In no way can I be describe myself as music aficionado for I rarely seek music. But music being that it makes its way into your ears through so many venues and vehicles, certainly finds me. A few years ago I stumbled upon Owen Chapman s music at live performance (using ice among other objects) at a conference on copyright s counterparts. I immediately loved it not only because it is a genre of electronic music I tend to like but because of the depth of its texture. While all music enfolds this feature, when I listen to his music, it is as if I am not listening to music but also touching it (and vice-versa). He just released an album whose song and sounds keep with his signature style of deep texture. It also makes an ethical call and claim: since remixing/sampling is citational, akin to academic quotation, it thus deserves a kind of explicit recognition and commentary. To honor this he is providing his music free of charge once one dips in with their own commentary and contribution. Full details and music here

In no way can I be describe myself as music aficionado for I rarely seek music. But music being that it makes its way into your ears through so many venues and vehicles, certainly finds me. A few years ago I stumbled upon Owen Chapman s music at live performance (using ice among other objects) at a conference on copyright s counterparts. I immediately loved it not only because it is a genre of electronic music I tend to like but because of the depth of its texture. While all music enfolds this feature, when I listen to his music, it is as if I am not listening to music but also touching it (and vice-versa). He just released an album whose song and sounds keep with his signature style of deep texture. It also makes an ethical call and claim: since remixing/sampling is citational, akin to academic quotation, it thus deserves a kind of explicit recognition and commentary. To honor this he is providing his music free of charge once one dips in with their own commentary and contribution. Full details and music here

Recently Eric asked on the LUG Vorarlberg mailing list about netbook experience. I wrote a lengthy reply summarizing my experiences with the ASUS EeePC 701. And I thought this is something I probably should share with more people than only one LUG: I ordered an ASUS EeePC 701 (4G) with US keyboard layout at digitec in Spring 2008, got it approximately one month later and posted a first resum after one month in my blog. I m still very happy with the EeePC 701, despite two commonly mentioned drawbacks (the small screen resolution and the small SSD which I both don t see as real problems) and some other minor issues. What matters

• Very robust and compact case. And thanks to a small fan being the only moving part inside, the EeePC 701 is also very robust against mobile use.
• Very pleasing always-in-my-daypack size (despite the 7" screen it s the typical 9" netbook size) and easily held with one hand.
• Black. No glossy display. Neither clear varnish nor piano laquer. Short: No bath room tile. Textured surface, small scratches don t stick out and don t matter.
• Debian (previously Lenny, now Sid) runs fine on it, even the webcam works out-of-the-box.
• Despite all those neat features, it was fscking cheap at that time. And it was available without Windows.

Nice to have

• There s power on the USB sockets even if the EeePC is turned off but the power supply is plugged in.
• The speakers are impressingly good and loud for their size. (But my demands with regards to audio are probably not too high, so audiophiles shouldn t run to ebay because of this. ;-)
• It has three external USB sockets.

What doesn t matter

• The small 7" 800 480 screen: I like small fonts and do most things inside a terminal anyway. And even with 800 480, those terminals are still much bigger than 80 25 characters. Only some applications and webpages have no heart for small screens.
• The small disk size: Quite a lot of programs fit on 4 GB of disk space. Additionally I use tmpfs a lot. And music and video files are either on a external 500 GB Western Digital 2.5" My Passport disk (which I need quite seldomly) or much more come via sshfs and IPv6 from my home server anyway. :-)
• The small keyboard: I just don t have any problems with the size or layout (right shift right of the cursor up key, etc.) of the keyboard. Well, maybe except that any standard sized keyboard feels extremely large after having used the EeePC exclusively for some weeks. ;-)
• The to 630 MHz underclocked 900 MHz Intel Celeron: It s enough for most of the things I do with the EeePC. Also the original 512 MB RAM are somehow ok, but for using tmpfs, but no swap space at all, 1 GB or 2 GB are surely the better choice.
• A battery runtime of 2.5h to 3h is fine for me.

What s not so nice

• The n key needs to be pressed slighty stronger than other keys, otherwise no n appears. So if one of my texts in average misses more n than other letters, I typed it on the EeePC. ;-)
• Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down need the Fn key. This means that these keys can only be used with two hands (or oe very big hand and I have quite small hands). This is usually no problem and you get used to it. It s just annoying if you hold the EeePC with one hand and try to type with the other.
• What looks like a single mouse button is a seesaw and therefore two mouse buttons below one button. This makes it quite hard to press both at the same time, e.g. for emulating a middle mouse button press. It usually works in about half of all cases I tried it. My solution was to bind some key combination to emulate a middle mouse button in my window manager, ratpoison:

  bind y ratclick 2

  And that mouse button bar already fell off two times.
• The battery reports only in 10% steps, and reporting in percentage instead of mAh is an ACPI standard violation because reporting in percentage is only allowed for non-rechargable batteries. It also doesn t report any charging and discharging rates. But in the meanwhile nearly all battery meter can cope with these hardware bugs. This was quite a problem in the early days.
• Now, after approximately 1.5 years, the battery slowly fritzes: When charging there are often only seconds between 10% and 40%. Rigorously using up all power of the battery helped a little bit. Looks like some kind of memory effect althought the battery is labeled Li-Ion and not Ni-MH and Li-Ion batteries are said to have no memory effect.
• The SD card reader only works fine if you once completed the setup of the original firmware or set the corresponding BIOS switch appropriately. No idea why.

Similar models Technically, most of this also counts for the EeePC 900SD (not 901) which only differs in screen, resolution and disk size as well as CPU, but not on the the case. So same size, same robustness, same battery, same mainboard, bigger screen, resolution, disk and faster CPU. (The 901 has a different CPU, a different battery, and a different, glossy and partially chromed case.) See Wikipedia for the technical specifications of all EeePC models. ASUS only big FAILure Stopping to sell most EeePCs with Linux and cowardly teaming up with Microsoft after having shown big courage to come out with a Linux only netbook. Well, you probably already know, but it s better without Windows So basically you no more get these really neat netbooks from ASUS anymore and you get nearly no netbooks with Linux from ASUS in the stores anymore. It s a shame. Would I buy it again? Sure. Well, maybe I would also buy the 900SD or 702 (8G) instead of the 701, but basically they re very similar. See Wikipedia for the differences between these EeePC models. And of course I still prefer the versions without Windows. But despite the low price, the EeePC 701 is surprisingly robust and still works as on the first day (ok, except battery, the mouse button bar and the n key ;-), so I recently bought a second power supply (only white ones were available *grrrr*) and ordered a bigger third party battery plus an adapter to load the battery directly from the (second) power supply without EeePC inbetween. What desktop do I use on the EeePC? None. I use ratpoison as window manager, uxterm, urxvt, and yeahconsole as terminal emulators (running zsh with grml based .zshrc even as root s login shell :-), wicd-curses as network manager and xmobar (previously dzen2) with i3status as text-only panel. Installed editors are GNU Emacs 23, GNU Zile and nvi. (No vim. :-) And of course a netbook wouldn t be a netbook if it wouldn t have a lot of network applications installed. For me the most important ones are: ssh, scp, autossh, sshfs, miredo, conkeror, git, hg, and rsync.

Still looking for an invite to Google Wave? I got some, so give me your GMail address (either via email, IRC or as comment here).

UPDATE: invites are finished quite fastly - I'll repost when (if) they'll give me others.

Playing with xemacs. Looking at a 3 year old bugreport that I thought was a bug on xemacs, and seeing that it's still not fixed. Hmmmm.. I'm working around in my elisp side but I don't think it's a very good idea. 364234.

Regular readers of this blog (yes, both of you!) may remember the computer/broadband/ directory that this post appears in as the collection of my Comcastic (yeah right) experiences with my ISP. But I think this week may top everything. I'll just try to jot down some notes before I forget all the gory details:

• On Tuesday, I edited one of the internal nvram configuration variables of my trusted wrt54g router in order to add the older daughter's shiny new iPod Touch to the set of 'permitted' MAC addresses. This router, running a custom Linux variant called OpenWRT had essentially not been upgraded since I first installed it, and still required a quick reboots after updating of configuration values. However, that worked fairly flawelessly for 4 1/2 years. Until Tuesday.
• Upon reboot, I got what appeared to be an invalid network setup from the cable modem. IP and Gateway assigned , but no DNS and no ability to ping anywhere. Crap. So I fiddled with this all evening, including a service call to Comcast but to no avail. When a laptop was directly plugged into the cable modem, it got correct settings albeit on a completely different subnet. So for the next day, we left one machine directly plugged so that my wife could at least telecommute.
• Somehow it became apparent that waiting insanely long for the router to remain powered-down -- and we're talking five minutes or longer -- helped. So by now we were suspecting the cable modem. I use a standard Motorola SB5101 I once had to buy in a rush because of the Comcastic ones who all of a sudden changed their minimum requirements which meant they would no longer connect to my existing modem. Anyway. So on Wednesday I called Motorola and had a decent service call with them but as I was at work I couldn't follow up with part numbers etc pp. At least I learned that I seem to have two months of the two-year warranty left...
• So by Wednesday evening I decided to fall back to the really cheap and old Speedstream router I had used before the Linksys wrt54g. That worked, albeit sloooooowly. Wired and wireless ethernet, direct assignment from the cable modem. All well. But did I mention it was sloooow though?
• Thursday evening was skipped as I was at the Chicago R meeting we organize to complement our R / Finance conferences in the spring.
• Given that the cable modem worked with the old Speedstream and with directly-connected machines, I decided to finally go for a long overdue update of the wrt54g software. So that happened on Friday, i.e. yesterday. And similar to my previous wrt54g notes, I needed to flash the new software with the tftp protocol and a helper script on a laptop connected to the router. All this took a while as I needed to remember to also send to a ping flood to the router to be able to catch the tftp request, needed to test which of the atftp and tftp binaries worked reliably, and whether the router prefers .bin images over .trx images when using the tftp protocol. But lo and behold this worked, and I configured a shiny new Kamikaze aka 8.09.1 version of OpenWRT. This even connected to the cable modem once I helped with DNS entries. OpenWRT generally rocks, and this new release is a lot nice than the more bare-bones version I used to run.
• Unfortunately, I had picked the bcrm47xx variant -- the 2.6.* kernel version of the OpenWRT Project's software for my WRT device. And guess what, that one does not include wireless support due to issues with Broadcom drivers and the kernel. Grrr. So once I had that confirmed this morning, I quickly switched to the bcrm-2.4 variant of the same 8.09.1 release. At least now I can flash from within using the mtd command from the commandline.
• But once up and running with the bcrm-2.4 release, I ran into the same issue we have had with the Motorola cable modem and Comcast behind them. Each time I connect with the wrt54g, I end up on a specific subnet, without DNS and with no ability to connect. The Speedstream still worked. So what to do? Well, MAC Cloning to the rescue. Now the Linksys wrt54g pretends to be the Speedstream, and all, at last, is well again.
• So after four days of intermittent service, which means that my few web pages, blog, and goodies like CRANberries were invisible, I now have better router software. That could have come a little easier, and I still don't quite know why Comcast decides to no longer service the wrt54g under the MAC address it presented itself with for 4 1/2 years. I have paid thousands of dollars over that time to get broadband access. But this, I don't quite call service. To top it all off, guess who cold-called to sell VOIP service while I wrote this up? Oh, it's Comcastic ...

So far, our household has resisted any piece of the iPhone onslaught. Yes, I carry an iPod Classic, but that s different. Terah s old Palm m100 is becoming a problem. The platform is dead, and the desktop sync drivers for it are decaying rapidly in every operating system. Not only that, but we would really like to be able to share calendars between us. Terah doesn t need a phone or a mobile data plan. After thinking about it a bit and getting some advice, we decided to get her the $200 8GB iPod Touch. And it arrived Friday. I ve used portable devices plenty before. I had my share of PalmOS devices: III, V, Clie; an HP 200LX DOS-based err netbook; a Zaurus; and an N810. The first thing that struck me about the iPod Touch was beauty no surprise there. The interface exuded an air of stability, like it wasn t going to just crash when something went wrong. It felt solid and well-planned. Physically, it s thin. Really thin. That s perhaps the most impressive thing about it of all. Sometimes the GUI masked underlying performance issues. For instance, it may take awhile to draw a web page. On the N810, you get to watch as different bits of the screen appear. On the iPod Touch, you sit there staring at a white screen with a spinning wheel for awhile, and then suddenly poof, the webpage is there. I d have to say the Apple approach feels better. Terah and I decided to sync with Google Calendar, and that setup was easy and well-done on the iPod Touch easier than on the Blackberry with Google s own app, in fact. The only question was that Contacts was a bit counter-intuitive; select the Google account and nothing shows up, but everything is there under the generic Contacts bucket. The Calendar worked very well, even properly handling meetings and invitations. The mail app works well, though it takes a long very long time to scroll through a lengthy email to get to the attachment at the bottom. There s no go to bottom of message feature that I could see, and my idea of pinching the screen to make the text tiny to make scrolling faster didn t work. The mail setup, though, is a complete and utter pain. There is no way anybody that doesn t know a lot of details about SSL certs could have made this work. When you add a mail account, it requires you to have an IMAP and SMTP server defined. It would like to use SSL/TLS with these, which is great. But if it can t validate the cert, it pops up a dialog box asking if you want to continue. You can say yes, but it just sits there for a couple of minutes and then fails with a mysterious error. I had to put my cert up on a webserver, point Safari at it, and install the cert to the device before it would talk to it. That solved IMAP. SMTP was another matter too. Strangely, on the initial account setup, there is no way to put in the port number for SMTP server. Yet it won t save your account until it can connect to one. Of course, most ISPs block the smtp port, so this was bound to fail. Finally I pointed it at a server on my local network temporarily, then went in and edited the account to point it to the real server with the second non-25 port it listens on for just such situations. Safari works really well. It s probably the best mobile browser I ve seen yet (I haven t seen Android or Palm Pre yet.) It is far better than the N810 browser, both in terms of speed and in terms of ability to reformat pages to fit the device. The tabbed browsing is a lot faster switching than the N810 s separate windows, and nicer too. The app store essentially lived up to my expectations. It was very easy to use, and obviously a closed proprietary ecosystem. The free apps that existed there mostly were adware. I looked for a Jabber client, and wasn t happy with any option. Some of them required Apple Push Notifications, with a complex network of two servers between the device and the Jabber server. No thanks to that invasion of privacy. And that brings me to the topic of weird limitations. iPod Touch apps, in general, can t run in the background. You exit Safari, and when you get back in, it s reloading that webpage. Now many apps are good at remembering their state, but this feels very PalmOS to me. You can t use the iPod Touch at all until you first sync it with iTunes. That is incredibly weird. The device has Wifi, people. Plus, why should I have to register it with Apple anyhow? And then there s the lack of a file manager, or anything like it. I can t scp a file from my computer to the iPod Touch like I can my N810, nor the other way round. It is generally unclear how much of the 8GB is in use, and by what. Terah needs a password-keeping program. There are several in the app store. I d really like one that uses Bruce Schneier s standard Password Safe format which is supported on just about any platform you care to name. Couldn t find one. Even if I could, I guess it wouldn t do me any good, since you can t copy the file to a PC anyhow. Sigh. Overall, Terah is very excited with the device, and I must admit to being so too. Its faster web browser means it s probably a good replacement for the N810 especially if you want a calendar, which the N810 completely lacks. It makes an excellent PDA, perhaps the first PDA I ve seen that equals the usability of the old PalmOS. On the other hand, it isn t really a power user s device. There are a lot of surprising limitations and missing features that competing devices have had for years.

a tale of three tools: mairix, maildir-utils (mu), nmzmail I think/fear I'm getting into this Getting Things Done thingie. For weird reasons I'll explain later on, part of the GTD work flow I'm implementing requires quick lookup from Message-IDs to the corresponding mail, no matter in which mailbox (actually Maildir) I've stored it. Hence, I've looked for a mail indexing tool which is Mutt-compatible, handles Maildirs, and supports Message-ID queries. In Debian (where else should I look? g), I found three: mairix, nmzmail, maildir-utils (whose upstream name is actually "mu"). The first one I tried is mairix. Last upload in Debian was 2 years ago, it doesn't seem to be particularly buggy, and in popcon it has about 300 installations. The integration with mutt is good: searches can create a sort of virtual Maildir, whose files are symlink to the search results; with a couple of macros you can have Mutt easily open the result directory after query. The reason why I ditched mairix, is that it heavily suffer from the NIH syndrome. mairix is a self-contained executable with no external dependencies; that in principle being good, I found nowadays totally unreasonable to not use some third party full text search indexer, given that in the FOSS world we have several good ones. A good aspect of mairix, which is missing in the competitors, is the ability to index messages incrementally as they flow in, e.g. via procmail. Still, the problem of that is that it is difficult to pair that with the habit of moving messages across mailboxes. To that end, periodic re-indexing, or better batch index updates, offers a better work flow. Then I tried nmzmail, which claims at is killer feature the "better integration with Mutt" wrt competitors. Actually, this is false, it has the same level of integration of the other (virtual maildirs with macros) and it doesn't even offer a ready to use set of macros in the doc! (yeah, they're easy to write, but given that you claim you're so well integrated with Mutt ...). The reason why I ditched nmzmail is that I didn't particularly like its choice of (external at least) indexer: Namazu. The index it created was very big (something like 250 Mb for about 400 Mb of Maildirs). Also, I had a bad feeling that the indexing was somehow Japanese-specific (the project having support for that language) and I found no way to disable support for that, which I obviously do not need. Finally, I tried maildir-utils and I was finally happy. It is implemented on top of Sqlite3 (for mail metadata) and Xapian (for full-text indexing). There are some bugs, but Norbert, as the very reactive maintainer, have tackled down most of them now and I've been happy to help with various feedback. Integration with Mutt is granted by the following 2 macros:

    macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>rm -rf ~/.mu/results; mu-find -o l -l ~/.mu/results " "mu-find"
    macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/.mu/results\n" "display mu-find results"

The first one query (you) for the search string, the second jumps to the results opening the virtual Maildir (which is useful, especially when you want to go back to the last query you did). I update the index every two hour with the following cron entry:

    31  */2 *  *   *     on_ac_power && mu-index -q

Beside a corner case bug which is close to solution, updating the index is very fast, usually a few seconds; index size is about 150 Mb. To conclude, my initial goal (message path lookup via Message-ID) is easily achieved as follows:

    $ mu-find -f P m:20091030112543.GA4230@usha.takhisis.invalid
    /home/zack/Maildir/INBOX/cur/1256902638_0.25702.usha,U=37563,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,S

In addition to that, I've now gained all-maildirs full-text search from within Mutt As a concluding remark, Enrico pointed me to Not much mail, but it seems to be (by authors' own admission) in early stage of development. Also, AFAIU it aims to be a MUA, whereas I'm perfectly fine with Mutt, I just need from time to time to integrate it with other components of my daily work flow.

The DebConf10 team just sent out a press release announcing the dates and venue for DebConf10 in New York City. Most of the readers of this blog already saw it through some other list, so I ll just put the dates here and provide the full text plus other relevant info via links.

• Dates: July 25-31, 2010 will be DebCamp and August 1-7, 2010 will be DebConf.
• Press release text
• First press coverage in response to our announcement
• Main conference website
• Visa info
• Email address for visa help(read the visa info page before emailing)
• Yes, thanks to Valessio Brito we already have I m going to DebConf10 buttons.

We hope to see many of you there!

Couchdb came onto my radar since distributed stuff is interesting to me these days. But most of what was being written about it put me off, since it seemed to be very web-oriented, with javascript and html and stuff stored in the database, served right out of it to web browsers in an AJAXy mess. Also, it's a database. I decided a long, long time ago not to mess with traditional databases. (They're great, they're just not great for me. Said the guy leaving after 5 years in the coal mines.) Then I saw Damien Katz's talk about how he gave up everything to go off and create couchdb. Was very inspirational. Seemed it must be worth another look, with that story behind it. Now I'm reading the draft O'Rielly book, like some things, as expected don't like others[1], and am not sure what to think overall (plus still have half the book to get through yet), but it has spurred some early thoughts: ... vs DVCS Couchdb is very unlike a distributed VCS, and yet it's moved from traditional database country much closer to VCS land. It's document oriented, not normalized; the data stored in it has significant structure, but is also in a sense freeform. It doesn't necessarily preserve all history, but it does support multiple branches, merging, and conflict resolution. Oddly, the thing I dislike most about it is possibly its biggest strength compared to a VCS, and that is that code is stored in the database alongside the data. That means that changes to the data can trigger processing, so it is mapped, reduced, views are updated, etc, on demand. This is done using code that is included in the database, and so is always available, and runs in an environment couchdb provides -- so replicating the database automatically deploys it. Compare with a VCS, where anything that is triggered by changes to the data is tacked onto the side in hooks, has to be manually set up, and so is poorly integrated overall. Basically, what I've been doing with ikiwiki is adding some smarts about handling a particular kind of data, on top of the VCS. But this is done via a few narrow hooks; cloning the VCS repository does not get you a wiki set up and ready to go. There are good reasons why cloning a VCS repository does not clone the hooks associated with it. The idea of doing so seems insane; how could you trust those hooks? How could they work when cloned to another environment? And so that's Never Been Done[2]. But with couchdb's example, this is looking to me like a blind spot, that has probably stunted the range of things VCSs are used for. If you feel, like I do, that it's great we have these amazing distributed VCSs, with so many advanced capabilities, but a shame that they're only used by software developers, then that is an exciting thought.

---

[1] Javascript? Mixed all in a database with data it runs on? Imperative code that's supposed to be side-effect free? (I assume the Haskell guys have already been all over that.) Code stored without real version control? Still having a hard time with this. :) [2] I hope someone will give a counterexample of a VCS that does so in the comments?

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

On Thursday I will be helping to kick start a debate about some of the possible differences (or not) between free and open source software at Eyebeam, which will be hosted by Upgrade. If you are interested but are not in NYC, there will be a live stream and chat.

Note: via Blog post (obviously different formatting) and sent by email roughly: Lying in one, lying in all. That is from Steve Waddington. Please see the attached screenshot I have obliterated service identifying information. I find it telling that what I said in my original post, of all the things there the one you decided to fact-check was the number of emails between us. And you got that wrong. What was is you said again? Falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus? Do you still stand by that statement? If you have looked at the original complaint, no one asked for anything but information on 'what went wrong'. It simply noted that fact that payment occurred, and we were disconnected and went on to say "We find the above experience of diconnecting [sic] our service by EXETEL a very poor customer relationship experience." The response to that could have been: "Yes, that is a poor customer experience. We will look into it and see if we can improve." Instead we had an accusatory email back commenting, firstly, of the amount of time of the disconnection. As if someone paying for something and not receiving it for only 1 minute is OK. The point being missed we paid for something and we did not receive it. The point being missed -- this is a poor customer experience The second email then, falsely, accused us of not actually paying in the first place! Later the individual concerned, after the TIO complaint, clarifies that 'yes', we did indeed pay. Very telling indeed, then, when you were pointed to my blog entry and rather than pick up on the stratgeic ("we are getting feedback, for free, on how we can improve our processes") you looked at the tactical ("he is lying! How I prove it and thus be happy in ignoring what was said"). As I said, It is easier to hear when your fingers are not in your ears. In light of your recent blog post, and the recently released TIO report, I find Exetels' behaviour all the more perplexing. Complain to Exetel, get your service contract summarily terminated. Complain about Exetel, and get libelled publicly. But I guess when you have 1/6th (163 out of 620) of your complaints related to Customer Service (from the TIO report) and 3% of your own existing customers (from your blog post) complaining, you get the reputation you earn.

I love the fact that phones are ready to get a decent OS. I bought the phone for better connectivity and to get GPS goodness. 90 days later seems a good time to review the pros and cons:

Pros:
• The phone sees updates (Android 1.6 has recent 2.6.29 build with much nicer battery status and search box).
• Easy to pick google calender together with useful gmail integration.
• Often use the phone for a quick websearch (cinema programs on the run, news, shop opening times, ..) - to lazy to power up real laptop.
• The touchscreen interface isn't too bad, but missed the nice resize effect seen on other touchscreens OS.
• Connectbot is a half decent ssh client.
• The consumed data is very low - never managed to touch the 1GB download bandwith limit.
• gmaps is fun to look up and helpful in finding directions.
• Last but not least important phone functions as easy dialing and good voice transmission are working.

Cons:
• The worst omission is a decent pdf reader. No way to read latest papers on arXiv.org.
• The next big missing thing that worked since years with mobile phones is bluetooth file sending and receiving out of the box.
• A more minor bugger - but still quite annoying: contacts sent to you as vCard don't get easily imported in contacts.
• The camera from the HTC magic is not really pleasant.

Of course Android still seems like an alien sandboxed Linux, but I must say that the average usage capability of the mobile phone is very nicely enhanced. P.S. Using allmost daily also Google Talk, Ultimate Stopwatch & Timer, Finance, GPS Status and the ultra cool Google Sky Map.

The debian GNU/Linux kernel s firmware content is one of the most troubling bugs, and (as I understand it):

• it mostly came from upstream (so fixing it only in debian isn t sustainable),
• it s something some FSF supporters kick us for (often while ignoring other not-aiming-for-100%-free systems and turning a blind eye to the non-program problem in their own back yard) and
• it s actually pretty hard to fix and even harder to get paid for fixing.

The latest Bits from the kernel team included: A constructive discussion was held about the outstanding firmware issues, how the team addresses them and how we might work with upstream to address our DSFG issues with kernel sources. The fuller minutes expand it a little: The main topic was concerned with continued splitting of non free firmware and ensuring Debian kernels remain useful even with our DSFG challenges. Discussion about upstream firmware releases and general agreement was reached to talk to Dave Woodhouse about this (as he did most of the upstream firmware splits) . Action item for Vince and Max to talk to Dave Woodhouse. Good luck and thanks for working on this! Another interesting point for our co-op is that xen dom 0 patches will be included in the squeeze kernel release subject to ongoing stabilisation work. The feature will be marked as deprecated and will not appear in future releases. vserver (which I still use on one server) is also going away, but that s less of a surprise. It appears that OpenVZ is the only one with continuing support in the debian kernel, so I guess I d better take another look at it (after it failed messily last time I tried). Will you be changing your virtualisation approach? Do you think debian will get any encouragement for its firmware-splitting, or more flaming for not going far enough?

After one year of development, today I uploaded my first package to CPAN: version 4.0 of Bryar.pm, a modular and extensible blog engine powered (by default) by Template Toolkit and originally written by Simon Cozens. I am officially a Perl developer! This is the software which I use for my own blog. Among the many changes in this release: caching, support for FastCGI, improved support for HTTP validators and a sitemaps generator.

For software, the question whether some software can be considered free is relatively easy to decide: Check the license of the code against the list of free licenses of your trust (the OSI list, the FSF list or the judgement applied by debian-legal) and that s (mostly) it. When it comes to web services in the broader sense, including hosters, communication providers, social networks etc., this are not so clear. In this blog entry, I ll try to list the various requirements that a service should fulfill and which I usually consider before deciding to use a service.The RequirementsA) Availability of source codeComing from the Free Software movement, this is the first requirement that comes to mind. If a web service claims to be free, then I want to be able to inspect how it is working, suggest and implement improvements and set up my own instance. For example, Canonical s software housing setup Launchpad was itself not Free Software until very recently. Having access to the source code is also the reason why I prefer gitorious over github for git hosting.B) Access to my dataDepending on the kind of service, it might hold data from me or about me that are important, such as my emails on a webmail service. If I won t have a way to easily retrieve my data to back it up or to move to a competitor, I ll think twice before trusting my data to this service.C) Free data formatsIf there is accessible data, it should be in a format that I can easily get and use with a choice of (Free) software. Not sure if such a service exists, but an online office suite only supporting its own proprietary file format (possibly with its own proprietary offline office suit) would be no option for me.D) An APIFor an extensively used service, I will want to have the possibility to optimize my user experience by automation. This requires that I can use the service not only in person, but also from tools I write. A very good example for this is Twitter: Besides registration, there is no need to use their web site at all and still use all the features, using the tools I find most fit for a task.E) Choice of providersCompetition is good. If a service is only provided by a single company, and I become dependent on the service, I become dependent on the company. A few years ago, SourceForge was mostly the only provider of gratis, comprehensive software project hosting. By now, there are a few alternatives, such as alioth, savannah or google code, which is appreciated. Note that when it comes to the proprietary instant messaging services (ICQ, yahoo messenger, MSN messenger), there is no choice of providers: To talk to my buddies on a certain network, I am bound to that provider. The same applies to social networks (Facebook, StudiVZ, XING), and is one of the reasons why I shun these yet. F) Federation between providersIf there is a choice of providers, and the service in question provides some kind of communication, it is very desirable if I can interact with users of the service on other providers. A very good example for this is e-mail: People @gmx.net can send mails to people @aol.com, and I can have @joachim-breitner.de and still communicate with everyone. This was not always the matter of course: Before Internet e-mail was common, people on AOL could not get in touch with people at CompuServe. These days, the problem persists with instant messaging (Jabber a.k.a. XMPP being the notable exception) and social networks. Also sites like gitorious or github could support federation if they would allow to create branches of repositories that are hosted elsewhere, allowing their users to use the familiar interface with all repositories they work with.Analysis of a few servicesSo far the theory. Let s see how various services fare.e-mailBeing from the old times of the Internet, when everything was better, it does not surprise that this passes all requirements: There is a large amount of Free e-mail servers and clients to choose from, my data is easily moved via well-known protocols such as POP or IMAP and save in standardized format. There is an abundance of service providers, and they all talk to each other. One could argue that the openness of email causes problems like spam, but I d say that this might be a design issue, but not inherent to the above criteria.Pretty much the same analysis applies to Jabber/XMPP.ICQI joined when I was young and unwise. Now I am stuck to AOL to keep in touch with a relevent part of my online correspondence. To use it on the operating system of my choice, other people had to reverse engineer the protocol and any time, AOL could change how its servers work and I ll be locked out. I can not get in touch with people on other networks, my buddy roster is not easily backed up and restored, and no, we can not see the source of the ICQ servers. I d wish I could switch over to Jabber completely, but there are always a few important people who do not use that yet.Github/GitoriousAlthough gitorious is slightly older, github managed to become more famous. These web sites allow developers to publish their source code and other contributors to easily branch, work on their changes, and propose them for merging in the main code. They are based on git, so I can get my data. There is a choice of providers. I am not sure how well I can access their functionality (merge requests etc.) programmatically. As said before, they do not interact well, and only gitorious has published its code.Facebook/StudiVZVery disappointing. I have heard that Facebook offers you a rich API, but otherwise, they fail every category. This is one of the reasons why I am not to be found on these networks yet.Twitter/identi.caTwitter, similar to Facebook, excels in the category API , but fails in the others. A better alternative is identi.ca: The software behind it is free, I can download contact data etc. It even supports federation via OpenMicroBlogging, although that did not break through yet it, it seems.OpenIDAnother very good example for what I want is OpenID, a service that allows websites to accept a user s credentials from another site. This saves the user from having to create accounts everywhere. There are free implementations, multiple providers, I can easily switch between them. A great feature of OpenID that goes a bit beyond federation is delegation: On the start page of my homepage http://www.joachim-breitner.de/, I saved who my OpenID provider is. Now I can use http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ as my OpenID, and even if I change my provider, this stays valid! This is a feature that not even XMPP easily provides.ConclusionWhether a web service is really free is a complicated question and has a graded answer. One has to balance the benefits of using a web service against the freedoms it is missing. I hope that in the long run, services fulfilling most or all of these requirements will prevail, so that I ll be networking socially and blogging microly with a good conscience.

My employer uses the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for backups and since we use Debian everywhere possible we needed packages of its client program, which is only distributed as RPMs. The initial conversion made with alien was unsatisfactory for many reasons, and the ugly original packaging did not help either. For this reason I spent a few hours to create an high quality Debian package for the Tivoli Storage Manager client. The client binaries cannot be redistributed, so when it is built from source it unpacks the RPMs and copies from there the files it needs to build the binary package. This work has been sponsored by Seeweb, a provider of web hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation services.