Search Results: "reg"

28 October 2009

Russell Coker: Exetel Stupidity

Anand Kumria has an ongoing dispute with Exetel, the latest is that a director of Exetel has libeled him in a blog comment [1]. Having public flame-wars with customers generally isn t a winning move for a corporation. But doing so in the context of the blog world is a particularly bad idea. The first issue is that almost everyone who regularly reads Anand s blog will trust him instead of a corporation (Anand is well regarded in the free software community). So it s not as if accusing Anand of lying will gain anything. But when a director of the company starts doing this it makes the issue more dramatic and interesting to many people on the net. Now Anand s side of the story will get even more readers, of course Anand s side was always going to get more readers than Exetel I m sure that Anand s blog is more popular than that of Steve Waddington. I wouldn t be surprised if my blog was more popular than Anand s and now my readers will be following the Exetel saga for the Lulz. I m sure that I won t be the last person to comment on this. The most amazing thing is that Steve Waddington talks about having to pay to take the TIO complaint. So I guess that means I should start complaining whenever I get bad service from an ISP and cost them some money! I should have stayed with Optus and started complaining all the time when they caused me problems! One thing that Steve and people like him should keep in mind is that members of our community are not only heavy users of the Internet, we generally recommend ISPs to other people, and many of us make money working for ISPs. If you want your ISP to get good reviews and to be able to hire good staff then attacking people like Anand is not the way to go.

Eduardo Marcel Macan: Latinoware: A minha menina (fontes)

A palestra sobre produ o musical com software livre no latinoware 2009 foi um sucesso. Muita gente pediu pra ter a musiquinha que produzimos para ilustrar a palestra, e que <noindex>Cesar Brod</noindex> cantou com tanta desenvoltura :) Ent o aqui segue o arquivo de projeto da m sica A minha menina que foi escolhida em homenagem a <noindex>minha namorada</noindex> e porque Brod queria algo MPB. Eu precisava de algo que pudesse vagamente se tornar parecido com Technopop/Electro. A m sica foi editada com <noindex>LMMS</noindex> (Linux MultiMedia Studio) 0.3.2 e poder ser carregada em qualquer vers o igual ou superior, pois foi feita exclusivamente com plugins e samples padr o da distribui o do LMMS. Apesar do nome, o LMMS est dispon vel para windows tamb m. O que voc est esperando? <noindex>Baixe daqui o LMMS</noindex> e o arquivo original da m sica daqui. P.S: A prop sito, a m sica n o foi masterizada e os volumes est o ajustados segundo os par metros do meu laptop, fone de ouvido e da sala l do latinoware. Brinque com os volumes de cada trilha para ajust -la a seu equipamento.

27 October 2009

Russ Allbery: An image from vacation

This was the view yesterday from just outside my hotel. Yachats, Oregon Needless to say, my vacation is going quite well. I've taken many pictures, read many books, written many reviews, and haven't thought about work (paid or volunteer) at all for about a week and a half. I'm slowly starting to recharge, although after this summer, a nice long vacation was exactly what I needed and I'm glad there's more of it left. I'll be back on line a bit more in about another week. In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy, productive time if you're not on vacation and a relaxing time if you are!

MJ Ray: What s in a name? Co-operative in names at Companies House

This was a Freedom of Information request to Companies House. The request was partially successful. I asked:
How many companies have been incorporated with the word co-operative in their name in the last few years and how many have been refused approval for the word co-operative?
After a bit of shuffling, the answer was:
we do not collate information on applications for company names that have been refused [...] As at the end of July there were 1,286 companies on the register with co-operative in their name. You may also wish to note that there were an additional 56 companies with cooperative in their name. [...] The figures for the companies that were incorporated within the last 3 years, and are still live, are 114 for co-operative and 14 for cooperative .
So, there has been about a 10% increase in cooperative names registered Companies House in the last three years, but there s no indication that Companies House are policing it effectively. Are you seeing more cooperatives around you recently? At least in the UK, the recession-support programmes offered to our co-op favour private companies over co-ops, but maybe new start-up co-ops can also access some funding? Have you met something called a co-op (apart from a computer game) which wasn t a co-op?

26 October 2009

Mark Brown: Setting up regulator consumers with dev_name

The Linux kernel regulator API requires that each system sets up the connections between the various voltage and current regulators in the system and the devices they supply, known as consumers within the regulator API. This is done using the struct device for the consumer device as the key for consumer access. This works well for things like platform devices which are generally always allocated at system startup but is not really usable with buses like I2C which only allocate the struct device late on during system startup. To help work with these buses Linux 2.6.32 will follow the clock API and allow the use of the dev_name() for the device instead. A new field dev_name has been added to struct regulator_consumer_supply which should be used instead of dev this is now the preferred mechanism. It is a simple string and so does not depend on any other initialization. For those backporting the relevant commit is 744ea1d0b59bf084f19559b8f199b644fbb0899c.

25 October 2009

Joachim Breitner: About the Freedoms of Web Services

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.

Erich Schubert: Facebook tweaks

Every time Facebook changes anything, people complain. Most of the time just because something has changed, without knowing actually what changed.The october layout change for example isn't too big in fact. As far as I can tell it's not much more than turning the "hot" items that were in the right sidebar into a special tab (and breaking the refresh for the live feed, but I guess they'll fix that soon). The "live" tab is basically all information (see below for getting rid of certain restrictions); the "News" tab tries to reduce this amount of information by only showing you certain posts Facebook magic considers to be "important". If you are a heavy user you will probably prefer the "Live" feed, if you are a casual Facebook user, go with the "News" feed to have less crap posts to read.Still there are some things you should be aware of when you are a facebook user (not all of these are new): Also you should never forget that all the data you put online is hard to get rid of again. Just don't put anything there you don't want everyone to know. Facebook can be really powerful when used right for example as promotion channel. But the way you should be using it is to first consider what you want people to have an impression of you, then try to present yourself this way. Don't just throw everything that comes to your mind there. (This even more applies to blogs and web sites, obviously, that don't have any privacy control)

23 October 2009

Dirk Eddelbuettel: From ORD Sessions to R-Forge in 12 hours with RProtoBuf

Yesterday, via in invitation from fellow Chicago-area Google Summer of Code mentor Borja Sotomayor, I attended the Second ORD Sessions. These are happening at the HQ of Inventable where a couple of technologists and Open Source geeks from the Chicagoland area get together and riff on code for a few hours after work over some pizza and beer. Sounded good, and I needed an excuse to try to mix the awesome Protocol Buffers with my favourite data tool, R. What are Protocol Buffers? To quote from the Google overview page referenced above:
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
and later on that page:
Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183 .proto files. They're used both in RPC systems and for persistent storage of data in a variety of storage systems.
So three hours later, I had an implementation of the 'addressbook reader' C++ example wrapped in a tiny yet complete R package that passed R CMD check. And one lingua franca for data has met another. So before going to bed, I quickly registered a new project at R-Forge, everybody's favourite R hosting site, and thanks to the tireless Stefan Theussl (and some favourable timezone differences) the project was approved and the stanza available by the time I got up. So I quickly filled the SVN repo and, presto, we had the RProtoBuf project at R-Forge within 12 hours of the ORD Sessions hackfest. I will try to follow up on RProtoBuf in a couple of days, this may lead to some changes in my Rcpp R / C++ interface package as well.

22 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: How can we advance without a tax increase?

There has been a lot of buzz recently in Mexico after a tax increase that has been announced for next year. The two main points I have seen criticized are:
Value Added Tax (IVA) increase from 15% to 16%
There was a great improvement regarding the original proposal by our de-facto ruler (why de-facto? Because it is still unclear whether he won the popular vote. He has about the same legitimacy as George Bush during his first term: Legal but illegitimate): In Mexico, there is a category of items regarded as fundamental, which are exempt of IVA (tasa cero). This category includes food and medicines Of course, this category makes up the bulk of the poorer people's consumptions, so they pay much less IVA than people with higher living standards. For a very long time, there has been a push to remove this exemption. This has been fortunately clearly understood and fought against. So, the presidential initiative, as I was saying, contemplated a global 2% tax which would not be IVA, and which would be applied universally. This tax would be earmarked to be applied to social programs, and was euphemistically called Impuesto de Combate a la Pobreza (poverty combat tax). Many people applied the concept of duck typing (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... It is a Value Added Tax). As many analysts, I believe this tax was meant to be the foot in the doorstop, leading to point out in a couple of years that anyway nothing is IVA-exempt anymore and the world has not come to an end, and we should apply universal IVA... So, the reduction in the increase (2% 1%) is not the most notable thing here The notable (and good!) thing is that they didn't succeed into killing the tasa cero.
3% tax on telecommunications
Many friends have started rallying (with the IMHO least effective way of protest you can find on Earth, just by stating their adherence in their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Wow, great deal!) that the original proposal included a 4% tax on telecommunications, and it appears that 3% will be applied. They say, quite fairly, that telephone and Internet access are no longer considerable a luxury, but a need to power the society into becoming better prepared, more competitive. My friends state as a contrast the Finnish ruling broadband access as a citizen right. What they seem not to realize is that the proportion of taxes in Mexico (collected from the responsible taxpayers, which is not by far the way for the bulk of the money in this country) is close to 30%, taking into account the big taxes (IVA, ISR/IETU) and the host of smaller ones. In Finland, the percentage of taxes payed by every person and remember that tax evasion is way lower than here!) is over 50%.
So What is my opinion on this? What would my ideal tax scheme be?
  • Nobody likes taxes. But the country needs far more infrastructure, far wider inverstments. We need higher taxes But we need those taxes to be collected from people with higher income. And yes, that would mean I would most probably pay more (as I do sit relatively high on the income scale Qualified work, even if you do not seek money for the sake of it, pays much better than non-qualified work; remember the minimal wage in Mexico is around MX$50 a day - Less than US$4 or 3).
  • The increases should be applied to the income tax (ISR). It is supposed to be around 30% for income levels over MX$5000 a month, with a very slight increase after that point. Income tax is highly deductible now, and most people with high income manage to ellude most of it. Many cases have been documented of companies as small as Walmart paying less than MX$1000 a year due to several (intentional? you bet!) holes in the legislation. That is where the bulk of the extra government income should come from!
  • For a couple of years, since I registered as a taxpayer (people receiving money exclusively as salaries under a given limit don't have to declare taxes) I have decided not to hire an accountant to make the numbers look prettier, and just do the numbers myself over the platform provided by SAT/Hacienda (the tax collecting authority). Yes, that means I am paying more than what I could But it also means I am paying what I should! And it is an expensive point of view, but I strongly invite others to do the same. If we criticize Walmart for making numbers look prettier, shouldn't each of us do the same? Shouldn't we all care to pay what we are supposed to, so that the government has enough funds to carry out its tasks?
Yes, I am painfully aware that an important portion of what gets into the government disappears due to corruption and ineptitude. Still, the only position from where I can criticize is from being clearly legal. The same point as I do with software: I cannot ask people to comply with my Free Software licensing if I use ilegally propietary software, can I? So no, I don't use any. Even legal propietary software, free-as-in-beer (i.e. Flash player). So, please think this over before you join the Lemmings into complaining about the tax increase. Yes, this is a bad moment to increase taxes. Yes, Mexico is the worst faring country in all of America in its response to the crisis; the GDP will probably fall between 8% and 10% this year and 2010 will not be much better. Yes, it would be better to increase competitivity. But, yes, we pay ridiculously low amounts of taxes And those of us who can afford a little reduction in our expenditure should do it. And those who make gross money should just stop it. Oh, and last point, regarding the #internetnecesario Twitter hashtag: Don't be Lemmings. Internet should be recognized a basic need for a free society. But right now in our country, it completely is a luxury, even if you cannot live without it. If you are Internet-addicted as myself, you most probably will not notice the 3% increase. FFS, We will pay MX$360 instead of MX$350 a month for my Infinitum connection. Will we really notice? In Mexico, middle and upper class are Internet-enabled. Lower classes are not. Things should change, no doubt. But it is not at all comparable to an universal IVA. Things should change and universal connectivity should be a given. But right now, calling Internet a basic good... is just out of touch with reality.

21 October 2009

Lior Kaplan: Encouraging open source in education


I ve read today a case study by Gregor Bierhals about an Austrian project called desktop4education which creates a desktop environment for school based on open suse. The fact that really surprised me (and for the better) was the fact that the federal government help the project by sending CDs/DVDs to other school and even willing to award schools to move to open source software and reducing license fees. While schools don t pay the the Microsoft Office license fee (10 euro per station), the federal government has decided to pay the schools 10 euro for each station that moved to open source software.
However, by the time of writing the situation is about to change as the Federal government increasingly adopts a policy that promotes the use of open source software in Austrian schools. Exemplary to this is the government s decision to pay any school 10 for each workstation that runs the free productivity suite Open Office that is provided by Sun Microsystems in replace of Microsoft Office, for which the government introduced a calculative license fee of 10.
I think this decision is radical as it motives the schools to move to open source software, and benefiting financially from the move. So while the government might pay a bit more, the money goes to the schools instead of commercial companies. I m sure that s a better investment of tax payers money. I can just hope more governments will adopt this policy. Posted in Proud to use free software Tagged: education, free software

20 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: Among the reasons that brought me to Debian...

Every now and then, people ask me why Debian? Why, among so many projects to choose from, I first liked, then got into, and finally I got committed into Debian, and not anything else? Of course, one of the main points back in 2000-2001 when I started using it, and still to this very day is a strong identification with the ideological side. Yes, I am a strong Free Software believer, and Debian is what best suites my ideology. Still, I did not only get into Debian because of this And I was reminded about this by an article in this month's Usenix ;login: magazine: An anecdotal piece by Thomas A. Limoncelli titled Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (article requires ;login: subscription, but I'll be glad to share it with whoever requests it to me I have of course no permission to openly put it here in whole online. Yes, I am expressly sending a copy of this text to the author, I will update this if/when I hear from him) [update] The author has kindly allowed me to redistribute his article's PDF Download it here. Before anything else I'll go on a short digression: I am writing a bit regarding the Free Software participants' culture, and this is a trait I love about it: The lack of formality. Even though ;login: (and Usenix as a whole) is not exactly Free Software, it runs quite close to it), it is a well regarded magazine (and association) with an academic format and good (not deep or highly theoretical, but good) contents. Still, it is quite usual to see titles as informal and inviting as this one. And it happens not only here I have been fearing having to explain at work, over and over, why I have requesting permissions to go to Yet Another Perl Conference, Festival de Software Libre or DebCamp, tagging them as academic settings. Or why I am wasting our library's resources on buying cookbooks, recipes and similar material on the most strange-sounding subjects. Anyway, back on track This article I found refers to the lack of value given to the system administrator's time when selling or purchasing (or more in general, as it happens also in Free Software, when offering or adopting) a product. Quoting Thomas:
A person purchasing a product is focused on the features and benefits and the salesperson is focused on closing the deal. If the topic of installation does come up, a user thinks, Who cares! My sysadmin will install it for me! as if such services are free. Ironically, it is the same non-technical executive who dismisses installation and upkeep as if they are free who might complain that IT costs are too high and go on a quest to kill IT spending. But I digress. I can understand why a product might be difficult to install. It is hard enough to write software, and with the shortage of software developers it seems perfectly reasonable that the installation script becomes an afterthought, possibly given to a low-ranking developer. The person purchasing the product usually requires certain features, and ease of installation is not a consideration during the procurement process. However, my ability to install a product affects my willingness to purchase more of the product.
Thomas goes on to explain his experience with Silicon Graphics, how Irix was so great regarding install automation and how they blew it when switching to Windows NT; talks very briefly about IBM AIX's smit, a very nifty sysadmin aid which is basically a point-and-click interface to system administration with the very nice extra that allows you to view the commands smit executes to perform a given action (and then you can copy into a script and send over to your hundreds of AIX machines) Incidentally, by the time I started digging out of what became the RedHat mess of the late 1990s and passed briefly through OpenBSD on my way to Debian enlightenment, I was temporarily the sysadmin for an AIX machine And I too loved this Smit approach, having it as the ultimate pedagogical tool you could ever find. Anyway, I won't comment and paraphrase the full article. I'll just point out to the fact that this was what ultimately sold me into Debian. The fact that I could just install anything and (by far) most of the times it will be configured and ready to use. Debian made my life so much easier! As a sysadmin, I didn't have to download, browse documentation, scratch head, redo from start until I got a package working Just apt-get into it, and I'd be set. Of course, one of the bits I learnt back then was that Debian was for lazy people Everything works in a certain way. Policy is enforced throughout. So as a sysadmin, I should better get well acquinted with the Debian policy and know it by heart. In order to be able to enjoy my laziness, I should read it and study it. And so I did, and fell in love. And that is where my journey into becoming a Debian Developer started. Why am I talking so nostalgic here? Because I got this magazine on the mail just last weekend And coincidentally, I also got bug report #551258 I packaged and uploaded the Haml Ruby library (Gem, as the Rubyists would call it). Haml is a great, succint markup language which makes HTML generation less of a mess. It is even fun and amazing to write Haml, and the result is always nicely formatted, valid HTML! And well, one of Haml's components is haml-elisp, the Emacs Lisp major mode to do proper syntax highlighting in Haml files. Of course, I am an Emacs guy (and have been for over 25 years), so I had to package it. But I don't do Emacs Lisp! So I just stuffed the file in its (supposed) place, copying some stuff over from other Emacs packages. During DebConf, I got the very valuable help of Axel Beckert to fix a simple bug which prevented my package from properly being installed, and thought I was basically done with it. I was happy just to add this to my ~/.emacs and get over with it: 
  1. (require 'haml-mode)
  2. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml$" . haml-mode))
  3. (require 'sass-mode)
  4. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass$" . sass-mode))
However As Mike Castleman points out: This requires manual intervention. So it is not the Debian Way! Reading Mike's bug report, and reading Thomas' article, made me realize I was dilluting something I held so dearly as to commit myself to the best Free Software-based distribution out there. And the solution, of course, was very simple: Debian allows us to be very lazy, not only as sysadmins, but as Debian packagers. Just drop this (simplified version) as $pkgroot/debian/haml-elisp.emacsen.startup and you are set! 
  1. (let ((package-dir (concat "/usr/share/"
  2.                            (symbol-name flavor)
  3.                            "/site-lisp/haml-elisp")))
  4. ;; If package-dir does not exist, the haml-mode package must have
  5. ;; removed but not purged, and we should skip the setup.
  6.   (when (file-directory-p package-dir)
  7.     ;; Use debian-pkg-add-load-path-item per  9 of debian emacs subpolicy
  8.     (debian-pkg-add-load-path-item package-dir )
  9.     (autoload 'haml-mode "haml-mode"
  10.       "Major mode for editing haml-mode files." t)
  11.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml\\'" . haml-mode))
  12.     ;; The same package provides HAML and SASS modes in the same
  13.     ;; directory - So repeat only the last two instructions for sass
  14.     (autoload 'sass-mode "sass-mode"
  15.       "Major mode for editing sass-mode files." t)
  16.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass\\'" . sass-mode))
  17.     ))
This will make the package just work as soon as it is installed, with no manual intervention required from the user. And it does not, contrary to what I feared, bloat up Emacs Adding it to the auto-mode-alist leaves it as known to Emacs, but is not loaded or compiled unless it is required. Deepest thanks to both of you! (and of course, thanks also to Manoj, for pointing out at the right spells in emacs-land)
AttachmentSize
Thomas A. Limoncelli: Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (Usenix's ;login: October 2009144.5 KB

Andrew McMillan: Using incron to autocommit changes in a folder

A friend e-mailed me this morning asking for some help with a problem he had where he wanted to make a folder writable by a group of people without making the files deletable. Stepping back from his question, I first pointed out that if the files are editable then they can be effectively deleted by removing the content from them, regardless of whether the directory entries themselves are retained. One solution which occurred to me would be to automatically version the content of the directory, and this reminds me of why versioning of /etc has never worked for me: it only happens when I remember to commit.
<!--break-->
Normally when I edit files in /etc, I am focused on achieving something now, and not on being able to undo it later. To this end I have written myself a script which will commit the contents of a directory (including adding new files and removing deleted ones) into a git repository, as follows: 
#!/bin/sh
#
# Allow for debugging.
[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && set -o xtrace
cd $1
MESSAGE="Autocommit"
# Initialise the directory if it's not in Git currently
if [ ! -d .git ]; then
  git init
  MESSAGE="Initial commit"
fi
# Any files that aren't in the directory, but are in the repository can be removed.
for F in  git ls-tree HEAD   cut -f2 ; do
  [ -e "$ F " -o -L "$ F " ]   git rm "$ F "
done
# Any files that are in the directory, but aren't in the repository can be added
git add .
# And commit...
git commit -m "$MESSAGE"
So this script takes one parameter: the name of the directory where changes have (presumably) occurred, and just blindly commits everything there. The magic glue, then, is the awesomeness that is 'incron' :-) My first target is the ~/bin directory of all of those useful little scripts that I tend to randomly edit without nearly enough version control: 
incrontab -e
home/andrew/bin IN_MODIFY,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVE \
     /home/andrew/bin/commit-directory /home/andrew/bin 2>&1   logger -t andrew-bin
With this, it means that whenever a file changes, is deleted from, moved into, or out of the directory we are monitoring, our commit-directory script is run. Just for testing I delete some ancient files that should have been killed a few computers back. A quick 'git status' in the directory shows everything was committed nicely. I edit a file and make some quick changes. Once again, I go into gitk and can see all the history. I sit back and ratchet my laziness another notch with a nice cup of tea, happy that, for now, at least, changes to my scripts are under revision control at last. Outstanding Issues Well, ok: it's usable as is, but there are a few small things that could be improved: I'll keep monitoring in the real world if these are real annoyances, and whatever other annoyances I find, and maybe I'll tweak that commit script a bit more - add a delay and/or some locking too it. I don't think that adding some push would be too big a deal either, and I'd love to get suggestions from Git geeks as to how to do this more simply/reliably too.

19 October 2009

Neil Williams: Unfriendly non-usability change in GNOME

I thought this was a bug in gtk but it turns out to be a usability feature introduced in GNOME - all the menu and button icons are disabled. Yuk!

I liked buttons and menus with icons, I've spent a lot of time writing the code to put customised icons on buttons (it is helpful to show an icon on a button that only exists in one app and which does an action specific to that one app to help the user know what the button will do - how else is the user to know without making the button label twenty lines long?) and it's weird if some show up and some do not. Plus the disabled menu icons were only ever partially disabled which was even more confusing. A picture is worth a thousand words - if some pictures aren't any good it's not reason to ditch every picture regardless of quality! Even worse to make it a default that cannot be turned back on cleanly.

The fix involves a partial fix in the System Appearance Interface tab and a hack in gconf-editor to complete the fix.

I now have icons on buttons and on menus, despite GNOME trying to be "helpful". I'll be updating a few screenshots that inadvertently ended up with naked buttons.

How long will it be before a package includes a GConf snippet that enables icons again just because the app is hard to use with all buttons and menu items looking the same? Heck, I might even do it in one of my own packages.

18 October 2009

Russell Coker: Mobile Phones Are Computers

One thing I noticed when I got my new LG U990 Viewty [1] mobile phone is the way the core telephony functionality has suffered while features for web browsing etc have been added. It seems that the core phone functionality (making and receiving calls and maintaining a list of names and phone numbers) has generally decreased since about 2004 when I got my first camera-phone. The Nokia GSM phones that I used prior to getting a 3G phone seemed to have a combination of signal reception, voice quality, and basic telephony features that beat all the 3G phones I ve used. The only way the 3G phones were better for core telephony features is in managing the list of recently called numbers. In my past two LG phones I ve been able to easily call an alternate number of the person I last called this feature was dropped in the Viewty. Some of my relatives have camera-phones that have an extremely poor ability to get a signal, they can t get a GSM signal in places where my Viewty can get 3G! Obviously making a usable phone was not a design priority for those devices! Then there s the issue of battery life. Early mobile phones had NiCd batteries that lasted a week, later mobile phones had Li batteries that lasted a week as a standard feature. Nokia sold phones with replacement batteries, so if you wanted to make lots of phone calls while on the move you could have a second battery charged and ready for use. Now the latest BlackBerry [5] apparently has batteries that only last for one day I haven t investigated the options for storing a second battery but a casual glance indicates that changing a battery will be a lot more difficult than on an old Nokia phone. I ve been wondering, why don t they just sell some mobile phones that don t support making phone calls? Smart phones that aren t very good at telephony is really only going half way, do it properly and just rip out the phone functionality! Or they could use the word phone to apply to devices that already exist to do mobile stuff. You could have an Amazon Kindle phone [2] that allows you to read documents, and a Nokia N800 tablet phone [3] for general Internet access including web browsing and email really the only smart-phone feature that is missing from the Nokia is a camera. For that matter my EeePC 701 [4] is probably about twice as heavy as my first mobile phone, maybe it could be called a phone too. If you have two phones, one for making phone calls and the other for doing smart-phone stuff then it won t matter so much if the smart-phone (which can t make phone calls) has it s battery run out. One likely objection to the idea of selling phones that can t be used for making phone calls is that it might confuse the users. However the current situation is that there are significant differences in the signal reception ability of mobile phones, the people who sell them don t know what the difference is, and the rare reviews that analyse signal strength (as done by Choice [6]) are become outdated rapidly and never cover all phones on the market. So I think it would be a great improvement if the phone sales people could say don t buy phone A if you want to make phone calls because it can t do that because currently anyone who just wants to make phone calls has a matter of luck to determine whether they get a phone that works well. The really sad thing however, is that some people apparently have usage patterns that are similar to my satire above. I have heard of people having two phones, one for smart-phone functionality and another for making calls. What we need is to have manufacturers put more effort into making hardware that can receive week signals, from now on I will consult the Choice review of this before making any mobile phone purchase or recommendation. If only a few million other people would do the same then the manufacturers would improve their products. The next thing we need is to have better software to run the phones. The deficiencies in the software on my Viewty could easily be fixed if everyone had source code access. Benjamin Mako Hill writes about some of the problems with closed-source on mobile phones [7]. He mentions security (in terms of our trust in the phone manufacturers), and the general ideal of having control over your own device. One specific problem he doesn t mention are the ways that mobile phones are deliberately crippled by the manufacturers, 3G phones have precious main menu space occupied by the services that are most profitable to the telephone company without regard to what the users desire. Another problem for people who desire free software is file format support. Camera-phones that save video to AVI format instead of OGG reduce our ability to use free software in other places as a general rule every time you transcode a video you either lose some quality or increase the file size so the format that the phone uses will be carried through many other computers and devices. Smart-phones generally have the ability to view a range of data types, the ability to view MS file formats is common (which excludes free competitors). My Viewty has an entire menu section dedicated to Google services (Gmail, blogger, youtube, etc). That s nice for Google who presumably paid well for that, but not so good for me as I don t use any of the Google features on my phone. Now a menu that had a caching IMAP client, an RSS feed reader, a Wordpress API client, a Jabber client, and a caching Wikipedia client would be really useful. My current phone is just under a year old, so I won t be buying a new phone until January 2011 (unless I break or lose my Viewty). Hopefully then there will be some better options. Before anyone suggests that I buy another phone to help with the coding, my current free software coding projects are all behind schedule http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091017-00

16 October 2009

Russell Coker: TPG Lies

Shortly before 9AM this morning I discovered that the IP address for my mail server was not being routed, according to my logs the problem started shortly after midnight. It s on a TPG ADSL connection, there is one IP address for the PPPOE link and 6 addresses in a /29 routed to it one of the addresses in the /29 is for my mail server. It wasn t until 3PM that I was able to visit the server to sort the problem out. It turned out that the main IP address was working but the /29 wasn t being routed to it. So TPG had somehow dropped the route from my routing table. I pinged all the addresses from a 3G broadband connection on my EeePC while running tcpdump on the server, and no packets for the /29 came through but the IP address for the PPP link worked fine. I was even able to ssh in to the server once I knew the IP address of the ppp0 device for future use I need to keep ALL IP addresses of all network gear on my EeePC not just the ones used for providing services. So I phoned the helpdesk, and naturally they asked me inane questions. My patience extended to telling them the broadcast address etc that was being used on the Ethernet device (actually a bridge for Xen but I wasn t going to confuse them). The system been power-cycled before I got there in the hope that it might fix the problem so I could honestly answer the question have you rebooted it (usually I lie rebooting systems to fix network problems is a Windows thing). But my patience started to run out when they asked me to check my DNS settings, I explained very clearly that my problem was that IP packets couldn t get through and that I wasn t using DNS and demanded that they fix it. I didn t get anyone technical to look at the problem until I firmly demanded that the help-desk operator test the routing by pinging my systems. The help-desk people don t have Internet access so that actually testing the connection required escalating the issue. It seems that the algorithm used for help-desk people is to just repeatedly tell people to check various things on their own system, and that continues until the customer s patience runs out. Either the customer goes away or makes requests firmly enough to get something done about it. So their technician did some tests and proclaimed that there was no problem. While said tests were being done things started working, so obviously their procedure is to fix problems and then blame it on the customer. It is not plausible to believe that a problem in their network which had persisted for more than 15 hours would accidentally disappear during the 5 minute window that the technician was investigating the problem. In the discussion that followed the help-desk operator tried to trick me into admitting that it was my fault. They claimed that because I had used multiple IP addresses I must have reconfigured my system and had therefore fixed a problem on my end, my response was I HAVE A HEAP OF MACHINES HERE RUNNING ALL THE TIME, I USE WHICHEVER ONE I FEEL LIKE, I CHANGED NOTHING . I didn t mention that the machines in question are DomUs on the same Xen server, someone who doesn t understand how ping works or what routing is wouldn t have been able to cope with that. I stated clearly several times that I don t like being lied to. Either the help-desk operator was lying to me or their technician was lying to them. In either case they were not going to trick me I know more about how the Internet works than they do. TPG was unable to give me any assurance that such problems won t happen again. The only thing I can be sure of is that when they lie they will stick to their story regardless of whether it works.

Russ Allbery: On vacation

It is that time of year again, in which I disappear for a while to get my head together, engage in intensive relaxation, and catch up on my reading. Don't expect to see much of me on-line for the next three weeks. I was going to post a book review tonight, since otherwise it's unlikely that I'll post any in the month of October, but I just ran out of steam. The steam that I had went to talking to friends, where I won't get much chance for a while. Since I lost all of last week sick with gastroenteritis, I think I'm going to give myself a free pass for this month on the review front. Regular reviews will resume once I get back from vacation. (Contrary to how it may appear, I have no intention of letting them slowly trickle off to nothing, nor have I stopped reading. I have three books finished so far this month and waiting for me to review. I just badly need a vacation and then better time allocation.) What with illness and with all of the work stress lately, I didn't do as good of a job this year of shutting everything down and getting everything into a good state before vacation. Apologies for the loose ends left sitting around, although I think everything will survive. I shall return refreshed, well-read, and with many more book reviews and photographs in hand. See you all in about three weeks!

Gunnar Wolf: Getting closer to the fifth EDUSOL Encounter

This is the fifth year we hold an EDUSOL, and we are closing in on it. EDUSOL is an online encounter whose topics are Education and Free Software Actually, this year we are widening our scope, and we will include Free Culture as well as a base area. Now, besides those three general areas, each year we have had a base topic around which we invite the speakers to talk about (although it is a lax requirement). This year, the base topic is social networks No, not in the Twitter/Facebook/blah sense, but as a wider phenomenon, studying interaction between people, the forming of communities. And for our particular areas, the forming of knowledge-based communities. Anyway I agreed with the organizers to provide the English translation of the participation invitation. I will skip the call for papers, as we are basically at the proposal deadline (October 17), but if you have anything you want to propose, please tell us so! Leaving that aside... Please excuse the quality of my translation, it is late and I'm tired. We will work on it :) Videoconference reception EDUSOL spans several participation categories. The closest category to a traditional, face to face conference. Each year, we invite a group of speakers to talk about a topic related to our main discoursive line. Among the speakers that have confirmed so far, we have: We invite you to be active participants in the videoconference cycle. You can invite your social or user group to be part of the Encounter. There are three ways to do it:
  1. Using the videoconference facilities in your University network
  2. Connecting from a personal computer with broadband access, by using Ekiga or any other H.323 client
  3. Following the .ogg stream and participating back via IRC
In any case (specially in the first two, which require more coordination), please contact us. For further information, visit http://edusol.info/es/e2009/convocatorias/videoconfrencias November 6: Free Education and Free Culture day We invite social and user groups to host talks regarding Free Education and Free Culture. This is not a call to promote Free Software, as there are many other spaces devoted to it. We should start with the idea that freedom resides in us, not in the software. Some of the topics our community recommends are: Further details at http://edusol.info/es/e2009/convocatorias/dialternativo We need some help in this area to generate contents with slides, making it easier for proposed scripts for the talks. If you want to collaborate, please write to our academic support list, http://lists.edusol.info/listinfo.cgi/soporte-academico-edusol.info Want to collaborate? Further questions or comments? We are holding on-line meetings for this group of topics on Thursday 22:00 GMT-5, in the #edusol channel in OFTC (irc.debian.org); you can enter the IRC channel using the Web client at http://irc.bine.org.mx or http://edusol.info/irc About EDUSOL EDUSOL started as a proposal seeking to provide a space so that people interested in education could discuss and analize the good and bad points about Free Culture and Free Software, with no geographic restrictions. Year after year, freedom-loving educators of all Latin America and Spain gather for our annual party. EDUSOL's core language is Spanish, although participation in English is allowed and encouraged (although understanding Spanish will be a strong aid). We invite you to participate and contribute in this collective effort using and commenting on our blogs, or adding your personal blog to our planet: http://edusol.info/es/node/add/blog
http://edusol.info/es/node/add/feedapi-node You can follow us by identi.ca or RSS: http://identi.ca/group/edusol
http://edusol.info/rss.xml

14 October 2009

MJ Ray: SPI October 2009

A board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 14 Oct) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted only yesterday, containing a proposal to hold a debian domain. The proposal says SPI Inc. will support a transfer of said domain to a registered non-profit organization in Taiwan which surprises me after the reply I had about Transferring to another non-profit that I d say that any transfer to a non-US non-profit is likely to be impossible. Oh and what happened to the contributing membership expiry resolution? I thought that was coming back this month. I see that there wasn t a SPI September 2009 meeting log summary sent to spi-general, probably because I wasn t there. I ll go do that now.

Robert McQueen: Telepathy Q&A from the Boston GNOME Summit

The first Telepathy session session on Saturday evening at the Boston GNOME Summit was very much of a Q&A where myself and Will answered various technical and roadmap issues from a handful of developers and downstream distributors. It showed me that there s a fair amount of roadmap information we should do better at communicating outside of the Telepathy project, so in the hope its useful to others, read on MC5 Ted Gould was wondering why Mission Control 4 had an API for getting/setting presence for all of your accounts whereas MC5 does not. MC5 has a per-account management of desired/current presence which is more powerful, but loses the convenience of setting presence in one place. Strictly speaking, doing things like deciding which presence to fall back on (a common example being if you have asked for invisible but the connection doesn t support it) is a UI-level policy which MC should not take care of, but in practice there aren t many different policies which make sense, and the key thing is that MC should tell the presence UI when the desired presence isn t available so it could make a per-account choice if that was preferable. As a related side point, Telepathy should implement more of the invisibility mechanisms in XMPP so it s more reliably available, and then we could more meaningfully tell users which presence values were available before connecting, allowing signing on as invisible. Since MC5 gained support for gnome-keyring, its not possible to initialise Empathy s account manager object without MC5 prompting the user for their keyring password un-necessarily (especially if the client is Ubuntu s session presence applet and the user isn t using Empathy in the current session but has some accounts configured). Currently the accounts D-Bus API requires that all properties including the password are presented to the client to edit. A short-term fix might be to tweak the spec so that accounts don t have to provide their password property unless it s explicitly queried, but this might break the ABI of tp-glib. Ultimately, passwords being stored and passed around in this way should go away when we write an authentication interface which will pass authentication challenges up to the Telepathy client to deal with, enabling a unified interface for OAuth/Google/etc web token, Kerberos or SIP intermediate proxy authentication, and answering password requests from the keyring lazily or user on demand. Stability & Security Jonathan Blandford was concerned about the churn level of Telepathy, from the perspective of distributions with long-term support commitments, and how well compatibility will be maintained. Generally the D-Bus API and the tp-glib library APIs are maintained to the GNOME standards of making only additive changes and leaving all existing methods/signals working even if they are deprecated and superseded by newer interfaces. A lot of new interfaces have been added over the past year or so, many of which replace existing functionality with a more flexible or more efficient interface. However, over the next 4-6 months we hope to finalise the new world interfaces (such as multi-person media calls, roster, authentication, certificate verification, more accurate offline protocol information, chat room property/role management), and make a D-Bus API break to remove the duplicated cruft. Telepathy-glib would undergo an ABI revision in this case to also remove those symbols, possibly synchronised with a move from dbus-glib to GVariant/etc, but in many cases clients which only use modern interfaces and client helper classes should not need much more than a rebuild. Relatedly there was a query about the security of Telepathy, and how much it had been through the mill on security issues compared to Pidgin. In the case of closed IM protocols (except MSN where we have our own implementation) then we re-use the code from libpurple, so the same risks apply, although the architecture of Telepathy means its possible to subject the backend processes to more stringent lockdowns using SElinux or other security isolation such as UIDs, limiting the impact of compromises. Other network code in Telepathy is based on more widely-used libraries with a less chequered security history thus far. OTR The next topic was about support for OTR in Telepathy. Architecturally, it s hard for us to support the same kind of message-mangling plugins as Pidgin allows because there is no one point in Telepathy that messages go through. There are multiple backends depending on the protocol, multiple UIs can be involved in saving (eg a headless logger) or displaying messages (consider GNOME Shell integration which previews messages before passing conversations on to Empathy), and the only other centralised component (Mission Control 5) does not act as an intermediary for messages. Historically, we ve always claimed OTR to be less appealing than native protocol-level end-to-end encryption support, such as the proposals for Jingle + peer to peer XMPP + TLS which are favoured by the XMPP community, mostly because if people can switch to an unofficial 3rd party client to get encryption, they could switch to a decent protocol too, and because protocol-level support can encrypt other traffic like SRTP call set-up, presence, etc. However, there is an existing deployed OTR user base, including the likes of Adium users on the Mac, who might often end up using end to end encryption without being aware of it, who we would be doing a disservice by Telepathy not supporting OTR conversations with these people. This is a compelling argument which was also made to me by representatives from the EFF, and the only one to date which actually held some merit with me compared to just implementing XMPP E2E encryption. Later in the summit we went on to discuss how we might achieve it in Telepathy, and how our planned work towards XMPP encryption could also help. Tubes We also had a bit of discussion about Tubes, such as how the handlers are invoked. Since the introduction of MC5, clients can register interest in certain channel types (tubes or any other) by implementing the client interface and making filters for the channels they are interested in. MC5 will first invoke all matching observers for all channels (incoming and outgoing) until all of them have responded or timed out (eg to let a logger daemon hook up signal callbacks before channel handling proceeds), all matching approvers for incoming channels until one of them replies (eg to notify the user of the new channel before launching the full UI), and then sending it to the handler with the most specific filter (eg Tomboy could register for file transfers with the right MIME type and receive those in favour to Empathy whose filter has no type on it). Tubes can be shared with chat rooms, either as a stream tube where one member shares a socket for others to connect to (allowing re-sharing an existing service implementation), or a D-Bus tube where every member s application is one endpoint on a simulated D-Bus bus, and Telepathy provides a mapping between the D-Bus names and the members of the room. In terms of Tube applications, now we ve got working A/V calling in Empathy, as well as desktop sharing, and an R&D project on multi-user calls, our next priority is on performance and Tube-enabling some more apps such as collaborative editing (Gobby, AbiWord, GEdit, Tomboy ?). There was a question about whether Tube handlers can be installed on demand when one of your contacts initiates that application with you. It d be possible to simulate this by finding out (eg from the archive) which handlers are available, and dynamically registering a handler for all of those channel types, so that MC5 will advertise those capabilities, but also register as an approver. When an incoming channel actually arrives at the approval stage, prompt the user to install the required application and then tell MC5 to invoke it as the handler. Colin Walters asked about how Telepathy did NAT traversal. Currently, Telepathy makes use of libnice to do ICE (like STUN between every possible pair of addresses both parties have, works in over 90% of cases) for the UDP packets involved in calls signalled over XMPP, either the Google Talk variant which can benefit from Google s relay servers if one or other party has a Google account, so is more reliable, or the latest IETF draft which can theoretically use TURN relays but its not really hooked up in Telepathy and few people have access to them. XMPP file transfers and one-to-one tube connections use TCP which is great if you have IPv6, but otherwise impossible to NAT traverse reliably, so often ends up using strictly rate-limited SOCKS5 -ish XMPP proxies, or worse, in-band base64 in the XML stream. We hope to incorporate (and standardise in XMPP) a reliability layer which will allow us to use Jingle and ICE-UDP for file transfers and tubes too, allowing peer to peer connections and higher-bandwidth relays to enhance throughput significantly. Future Ted Gould had some good questions about the future of Telepathy
Should Empathy just disappear on the desktop as things like presence applets or GNOME Shell take over parts of its function? Maybe, yes. In some ways its goal is just to bring Telepathy to end users and the desktop so that its worth other things integrating into Telepathy, but Telepathy allows us to do a lot better than a conventional IM client. Maemo and Sugar on the OLPC use Telepathy but totally integrates it into the device experience rather than having any single distinct IM client, and although Moblin uses Empathy currently it has its own presence chooser and people panel, and may go on to replace other parts of the user experience too. GNOME Shell looks set to move in this direction too and use Telepathy to integrate communications with the desktop workflow. Should Telepathy take care of talking to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc? There s no hard and fast rule Telepathy only makes sense for real-time communications, so it s good for exposing and integrating the Facebook chat, but pretty lame for dealing with wall posts, event invitations and the like. Similarly on the N900, Telepathy is used for the parts of the cellular stack that overlap with real-time communications like calling and SMS, but there is no sense pushing unrelated stuff like configuration messages through it. For Twitter, the main question is whether you actually want tweets to appear in the same UI, logging and notification framework as other messages. Probably not anything but the 1-to-1 tweets, meaning something like Moblin s Mojito probably makes more sense for that. Later in the summit I took a look at Google Latitude APIs, which seem like something which Telepathy can expose via its contact location interface, but probably not usefully until we have support for metacontacts in the desktop. Can/will Telepathy support IAX2? It can, although we d have to do a local demultiplexer for the RTP streams involved in separate calls. It s not been a priority of ours so far, but we can help people get started (or Collabora can chat to people who have a commercial need for it). Similarly nobody has looked at implementing iChat-compatible calling because our primary interest lies with open protocols, but if people were interested we could give pointers its probably just SIP and RTP after you dig through a layer of obfuscation or two.
If you want to know more about Telepathy feel free to comment with some follow-up questions, talk to us in #telepathy on Freenode, or post to the mailing list.

13 October 2009

Christian Perrier: Virtualization for dummies?

Dear Lazyweb, I'm currently installing my new toy^W laptop, namely a shiny Dell E4200 that will replace my good old X1. As this is not only my Debian laptop but also my work machine and I need to work with Windows several hours a day...but still receive my mail through my Debian laptop, I decided to put my fingers into virtualization. I know nearly nothing about this whole thing (up to now, my Windows work machine was a desktop machine). So, that's a perfect occasion to make my mind abou tall this, right? What I have been able to figure out as of now is that I could use Xen for this: the Debian machine would be the host machine (if I understand properly Xen jargon, that would be the dom0) and I would run Windows in a virtual machine (domU). Another option would be having the host system run a very small Debian system and use two "domU", one with Debian unstable and the other one with Windows. But, indeed, I don't really see the benefit of this except wasting my resources. As I'm having hard times having a Xen hypervisor work properly (I iitially installed the machine as a regular Debian machine), I actually wonder whether I'm going The Right Way.....and I also try to find some good "virtualization with Xen for dummies" references. For instance, about how to boot the damn hypervisor when using grub2, an encrypted root file system (/boot on ext2), etc. Where, really, do I need to look?

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