Hi lazyweb, I m wondering if there a lot of demand for such a feature, being to be able to install 2 (or more) major releases of iceweasel on the same computer. If there is a strong demand, I may consider allowing it. Please reply in the comments on this blog with your feelings, for or against the implementation of this co-installability. Thanks. PS: you may also forward this query to other sites and send people back here to leave their opinion.

I'm moving to the US on Thursday, so I will be here on Wednesday evening from about 7. If your presence is unlikely to make me stupifyingly angry, feel free to join me.

For those who aren t clinically dead, you may have heard of the BBC . The BBC are the state-ish-funded TV network in the UK, and the country s biggest broadcaster, alongside three other major terrestrial broadcasters who make their content widely available without payment ITV, Channel 4, and Five. These broadcasters also make some or all of their programming available for streaming over the Internets usually their home-grown programming only, not licensed stuff from America. Now, once upon a time, the online functionality was mostly offered via a proprietary P2P-and-DRM-based system called Kontiki. Kontiki was unpopular for various reasons for example, it was Windows-only, and banned by several Internet providers due to the use of P2P (e.g. I know such technology is still banned on the University of Oxford network). As a result, this lead to the introduction and eventual replacement of browser-based streaming solutions, starting with the changes made to BBC s iPlayer. iPlayer is nowadays a combination of an Adobe Flash service for web surfers, an unencrypted MP4 streaming service for users of mobile devices such as iPhones, and as of a couple of weeks ago, has streaming support built directly into the PlayStation 3 s user interface too. Oh, and on the PC, it supports DRM-based downloading courtesy of the Adobe Air platform, on Windows, Mac, and Air-capable (x86) Linux. Channel 4 s service 4od, and Five s Demand Five, are also based on Adobe Flash, and streaming-only. They re basic and functional. The final interesting one here is ITV s ITV Player. ITV Player was, until about a week ago, the only non-Flash service, instead making use of Microsoft Silverlight. They have now changed to be Flash-based, like their peers, meaning the entire market mandates use of the Adobe Flash plugin or, at a push, command-line utilities or browser plugins which grab the raw video files from the broadcasters servers, in violation of their licenses. Why is this interesting? Well, when ITV Player used Silverlight, we could watch TV using Free Software: Novell Moonlight 2.0 Beta 1.1 and above worked fine with it, on i386 and AMD64 (and other architectures with a recompile). Now that it s using Flash rather than Silverlight, where do we stand for watching streaming TV legitimately with Free Software? Let s take a peek! Firstly, some preamble. I m running Ubuntu Jaunty, and I hand-compiled a SVN (I think SVN? Maybe Bzr) snapshot of Gnash revision 11485 to ensure I had an up-to-date view of proceedings. It definitely seems to be working, as I m introduced to the world of Flash advertising via Gnash, and Youtube.com also works, more or less. And I m not discussing Adobe s Flash plugin here, for various reasons:

• It s proprietary. Boo.
• It s i386-only in several instances a beta of an AMD64 plugin exists, but your browser will crash on BBC iPlayer sites if you have the iPlayer Adobe Air app installed, as Air is i386-only. And the packages in Ubuntu install the i386 plugin alongside the abominable and crashy nsPluginWrapper.
• Did I mention it was proprietary? If the only way to surf the web on a Free OS is with proprietary software, then we re not doing very well.

So, Gnash it is. Firstly, it s a PITA to compile, as upstream seem to have misunderstood how AutoFoo works i.e. it detects that you don t have headers installed for certain features, and tells you so, yet still enables those features at configure-time (and obviously fails when building). Hey guys, if I don t have qapplication.h, take the hint and disable KDE support for me like every other bloody app does. With that out of the way, let s get to it! BBC iPlayer Well, what does the landing look like? Looks fine to me! Let s try playing a show! Oh. Um Never mind, then. Seems iPlayer s JavaScript to detect Flash presence doesn t pick up on Gnash, and it bails out. Score so far: 0/1 Demand Five Another former Kontiki partner, how do these guys fare? Hey, that looks pretty good to me! Perhaps we re onto a winner this time? Poot. Gnash is definitely being invoked see the context menu there but it sure isn t doing anything useful. Score: 0/2 Channel 4 4od How do those hip cats at Channel 4 fare? Hm Gotta confess, not feeling too hopeful about this one Oh, well, even worse than iPlayer. What you folks might not recognise is the missing Play buttons which are supposed to be to the right of the program descriptions in that list of episodes. Presumably more Javascript/Flash interop failure. 0/3 ITV Player Last, but not least, how does the newest entrant into Microsoft-free streaming fare? Now, now, in fairness, it s always been this bad, even when they used Silverlight weirdos that they are, ITV have always used Flash for their navigation, even when they used Silverlight for playback. The Flash-based navigation you (don t) see here is barely any better even with the proprietary Flash plugin. What the proprietary plugin does NOT do, however, is consume the 750 or so meg of RAM that Gnash did when sat idle on this screen. I mean, that s not a problem, that s why I have 6 gig in here, but still, not wise on Wifey s netbook. Oh. Well then. 0/4 it is. So? What annoys me here isn t so much that nothing works. I m used to there being temporary gaps in Free Software functionality, that s pretty normal. But I m greatly vexed that one of these four used to work on a Free platform, and now it doesn t and that places like UbuntuForums are filled with people celebrating that fact. Celebrating that ITV have stopped using the evil nasty Microsoft system which happened to have a functional Free replacement and that they ve now moved to a non-Microsoft system which mandates a proprietary plugin. It s not the first time either Major League Baseball in the USA used to use Silverlight for their HD streaming, and now they use a combination of Flash and a proprietary Windows-only extension to Flash to make it load WMV files this is considered a victory. It really isn t. We should NEVER be forced to use Proprietary software in order to surf the web yet now we ve gone from having access to 25% of the UK s streaming TV services via Free Software to 0% of them, and people are happy about it. So, I want you to think long and hard about this question, one which seems to get the oddball answer far too often: What is more important promoting Free Software, or demoting Microsoft Corp?

Yay, thinkfan just got accepted by the ftp-masters.

Now all owners of noisy fans (like on my Thinkpad X300) can control these and make them a lot nicer for daily usage.
(the package has sane defaults in thinkfan.conf, but I still decided to deactivate it in /etc/default/thinkfan because you can demage your hardware quite easily when you don't know what you're doing)

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net. From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties. Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his Dirty Jobs TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier. The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time. Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I ve visited the crypt, it s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors some of which had mummified flesh attached Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it s in transit. Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9]. The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well. Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines. Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests. Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11slee.html
• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25985054-29277,00.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
• [4] http://www.gapminder.org/
• [5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html
• [7] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2009-08-30-11-33_trying_to_understand_tcp_performance.html
• [8] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/christian-couples-share-email-accounts-to-stay-faithful-20090907-fdaw.html
• [9] http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html
• [11] http://opensource.org/node/465
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [13] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/netbooks-microsoft-a-turning-point/
• [14] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983 2009-rest-in-peace.ars

I came across this quote while wrapping up Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, one of my favorite books on the craft of writing. The quote is remarkable not only for its content, which is spot on, but its.. clarity and grace:

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop We do this every time we listen to music. We do not seize hold of a particular chord or phrase and shout at the orchestra to go on playing it for the rest of the evening; on the contrary. However much we may like that particular moment of music, we know that its perpetuation would interrupt and kill the movement of the melody. We understand that the beauty of a symphony is less in these musical moment than in the whole movement from beginning to end. If the symphony tried to go on for too long, if at a certain point the composer exhausts his creative abilities and tries to carry on just for the sake of filling in the required space of time, then we begin to fidget in our chairs, feeling that he has denied the natural rhythm, has broken the smooth curve from birth to death, and that though a pretense of a life is being made, it is in fact a living death. Alan Watts, The Meaning of Happiness.

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I'm looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn't want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit. Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It's been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I've tried different build systems, I've tried different implementation languages, I've tried different configuration file formats, I've tried different support libraries, I've tried different version control systems, I've tried different documentation formats. So while it's definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven't really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on. These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, including BIP, ZNC and ShroudBNC so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks). cp: Anathema - Shroud of False

No Xorg update entered testing since Lenny was released. The last big remaining bug in unstable was the Intel driver locking up on i865 when the UXA/GEM acceleration is used (and 2.8.x only supports UXA so there is no work around). See #541307. Fortunately, Eric Anholt found out that it was caused by a kernel bug in the intel-agp driver. The fix is not in vanilla 2.6.31, so you'll have to apply the patch or wait for an updated 2.6.31.x kernel to be released. Anyway, the Intel driver 2.8.1 as well as Xserver 1.6 and Mesa 7.5 will enter testing soon. If you have a i865, make sure your kernel contains the above fix or you'll likely experience lockups soon after X startup. Update: If building the intel-agp driver as a module, you will also need another small patch to export the clflush_cache_range() function to modules. Update: Everything just entered testing of real.

Got caught by a meme bug from Planet Ubuntu, so Mr vrms, here goes:

zakame@perlis:~/blog/memes$ vrms
               Non-free packages installed on perlis
autoconf-doc              automatic configure script builder documentation
emacs23-common-non-dfsg   GNU Emacs shared, architecture independent, non-DFSG i
firmware-iwlwifi          Binary firmware for Intel Wireless 3945, 4965 and 5000
make-doc                  Documentation for the GNU version of the "make" utilit
  4 non-free packages, 0.3% of 1524 installed packages.

This is on my laptop running Debian Sid. Here's my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid main
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ sid main

I installed the non-free packages manually. As seen on the list, its just mainly non-free GFDL documentation for the GNU tools (oh, the irony,) and firmware files for perlis' Intel 3945 wireless. Interestingly, there's no corresponding -doc package for automake, due to its documentation having no invariant sections and cover texts, passing muster to vrms' (nee Debian's) interpretation of the GFDL.

Site was down for almost a week, due to my provider being DDoSed. Email was broken more so as SMTP was the target, but it was rather odd that the data center decided to block outgoing SMTP connections from a block of IPs, where my VPS is unfortunately a member of. I've since switched to a new provider. This makes my third OpenVZ VPS, though I was meaning to move on to Xen. At 6 US dollars a month though, it seems quite a bargain, so I'll have to see where this goes. The move also afforded me to change some stuff under the hood. Apache is gone, replaced by nginx (although this required having blosxom running under a thttpd backend, until I can whip up a FastCGI equivalent.) BIND gave way to maradns, cutting down significant memory usage. And dropbear replaces the OpenSSH server. Exim 4 and dovecot remain though, as they seem to quite big (or small) enough for my purposes. I'll document more about the changes in later posts. In the meantime, I need to catch up on emails and packaging...

Yeah, OK, I suck and I should have posted about DebConf 9 while I was there or shortly afterwards. Well, I've been busy with various things (or, to be more specific, one person \o/). I'm slowly catching up on stuff now, so I thought I'd write something and link to some photos! I drove down from the UK with Neil, Chris and Chris and we had a good trip. We left Cambridge really early on Wednesday the 22nd, stopped at Le Mans for lunch, then headed to San Sebastian overnight. The French autoroutes were mostly empty and we made very good time, swapping drivers every two hours. The venue was superb, with just about all the facilities we needed on site. And there was a handy outdoor bar in the park just up the street. Yay! As always, it was excellent to meet up with Debian friends old and new from all over the world. The DebConf team did a great job of making the conference happen and I had a wonderful time, as did everybody else I spoke to. There was an official day trip involved, but as we had 2 cars from the UK a group of us rebelled and made our own trip out to do touristy things. We visited the Roman ruins in Merida (photos here), then as we were so close to Portugal we decided to head over the border and found the lovely old town of Elvas. After the conference, we headed slowly back up to the north coast of Spain, stopping over in Madrid and then Bilbao before catching the overnight ferry back to England. Along the way on that trip we saw a few sights such as the historic city of Pamplona and the "Valley of the Fallen", the monument to people killed in the Spanish Civil War. I got back to Cambridge late on Monday the 3rd, tired but happy. We'd done 2,400 or so miles in the car and several hundred more on the ferry, and we'd all had a great journey. We saw some silly stuff along the way too, and I'll post more about those soon.

On Luis Villa's urging, I wrote up a short response to this article on "why Google Chrome OS will turn GNU/Linux into a desktop winner." I've posted my article over at Autonomo.us where it seemed most important.

Water supply, in the developed world, is one of those things you just pretty much take for granted. You turn on the tap, and clean, cool, refreshing water comes out. Similarly, when I go to a fire in my shiny fire truck, no matter what time of the day or night, I expect to able to hook up to a hydrant and have a strong, steady supply of water available. This level of reliability is something that we in the IT industry can typically only dream of. Practically 100% reliability over a period of decades, without constant maintenance and tweaking? Not a hope. To even get close to that, we need clusters of fully-redundant servers, fancy database replication techniques, and probably something totally out of left-field like Erlang's ability to reload code on the fly. But how do the water utilities do it? Clusters of fully-redundant high-capacity pumps, fancy pipe re-routing techniques? Or something totally out of left-field like a big water tank and gravity? Where I live, we've got the latter. Thinking about how it probably operates and is managed, I'm blown away by the sheer simplicity and robustness of the whole design, and how it can handle all manner of failures. First off, consider how few components have to be working in order for the water supply to continue for a while after some sort of catastrophic failure. We need:

• Gravity. The water tank is at a high point, and gravity (and the derived force of air pressure) keeps the pipes pressurised. While gravity can, in theory, fail, if it actually does then we've got bigger problems.
• The water tank must be present and with at least some capacity to hold water. Yep, we can blow a hole in the top or side of the water tank and still have some (diminished) capacity to supply water. Try blowing a hole in the side of your data centre and see what happens.
• Piping from the water tank to the water consumption point. I'd say this is the weakest link, but it's a pretty robust link overall (modulo rampaging backhoes) and any other centralised water supply method (other than perhaps teleportation) is going to be at the mercy of a piping failure too.

Note that this list of elements doesn't include any moving parts, or even guaranteed continuous water supply from a dam or other huge supply store. You can lose your feed pump(s), supply lines, or anything else that's on the supply side of the water tank for some period of time and nobody on the consumption side will know or care. Need more resilience to supply-side failure? Just build a bigger tank. This blows my mind, it really does. Need to do pump maintenance? No problem, just make sure that the tank is large enough to service demand over the period of the "outage", and go for it. Can't find a pump supplier to give you a restoration SLA of less than a week? Just make sure you've got a water tank that'll provide for a week's consumption. Basically, any supply-side reliability problem can be solved with "build a bigger tank", and while there's a limit to how big we can make tanks, I'll bet we know a lot more about building huge water tanks to withstand some freaky failure conditions than we do about building pumps that won't fail for 100 years. If you do need more capacity than a single tank can provide, just parallelise -- horizontal scaling of the water supply. Woohoo! Your big water tank also provides cost savings in your other equipment. If you had to pressurise a water supply using pumps, not only would you need your redundant array of very expensive pumps (Hmm, RAVEP-5 sounds like a Doctor Who villain), but those pumps would need to be able to provide your peak consumption flow (toilet breaks during the Super Bowl, probably). I'd imagine that could get mighty expensive, and without providing much benefit for 99% of the time. I see this capacity problem at work all the time. Customers who have the occasional massive traffic spikes need to massively over-provision their average utilisation to successfully service that 1% of the time that they're doing heavy traffic. Yes, I know, cloud computing, horizontal scaling, capacity on demand, yadda yadda yadda. It's not a panacea, and the number of apps that are designed to properly scale horizontally over a large range of traffic volumes is miniscule. My general point, though, is that it when you've got a variable load, it costs a whole lot more to provision systems to supply peak demand than to provision systems that can deal with average demand. A suitably large water tank means you can easily deploy a much smaller capacity feed pump. All you have to do is make sure that when demand exceeds supply, you've got enough water in your tank to cover the difference between the demand and supply over that period. When your peak capacity increases, and is starting to strain your infrastructure, you've got a choice, too: you can upgrade the pump or increase your storage capacity, whichever is cheaper / easier / quicker / provides better kickbacks / whatever. This is all well and good, you say, but computer systems aren't water supplies. There's a lot more moving parts, inputs, and outputs, and those all have to be handled. This is quite true. Water-powered computers are not in high demand. However, I think we could produce some much more reliable systems if we looked for ways we could simplify capacity and redundancy issues, water supply style, instead of layering more and more cruft into our solutions.

---

Ironically, just after I started writing this post (and this gives you an idea of how long it's been sitting in my drafts folder), I saw an article in the RISKS digest about a water supply problem in Santa Cruz, caused by a power outage killing the refill pump for an extended period and resulting in the storage tank running dry. Hey, I never said that it was a foolproof system -- especially when you've got failures of imagination that result in the system that tells people that there's no power relying on the power source it's monitoring being up in order to be able to tell people that there's no power...

Funny how working on a program immediately inspires to do more. Remember that the initial motivation for debtree was to find out why a package was installed? It can now show that in the dependency graphs! I'm not quite ready to do a new release, but the new version is available from the git repository. Let's start with a simple example (all graphs are based on Lenny).

$ debtree -I --rdeps-depth=3 apt

Only installed packages are displayed here; if the -I option is omitted, debmirror will display all, but that does tend to explode the graphs, especially for common libraries. As for forward dependencies, the color of the arrows indicates Pre-Depends, Depends and Recommends. The reverse dependencies are shown three levels deep (one is default). The graph will always include all direct reverse dependencies (both on the package itself and all virtual packages provided by it. For indirect reverse dependencies there's a cut of that is set at five by default. Example is debconf, that apparently has 9 reverse Pre-Depends and 58 reverse Depends installed on my system. The next one is simply beautiful.

$ debtree -I --rdeps-depth=20 --no-conflicts libcairo2

Because of the --rdeps-depth=20 this shows the full recursion! I was surprised that this graph remained a reasonable size. Apparently no packages depend on the virtual package libcairo, at least none that I have installed. The final one is extreme, and I must confess that I have cheated a bit by suppressing the least interesting reverse depends (which explains why it does not match the numbers from the apt graph).

$ debtree -I -R --no-recommends --no-conflicts debconf

The most interesting thing here is how it shows the debconf-2.0 transition. Most packages depend on 'debconf debconf2.0'; tex-common instead has 'debconf cdebconf', while tasksel and exim4 have both combinations (probably one explicitly in debian/control and the other added by debhelper. ucf is missing the alternative; apparently does not use debhelper (no prizes for guessing who the maintainer is :-). Notice anything about iamerican and ibritish? Yes, they really have a double dependency on 'debconf debconf2.0'. The one thing missing is the version info for versioned dependecies. Not sure yet if I want to add that for reverse dependencies. P.S. SVG versions of the images are available in the same directory as the JPGs.

I end up traveling quite a bit. Sometimes I forget to tell friends in the places I'm going that I'm going to be there. This results in a tragedy: we end up missing each other! So now, when I'm going to be traveling, I'm going to write updates that you can easily follow. Here are some reasons you might want to subscribe:

• You want to know when I next go to India so you can tell me to bring back a ten-paise coin.
• You want to know when I'll be nearby so we can roast eggplant together.
• You want to impress me with advice on live music wherever I go.
• You're carefully avoiding me.
• You like receiving email.

To subscribe, here are your choices:

• Follow notAFoodTruck on Identi.ca, the Free microblog service.
• Subscribe to the notAFoodTruck email list.
• If you use Twitter, follow @notAFoodTruck.

(And thanks to Chris for suggesting I do this, and helping me give it a name.) Parker wondered how I'm keeping these all up to date. Here's what I do:

• I send an IM to update@identi.ca.
  • (Really, I use XChat or irssi to send an IRC message. For me, IM is mediated through BitlBee and ctrlproxy, but you don't have to know that.)
• Identi.ca posts to the Identi.ca feed.
• Identi.ca cross-posts that to Twitter.
• rss2email running on my server wakes up every hour, checks identi.ca's RSS feed, and sends an email if necessary.

There is currently a discussion on a private mailing list about whether some money from a community organisation should be used to assist the development of Gnash (the free software Flash player) [1]. The main reason for this is that there are apparently some schools that depend on flash web sites to such a degree that they won t consider using a free OS that lacks Flash support. It has been shown that there are a number of issues related to contributing financially to free projects, the people who advocate financial contributions in this case assure us that such problems have been addressed but it will remain controversial to some extent. One thing that is not controversial is the fact that testing and debugging is universally a good thing. So I advocate doing such testing as a way to contribute to Flash development and therefore free software use in education. The Debian-Edu project has a web page with a link to flash sites that can be used for testing [2]. So I plan to now install Gnash on all Linux desktop systems that I run and get bug reports to help development. I encourage others to do the same. Also there is the Ming library for developing Flash files which could apparently do with some help in the development process [3]. While a non-free format such as Flash is not ideal, it s certainly a lot better than Silverlight! Note that I don t have strong feelings about the issues of financial support for Gnash (which is why I didn t contribute to the private discussion in question). But I am convinced that more people using and testing Gnash is a good thing.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash
• [2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/FlashInDebianEdu
• [3] http://www.libming.org/

Some people seem to believe that the problem with copyright law is the inability of people on the free culture side of the debate to compete with the large amounts of money that are being spent but the RIAA et al. I think that a significant part of the problem is that many intelligent and well-meaning people are simply unaware of or unconvinced by the arguments. For example the Reid Report post titled Paul Porter speaks truth to Black radio [1] includes the quote Only the United States, North Korea and Iran don t pay royalties for performers on free AM/FM radio . This point actually sounds quite reasonable and will convince many intelligent and well-meaning people who have an interest in politics such as Ms Reid. Cory Doctorow has written an interesting article titled Internet rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress [2]. He describes how the big entertainment companies are failing to properly represent their customers or the artists who produce the content, and in the process creating monopolies out of companies such as Apple and Google. Cory starts by raising the issue of cultural discourse, monopolies in the distribution of popular art will lead to control over the political process. Ironically the article that Ms Reid cited [3] mentions the issue of pay for play which led to a steady diet of misogyny, violence and drug culture on the airwaves. Brendan Scott has written about a similar issue in Australia where the music copyright holders are trying to get massive increases in license fees from restaurants and other small businesses [4]. The expected result of this is greater use of classical music (which is out of copyright) and more interest in purchasing licenses from small musicians who aren t affiliated with the music cartels. One of his main points is that playing music in public places (including public radio frequencies) is the major form of advertising for musicians. Michael Tiemann writes about a Brazilian band that has been quite profitable by skipping the recording industry, providing the fans what they want, and selling CDs direct to fans [5]. This is one of many examples to illustrate the fact that the current music factory system is not required for musicians to make a profit. Amanda Palmer has written an interesting blog post about how the Warner music group wasn t getting as much money from Youtube as they wanted so they demanded that HER music videos be removed [6] (among many others). So we have a music studio that doesn t even pay the artist (below a certain number of sales the artist gets no payment, selling 30,000 albums is not enough to get a cent) demanding that the music videos be made unavailable to fans when the artist wants them published. This is a travesty and if similar licensing schemes are implemented for radio stations then we can expect that some radio stations will be financially discouraged from playing music even when the artist would be happy to have it played for free! In Australia we have an organisation that secretly taxes all viewing of material that they think is under copyright with a suitable license (they give no detailed information on how they determine the copyright and license status they probably violate my license by taxing universities for copying posts from my blog). Educational institutions and other organisations that sign up get to pay them some money based on what they are deemed to have used. The money is then distributed to the creators in proportion to the amount of use their material received. The distribution rules state that any amount less than $50 per year for an Australian resident or $200 per year for a non-resident will be instead redistributed to other people [7]. Usually analysis of The Long Tail [8] comprises the majority of the sales if users are given enough opportunities to search for a product that is a good match for their requirements. This is the entire basis of businesses such as Amazon.com. The Australian Copyright Agency (Copyright Agency Limited CAL) seems to have a business model of taking all the revenue that might be earned by the creative people in the long tail and give it all to the top performers. If a similar system was implemented for the US music industry then it would be great for Michael Jackson s estate, but bad for the vast majority of musicians. It seems likely to me that the current situation with the music industry is fairly optimal for making a few very popular musicians very rich. The proposed changes for the US will make things even better/worse (depending if you are among the rich few or the majority of the population). One thing we need to ask ourselves is whether we want laws that will make a few people rich or laws that will give many people an adequate income for work they enjoy and which also enriches our culture. This correct decision seems obvious to me. Can anyone think of other good points that should be raised when discussing such issues with people who don t consider copyright to be a big issue?

• [1] http://blog.reidreport.com/2009/06/paul-porter-speaks-truth-to-black-radio.html
• [2] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=178058
• [3] http://ebonyjet.com/culture/index2.aspx?id=13434
• [4] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/artists-should-pay-cafes/
• [5] http://opensource.org/node/444
• [6] http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/66586355/the-man-strikes-again-youtube-wars
• [7] http://www.copyright.com.au/assets/documents/distribution_rules_0809.pdf
• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

Hello, The DebConf10 local team would like to announce availability of visa information at http://debconf10.debconf.org/visas.xhtml Full information is contained at that page, provided by our lawyer; however some important points are indicated below. - The United States depends on its tens of millions of visitors annually for its economy to function. Getting approved for a visa is not a rare exception, and it is even easier given our generous free help from an immigration lawyer. - If you are from a Visa Waiver Program country (see visa page), fill out the ESTA web form to apply for your travel authorization now. You don t need any information about the conference itself or your means of travel. - If you will need to apply for a visa, check the visa information page for information on what to do. Carefully check the wait times for your country s embassy. For most countries there is no *immediate* urgency, but plan to get an appointment well in advance of May 2010. - Make sure you will have a passport that will expire in February 2011 or later (6 months after the latest possible DebConf date). If not, apply for a new passport. Special note to Venezuelans: Since the wait time for a visa appointment in Caracas is so long, we have been paying special attention to its visa application process. We have reports that the dates for visa appointments are moving quickly, getting later and later. If you are are applying for a visa in Caracas, you need to make an appointment immediately. You just need to make an appointment now, supporting materials can be assembled later. Also consider applying for a visa in a different US embassy such as the Quito, Ecuador one with a significantly shorter wait time. Consult with our lawyer for advice on the advantages and disadvantages of doing this. The local team hopes that everyone interested can meet us in New York City and have a great DebConf10 experience! Feel free to email us (publicly archived list) or ask in #debconf-team or #debconf-nyc on OFTC with your questions or ideas. - The DebConf10 Local Team

8 RC bugs in 8 days I got back from vacation about 10 days ago. For the first time in recent years, I've spent 2 weeks of vacation mostly without email (excluding 2 "breaks" of 10 minutes each in an internet point, just to verify that my electronic world was not collapsing). The net result is that I feel very recharged and more productive both at work and for other tasks. Including Debian. Hence, during last week, I've tried an experiment. When during the day I feel bored about a given task, instead of reloading compulsively the page of an online newspaper, instead of checking (once more) my email, instead of checking (once more) my feeds, I try to fix an RC bug. For the first week, the result has been encouraging: one RC bug fixed per day (on the average, some day I haven't fixed any, some other 2 or 3):

• 30/08/2009 bug #543067 - mergelog - tell autoreconf to install missing files (i.e., pass "-i")
• 31/08/2009 bug #536971 - mergeant - add missing build-dep, thanks kibi for the triage
• 01/09/2009 bug #521937 - gplanarity - add missing build-dep, thanks peter green for the triage
• 02/09/2009 bug #537010 - gspot - add missing build-dep and CFLAGS/LIBS on libgnomeui
• 03/09/2009 bug #536955 - gnubiff - patch configure.ac to add libgnomeui CFLAGS/LIBS
• 04/09/2009 bug #536934 - xnee - patch configure.in to add libgnomeui CFLAGS/LIBS
• 05/09/2009 bug #537033 - hspell-gui - patch configure.in to add libgnomeui CFLAGS/LIBS
• 06/09/2009 bug #537030 - gnome-photo-printer - add missing build-dep on libglade2-dev

In some sense, this try to be kudos to the amazing initiative of Sesse, a few releases ago (or was it Lenny? my memory still sucks, no matter how recharged I feel). He has been fixing one RC bug a day for several months. I'm quite sure I won't be able to deliver the same result, but maybe this post will motivate other people, so that collectively we can fix a handful of RC bugs per day. Of course in the beginning it's easy, because there are a lot of "simple" bugs to fix and also because (as you can notice in the list above) "clusters" of similar RC bugs, that require similar fixes, can be identified. But the effort is useful nevertheless, since it cleans up RC bug list enabling more capable people to fix more resistent bugs. I'm gonna tag RC reports like this one with "rc" and "debian". If people follow up with similar initiatives we can rinse out of planet a feed of pretty good news for the Debian development community In the interest of sharing best practices, here is my RC bug squashing workflow:

1. go to http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php, choose "both" (i.e. squeeze + sid) as distribution and sort by "bugnr" (so that you can avoid most recent reports, which are not yet NMU material)
2. choose an inspiring bug form the list which is at least 1 week old (better at least 2 or 3), study its log; for the moment, I tend to prefer neglected bug logs, where the maintainer has been unresponsive
3. apt-get source package , sudo cowbuilder --build package_1.2-3.dsc , install the result and check for bug reproducibility
4. fix the bug ! (yes, this is the easy step ), taking care of not changing anything else
5. dch --nmu
6. dpkg-source -b package-1.2/ , sudo cowbuilder --build package_1.2-3.1.dsc , check if the bug is fixed and the package otherwise working
7. lintian package_1.2-3.1.changes , check that there are no regressions in lintian errors wrt latest uploaded version
8. interdiff -z package_1.2-3.diff.gz package_1.2-3.1.diff.gz , check that no unexpected changes have slipped in
9. debsign package_1.2-3.1*changes , dput -e 2 package_1.2-3.1*changes (as allowed by devref 5.11.1)
10. nmudiff --delay 2 , in the text: briefly describe in what the patch consists, and mention devref 5.11.1

I welcome suggestions on how to improve the above workflow in order to be both more effective and more polite with maintainers (FWIW, all the maintainer feedback I've received thus far for the above NMUs has been totally positive: you rock guys.).

Cory Doctorow has written an interesting column for the Locus Magazine about his experience in giving away free copies of his books [1]. Mainly he rants about some of the criticism he has received, initially it was people claiming that giving away books for free only worked because he was not a well known author, now people claim that it only works because he is well known. I d like to see authors publish free work (as Cory does) and then sell print-on-demand t-shirts. Cafepress.com has their cheapest t-shirt at $US16.99, Zazzle.com has a shirt for $US15.95, and SpreadShirt.com has shirts for as little as $US6.40 but their web site is difficult to navigate and gives me a lack of confidence in their operation. In spite of the difficult web site SpreadShirt.com seems to be the best offer at $6.40 for a basic shirt, that means either lower prices for the customer (and more sales) or a higher profit margin. The sale of a t-shirt could give the same revenue to the author as a sale of a book while also costing less than the price of one book in a store. It would be more useful after the book has been read (something you can wear rather than something that takes up space on a shelf), and it would advertise the book. The amount of effort required to create a decent shirt is a small fraction of the effort required to write a book, in many cases the cover artwork could be used with only minor alterations. Cory Doctorow s novels page has images that could make seven different great shirts with a small amount of effort [2]. I m sure that there are also many people who want to buy the book and the shirt, so it should give a general increase in revenue.

• [1] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/09/cory-doctorow-special-pleading.html
• [2] http://craphound.com/index.php?cat=5