was never designed for such things. It’s a pity that some of the money spent on supposedly protecting children from drugs couldn’t be spent on making cars safer for them. The government is in the best position to force car manufacturers to improve their safety features while parents are in the best position to teach children about the dangers of drugs.

• [1] http://www.volkswagen.com.au/pdf/Brochures/Passat_160807.pdf

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