Search Results: "reg"

11 February 2010

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: [Updated] RC-Bug statistics for Squeeze, calendar week 6:

Back in the Lenny release cycle, I published some statistics of the release critical bugs. As we are (try to) get nearer to a freeze of Squeeze I think it's time to start that again. But first, a small explanation follows, what these numbers actually mean. If you look at our official bug tracking system currently lists 750 release critical bugs affecting the next stable release. While this number is kind of true, it is not accurate to use it to measure the state of the release. The unofficial rc bug thingy at bts.turmzimmer.net is quite more powerful to actual get some interesting numbers, as you can ignore specific kinds of bug and filter them properly. Note, that at the very end of the detailed list of the bugs you get the total number. With that interface you can for example filter them by different distributions. For example it currently lists 650 rc bugs in total for any distribution, but if you filter for squeeze bugs, you get only 518. That's a different number as the official bug tracker shows; I'm not entirely sure why, but a part of that difference is that both the official and the unofficial web pages are only synced periodically. Should someone be able to give a good explanation about the differences, please step forward ;) But let's play more: You can filter for bugs valid in squeeze-only, but not in sid. These bugs are already fixed in sid, but the packages haven't yet migrated to squeeze. Currently that are 94 bugs. We can furthermore ignore bugs only in sid; when squeeze is unaffected, we just don't migrate the broken package from sid to squeeze. The number that is most interesting for contributors is the number of bugs affecting both, sid and squeeze, as these are the ones which really need to be fixed as no fix is known, yet. So filtering for bugs for both we are down to 424 at the moment. But of these 424 remaining release critical bugs, we can still ignore some (for now). For example bugs concerning packages in non-free or contrib (9 currently) won't stop us from release, will they? There are also many bugs marked as pending (32), meaning that the maintainer is aware of the bug has a fix prepared and is just waiting with the upload a moment. Some of this bugs have already a patch (64), but no one reviewed it and uploaded it by now. You'll also see that you can ignore merged bug reports (47). That are bug reports reporting the very same bug several times. Finally there are bug fixes already uploaded to the so called delayed queue (6). This are bug fixes which where uploaded by someone else than the real maintainer, but to give the maintainer a chance to act on himself or to comment, the upload is delayed by some days before it will actually hit the archive. Currently 6 bugs are fixed by uploads to delayed. 17 bugs are claimed meaning that someone already said he will take care of this bug (but they are not finished, yet). You could also ignore the bugs invalidated by today's britney bug category, representing bugs which will vanish after the next migration of packages from sid to freeze, but as we are only looking at rc bugs in both sid and squeeze, this number will always 0 ;) That leaves bugs somehow other marked as fixed which are bugs (39) where I honestly have no Idea what they are... If someone can explain them, please do so ;) Here is a small tabular showing the above numbers:
Total:650
Affecting Squeeze:518
Squeeze-only:94
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:424
Of these 424 bugs...
... are pending32
... are patched:64
... are duplicates:47
... are in Non-free or contrib:9
... are claimed by someone:17
... are fixed in the delayed queue:6
... are somehow marked as fixed:39
Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
260 That's a pretty number, isn't it? There are only 260 bugs left which need our immediate attention :) But that is a rather optimistic view of the situation. We e.g. assume that all bugs having a patch are really fixed by the patch. We also ignored, that some bugs in squeeze are already fixed in sid, but the package can't migrate because the package in sid contains a new bug. (Which happens to release wizard Marc Brockschmidt quite often.) So if we take off the purple classes and take a more pessimistic view (release mangers must be pessimists to ensure high quality packages ;) we count the bugs in squeeze and ignore only those bugs, which are: With this release managers views, 424 bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release. As far as I know, we can freeze once that number is reliable under 300. So we better get working ;) When asked, what is the thing mostly needed to help the release, I was told: mips porter!
As you might have read we have some problems with the mips and mipsel architectures. It seems we have all the hardware we need, but it doesn't work very reliable. I have been told, that over 300 packages are only waiting to be build on mips* architectures. So if you can help us in that regard, please contact our mips porter mailing list. Update: Andreas Barth just told me, that he already send a couple of mails to the mips list describing the problem and asking questions. Answers to these questions would be most welcome and accpeted gladly.

Asheesh Laroia: Google and University email

Should universities switch away from hosting their own email and join the Google bandwagon? Adi Kamdar wrote to the Students for Free Culture discussion mailing list linking us to a Yale Daily News article discussing an "almost-definite" switch for Yale to Google Apps for Education. Adi asked for thoughts, so here are mine.

Privacy One interesting thing about the Gmail option is that, when deployed for all students, students have no choice but to let Google read their official email. Some students might take part in activism that they want to shield from Google, a corporation with its own interests, or the attackers that attempt to break into Google's systems (see the recent attacks from crafty pro-Chinese-government hacktivists). Before a switch to Gmail, each student could choose if Google was the kind of company they wanted to share their email with. After a switch to Google Apps, the choice is made for them. But this highlights a different issue: Before a switch to Google, students have no choice but to let university administrators read their official email. That's not necessarily optimal, either. Others have pointed out in this thread that this option comes with legal advantages with regard to privacy law. At least that's some consolation. It's still true that students can encrypt their email and make it difficult for any eavesdropper to figure out the bodies of their emails. But that's no use for hiding the identities of the people with whom they communicate -- no email crypto I know hides email addresses.

Software freedom and open standards This is juxtaposed against another difficult situation: Matt Senate wrote about the sucky Squirrelmail system that Berkeley uses (used?) for webmail. The fact that SquirrelMail is Free Software is small consolation for Matt. From his perspective, because it's a hosted web application, he has no more freedom than he would have with Gmail. At least Berkeley's IMAP server followed standards! That's more than we can say for the Gmail IMAP server, which is famous for basically supporting just enough IMAP for Microsoft Outlook to work. But standards compliance is small consolation. If the university email server "properly" supports IMAP, but isn't fast or doesn't provide the new extensions that make threading or search speedy, it's not much relief to know that you can use any client you want to slowly read your email.

Internet history Truth be told, University-hosted Internet services are based on what you might call the original Internet perspective. The Internet began as a network of networks. A University was a network island unto itself, running its own email, news, and Ethernet services. When inter-network connection was available, you can email people at other institutions. When it wasn't, well -- the Internet is a useful tool, but it's down right now. "Don't worry," the admins might tell you, "you can still read your email with PINE." It used to be that inter-network connectivity was icing on top of the "real" network a person used. Today, inter-network connectivity is the whole point of a network connection. How embarrassing for each individual network! To test if our connections are working, we skip right over the local content and point our web browsers at a search engine. Users today aren't satisfied to read their email from imap.institution.edu and read USENET news-- they thirst for real-time access resources available beyond the university. Students weren't interested in the J-Stream service I helped set up at Johns Hopkins; instead they mostly posted and watched videos at YouTube. They don't really care if the the student-oriented wiki is based on campus or instead halfway across the globe (say, in Japan). The original Internet was based on autonomous networks and opt-in routing. But eventually, all the networks opted in. Users drive everything, and when they don't get what they want, they vote with their feet. Companies like Facebook and Google stand ready and armed to provide shockingly-efficient services to millions of users who choose them. You could say that with today's network, the autonomy shifted from the network to the users. The nice thing about University-run services is that students can organize and ask for changes, as Fred pointed out. And for people like me, there's something nice about knowing the person who runs your email system. But if your busy university staff doesn't have time to investigate an email server with fast full-text indexing, you might wish for change. Having the university tear down its internal services is a progression toward seeing its network as simply transit. Imagine the loss of pride. It used to be that the university personally ran a system for helping users get what they wanted. As it becomes simply transit, the staff are just greasing the cogs of a larger, invisible machine that's easy for users take for granted. Some netizens like me hold email as sacred, a beautiful institution based on standards and a decision to interoperate. When your university switches to Gmail, I'll be sadder, but maybe what you'll get is professors who can spend more time with students and less time configuring desktop software.

Trade offs Every university has a choice: Pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year for dedicated staff to run an in-house email system, or let Google do it. Think for a moment of what good could come from those dollars when put to use in other ways for students. Your school could start a switch to all-organic food. It could start paying more of its employees a living wage. Imagine the travel funding for student activities that can come from hundreds of thousands a year well-spent. It could run a massive used textbook clearinghouse to help students avoid pouring their dollars into the textbook industry. And now cry with me. What I've asked you do is to consider sacrificing institutional autonomy for cold, hard cash. That's to say nothing of the ecological benefits or the productivity increases possible from having Google's paid experts run this part of the computing system.

Conclusion Is an official Google email system much different than the reality most students I know live, which is configuring their student email address to forward to gmail.com? For those of us who would be sadder with one more push toward centralizing email with Google -- for those who see it as the behemoth whose size threatens the decentralization that used to be the core of the Internet -- I ask you to think positive. "See the profit from your loss." I have no conclusions for you, just niggling questions.

10 February 2010

Matthew Palmer: Using Virgin Mobile Broadband with wvdial

File Under: Stuff I'm guaranteed to forget if I don't write it down I just went a bit wild and decided to get myself some mobile broadband love -- I'm finding that I crave a bit of light 'net when I'm out and about, and an impending change in circumstances will mean that I'm out and about a lot more than I am currently. I have: My wvdial.conf stanza looks like: 
[Dialer virgin]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP" "VirginBroadband"
Stupid Mode = 1
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Username = irrelevant
Dial Command = ATDT
Password = irrelevant
Baud = 460800
I also had to disable CHAP (by putting -chap in /etc/ppp/options, although I suspect the same would have worked in /etc/ppp/peers/wvdial). After that, a simple sudo wvdial virgin and I was away. Scarily enough, there was actually some useful information on the Virgin support site regarding the settings, which helped me confirm that I was on the right track. I have no doubt that the universe will find some alternate means of punishing me down the line.

9 February 2010

Russell Coker: Web Site Validation

Over the last few days I ve got this blog and my documents blog to conform to valid XHTML according to the W3C validation service [1]. One significant change that I made was to use lower-case for HTML tags. For about 15 years I ve been using capitals for tags to make them stand out from content and my blogs are the latest in a long line of web sites with that. Naturally I wasn t going to correct 900 posts manually so I ran a series of SQL commands such as the following on my database server (where X is the Wordpress table prefix): update X_wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'<PRE>','<pre>'); But make sure you have a good backup of your database before running SQL search and replace commands on your blog data. After running such commands about 90% of my blog posts conformed, so I only needed to edit about 90 posts to correct things. This process gave some real benefits. One issue is that an apostrophe in a URL must be quoted, otherwise some browsers will link to the desired URL and some will link to a truncated URL. Fixing a couple of variations of this problem resulted in some broken links being fixed. Another issue is that you can t have paragraphs (<p> tags) within list items, fixing this made some of my posts align correctly it was a tricky fix, in some cases I had to use <br/> to break up text in a list item and sometimes I replaced lists with different sections delimited by <h3> headings (which apparently is rumored to give better SEO). It would make a really nice Wordpress feature to be able to do W3C validation as part of the publishing process, ideally an attempt to publish or schedule a post would result in a message saying saved as a draft because it s not valid XHTML if the checks failed. The source to the W3C validation software is significantly larger than Wordpress [2], but it seems to me that there are two main types of Wordpress installations, small ones for personal use (which tend to be on fairly idle servers) and big ones that have so much traffic that the resource usage of validation would be nothing compared to the ongoing load. As there seems to be no way of validating my posts before publication my best option is the W3C button I now have on my blog. This allows me to validate the page at a click so while I can t entirely avoid the risk of publishing a post with invalid XHTML I can at least fix it rapidly enough that hardly anyone will notice. It also seems like a useful feature to have aggregators like Venus [3] check for valid HTML and not display posts unless they are valid. It s not a feature that could be enabled immediately (I m sure that if you click on this link to the W3C validation service [1] from a Planet feed you will see lots of errors and warnings), but once bloggers have time to fix their installation it would allow preventing some of the common annoyances of Planet installations. It s not uncommon on popular Planets to have unmatched tags in a post which results in significant amounts of the content being bold, underlined, in italics, or for the greatest annoyance struck-out. I know that this may be a controversial suggestion, but please consider why you are blogging if you are blogging for the benefit of your readers (which seems to be the case for everyone other than sploggers) then it seems that the readers will benefit more by not having a broken post syndicated than they would benefit from having it syndicated and thus messing up the display of many following posts. The next thing on my todo list in this regard is to do some tests of accessibility. The work that I have done to pass the XHTML validation tests has helped to some degree if nothing else the images now all have alt= descriptions, but I expect that it will be a lot of work. The Wordpress Codex has a page about accessibility, I haven t read all of it yet [4]. Does anyone have any recommendations for free automated systems that check web sites for accessibility? What would be ideal is a service that allows different levels of warnings, so instead of trying to fix all problems at once I could start by quickly fixing the most serious problems on the most popular posts and finish the job at some later date.

Robert Collins: Is a code of silence evil?


Looking at using google apps for my home email, as I want to be able to have my home machines totally turned off from time to time. Found this interesting gem in the sign up agreement (which I have not yet agreed to :P ):
11. PR. Customer agrees not to issue any public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement without Google s prior written approval. Google may (i) include Customer s Brand Features in presentations, marketing materials, and customer lists (which includes, without limitation, customer lists posted on Google s web sites and screen shots of Customer s implementation of the Service) and (ii) issue a public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement. Upon Customer s request, Google will furnish Customer with a sample of such usage or announcement.
This is rather asymmetrical: If I agree to the sign up page, I cannot say I am using google apps , but google can say Robert is using google apps . While I can appreciate not wanting to be dissed on if something goes wrong, this is very much not open! A couple of implications: Everyone seeking support for google apps in the apps forums is probably in violation of the sign up agreement; we can assume that anyone having a terrible experience has been squelched under this agreement. Le sigh.

8 February 2010

Biella Coleman: Hacker and Troller as Trickster

trickster If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:
Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.
These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:
I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9
At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Biella Coleman: Hacker and Troller as Trickster

trickster If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:
Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.
These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:
I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9
At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Olivier Berger: New inter-forges discussion list on planetforge.org

You work on developing a software forge, you re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator. Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools. You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).

7 February 2010

Marco d'Itri: Advances in networking for virtual machines

So far the networking of virtual machines has usually been managed by configuring a Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) in the host, i.e. the good old implementation of 802.1D in the Linux Kernel:
A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) is a capability within a physical end station that supports local bridging between multiple virtual end stations and (optionally) the external bridging environment.
While this works well and in some cases is the best solution, in other setups performances or policy needs dictate that the traffic between virtual machines is forwarded to an external bridge (the Ethernet switch connected to the host) and back without having in the host a real bridge learning MAC addresses from its ports and implementing the STP. Enters the VEPA:
A Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) is a capability within a physical end station that collaborates with an adjacent, external bridge to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks. The VEPA collaborates by forwarding all station-originated frames to the adjacent bridge for frame processing and frame relay (including "hairpin" forwarding) and by steering and replicating frames received from the VEPA uplink to the appropriate destinations.
Support for VEPAs has been added to Linux 2.6.33 with a simple change to the macvlan driver. The next step will be to use the macvtap driver (available in 2.6.34), which exposes a tap character device usable by kvm-qemu and "connected" to a macvlan-like interface.

Ben Armstrong: Eee PC care at 2 years

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

MJ Ray: The Phone Co-op 2010

Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting
Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham s gift and this summer s Co-operatives Fortnight. As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

Questions about the annual report asked about:

6 February 2010

Christian Perrier: Unofficial samba 3.2.15 packages available

I recently upgraded a critical file server at work, from etch to lenny. With that upgrade, samba version was bumped from 3.0.24 to 3.2.5. We were then hit by a quite severe bug where files ACLs are messed up on Excel files after saving the files (upstream #4308, fixed upstream in 3.2.8). I will probably consider fixing the official Lenny packages (there is no bug reported about this in Debian, though) along with a few other quite severe ACL-related bugs (Mathieu Parent, who maintains ctdb, pointed me to a few such bugs). However, I couldn't wait for such a long time and backporting the fix for #4308 isn't completely straightforward. So, I decided to upgrade our server to the latest Samba 3.2 version, namely 3.2.15 (upgrading to 3.4 series could bring other kind of regressions and we have no time to properly test everything...users already have their guns handy). This is where the Debian Samba packaging team unofficial repository becomes handy. It is meant as as service to users who want to run the very latest samba code and have the same packaging choices we have in supported Debian releases. We already had 3.2.14 there but I never took time to update to 3.2.15. This is done now. Moreover, as our production server uses the amd64 architecture, these unofficial backports are now available for both i386 (my usual build machine) and amd64. Using this repository is as easy as: 
deb http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages lenny-backports/
deb-src http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org/packages lenny-backports/
Please note that this APT source does not use GPG signing of Packages files. When I am less lazy, I'll try to at least sign it with my GPG key.

5 February 2010

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2010 Open for Registration

The annoucement below went out to R-SIG-Finance earlier today. For information is as usual the the R / Finance 2010 page:
Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2010: Applied Finance with R
April 16 and 17, 2010
Chicago, IL, USA
The second annual R / Finance conference for applied finance using R, the premier free software system for statistical computation and graphics, will be held this spring in Chicago, IL, USA on Friday April 16 and Saturday April 17. Building on the success of the inaugural R / Finance 2009 event, this two-day conference will cover topics as diverse as portfolio theory, time-series analysis, as well as advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management and trading. Invited keynote presentations by Bernhard Pfaff, Ralph Vince, Mark Wildi and Achim Zeileis are complemented by over twenty talks (both full-length and 'lightning') selected from the submissions. Four optional tutorials are also offered on Friday April 16. R / Finance 2010 is organized by a local group of R package authors and community contributors, and hosted by the International Center for Futures and Derivatives (ICFD) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Conference registration is now open. Special advanced registration pricing is available, as well as discounted pricing for academic and student registrations. More details and registration information can be found at the website at
http://www.RinFinance.com
For the program committee:
Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, John Miller,
Brian Peterson, Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan
See you in Chicago in April!

Matthew Garrett: Shaping young minds

I'm off to CMU at the weekend, in order to do a couple of talks on Monday (the 8th). I'll be giving an introduction to ACPI to the operating systems class in the morning, and an open presentation on Fedora, some of the challenges we face and how to get involved in Linux in the afternoon. This is as a result of our cooperation with CMU, which has led to things like the request on the right. How could we refuse?

Marco T&uacute;lio Gontijo e Silva: Using sup-mail


Some time ago I wanted some features that evolution wouldn t give to me, such as a good user experience without using the mouse, and the possibility to use an external editor for writing e-mails. I always liked gmail web interface, but I don t like using software that I can t change or see the code, so I wanted threaded view, but I was not with a very high expectative of finding it, since I ve never seen it anywhere else. I tried icedove, sylpheed, claws and mutt, but none of them was good enough for me. I couldn t use very well icedove, sylpheed and claws only with the keyboard, and mutt wouldn t show me a list of folders with how many unread messages there was in each of them. mutt-patched tries to do this, but the number of messages aren t updated automatically. So I kept with evolution. At that time, I even tried evolution from experimental, which contained a plugin to use an external editor. The result was that I got even more crashes, and the external editor was not very nice. I gave up about it when I had to remove totem because of broken dependencies with the evolution from experimental. Some days ago Rafael (Pre ) Cunha de Almeida told me that he heard of this sup, and tried using it, but didn t like very much, because it was not good for accessing the mail from two different machines. As I use only my notebook most of the time, I decided to try it out. And i m liking it: it s mostly like gmail, but with a very good feature I don t remember seeing in gmail: you can kill a thread, and even if more mail arrives from that thread, it ll not be shown in your inbox. Other thing I liked about it is that it s highly customizable in Ruby, which made me feel a little bit like in XMonad. The first problem I found on it was the handling of UTF-8. I found this bug about it, and installed the recommended package, so it worked. I hope this correction, or the better one suggested here, get to Debian. I took a look at the Hooks page on the sup wiki, and used the fetchmail suggestion. I noticed that the code that was there in the time didn t worked here (maybe a bashism?):
fetchmail >& /dev/null
 So I replaced it in the wiki with:
fetchmail 2>&1 > /dev/null
 which worked here. I wanted to create a new binding, to kill the thread, kill the buffer, and move to the next message in thread-view-mode, so I tried some possibilities without success, until I got to this, with the help of hyperbolis@#sup@irc.freenode.net:
class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
@@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
"Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
def kill_and_then op
dispatch op do
multi_kill [@thread]
end
end # From lib/modes/thread-index-mode.rb
## m-m-m-m-MULTI-KILL
def multi_kill threads
UndoManager.register killing # threads.size.pluralize thread do
threads.each do t
t.remove_label :killed
add_or_unhide t.first
Index.save_thread t
end
regen_text
end threads.each do t
t.apply_label :killed
# hide_thread t
end regen_text
BufferManager.flash # threads.size.pluralize thread killed.
threads.each t Index.save_thread t
end
end This is the content of the file ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. I copied a function from the source code of sup, commenting one line that was relative to that context.

4 February 2010

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Travel agenda before FOSDEM

In last few days I spent some time with travel agenda. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for FOSDEM, so I'm arranging last minutes things like online checking. Whoever wants to meet me just drop me an email or just check things I want to visit and find me there. Meanwhile got open registration for Debconf 10, so when I was in travelling mood, I also filled in that one. Right now it looks like it will be quite tough for me to pay this trip, but there is still some time to sort it out :-).

Mike Hommey: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 diff stats

As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files): A few observations on the above data: The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)): Many others were sent: A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)): A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)): Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)): Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)): Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)): Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)): Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)): And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below): Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Farewell Central Park Apartments

In buying a place and moving, we've left the home we've been in for just over 4 years. Central Park Apartments was a wonderful community for us, and we made many wonderful friends there. At the peak of awesome, we knew really well the occupants of 4 out of the 7 other apartments in our building, as well as numerous others throughout the complex. The company running the place ran it really well. Everything was well maintained. I wouldn't recommend one of the single-level apartments, as the inter-floor sound insulation was pretty terrible, but the townhomes were great (albeit the kitchens were a bit small). We were in a Greenwich floorplan. The other big plus for me was that it had data cabling. We'll miss all of our friends there, but thankfully they're not very far away.

DebConf team: Registration now open for DebConf10 (Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz)

Registration is now open for DebConf10. The dates of the conference are August 1-7, 2010, with arrivals at our group lodging permitted as of 3 PM on July 31 and departures required by 11 AM on August 8. The conference is preceded by DebCamp from July 25-31 including the arrival day. To receive announcements regarding DebConf and DebCamp, please subscribe to the debconf-announce mailing list. In order to avoid spamming Planet Debian with a long post detailing registration procedure, travel sponsorship, DebCamp info, and cost of attendance, please instead see the DebConf10 website s registration page to answer all your questions. As always, feel free to contact the DebConf team via email or IRC for answers not provided by the website. DebConf10 is going to be great. We re looking forward to seeing you in New York in August! the DebConf team

Gunnar Wolf: ber-redundant paperwork

ber-redundant paperwork
So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:
CURP
Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:
  • WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
  • 760427: birth date, yymmdd
  • H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
  • DF: State or federative entity I was born in
  • LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
  • 03: Deambiguation digits
So far, so good.
Age
Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!
Sex
Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it
Birth date
Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!
Nationality
This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?
Birth place
The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does
Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

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