It s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest and I m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli accepted my invitation. He has a difficult role in the community, but he s doing a really great job of it. He s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion. Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Stefano: I m Stefano Zacchiroli, but I prefer to be called Zack, both on the Internet and in real life. I m 32, Italian, emigrated to France about 4 years ago. I live in Paris, and I find it to be one of the most gorgeous and exciting cities in the world. As my day job I m a Computer Science researcher and teacher at University Paris Diderot and IRILL. In my copious free time I contribute to Debian, and I m firmly convinced that doing so is an effective way to help the cause of Free Software. Besides, I find it to be a lot of fun! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Stefano: Flash back to 1999, when I was a 2nd year student in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Back then in Italy it was uncommon for young geeks to get exposed to Free Software: Internet was way less pervasive than today and most computer magazines didn t pay much attention to GNU/Linux. Luckily for me, the professor in charge of the student lab was a Free Software enthusiast and all students machines there were running Debian. Not only that, but there was also a student program that allowed volunteers to become sysadmins after having shown their skills and convinced the director they were trustworthy. Becoming one of those volunteer Debian admins quickly became one of my top objectives for the year, and that is were I ve learned using Debian. The year after that, I got in touch with a research group that was to become the happy bunch of hackers with whom I would have done both my master and PhD theses. They were designing a new proof assistant. Most of the development was in OCaml and happened on Debian. OCaml was available in Debian, but many of the libraries we needed were not. So I approached the Debian OCaml Team offering to help. Before I realize what was going on I was (co-)maintainer of tens of OCaml-related packages. At some point I got told I think you should apply as a Debian Developer . So I did and in a couple of months I went through the New Member (NM) process, that was back then in its infancy. I still remember my happiness while reading the account created mail, the day after my 22nd birthday. I know the NM process went through some bad publicity in the past, but I m happy to see that nowadays the process can be as swift as it has been for me 10 years ago. Raphael: It s your second year as Debian Project Leader (DPL). Are you feeling more productive in the role? Do you fear to burn out? Stefano: I m feeling way more productive, no doubts. The task of the Debian Project Leader is not necessarily difficult, but it is a complex and scarcely documented one. It is also profoundly different from any other task that Debian people usually work on, so that experience doesn t help much in getting started. Before becoming effective as DPL one needs to get to know many people and mechanisms he is not familiar with. More importantly, one needs to set up a personal work-flow that allows to keep up with day-to-day DPL tasks (which are aplenty) as well as with urgencies (that tend to pop-up in the leader@debian.org INBOX at the least convenient time). Finally, one also needs to do proper traffic shaping and always retain enough motivation bandwidth to keep the Project informed about what is going on in DPL-land. Finding the right balance among all these ingredients can take some time. Once one is past it, everything goes way more smoothly. The above is why I m constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL s TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next. Regarding burn out, I don t feel prone to its risk these days. If I look back, I can say that my contributions as DPL have been pretty constant in volume over time; my enthusiasm for the task, if anything, is on the rise. The effectiveness of my contributions as DPL are, on the other hand, not mine to judge. Raphael: If you had to single out two achievements where you were involved as DPL, what would they be? Stefano: I d go for the following two, in no particular order:

• Dialogue with derivatives. When I became DPL ~1.5 years ago the situation on that front was pretty dire. In the specific case of Ubuntu, by far the most successful and customized of all Debian derivatives, I remember being scared of raising the topic of collaboration with them on mailing lists. More generally, we had no specific initiatives to foster technical collaboration with and among derivatives. A huge potential of (forwarded) contributions to Debian was being wasted. Today things look much better, as I ve documented in recent talks at DebConf11 and UDS-P. The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum and many people who apply to become Debian Developers come from derivatives. Conflict situations still exist, for good reasons that we still have to either fix or figure out entirely. But I m positive we re on the right track.

  The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum

  This is by far not an achievement of mine alone. In particular, many of the activity of the Derivatives Front Desk have been organized by other enthusiastic volunteers. But I ve done my part, especially in breaking the ice and in proposing a vision of Free Software distribution where all distros play a role and are welcome to join the game, as long as they give back and give credit to their respective upstreams.
• Process membership. I m proud of having promoted the general resolution (GR) that has clarified (and advertised to the world) that Debian welcomes all kind of contributions, and that they all equally matter to become proper members of the Project. I notice only now while writing this that the GR title, traditionally chosen by the secretary, was Debian Project Members . That choice harmonically closes the circle with the recent renaming of the NM process to New Member process. Today, we have several project members (AKA Debian Developers ) that are active citizen of Debian with voting rights, even though they take care of tasks other than packaging. Anyone can become a Debian citizen, as long as they are ready to abide by Debian s values, have a track record of verifiable contributions to Debian, and are committed to keep them coming in the future.

  We have several project members that [ ] take care of tasks other than packaging.

  Once gain, this is by far not an achievement of mine alone, very little project-wide achievements are. DAM has helped a lot and support from the project as a whole has been immense.

OK, let me cheat and add a third one I m also proud of having been able to report to the Project my whereabouts as DPL, thoroughly and periodically, since the very beginning is first term. People annoyed by my reporting logorrhea now have all my sympathies. Raphael: Among the possible new features of Debian Wheezy, which one gets you excited most? Stefano: It s multi-arch, no doubt. Even though it is not a directly user visible change, it s a very far reaching one. It is also one of those changes that make me feel that moment of truth of coders, when you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

It s multi-arch [ ] you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

Raphael: If you were not DPL and could spend all your time on Debian, what project would you do? Stefano: I would sit down and do software development for Debian. It s impressive how many important and beneficial changes for Debian could be delivered by specific software improvements in various parts of our infrastructure. We tend to attract many packagers, but not so many people willing to maintain Debian infrastructure softwares like dak, britney, debbugs, the PTS, etc. Their maintenance burden then falls on the shoulders of the respective teams which are generally very busy with other important tasks. As a project, we seem to be more appealing to packagers than to software developers. That is a pity given the amount of exciting coding tasks that are everywhere in Debian. Part of the reason we are not appealing to developers is that we are not particularly good at collecting coding tasks in a place where interested developers could easily pick them up. It also takes quite a bit of inside knowledge to spot infrastructure bugs and understand how to fix them. I long for some spare hacking time to check if I m still good enough of a coder to hunt down longstanding bugs in our infrastructure, which have ended up being my pet peeves. I d also love to dive again into RCBW. It s less committing than package maintenance, more diverse and challenging, and also an immensely useful activity to get Debian releases done. Raphael: Martin Michlmayr is worried that there is so few paid opportunities around Debian. Do you agree with his sentiment, and if yes do you have ideas on how to improve this situation? Stefano: The idealistic me wishes Debian to be a community made only of volunteers that devote their free time to the Project. Oh, and that me also wishes Debian to be competitive with similar projects, no matter how many full-time employees others have! That is coherent with a view of society where everyone has a day job, but also engages in volunteering activities ensuring that public interest is pursued by people motivated by interests other than profit. But I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role. I admire projects that strike a good balance between volunteer and paid work. The Linux kernel is emblematic in that respect: many developers are paid by companies that have a commercial or strategic interest in Linux. Nevertheless volunteers contributions are aplenty and the Linux community gives a convincing impression that choices are driven by the community itself (or by its benevolent dictator) without money-driven impositions.

I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role.

Such an ecosystem does not exist around Debian. We do have a partner program that allows for it to happen, but we have very few partners with an interest in doing distribution development work. Like Martin, I m worried by this state of affairs, because it de facto means we lag behind in terms of available people power. In a community of volunteers, that might frustrate people and that is not good. To improve over the status quo the first step is to federate together small and medium companies that have a strategic interest in Debian and listen to their needs. I m already in touch with representatives of such companies that, in many cases, already employ Debian Developers to do some distribution work in Debian. We will be soon sending out a call to reach out to more such companies, but since we are discussing this, why waiting? If some of our readers here are representative of such companies, I encourage them to get in touch with me about this. Raphael: You know that the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is on good track but the liberation of the book is not yet assured. What do you think of this project? Stefano: I m happy about the project, to the point that I ve accepted writing a testimonial for it . I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian and I welcome any initiative that might help closing that gap.

I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian.

Free Culture is a great offspring of Free Software and I m convinced we need to stand up against double standards in the two camps. Letting aside software-specific licensing details, the basic freedoms to be defended are the same. They are those freedoms that ensure that a reader is in full control of his book, pretty much as they ensure that a computer user is in full control of the software that runs on it. I m therefore proud that Debian has long resolved that the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) apply not only to software but also to books and other pieces of documentation. But the status quo implies that not only we have very few up to date, high quality books about Debian. It also implies that, at present, we have no such book that we can distribute in the Debian archive, showing off the Free Software (and Free Culture!) values we stand for.
Crowdfunding is considered to be a good mate for Free Culture, where the services model that applies to Free Software is more difficult to exploit. I so wish any luck to yours and Roland s initiative. A different matter is whether Debian, as a project, should endorse the initiative and actively campaign for it. As you know, I think it should not. While we do advertise general project donations, we don t do mission-specific fundraising campaign for Debian itself. Coherently with that, I don t think we should relay crowdfunding campaigns for 3rd parties, even when the result would be beneficial to Debian. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Stefano: There are two classes of people that I particularly admire in Debian:

• Those with an uncanny ability to guide discussions towards constructive conclusions. We are lucky to have many in Debian and I admire all of them. Having to single out one I d name Russ Allbery, in honor of whom I hereby propose the periodic Russ Allbery s Distinguished Flametamer Award .
• People stepping up for responsibility roles, especially when the responsibility put them in tough spots. Release teams, ftp-masters, DSA, DAM, as well as past and present members of teams with similarly hot seats have all my admiration.

---

Thank you to Zack for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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Today, while merging changes to phpMyAdmin from our translation server I was very surprised that we have two languages which already reached 100% - Slovenian and Turkish (and four more just few strings from 100%). The huge amount of new strings introduced during 3.5 development (mostly being MySQL advisor hints) made me thing it will take very long time till they all get translated, but I was proven wrong. Anyway there is still lot of work to do, so feel free to join our translators team.

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At work we have heaps of servers. I believe the total count is around 1000 at the moment. To be able to get help from the vendors when something go wrong, we want to keep the firmware on the servers up to date. If the firmware isn't the latest and greatest, the vendors typically refuse to start debugging any problems until the firmware is upgraded. So before every reboot, we want to upgrade the firmware, and we would really like everyone handling servers at the university to do this themselves when they plan to reboot a machine. For that to happen we at the unix server admin group need to provide the tools to do so. To make firmware upgrading easier, I am working on a script to fetch and install the latest firmware for the servers we got. Most of our hardware are from Dell and HP, so I have focused on these servers so far. This blog post is about the Dell part. On the Dell FTP site I was lucky enough to find an XML file with firmware information for all 11th generation servers, listing which firmware should be used on a given model and where on the FTP site I can find it. Using a simple perl XML parser I can then download the shell scripts Dell provides to do firmware upgrades from within Linux and reboot when all the firmware is primed and ready to be activated on the first reboot. This is the Dell related fragment of the perl code I am working on. Are there anyone working on similar tools for firmware upgrading all servers at a site? Please get in touch and lets share resources.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Temp qw(tempdir);
BEGIN  
    # Install needed RHEL packages if missing
    my %rhelmodules = (
        'XML::Simple' => 'perl-XML-Simple',
        );
    for my $module (keys %rhelmodules)  
        eval "use $module;";
        if ($@)  
            my $pkg = $rhelmodules $module ;
            system("yum install -y $pkg");
            eval "use $module;";
         
     
 
my $errorsto = 'pere@hungry.com';
upgrade_dell();
exit 0;
sub run_firmware_script  
    my ($opts, $script) = @_;
    unless ($script)  
        print STDERR "fail: missing script name\n";
        exit 1
     
    print STDERR "Running $script\n\n";
    if (0 == system("sh $script $opts"))   # FIXME correct exit code handling
        print STDERR "success: firmware script ran succcessfully\n";
      else  
        print STDERR "fail: firmware script returned error\n";
     
 
sub run_firmware_scripts  
    my ($opts, @dirs) = @_;
    # Run firmware packages
    for my $dir (@dirs)  
        print STDERR "info: Running scripts in $dir\n";
        opendir(my $dh, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $dir: $!";
        while (my $s = readdir $dh)  
            next if $s =~ m/^\.\.?/;
            run_firmware_script($opts, "$dir/$s");
         
        closedir $dh;
     
 
sub download  
    my $url = shift;
    print STDERR "info: Downloading $url\n";
    system("wget --quiet \"$url\"");
 
sub upgrade_dell  
    my @dirs;
    my $product =  dmidecode -s system-product-name ;
    chomp $product;
    if ($product =~ m/PowerEdge/)  
        # on RHEL, these pacakges are needed by the firwmare upgrade scripts
        system('yum install -y compat-libstdc++-33.i686 libstdc++.i686 libxml2.i686 procmail');
        my $tmpdir = tempdir(
            CLEANUP => 1
            );
        chdir($tmpdir);
        fetch_dell_fw('catalog/Catalog.xml.gz');
        system('gunzip Catalog.xml.gz');
        my @paths = fetch_dell_fw_list('Catalog.xml');
        # -q is quiet, disabling interactivity and reducing console output
        my $fwopts = "-q";
        if (@paths)  
            for my $url (@paths)  
                fetch_dell_fw($url);
             
            run_firmware_scripts($fwopts, $tmpdir);
          else  
            print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
            print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
         
        chdir('/');
      else  
        print STDERR "error: Unsupported Dell model '$product'.\n";
        print STDERR "error: Please report to $errorsto.\n";
     
 
sub fetch_dell_fw  
    my $path = shift;
    my $url = "ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/$path";
    download($url);
 
# Using ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/catalog/Catalog.xml.gz, figure out which
# firmware packages to download from Dell.  Only work for Linux
# machines and 11th generation Dell servers.
sub fetch_dell_fw_list  
    my $filename = shift;
    my $product =  dmidecode -s system-product-name ;
    chomp $product;
    my ($mybrand, $mymodel) = split(/\s+/, $product);
    print STDERR "Finding firmware bundles for $mybrand $mymodel\n";
    my $xml = XMLin($filename);
    my @paths;
    for my $bundle (@ $xml-> SoftwareBundle )  
        my $brand = $bundle-> TargetSystems -> Brand -> Display -> content ;
        my $model = $bundle-> TargetSystems -> Brand -> Model -> Display -> content ;
        my $oscode;
        if ("ARRAY" eq ref $bundle-> TargetOSes -> OperatingSystem )  
            $oscode = $bundle-> TargetOSes -> OperatingSystem [0]-> osCode ;
          else  
            $oscode = $bundle-> TargetOSes -> OperatingSystem -> osCode ;
         
        if ($mybrand eq $brand && $mymodel eq $model && "LIN" eq $oscode)
         
            @paths = map   $_-> path    @ $bundle-> Contents -> Package ;
         
     
    for my $component (@ $xml-> SoftwareComponent )  
        my $componenttype = $component-> ComponentType -> value ;
        # Drop application packages, only firmware and BIOS
        next if 'APAC' eq $componenttype;
        my $cpath = $component-> path ;
        for my $path (@paths)  
            if ($cpath =~ m%/$path$%)  
                push(@paths, $cpath);
             
         
     
    return @paths;
 

The code is only tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux, but I suspect it could work on other platforms with some tweaking. Anyone know a index like Catalog.xml is available from HP for HP servers? At the moment I maintain a similar list manually and it is quickly getting outdated.

Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own. I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support without extra software (something I haven t tested yet but will use a lot if it works correctly) and Wifi AP support. Both phones are about the same size, the Galaxy S has slightly more RAM (reported as 304M vs 280M which doesn t really matter) and a lot more main storage (1.87G vs 465M usable after the OS is loaded). The main down-sides of the Galaxy S is that it lacks a flash . I m not aware of any phone camera having a proper flash, but the limited LED flash is useful for taking pictures at times and there are a variety of programs that can turn it on for use as a torch. Also I wonder whether the Samsung people actually test their phones in real use or whether they just build them to spec. When you read the specs it sounds nice to have a phone that s only 9.9mm thick (apart from the bulge at the bottom), but that makes it really difficult to hold. The Xperia X10 is 13mm thick and isn t as slick so you are much less likely to drop it. I sometimes wonder whether phone companies are designing their products to be broken so that they can sell replacements. Three Networking Sucks My parents use 3G broadband from Three as their only connection to the Internet, this is fast enough for viewing Youtube on occasion and generally works well for them. However whenever I try to transfer any data to their system which has integrity checks it turns out to be corrupted. About every megabyte of data transferred has a corrupt packet that has a matching checksum presumably it s a bug in Three s network. Because Three are desperate for customers they have given me a free 6 month subscription to a data SIM [1]. I ve been using that SIM with my Galaxy S and found the same data corruption problem and I ve reproduced it in many places around Melbourne so this isn t just one unreliable cell tower, it s something broken in the core of the Three network. The obvious solution to this is to use a VPN so the corrupt packets will be dropped. So I set up a PPTP VPN only to discover that it seems impossible to make the default route be via the VPN, there has been a bug report about this since 2009 the iPhone allows configuring whether Internet traffic should go via the VPN, it can t be that hard [2]. There is an option to use a proxy for web access, but when I tried that on Android 2.1 it only worked for the system web browser not for things like the Android Market. But there is no option for configuring a proxy for use when the VPN is active, so it doesn t seem likely that I could run a proxy on the VPN network and direct all traffic to it. Due to corruption on the Three network and the inability to get a VPN working correctly it seems that I can t use the Three SIM. Android isn t Really Free Software While Android implementations generally stick to the GPL and other free software licenses that are involved they seem to be a poor example of providing freedom to users. My Xperia X10 is running Android 2.1 because Sony-Ericsson has locked the boot loader so I can t install a newer kernel. They don t care enough to release a new version this is stupid of them because it means that I am much less likely to recommend their products. If Sony-Ericsson releases a newer Android release then it will be a total OS reinstall, unlike the way I can upgrade a Debian system an application at a time. I can t install new packages that replace system packages, so the Email and SMS programs that I ve installed sit along side the ones that came with the system. Periodically the unwanted SMS and Email programs show up. I can t make my Android phones perform basic networking tasks that I ve done on Linux systems since the early 90 s. Hiding the complexity from the newbies is OK, but they need to make the full capabilities of the system available to experts. It seems to me that Android effectively gives the majority of users no more freedom than the iPhone does. Even for the small minority of us who are technically capable of rooting phones and installing CyanogenMod etc it s often limited by technical measures and the amount of time required. Update: Philipp Kern pointed out that his Galaxy S has a front facing camera. I have checked my phone and discovered that it has one too. When I published this post I criticised the Galaxy S for not having a front facing camera for video-calls based on a misunderstanding of the Wikipedia page (which says that SOME models lack it) and not testing it. Thanks for the correction Philipp and sorry for publishing wrong data.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/06/04/leaving-three/
• [2] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4205

I want to blog frequently but usually don't seem to find the time for it. I'm not above tying myself to the mast if it means blogging more. Iron Blogger is a blogging and drinking club based on this premise. The rules are pretty simple:

• Blog at least once a week.
• If you fail to do so, pay $5 into a common pool.
• When the pool is big enough, the group uses it to pay for drinks and snacks at a meet-up for all the participants.

Nelson Elhage ran the original Iron Blogger for about a year before the effort ran out of steam. I've started a new instance with a couple people from the previous group and a bunch of folks from Berkman, MIT, and beyond. If you live in Boston and want to join, there are still a couple of spots available. I'm going to cap the current group, at least temporarily, at about 30 people because I think that's the maximum we'll fit into a local pub. Look over the site and send me an email if you're interested. If you don't live in Boston but want to organize your own Iron Blogger, you can use the software in Nelson's git repository (or my branch) to automate nearly the whole process of tracking posts, generating reports, and updating the ledger of debts.

Screensaver control on the Linux desktop is a total mess, but the xdg-screensaver command provided an interim cross-desktop solution by detecting and using the appropriate underlying interfaces. For GNOME, it depends on the gnome-screensaver-command --poke option, but that has been broken and then removed in favour of the cross-desktop D-Bus API org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver another GNOME-specific API which can't practically be used by xdg-screensaver. What's more, switching to the new API seems to have introduced various bugs in GNOME's own video player, Totem, such that it often failed to inhibit the screensaver in GNOME 2.32 and 3.0. Apparently everything is wonderful again in 3.2; here's hoping. (In case anyone asks where my bug report on the totem package is, I already looked at the bug list and it's clear that there's no point.) Updated: Well I said the GNOME Session D-Bus API couldn't practically be used in xdg-screensaver, but then set out to prove myself wrong. And with the aid of Perl, I may have succeeded.

Yesterday I wrote about an alleged attack on the Windows 8 secure boot implementation. As I later clarified, it turns out that the story was, to put it charitably, entirely wrong. The attack is a boot kit targeted towards BIOS-based boots. It lives in the MBR. It'll never be executed on any UEFI systems, let alone secure boot ones. In fact, this is precisely the kind of attack that secure boot is intended to protect against. So, context.

The MBR contains code that's executed by the BIOS at boot time. This code is unverifiable - it's permitted to have arbitrary functionality. There's only 440 bytes, but that's enough to jump to somewhere else and read code from elsewhere. There's no way for the BIOS to know that this code is malicious. And one thing this code can obviously do is load the normal boot code and modify it to behave differently. Any self-validation code in the loader can be patched out at this point. The modified loader will then load the kernel, and potentially also modify it. At this point, you've lost. Any attempts to validate the code can be redirected to the original code and so everything will look fine, up until the point where the user runs a specific application and suddenly your kernel is sending all your keystrokes over UDP to someone in Nigeria.

These attacks exist now. They're in the wild. In a normal UEFI world you'd do the same thing by just replacing the UEFI bootloader. But with secure boot you'll be able to validate that the bootloader is appropriately signed and if someone's modified it you'll drop into some remediation mode that recovers your files, from install media if necessary.

Obviously, this protection is based on all the components of secure boot (ie, everything that runs before ExitBootServices() is called) being perfect. As I said, if any of them accept untrusted input and misinterpret it in such a way that they can be tricked into running arbitrary code, you'll still have problems. But when discussing the pros and cons of secure boot, it's important to make sure that we're talking about reality rather than making provably false assertions.

comments

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2011 schedule might give you some inspiration. Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: your name, the title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects) and a short abstract of one or two paragraphs. The deadline for submissions is December 20th 2011. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4-5 February 2012. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devroom@lists.fosdem.org Also, if you are attending FOSDEM 2012, please add yourself to the KDE community wiki page so that we organize better. We need volunteers for the booth!

Never Again I grew up in the era of old men at Church, wearing poppies and their medals this time of year, in commemoration of their friends and neighbours who had died in the Great War. On the 11 November, they would remember the Armistice, those who had died, and with silence respect the promise that it be the War to End All Wars. Because for them this was not an ironical phrase, but a promise betrayed; that Never Again should this happen. As the last of those men have died, the commemorations of the Armistice have been insidiously hijacked, and using 'honouring our troops', those who never had to see their brothers drown in the mud at Passchendale have moved from 'Never Again' to 'Always Ready', always ready to fight, always read to go to war. As a pacifist I have always felt uneasy about war commemorations. But it is all too late that I realise why I never really had a problem with those who fought in the war, and never talked of its horrors. Its those for whom the commemoration is a time for fine speeches, then back to the office to prepare for the next war that I despise. Never again.

I probably don t have to present Mark Shuttleworth he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1). I have met Mark during Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico), we were both trying to find ways to enhance the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. The least I can say is that Mark is opinionated but any leader usually is, and in particular the self-appointed ones! Read on to discover his view on the Ubuntu-Debian relationship and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Mark: At heart I m an explorer, inventor and strategist. Change in technology, society and business is what fascinates me, and I devote almost all of my time and wealth to the catalysis of change in a direction that I hope improves society and the environment. I m 38, studied information systems and finance at the University of Cape Town. My hearts home is Cape Town, and I ve lived there and in Star City and in London, now I live in the Isle of Man with my girlfriend Claire and 14 precocious ducks. I joined Debian in around 1995 because I was helping to setup web servers for as many groups as possible, and I thought Debian s approach to packaging was very sensible but there was no package for Apache. In those days, the NM process was a little easier Raphael: What was your initial motivation when you decided to create Ubuntu 7 years ago? Mark: Ubuntu is designed to fulfill a dream of change; a belief that the potential of free software was to have a profound impact on the economics of software as well as its technology. It s obvious that the technology world is enormously influenced by Linux, GNU and the free software ecosystem, but the economics of software are still essentially unchanged. Before Ubuntu, we have a two-tier world of Linux: there s the community world (Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo) where you support yourself, and the restricted, commercial world of RHEL and SLES/SLED. While the community distributions are wonderful in many regards, they don t and can t meet the needs of the whole of society; one can t find them pre-installed, one can t get certified and build a career around them, one can t expect a school to deploy at scale a platform which is not blessed by a wide range of institutions. And the community distributions cannot create the institutions that would fix that. Ubuntu brings those two worlds together, into one whole, with a commercial-grade release (inheriting the goodness of Debian) that is freely available but also backed by an institution. The key to that dream is economics, and as always, a change in economics; it was clear to me that the flow of money around personal software would change from licensing ( buying Windows ) to services ( paying for your Ubuntu ONE storage ). If that change was coming, then there might be room for a truly free, free software distribution, with an institution that could make all the commitments needed to match the commercial Linux world. And that would be the achievement of a lifetime. So I decided to dedicate a chunk of my lifetime to the attempt, and found a number of wonderful people who shared that vision to help with the attempt. It made sense to me to include Debian in that vision; I knew it well as both a user and insider, and believed that it would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions. I share Debian s values and those values are compatible with those we set for Ubuntu.

Debian would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions.

Debian on its own, as an institution, could not be a partner for industry or enterprise. The bits are brilliant, but the design of an institution for independence implies making it difficult to be decisive counterparty, or contractual provider. It would be essentially impossible to achieve the goals of pre-installation, certification and support for third-party hardware and software inside an institution that is designed for neutrality, impartiality and independence. However, two complementary institutions could cover both sides of this coin. So Ubuntu is the second half of a complete Debian-Ubuntu ecosystem. Debian s strengths complement Ubuntu s, Ubuntu can achieve things that Debian cannot (not because its members are not capable, but because the institution has chosen other priorities) and conversely, Debian delivers things which Ubuntu cannot, not because its members are not capable, but because it chooses other priorities as an institution. Many people are starting to understand this: Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow. Neither instrument is particularly useful on its own, except in a museum of anthropology

Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow.

So the worst and most frustrating attitude comes from those who think Debian and Ubuntu compete. If you care about Debian, and want it to compete on every level with Ubuntu, you are going to be rather miserable; you will want Debian to lose some of its best qualities and change some of its most important practices. However, if you see the Ubuntu-Debian ecosystem as a coherent whole, you will celebrate the strengths and accomplishments of both, and more importantly, work to make Debian a better Debian and Ubuntu a better Ubuntu, as opposed to wishing Ubuntu was more like Debian and vice versa. Raphael: The Ubuntu-Debian relationship was rather hectic at the start, it took several years to mature . If you had to start over, would you do some things differently? Mark: Yes, there are lessons learned, but none of them are fundamental. Some of the tension was based on human factors that cannot really be altered: some of the harshest DD critics of Canonical and Ubuntu are folk who applied for but were not selected for positions at Canonical. I can t change that, and wouldn t change that, and would understand the consequences are, emotionally, what they are. Nevertheless, it would have been good to be wiser about the way people would react to some approaches. We famously went to DebConf 5 in Porto Allegre and hacked in a room at the conference. It had an open door, and many people popped a head in, but I think the not-a-cabal collection of people in there was intimidating and the story became one of exclusion. If we d wanted to be exclusive, we would have gone somewhere else! So I would have worked harder to make that clear at the time if I d known how many times that story would be used to paint Canonical in a bad light. As for engagement with Debian, I think the situation is one of highs and lows. As a high, it is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer in Debian on a problem in which there is mutual interest. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are as problematic within Debian as between Debian and outsiders. As a low, it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution, because of the design of the institution.

It is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer [ ] [but] it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution.

In order to collaborate, two parties must make and keep commitments. So while one Debian developer and one Ubuntu developer can make personal commitments to each other, Debian cannot make commitments to Ubuntu, because there is no person or body that can make such commitments on behalf of the institution, on any sort of agile basis. A GR is not agile . I don t say this as a critique of Debian; remember, I think Debian has made some very important choices, one of those is the complete independence of its developers, which means they are under no obligation to follow a decision made by anyone else. It s also important to understand the difference between collaboration and teamwork. When two people have exactly the same goal and produce the same output, that s just teamwork. When two people have different goals and produce different product, but still find ways to improve one anothers product, that s collaboration. So in order to have great collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian, we need to start with mutual recognition of the value and importance of the differences in our approach. When someone criticises Ubuntu because it exists, or because it does not do things the same way as Debian, or because it does not structure every process with the primary goal of improving Debian, it s sad. The differences between us are valuable: Ubuntu can take Debian places Debian cannot go, and Debian s debianness brings a whole raft of goodness for Ubuntu. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Mark: Internal tension about the vision and goals of Debian make it difficult to create a harmonious environment, which is compounded by an unwillingness to censure destructive behaviour. Does Debian measure its success by the number of installs? The number of maintainers? The number of flamewars? The number of packages? The number of messages to mailing lists? The quality of Debian Policy? The quality of packages? The freshness of packages? The length and quality of maintenance of releases? The frequency or infrequency of releases? The breadth of derivatives? Many of these metrics are in direct tension with one another; as a consequence, the fact that different DD s prioritise all of these (and other goals) differently makes for interesting debate. The sort of debate that goes on and on because there is no way to choose between the goals when everyone has different ones. You know the sort of debate I mean Raphael: Do you think that the Debian community improved in the last 7 years? If yes, do you think that the coopetition with Ubuntu partly explains it? Mark: Yes, I think some of the areas that concern me have improved. Much of this is to do with time giving people the opportunity to consider a thought from different perspectives, perhaps with the benefit of maturity. Time also allows ideas to flow and and of course introduces new people into the mix. There are plenty of DD s now who became DD s after Ubuntu existed, so it s not as if this new supernova has suddenly gone off in their galactic neighbourhood. And many of them became DD s because of Ubuntu. So at least from the perspective of the Ubuntu-Debian relationship, things are much healthier. We could do much better. Now that we are on track for four consecutive Ubuntu LTS releases, on a two-year cadence, it s clear we could collaborate beautifully if we shared a freeze date. Canonical offered to help with Squeeze on that basis, but institutional commitment phobia reared its head and scotched it. And with the proposal to put Debian s first planned freeze exactly in the middle of Ubuntu s LTS cycle, our alignment in interests will be at a minimum, not a maximum. Pure <facepalm />. Raphael: What would you suggest to people (like me) who do not feel like joining Canonical and would like to be paid to work on improving Debian? Mark: We share the problem; I would like to be paid to work on improving Ubuntu, but that s also a long term dream Raphael: What about using the earnings of the dormant Ubuntu Foundation to fund some Debian projects? Mark: The Foundation is there in the event of Canonical s failure to ensure that commitments, like LTS maintenance, are met. It will hopefully be dormant for good Raphael: The crowdfunding campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is still going on and I briefly envisioned the possibility to create the Ubuntu Administrator s Handbook. What do you think of this project? Mark: Crowdfunding is a great match for free software and open content, so I hope this works out very well for you. I also think you d find a bigger market for an Ubuntu book, not because Ubuntu is any more important than Debian but because it is likely to appeal to people who are more inclined to buy or download a book than to dive into the source. Again, this is about understanding the difference in audiences, not judging the projects or the products. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Mark: Zack is the best DPL since 1995; it s an impossible job which he handles with grace and distinction. I hope praise from me doesn t tarnish his reputation in the project!

---

Thank you to Mark for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an inside cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn t be a problem. I ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn t previously needed a holiday then I d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel. The Issues of Booking When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage. With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments it s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating. Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc. When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren t as interchangeable as hotels it s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn t previously consider because it s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them. The Problem with Princess I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers I don t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about. So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone s money and then telling them that they can t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy. I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers license number which was adequate. While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can t be booked. This is misleading and annoying. Further Hassle But the difficulty doesn t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire which is usually only early or late but some ships offer anytime . Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded. Other Cruising Stuff Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren t sharing a room. If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference. Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I ve attended. For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow. It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

• [1] http://www.cruisecritic.com/
• [2] http://insightcruises.com/
• [3] http://landrykling.com/
• [4] http://alumnicruises.org/Autism/Autism_Home.htm

I'm working on a personal pet project and wanted to get some feedback on the best apps to use in a touch only environment. I know that there are a few people who use Debian or Ubuntu on a tablet, and I was hoping to get suggestions on the best desktop environment and apps available. Please leave some comments with suggestions, and with a little luck, I'll have something to demo on this blog in a few weeks.

There's been a lot of noise with Microsoft requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 OEMs. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Secure Boot requires that the boot chain is signed, and this 'feature' must be enabled by default. Although I have been unable to find specific details, it appears that the chain of trust needs to extend from BIOS/UEFI all the way down to the kernel. Obviously, requiring a signed boot chain makes using FOSS platforms like Ubuntu or Debian an impossibility short of having the UEFI Platform Key and resigning the entire chain.

Steven Sinofsky's MSDN blog has a fairly good overview how it works. Canonical and Red Hat also have a good white paper on why secure boot is a serious problem for Linux distributions. Even if secure boot itself can be disabled, it *greatly* rises the bar for general end-users to successfully install Ubuntu on their machine. In addition, it is the responsibility of OEM and BIOS manufacturers to provide the option to disable it.

There already has been a long history of OEMs removing BIOS options or introducing DRM; for instance, locking out VTx on Sony laptops, or restricting laptops to only accept 'branded' wifi and 3G cards. Given this track record, can OEMs realistically be trusted to have this option available?

What most people don't realize is that secure boot itself is not a new concept; its simply part of the Trusted Computing initiative, and has been implemented on embedded platforms for many years. If you own any iPhone, or one of the vast majority of Android devices, you are using a device that either has the secure boot feature, or something very close. This especially painful in Android as Google's security system restricts users to a *very* limited shell and subset of utilities which can be used on non-rooted devices. WebOS, Maemo, and to my knowledge Meego give the end-user full unrestricted access to the boot chain and you can swap kernels and even the entire OS out if one was so motivated.

Although it is still an ongoing problem, several vendors such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola (kinda), and even Sony. In the Android community, having unlockable bootloaders has been a welcome middle ground in the traditionally restrictive and locked-down world of cellular devices.

While some may argue that such locks are necessary to protect consumers, it is perfectly feasible to create devices with unlocked bootloaders that are still secure. The Nook Color's is an Android powered eReader. It's stock firmware doesn't allow sideloaded applications or even access to a user shell via adb, but the BootROM on the device attempts to boot from the microSD card before eMMC, making it possible for enterprising users to easily modify the underlying OS (as well as making it physically impossible to brick the device due to a bad flash). Barnes and Nobles even sells a book on rooting the Nook Color; it was right next to the devices on display at the time. In addition, they've continued the tradition of easily modifiable devices with both the Nook Simple Touch, and the Nook Tablet.

One of the most impressive attributes is the possibility of running Ubuntu on it. The absolute poster child for this is the Toshiba AC100. For those of you unfamiliar, it ultralight netbook that shipped with Android 2.1/2.2 with easy access to the built in flash via the mini-USB port on the side of the device. Due to the valiant efforts of the AC100 community, Ubuntu was ported to this device, and became a supported platform with images available on cdimages.ubuntu.com. If you were an attendee at UDS, you likely saw several AC100s all running Ubuntu.

This brings me to the point that motivated me to write this post in the first place. One of the most impressive tablets I've seen to date is the ASUS eeePad Transformer, an Android tablet with fully dockable keyboard. I have one of these devices, and its one of the most impressive and usable Android tablets I own. Sadly, such a powerful device was hobbled from its true potential due to ASUS's decision to ship the device with a locked and encrypted bootloader. Surprisingly, the Secure Boot Key (SBK) was acquired and released to the wild, making it possible to reflash the device. Sadly, even with the SBK, the device's bootloader is still extremely hobbled compared to the AC100 making flashing a slow and difficult process.

In response, ASUS refreshed the eeePad's hardware to the new B70 SKU, which has a new Secure Boot. Despite this, a root exploit was recently found to allow people to circumvent these restrictions and install customs ROMs. It is however only a manor of time before ASUS responds and releases a new update that fixes this bug.

Steven Barker (lilstevie) on xda-developers successfully created a port of Ubuntu to the Transformer. Currently, installing Ubuntu on the Transformer requires nvflash access, so its not possible to use his image on the newly liberated B70 devices. I am certain that a new method of installing via an update.zip will be developed for those of us with hobbled devices.

It is a showcase of what is possible when you have open hardware, and also proves one indisputable point: any 'trusted boot' or DRM scheme can and will be defeated; at best you piss off your userbase, and at worst, you force users to exploit bugs to gain control of their device. As it is impossible to reflash these devices from the bootloader, a failed kernel flash WILL brick these devices, increasing warranty and support costs as users try to return their now broken devices.

In closing, while there have been some victories in ongoing war of open hardware vs. trusted comptuing, the road ahead still remains very murky. Victories in the mobile market have shown that there is a market for open devices. Google's own Nexus One was sold as a developers phone and as a way to encourage manufacturers to raise the bar. It sold well enough to recoup its development costs.. While there is no official statements, the Nokia N900 is suspected to have broken all sales expectations, backed up by the fact that Angry Birds sold extremely well on the Ovi Store for the N900.

From the article in question:

What reaction have you had in terms of sales and customer feedback?

Angry Birds had already been launched on App Store before it came out on Ovi Store, and it had a great review average from iPhone reviewers and users alike, so we expected a good reception from N900 users as well.

Even so, we were quite surprised by just how the N900 community immediately took the game to heart. The game obviously made many people very happy, and that is really the greatest achievement that anyone who creates entertainment for a living can hope for. Well, maybe the greatest achievement is huge bundles of cash, but making people happy comes a close second.

In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable.

That being said, with Microsoft pushing secure boot and trusted computing down everyone's throats with Windows 8, it is hard to say what the future might hold for those of us who want to own our devices.

Yesterday, I finally took closer look at long standing GePeS bug on displaying speed and altitude wrongly (which I've mentioned in very first posts). For some reason I believed it is not my bug, but in QML bindings and let it be there. Receiving complain from Maarten ter Huurne, that this does not work made me look into it more deeply. Of course I found out it was caused by stupid typo and quickly fixed it. New release is now available on GePeS homepage and will be available shortly in Nokia store.

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Back in the dark ages of the web, before the introduction of CSS 3, browsers could only display fonts available on the client system. Thanks to the introduction of @font-face and its now widespread support, this is over. Now, Web designers have access to a large selection of fonts and most users will be able to appreciate them. Typekit provides a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on websites. I expose here my own, mostly uneducated¹ on the typographic side, look on this service.

Fonts embedding 101 There are several ways to embed fonts for the Web. Let s have a look at the most common ones.

Self-hosting and @font-face A first possibility is to host fonts yourself and provide a CSS file with the appropriate @font-face declarations. There are five important things to know:

1. There is no common format. You will need to host different versions of the same font to support most browsers.
2. Of course, Internet Explorer comes with its own quirks that you need to work around.
3. Most browsers enforce a same origin policy. You need to serve your fonts from the same domain as the requesting page. You can circumvent such a limitation by enabling cross-origin resource sharing: add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header when serving fonts.
4. Fonts are unlikely to change. To leverage caching, configure an explicit expiration date far in the future. Something like 30 days.
5. There is no MIME types registered for fonts. Don t bother setting one, even if Google Chrome likes to complain about them in the console.

One great resource is Font Squirrel which provides kits with fonts and the appropriate CSS declarations. You choose your font family (or upload one of your own), the formats that you want to use (check them all) and you will get a ZIP archive with all fonts and a CSS file. You may want to tweak it a bit to enable automatic use of the bold variant when needed and to use a local copy if available. For example, if you choose Crimson, an oldstyle typeface, you may want to declare the bold version with font-weight: bold and add local names:

@font-face  
    font-family: 'Crimson';
    src: url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot');
    src: local('Crimson Bold'), local('Crimson Text Bold'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.svg#CrimsonBold') format('svg');
    font-weight: bold;
    font-style: normal;
 

Google Web Fonts For open-source fonts, you can also use Google Web Fonts instead of hosting the files yourself. Build a collection of fonts and choose the variants that you want to use for each of them. You will then be provided with a code snippet to paste in the <head> element of your page. For example, for Crimson:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Crimson+Text:400,700,400italic'
      rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Why choose this solution over self-hosting?

1. You don t use your own bandwith to serve fonts. This may be important if you pay for it.
2. Google uses its own CDN to serve fonts. If you don t use a CDN yourself, this can be a major performance improvement.
3. Caching is more efficient since many sites will use the same font.
4. It s easier to do it right.

Unless you are concerned about Google tracking your users², I think this is a better solution than self-hosting. Quick delivery of fonts is pretty important since content rendering can be delayed by them.

Paid services If you would like to use commercial fonts, like Adobe Minion Pro or Paratype Futura PT, a convenient option is to rent them. Typekit is service providing such an option. Pricing depends on volume and the number of fonts you want to have access to. There is a free plan and the first paid plan is US$24.99 per year. Other similar services exist. Feel free to compare. Once registered, the workflow is similar to Google Web Fonts. You choose your fonts, assemble them in a kit and publish it. Instead of directly providing a CSS file, Typekit provides some Javascript which will in turn download a CSS file containing all fonts in the appropriate format for the browser (on most browsers, fonts are inlined).

<script type="text/javascript"
        src="//use.typekit.com/tyt0atd.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  try Typekit.load(); catch(e) 
</script>

Typekit: the good parts So, why choose Typekit? First, there is the very large choice of fonts. The first paid plan comes with more than 500 fonts from about 80 foundries. There are about a hundred serif fonts and a couple hundred sans serif ones. Typekit provides a convenient interface to browse fonts. You can either search fonts by name or by characteristics. In the last case, you can filter on properties like the classification (serif, sans serif, decorative, etc.), weight, width, contrast, x-height, recommended use or language support. Once a font is selected and added to your kit, you can easily choose what variants you want. The kit total size is displayed. If you happen to meet any problem or have some questions, Typekit support is very responsive. I got clear and crisp answers in less than a few hours in the week-end.

and the bad ones Unfortunately, Typekit has also some shortcomings. One of the most commonly cited is that Javascript is mandatory. No Javascript, no fonts. If you want to display the appropriate fonts for users without Javascript, you should just not use Typekit.

Not free, nor free While Typekit offers some open-source fonts, most of them are not. Moreover, only a few of them are available in the free plan. While I would prefer to use open-source fonts, I don t consider this a strong requirement: if you are dissatisfied for some reason, switching back to open-source fonts (or another service) is fast and easy. I like serif fonts a lot and they get less attention from the FLOSS world: it is difficult to find one whose readability on screen is excellent. Droid Serif is a nice font but is a bit too black for me. Maybe Cardo would be a good match. You may disagree and in this case, Google Web Fonts or self-hosting seem the perfect match.

Difficulty to choose and test fonts While browsing fonts is easy and smooth, choosing and testing them is another matter. For example, Typekit is missing some interface to compare font rendering for whole paragraphs at a given size. It also misses a way to check how two fonts render together, one for headings and one for paragraphs. Here, Google Web Fonts is more versatile. Things become really difficult when you want to test your selected fonts for real. Except if you have invested into one of the expensive plans, you can only include a limited number of fonts in your kit. Each time you want to try another set of fonts, you need to modify your kit and wait for it to be distributed across Typekit network. You may have to wait five or ten minutes between each change! Another inconvenient thing is that once you publish your site, any change to the kit will affect the published version. Therefore, you need to use a second kit for development and play back and forth with those two kits. What would be convenient here is a special kit with all fonts from the library with restricted access to some IP to avoid abuse. This is something done by Fontdeck, a competitor.

Poor subset support Because you want to keep the font size small (about 30 kB for each variant), Typekit usually proposes two subsets: the default one contains only latin characters and the complete one with all glyphs. If some glyph is absent from the default subset, you need to use the complete one which is roughly two to four times the size of the default one. This is a bit huge for only one character. What would be nice is to have subsets for each language. In my case, I would take a French subset because I need the glyph which appears in French in words like c ur (heart or core) or il (eye). I don t want to select the complete subset just for this character. When a glyph is absent, the next font in the CSS stack is used. For example, if the selected font is FF Tisa Web Pro and the next font in the stack is Droid Serif, here is how the word c ur may be rendered. On the first line, FF Tisa Web Pro contains the appropriate glyph. On the second line, the glyph is absent and taken from Droid Serif. Since x-height and contrast are a bit different, the replaced glyph seems out of tone. At small sizes, the difference accounts for more than 10%. I have also added a third line where the ligature is built from o and e and the following style is applied to e :

.lf-ligature  
    margin-left: -0.172em;
    zoom: 1; /* Here to trigger hasLayout on IE7 */
 

As you can see, the result seems good. I have a piece of Javascript turning a ligature into the appropriate markup. It can be extended to handle more ligatures and could be adapted to handle other composed characters (like the ones in Anton n Dvo k ).

Defective caching Because a document can only be rendered after the fonts have been loaded³, it is pretty important to deliver fonts as fast as possible. Typekit uses Edgecast as a CDN and DynECT for DNS hosting. Two files are downloaded. Both of them are hosted on use.typekit.com. The first one is a script that will act as a loader. Based on the characteristics of your browser, it will choose how to download the requested fonts for best rendering. The second file is generally a big CSS file containing the fonts. Here are the headers returned for the first file:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:34:16 GMT
ETag: "388467610+gzip"
Expires: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:39:16 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:31:57 GMT
Server: ECS (cdg/D624)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 7440

First, notice that the content is served compressed. Good point. The next headers to look at are Cache-Control, Date, ETag and Expires: the server requests the content to be cached for 5 minutes. When the browser notices that its copy is out-of-date, it will issue a new request including a If-None-Match: 388467610+gzip header. Unless the kit has been modified, the server will answer with 304 Not Modified and no content. The copy of the browser will be valid for another 5 minutes. This means that after 5 minutes, at least 3 round-trips are needed to check if our fonts are up-to-date. Worse, sometimes, Typekit servers may be just slow. They can wait one second before answering, just to send a 304. Since the first file is a script embedded in <head>, the whole page is blocked until you get the answer. Here is an illustrative example with Chromium 14 where a page using Typekit is loaded while all static assets are in the navigator cache and things have gone wrong (which is pretty rare): Since fonts are needed, the rendering has been paused for 3.5 seconds until Typekit was fully loaded. If we look more closely, we may also notice we got a status 200 from the server instead of 304. Here is an excerpt of the browser request:

GET /tyt0atd.js HTTP/1.1
Host: use.typekit.com
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
If-None-Match: "2200251225+gzip"
If-Modified-Since: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT

And here is an excerpt of the answer headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:10:03 GMT
ETag: "2200251225"
Expires: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:15:03 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT
Server: EOS (lax001/54E5)
Content-Length: 25755

What happened? For some unknown reason, the server denied the access to the compressed version of the resource: there is no Content-Encoding: gzip while the browser did send Accept-Encoding: gzip. The tag provided by the browser (2200251225+gzip) came obviously from the compressed resource and therefore does not match. RFC 2616 requests If-Modified-Since header to be ignored if the tag does not match. Consequently, the server answers with 200 OK and resend the whole file. The same problem happened with the CSS file. Let me stress again how important the problem is: we had to download again the two files but we also downloaded the non-compressed version. Now, let s suppose that we did not run into this problem and the server answered with 304 Not Modified. The result is still not satisfactory: we would have waited 1.3 seconds to get both answers from the server. Keep in mind that most of the time, Typekit is pretty fast. Here is how I think this should have been done: each time you modify your font kit, you get a new URL to use (containing the version of the font kit for example). This resource and the associated fonts (whose URL is also versioned) are requested to be cached for several days. As a sidenote, this also enables to modify a kit for your development environment without modifying the kit for your production site. I suspect that Typekit did not go this way to track kit usage more accurately and enforce the appropriate pricing. Having multiple versions of the same kit would also allow us to use more fonts that we are paying for. UPDATED: Typekit support knows the problem and is working on it:

You ve identified a small bug in our CDN provider that we re working with them to fix. Hopefully I can give an explanation of what s happening. The CDN edge servers have a cache of recently served kits on them. Any request that is served from that cache will be correctly Gzipped and handle ETags. Unfortunately, if the content isn t already in cache and needs to be fetched from the master origin server then the request won t be gzipped correctly which has the side effect of breaking ETags. [ ] We are working to on getting this bug fixed, but any change to a globally distributed CDN will take some time. We re also working on having our content cached longer than 5 minutes whilst still allowing people to quickly update their site.

Conclusion I have mixed feelings about Typekit. While the difficulty to test fonts and the lack of language-related subsets are annoying, I have been able to work around them. However, the caching problem is more annoying. I am still considering going back to Google Web Fonts just because of this.

---

1. While I have a high interest in typography, have my own copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and have throughly read The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web , I am still fairly novice on this matter.
2. Google serves fonts from a cookie-less domain. Technically, they could still do some kind of tracking but I believe they don t.
3. In fact, browsers have different strategies on how to render before fonts availability. Paul Irish wrote a comprehensive article on FOUT. One common strategy is to render a blank space until downloaded fonts are available. If this takes too much time, fallback fonts may be used.

A few years ago, I ran into my friend Jay in the MIT Infinite Corridor. He was looking for volunteers to have their pictures taken and then added to the library of freely licensed and remixable media that would ship with every version of Scratch -- the graphical programming language built by Mitch Resnick's Lifelong Kindergarten group that is designed to let kids create animations and interactive games. Jay suggested I make some emotive faces and I posed for three images that made the final cut: But although I've spent quite a bit of time studying the Scratch community in the last few years as it is grown to include millions of participants and projects, I forgot about about Jay's photo shoot. A couple months ago, Acetarium resident Andres Lombana Bermudez pointed out that there was a mako tag on the Scratch website and that a whole bunch of users had been publishing projects using the pictures of me which, apparently, shipped in Scratch under my name. For example, in this project in which I dance in front of a enormous "MAKO" banner: That said, given the rather emotive nature of the pictures, I seem to usually end up being blown up shot, shrunk, set on fire by dragons, or meeting other similarly unfortunate ends. There's quite many more entertaining examples under the tag and many more elsewhere on the Scratch website although they are a little trickier to track down. Jonathan Zittrain likes to say that the best technologies are generative in the sense that they encourage their users to make things with them that the designer never forsaw or anticipated. I feel generative.

During the OpenRheinRuhr I noticed that a friend of mine didn t know about zgrep and friends. So I told him what other grep variations I know and he told me about some grep variations I didn t know about. So here s our collection of grep wrappers, derivatives and variations. First I ll list programs which search for text in different file formats:

grep through what	Fixed Strings	Wildcards / Basic RegExps	Extended RegExps	Debian package
uncompressed text files	fgrep	grep	egrep	grep
gzip-compressed text files	zfgrep	zgrep	zegrep	zutils, gzip
bzip2-compressed text files	bzfgrep	bzgrep	bzegrep	bzip2
xz-compressed text files	xzfgrep	xzgrep	xzegrep	xz-utils
uncompressed text files in installed Debian packages	dfgrep	dgrep	degrep	debian-goodies
gzip-compressed text files in installed Debian packages	-	dzgrep	-	debian-goodies
PDF documents	-	-	pdfgrep	pdfgrep
POD texts	podgrep	-	-	pmtools
E-Mail folder (mbox, MH, Maildir)	-	mboxgrep -G	mboxgrep -E	mboxgrep
Patches	-	grepdiff	grepdiff -E	patchutils
Process list	-	-	pgrep	procps
Gnumeric spreadsheets	ssgrep -F	ssgrep	?	gnumeric
Files in ZIP archives	-	-	zipgrep	unzip
ID3 tags in MP3s	-	-	taggrepper	taggrepper
Network packets	-	-	ngrep	ngrep
Tar archives	-	-	targrep / ptargrep	perl (Experimental only for now)

And then there are also greps for special patterns on more or less normal files:

grep for what	uncompressed files	compressed files	Debian package
PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression)	pcregrep (see also the grep -P option)	zpcregrep	pcregrep
IP Address in a given CIDR range	grepcidr	-	grepcidr
XPath expression	xml_grep	-	xml-twig-tools

One question is though still unanswered for us: Is there some kind of meta-grep which chooses per file the right grep from above by looking at the MIME type of the according files, similar to xdg-open. Other tools which have grep in their name, but are too special to properly fit into the above lists:

• ext3grep: Tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
• xautomation: Includes a tool named visgrep to grep for subimages inside other images.

Includes contributions by Frank Hofmann and Faidon Liambotis.

So, like many people, I have received GNOME 3 in the latest upgrade on Debian testing, and switched away to Xfce very soon after. What's amazing (to me) about this whole experience, however, is how easy it is to switch desktop environments in Debian. Two years ago, I fled KDE in very similar circumstances. I have since used Openbox, LXDE, GNOME, Xfce, as well as a few more obscure window managers in short-lived experiments. All of this was easy to do and worked flawlessly. Most of my settings, my preferred programs, and startup applications were preserved, and if I didn't like it, I could switch back without a problem. (Ironically, the upgrades from KDE 3 to KDE 4 and from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 lost far more settings than changes to other environments.) And of course you can mix and match applications from different environments, and these days this doesn't result in a visual crime. I don't know whom to thank for this, probably a combination of upstream developers, freedesktop.org guys, and Debian maintainers. Keep it up.

No matter whether you're a professional or hobby player, if you play Magic: The Gathering, you certainly visit Wizards of the Coast's homepage from time to time. And while other parts of the WotC's page have been made unusable without ECMAScript enabled, the MTG part can be used without it mostly. The one part, that didn't work (and I needed) was card links. They have some ECMAScript to fetch the image from the Gatherer and overlay that on the current page, if you hover over a card link. If you click, it's again some script, that opens a Gatherer window. I just want all card links to be plain links pointing to the respective entries in the rather lightweight magiccards.info card search, which displays all relevant data in a compact layout. Today I finally got around to throw the ten or so lines of ECMAScript together, Greasemonkey needs to make that happen. If you like to give it a try, you can download it from my Greasemonkey script collection (direct link for the impatient: wotc_with_noscript_and_card_links.user.js). As an additional note: I'd like to point out, that there are other scripts available from userscripts.org which can do the same. But all those scripts did a lot else (like using jQuery to fetch the image on mouse over from magiccards.info).

This blog post isn t only directed to ThinkPad owners as most notebook Linux users with Intel Core Duo 1/2 and i3/i5/i7 processors have been affected by this bug if not all. And yes, this problem is present on latest Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 11.10. Prelude I m owner of Thinkpad X300, great machine except the fact that just recently I replaced its 3rd cooling fan! Yea, I do a lot of compiling and it s on all the time, but still this kind of things shouldn t happen. I first linked this problem to the fact that Thinkpad fan on Linux (as of 2.6.22) always works at what s its basically maximum RPM, thus the reason there are numerous fan control scripts. My favorite one is Thinkfan, but controlling fan doesn t really help if you have a overheating problem. For matter of a fact it working on its maximum speed might only help, with its own toll. As of kernel 2.6.38 up until 3.1 (still present) there has been a problem of power regression but besides this I had slight problem with overheating. Regarding overheating in beginning I tried reporting bugs, tried different Thinkfan configurations, blamed proprietary software such as Adobe Flash for spiking up CPU temperature, however this problem was somewhat solved. After numerous battery calibrations and as these didn t work in the end for battery life getting poorer with each day, I just blamed the factor that notebook was getting pretty old (~3 years). Then the consumer woke up inside of me and I thought it was time to get new notebook. I laid my eyes upon ThinkPad X1 thing of beauty except one mayor drawback, its price. I did some reading on X1 and interesting enough, X300 comes with Core Duo 2 L7100 but overheating + power regression was still present even on latest Intel Core I* series. Reading this killed the consumer and woke up the hacker side. Solution Initial workaround to the problems of power regression is to add pcie_aspm=force besides existing GRUB boot arguments, this did help to some point but what really helped in both cases was also adding i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 or at least I thought so since this line only applies to Sandy Bridge (i3/i5/i7) and latter. In the end my /etc/default/grub looks like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1"

and make sure you run update-grub after making these changes. Besides the arguments I used there are other ones you can use and for more info please head to Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks . Results I ended up with such simple tweak are more then satisfactory as I got some ~45 extra minutes of battery life besides the fact that it lowered temperature by some ~10 C. Guess this also gives me extra time until I get a chance to lay my hands on X1 P.S: After I posted this some argued that this is a workaround rather then a fix and folks at [Phoronix] just posted what they call a proper solution to this problem. Also please note although Sandy Bridge users that enable this might sometimes get a video corruption bug, i915_enable_rc6 is still supposed to get enabled by default in 3.2. So logical conclusion you can come up with is unless you re troubled by this problem, you might not want to use this work around/fix at this point. And hope it ll be fixed in future releases of your favorite Linux distribution.