Apparently, live.com thinks that any browser coming from a ppc architecture is a mobile device. This sucks for the users of the hundreds of thousands of powerpc desktops still in service. I don't use hotmail myself, but i do support people who use it. I set one of my clients up with debian squeeze on their PPC machine because all the proprietary vendors have basically given up on that architecture -- debian represents the best way to get modern tools on these machines (and other machines too, but that's a different argument). However, this client couldn't get to their hotmail account, despite using the latest version of iceweasel (3.5.12). They were directed to a crippled interface that didn't include the ability to attach files, and was a gross waste of the desktop screen space. It appears to be the "mobile" version of live.com's services. However, the same version of iceweasel on an i686 test machine could access the standard version of hotmail with no trouble. My friend jeremyb helpfully suggested fiddling with the User Agent string exported by the browser. Some experimentation shows that the presence of the string "ppc" within any parenthetical expression in the UA makes live.com show the crappy interface. You can try it yourself (if you have a hotmail account) on your x86 or amd64 machine by adding (ppc) to the default valule of general.useragent.extra.firefoxComment in about:config. Stupid stupid stupid. I'd like to have fixed this by overriding the browser's reported architecture (or simply by removing it -- why does a web server need to know the hardware architecture of my client?). But there doesn't appear to be a way to do that with the way that mozilla constructs the UA. Instead, i needed to add a new string key named general.useragent.override which is not exposed by default in about:config. This raises some questions:

• Why are we publishing our hardware architectures from our browsers anyway? This seems like unncessary leakage, and not all browsers do it. For example, Arora doesn't leak this info (despite a poorly-argued request to do so). Browsers are already too identifiable by servers. This information should not be leaked by default.
• Why does live.com insist on sending ppc users to the crappy "mobile" version? Are they trying to encourage the treadmill of hardware upgrades that proprietary vendors benefit from? Is there some less insidious explanation? Are there actually more powerpc-based mobile devices than desktops?
• why is there no simple way to tell Firefox/Iceweasel to override or suppress the architecture information? Having to override the useragent string entirely means that when iceweasel does eventually get upgraded, it's going to report the wrong version unless i can remember to update the override myself (i can't reasonably expect a non-techie client who never heard of user agents before today to remember how to do this correctly).

Any ideas?Tags: browser, hotmail, powerpc, ppc, useragent, wtf

Okay, adding comments lead exactly to the expected situation of spam comments, so I just added fccv and started using typepad to help me in fighting with spam. I hope it will catch most of it (it would catch all I've had to delete manually so far) and will avoid false positives.

It might seem odd that someone who has come from a research organisation to one which is for education and research should ask a question such as the title! Some explanations are in order. Mathematics is one of the oldest intellectual activities of mankind, so it is not surprising that the amount of mathematics that has already been done is enormous as compared with almost any other discipline. One consequence (that has not escaped notice!) is that people who prove theorems are often much older today than in earlier years. Another important consequence is that for anyone active in mathematical research today, most mathematical learning has happened outside the classroom. Moreover, such non-classroom learning is far from linear. Monuments of mathematical beauty are built on wooden stilts; the latter are only turned into firm pillars when one finally writes down the fruits of one s research. The above paragraph is nothing new to working mathematicians, but each incoming generation must learn it anew. This is because courses and books in mathematics are often structured in a linear way. There are clearly defined prerequisites and everything new is either defined or proved in strict deductive order. This serves the important purpose that each fresh batch of students verifies the grand edifice . However, it also leaves many a student with the false impression that this is how mathematics is done. Even worse, it may leave the impression that classroom and textbook learning is what mathematics is about. One should certainly strive to improve one s classroom skills, to write more readable textbooks and to design better courses. However, one should never lose sight of the wide open spaces where many new mathematicial objects are built.

Another one, just not to forget it, since I'm just starting to play with grsecurity. When building package under pbuilder/cowbuilder and using a grsec kernel, you have some stuff to tune. I built my grsec kernel with the sysctl options enabled, so it's easier to fix. The first thing I needed, not directly related to building packages, is the permission for my user to execute stuff in untrusted folder (since I really need to be able to run stuff from my home). I've configured Trusted Path Execution with:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo sysctl -a grep kernel.grsecurity.tpe
kernel.grsecurity.tpe = 1
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_gid = 500
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_invert = 1
kernel.grsecurity.tpe_restrict_all = 1 So what I need from there is to add my user to that group:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo addgroup --gid 500 grsec-tpe
Adding group grsec-tpe' (GID 500) ...
Done.
corsac@hidalgo: sudo adduser corsac grsec-tpe
Adding user corsac' to group grsec-tpe' ...
Adding user corsac to group grsec-tpe
Done. That works fine for general usage (at the cost of less protection for my user). When trying to build stuff in pbuilder, the first problem I hit was during dependencies installation:

[81903.221359] grsec: From 127.0.0.6: denied chmod +s
of /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/usr/local/share/sgml/stylesheet
by /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/bin/chmod[chmod:10424] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:0/0,
parent /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.8616/var/lib/dpkg/info/sgml-base.postinst[sgml-base.posti:10421] uid/euid:0/0 gid/egid:0/0 grsec enforces some more protection when in a chroot, and especially forbids some operations in there. So I add an exception, using sysctl. For that, a convenient /etc/sysctl.conf.d/grsec.conf will help:

# we need to do stuff in chroots for package building
kernel.grsecurity.chroot_deny_chmod=0

# lock grsec sysctl
# kernel.grsecurity.grsec_lock=1 The last one is still in comment since I know I'll have to tune further the sysctl. With this, the build-deps install fine, but when starting the build itself, it fails because I can't execute stuff inside chroot, and especially not debian/rules:

Sep 20 19:43:24 hidalgo kernel: [87339.510137] grsec: From 127.0.0.6: denied untrusted exec of
/home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/tmp/buildd/evolution-data-server-2.30.3/debian/rules by
/home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv[fakeroot:10916] uid/euid:1234/1234 gid/egid:1234/1234,
parent /home/corsac/debian/pbuilder/build/cow.26657/usr/bin/fakeroot-sysv[fakeroot:10895] uid/euid:1234/1234 gid/egid:1234/1234 That's again because of TPE. Because, inside the chroot, the pbuilder user (uid 1234) doesn't belong to the grsec-tpe group (which doesn't even exist). So the correct fix here is to create a 500 group inside the chroot, and add the pbuilder user:

corsac@hidalgo: sudo cowbuilder --login --save-after-login
-> Copying COW directory
[ ]
root@hidalgo:/# sudo addgroup --gid 500 grsec-tpe
Adding group grsec-tpe' (GID 500) ...
Done.
root@hidalgo:/# sudo adduser pbuilder grsec-tpe
Adding user pbuilder' to group grsec-tpe' ...
Adding user pbuilder to group grsec-tpe
Done. Et voil !

I've just released a new Blog::Spam module to CPAN. The Blog::Spam module is 99% of the code behind the blog & forum spam detection service. On the whole I'm pleased with the way that development has gone, and although I'm going to keep tinkering it is essentially "complete". Now I need to go back and fix bugs in chronicle, asql, and rinse. ObSubject: "You are just an ordinary man in a cape!" - Batman Begins.

One of reasons of recent move my blog to custom Django based application was use of comments. Today I've finally found time to enable support for them, so you can provide me feedback directly without mailing me or reposting on some planet where my blog is syndicated. I hope it will not turn into fight with spam bots, for now I'm using only protection Django has built-in.

This is mostly inspired on this article. The main difference is that I talk about sup instead of mutt, and use SpamAssassin together with bogofilter. Having all these utilities installed and the sources for sup configured, you only need to touch procmail and sup configuration files. My ~/.procmailrc contains a lot of comments, but what it does is basicly the following: If the message is smaller than 250 KiB, it calls SpamAssassin with it. This will create the headers X-Spam-Level and X-Spam-Status in this message. Only messages smaller than 250KiB are considered because most spam isn't bigger than that, and considering big messages would overload SpamAssassin. Then, if SpamAssassin consider this message as spam, tell bogofilter about it. Next, call bogofilter, which will add the X-Bogosity header to the message. Now we have to configure sup. We need to tell it to update bogofilter when we manually mark a message as spam. For this we can use ~/.sup/hooks/mark-as-spam.rb. We must consider two cases: the case where bogofilter thought it was not spam, and the case where bogofilter was not sure about its status. In the first case, we must tell it to forget that the message was not spam and to register it as spam now. In the second, just register it as spam. Also, we don't want spam on inbox. So we can edit ~/.sup/hooks/before-add-message.rb to look for the headers generated by SpamAssassin and Bogofilter and remove the :inbox label. It's important to mark unsure messages with a label so that we don't forget to mark it as spam if it is, and as not spam if it's not. So we need a way to mark messages as not spam. I included a new keybinding in ~/.sup/hooks/startup.rb. Unfortunatelly, I don't know how to include a new keybinding in sup without repeating all the keybindings for the mode I'm dealing with, so that's how I've made it. The command removes the :unsure label and mark it as non-spam. It also sets the undo command, unregistering the message in bogofilter. The case where the message was previously marked as spam, and not unsure, is also handled. I'm sure there's a lot of room for improvement, specially in the Ruby part, but it seems to be working.

The week before DebConf has been traditionally been DebCamp. This has been advertised as a time for core teams to come early to work on their projects together, and this post will talk more about what that means.At DebCamp, there is not much infrastructure set up yet. We have (unfurnished) hacklabs, accommodations, and usually food from the very beginning. We'll have Internet access, but the network and power distribution isn't set up yet. People find what they can and make their own space to work. The DebConf team works on setting up hacklabs starting on day 0 or 1, and the DebCampers serve as the test subjects to make sure that everything works.There intentionally aren't many scheduled activities during DebCamp. The organizers have too much else to do, and events aren't the main purpose of DebCamp. If some people wanted a place to meet, they could probably find a place, though. Some years, there have been one or two workshop type events on the DebCamp schedule.DebCamp has frequently been explained by "Development teams like debian-installer and debian-edu also have the possibility of meeting beforehand for undisturbed collaborative work. ... Interested teams should contact the organizers upfront to make special arrangements." (From the DC10 website) Also included in DebCamp are the DebConf organizers - we desperately need that time to pull organizers from over the world together to get us on the same page locally. Furthermore, anyone without a workplan can attend DebCamp by paying their actual costs.However, saying that DebCamp is limited to these groups of people doesn't reflect reality: Anyone can attend. Thus the DebCamp description doesn't necessarily reflect the actual limits for attending. This has the appearance of resulting in (and some people believe it has) a DebCamp which is biased towards those who well-connected with organizers, since they know that basically anyone can go and get a free extended holiday with Debian people. In fact, getting anyone to review the submitted workplans has met resistance in the last few years.For DebConf10, we did manage to reach agreement to filter out possible tourist-like people, but it was a similar (or only slightly more strict) criteria than DebConf itself. This was done very late, too late to be fair to force adjustments in travel plans of too many people. The difference between the DebCamp listed criteria and who has gotten sponsored for DebCamp in the past caused contention among some new organizers this year. Why didn't they know that they would have qualified for DebCamp past years? The moral of the story is that we need to be more clear on the purpose of DebCamp and make the actual qualifications for attending concrete and well-known so that it remains fair.Of course, it's also true that non-core developers and other interested people to attending DebCamp is a good thing, since it is a strong motivator to get more involved in Debian. Local people are encouraged to attend and learn/hack/volunteer. DebCamp isn't meant to be exclusive, just to reflect the realities of a limited budget.
DebCamp is a very important part of DebConf, both for Debian development purposes and for DebConf set-up purposes. However, since it is a week of limited attendance with mostly the same people attending year after year, we need to ensure that it remains transparent to the rest of Debian.Tags: debconf

After being completed in German, Spanish, Swedish, dpkg manpages (including the horrific dpkg-source(1) manpage) are fully translated in French. 1937 paragraphs of geek jargon now using the beautiful langue de Moli re (however, I used the 21st century variant and not 17th century). You can thank my daughter for living in Bordeaux and us for visiting her this week-end, indeed. According to the statistics page, we still have some work to do, and 100% will be a no-go for squeeze but I think that the French l10n team can be proud anyway.

Given the impending deprecation of vservers, I've decided to make the switch to KVM on my laptop. Although lxc is a closer approximation to vservers, I decided to go with KVM due to it's support in Virtual Machine Manager. My first step was to confirm that my CPU would support kvm:

egrep -o "svm vmx" /proc/cpuinfo

If that command outputs either svm or vmx (depending on whether you have Intel or AMD hardware) then your CPU supports virtualization. I'm working on a host machine called chicken, which has a logical volume called vg_chicken0. All vservers on chicken operate on a root filesystem that is backed by their own logical volume. In this post, I'll describe the steps to convert the vserver hobo (which operates on a filesystem mounted on the host in /var/lib/vservers/hobo and is backed by the logical volume called vg_chicken0-hobo_root). Both chicken and hobo are running debian squeeze. vservers don't have a kernel installed or grub. KVM virtual servers need both. I was hoping I could simply enter the vserver, install both a kernal and grub and be ready to go. However, grub installation will fail miserably because grub can't figure out how to install on the underlying disk (which is hidden from the vserver). Next, I tried launching a kvm instance, passing a debirf generated ISO with the -c (cdrom) option. However, grub recognized that it was being installed onto a device that did not have a partition table (the logical volume was directly formatted with a file system). So, since I had disk space to spare, I created a new logical volume:

lvcreate --size 5GB --name hobo_root_new vg_chicken0

I then added a gpt partition table (why not prepare for the coming 2TB disks?) and created two partitions. One partition for grub2 and one for everything else:

parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new mklabel gpt
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart biosboot 2048 4095 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new set 1 bios_grub on 
parted /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_new unit s mkpart primary 4096

When prompted for the end of the last partition, choose: -1 and accept the adjustment. I had to eyeball cat /proc/partitions to figure out which dm device was the second partition (dm-19). I then created a file system:

mkfs -t ext3 /dev/dm-19

Mounted it:

mount /dev/dm-19 /mnt

And rsync'ed the data:

rsync -a /var/lib/vservers/hobo/ /mnt/

With the data in place, I chroot'ed and installed the packages I needed. When prompted, I chose not to install grub to the disk, because I wanted to wait until I had an environment in which the proper disk would be available to grub as it will when the virtual server boots (see below):

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
aptitude install linux-image-2.6-amd64 grub2
umount /proc
exit

Then, I cleaned up:

umount /mnt
umount /var/lib/vservers/hobo
lvremove vg_chicken0/hobo_root
lvrename vg_chicken0/hobo_root_new hobo_root
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp1
dmsetup remove /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root_newp2
kpartx -d /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root

And I removed it from /etc/fstab. Next, I created a new kvm virtual server, using the disk /dev/mapper/vg_chicken0-hobo_root and passing a debirf cd image with -c: virt-install --name hobo --ram 512 --disk /dev/mapper/vgchicken0-hoboroot -c /usr/local/share/debian/ISOs/debirf-rescuesqueeze2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64.iso After logging in, I installed grub2 (aptitude update; aptitude install grub2) and then I installed grub:

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/
grub-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

After running grub-install, edit /mnt/boot/grub/device.map so it reads:

(hd0) /dev/sda

Then, rerun grub-install command. I tried generating the grub.cfg file, but got an error message indicating that grub-probe would not detect the device providing / (because I was running on a ram file system from debirf). I added the following to /mnt/etc/fstab:

/dev/sda2  /     ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
proc       /proc proc defaults          0 0

And then re-generate the initrd image:

chroot /mnt
mount /proc
update-initramfs -u

So, I rebooted the virtual machine by typing:

exit
reboot

This dropped me into a grub shell. I manually typed:

root (hd0,gpt2)
linux /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2 ro
initrd /initrd.img
boot

Once booted, I logged in a completed the task with:

update-grub

I ve been sitting on this one since more than a month. I ve contacted upstream on the 19.08.2010 and the Debian maintainer on the 02.09.2010. No reaction from them till today, and no, my spamfilter does not eat mail ;) Still, I won t tell you the name of the software (but you could easily guess or check ) So let s put the grey hat on and begin ;) Foreword: when I write spam-filter, I mean some DNSBL/SPF/blah filter, not SpamAssassin, crm114 or other content-based filters. common spam-filters There are plenty of spam-filters out there which work after the following schema:

for check in checks:
    if check(mail) == BAD:
        reject(mail)
        break

And the checks often look like this:

def check(mail):
    errors = False
    result = some_magic(mail)
    if not errors: return result
    else: return GOOD

Here some_magic is a function that do the actual checks (DNSBL lookups etc) and which stores possible happened errors in errors. If an error occurred, it s safer to say the mail was good (or at least not bad) than bad. the problem This looks like a sane approach on the first sight: iterate over all checks and execute them until a mail is found to be spam (and the corresponding check did not end up in an error (imagine some weird DNS error for DNSBL or SPF checks here)). But then the author realizes that the errors might be global , like with DNS: when the first check notices that it can t resolve anything (ie. it ran into a DNS timeout three times in a row), the second check (which also utilizes DNS queries) will most probably result in an error too. After this he adds a global counter for DNS errors and skips all the checks that use DNS if this counter is >=3. Great idea , you say, saving resources is good . Bad idea , I say The reason is simple: DNSError != DNSError. Why? The local resolver might be broken, then every DNS query will end up with an error and DNS-based checks should be really disabled. The first three (out of eg. ten) DNSBLs might be down, but that s not a reason to skip the other seven and the SPF check. Etc Now let s assume all configured DNSBLs are working properly, so is the local resolver and the checks are:

checks = [check_HELO, check_SPF, check_DNSBL]

How could one attack this filter? the attack Set up the following zone

spam.example.com IN NS ns1.example.com
spam.example.com IN NS ns2.example.com
spam.example.com IN NS ns3.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx1.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx2.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx3.spam.example.com
spam2.example.com IN MX mx4.spam.example.com
ns1.example.com IN A 10.1.1.1
ns2.example.com IN A 10.2.2.2
ns3.example.com IN A 10.3.3.3

and greet the to-be-spammed-MTA with EHLO client1.spam.example.com
What happens? The spam-filter tries to resolve client1.spam.example.com in check_HELO to check whether the hostname matches the IP-address the connection is coming from, fails three times (there are no reachable DNS servers in 10.0.0.0/8) and continues with the next two checks, but these are skipped because of previous DNS errors. As no checks could identify the mail as being spam, the mail is delivered to the users mailbox. With some creativity this can also be used in SPF records (via spam2.example.com), sender-domains etc. conclusion If you want to save resources by skipping DNS-based checks after another (DNS-based) check failed don t! Think whether this is really the same error you are seeing Additionally this can be used as a sort of DoS against the not said software: according to the logs each of my tries needed between 30 and 36 seconds (!) to complete imagine some hundred simultaneous requests the end You think I did something wrong with that post? Throw the first stone then, I don t care.

There are corners of the Internest where foolish people congregate, and invent stories. These foolish stories are then read as gospel by trusting people, and reposted, until the original made-up source is concealed from view. As an attempt to stem this flow of disinformation, here are some commonly held but incorrect beliefs about the Mono framework, and an explanation of the reality of the situation, as far as I understand it. The next Mono version is co-developed with Microsoft There is a grain of truth behind this one, but it s a gross mischaracterisation. Mono 2.8, when it ships, will bundle, for convenience, a number of Free Software libraries, which are released by Microsoft under a license considered Free Software by the Free Software Foundation, the Ms-PL. These are:

• System.Web.Mvc and System.Web.Mvc2: ASP.NET MVC, a library for writing ASP.NET web pages with a model-view-controller design, similar to Rails for Ruby. This is not news System.Web.Mvc has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.4.2 (June 25th 2009). System.Web.Mvc2 has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6.7 (July 14th 2010).
• System.Numerics: Mono re-uses Microsoft s implementation of BigInteger.cs from the Dynamic Language Runtime (see below). This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, as it is part of .NET 4.0 (Mono 2.8 targets .NET 4.0 compatibility by default).
• System.Data.Services.Client: The OData SDK client library. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8.
• System.ComponentModel.Composition: The Managed Extensibility Framework, a library for writing and using plugins. This is similar in scope to the existing Mono.Addins project. This is indeed new to Mono 2.8, although it was added to Mono Trunk in 2009.
• System.Web.Extensions: Microsoft Ajax, a library for using Ajax inside ASP.NET projects. This is not news MicrosoftAjaxLibrary has been bundled in Mono since Mono 1.2.6 (11th December 2007).
• Microsoft.Scripting.Core and Microsoft.Dynamic: The Dynamic Language Runtime is a framework permitting implementation of dynamic languages (such as Python or Ruby) on top of the core .NET runtime. It is used for IronPython and IronRuby, amongst others. The DLR has very recently changed license from Ms-PL to Apache 2.0, but the version bundled in Mono is still under the older license. This is not news the DLR has been bundled in Mono since Mono 2.6 (14th December 2009).

So, to summarise, there are five Free Software libraries written by Microsoft under the Ms-PL included in Mono 2.8 but only two of those five are new, and none of them were co-developed in any meaningful sense. Mono development is dead There have been reports that Mono development has ended, on the basis that no commits have been made to Novell s Subversion server for a few weeks. However, these reports miss one minor detail Mono has moved to Github.com. There were 35 commits from 9 different people to the main mono.git repository (of dozens of repositories under the main Mono project) in the last 2 days, at time of writing far from dead. Mono lacks features found in Microsoft.NET Mono lacks libraries found in Microsoft.NET, such as the Windows Presentation Framework GUI toolkit. In terms of features, i.e. things implemented at a compiler or runtime level, Mono is typically more advanced. This is helped in no small part by Mono s Free Software development model, allowing experimentation and what if changes to the core runtime which a sluggish corporate behemoth like Microsoft cannot accommodate. To give three real-world examples, Mono allows embedding of its compiler as a service, and provides a REPL shell this is a planned feature for .NET 5.0, but has been available for years in Mono; Mono.Simd provides a number of data structures which will run on any version of Mono or Microsoft.NET, but will use optimized CPU extensions like SSE when run on a sufficiently new version of Mono, on an appropriate architecture as far as I m aware, there is nothing like this available or planned for Microsoft.NET. Mono is able to produce fully compiled, static executables which do not need to JIT anything at runtime this is used for iPhone compilation, for example, where JITters are not permitted. There is no comparable feature in Microsoft.NET. Clearly, Microsoft.NET can only be thought of as more featureful if one defines features in terms of does it have lots of libraries? in terms of functionality, Mono is ahead. Mono can sneak onto your system without your knowledge If you don t have the mono-runtime package installed, you can t run Mono apps. It is possible to install some Mono apps alongside the awful-yet-popular mononono equivs package, since the popular equivs script fails to place Conflicts on the correct packages (F-Spot will be blocked, Tomboy will not). No package in Debian or Ubuntu embeds its own copy of the Mono runtime, and we have no plans to make any changes to packaging which would allow execution of any C# application without mono-runtime installed. If one is using a different OS, then things may be different e.g. The Sims 3 for Mac & PC uses embedded Mono, which you wouldn t know about without looking. Canonical are pursuing a pro-Mono agenda, and are responsible for it being pushed in Debian Mono development has been happening in Debian for longer than Canonical has existed the first upload was made in April 2002. Ubuntu is made primarily from software already available in Debian deemed of sufficient quality, and when F-Spot and Tomboy became parts of the default Ubuntu desktop system in 2006, both pieces of software were already available in Debian and deemed of sufficient quality. Nobody working on Mono in Debian is paid by Canonical actually, that s not entirely true, three packages related to accessibility are officially maintained by someone who was hired by Canonical after doing the initial packaging work when he worked for Novell. But the Mono runtime itself, Canonical have no influence over its direction in Debian. As for a pro-Mono agenda , they ve always taken an extremely pragmatic approach to language choice, never showing any real preference for one language or another when it comes to app selection. They don t exhibit any overt anti-Mono policies, which is not the same thing. The names of people contributing to Mono in Debian are not secret check the pkg-mono team page on Alioth. The System.Windows.Forms namespace is protected by Microsoft patents The truth is, nobody knows for sure if SWF, or any other part of Mono, or any other framework such as Vala or Python, is covered by Microsoft patents. The way the US patent system is contrived, it is actively dangerous to check whether something contains any patents when you write it, as you are liable for triple damages should it later emerge that there WAS a patent, even if your searching missed the fact. You cannot patent an API or namespace only a specific implementation of a software concept, in those countries where software patents are permitted. There has never been any evidence shown that Mono s implementation of SWF, or indeed any part of Mono, infringes any Microsoft-held patents, because if that were the case, then the code would be rewritten to avoid the issue much like the approach taken by Linux kernel developers when a patent becomes apparent. The belief within the Mono community is that the core parts of Mono as defined in ECMA334/335 are safe (they are covered by the Microsoft Community Promise patent grant); any of the Ms-PL libraries mentioned above is definitely safe (Ms-PL includes an explicit patent grant); and the rest of the package is likely safe too (on the basis that it is a named component of the Open Innovation Network s list of protected software and on the basis that there s unlikely to be anything patentable in one of many implementations of basic ideas like database connectors). Nobody knows for sure, because that s how the system works. But, again, nobody knows for sure that Microsoft patents don t apply to other frameworks such as Python there is simply a belief and an assumption that they do not. MonoDevelop contributors removed GPL code from MonoDevelop, in an attack on the GPL This is somewhat disingenuous, given MonoDevelop is LGPL. The MonoDevelop team excised the remaining GPL code (and there wasn t much of it) in order to grant greater Freedom to developers. Previously, the entire MonoDevelop IDE was a GPL combination, meaning any add-ins for the IDE also needed to be GPL, regardless of developer choice. Now, any developer can write an add-in for MonoDevelop, using the license of their choice, whether another Free license like the Mozilla Public License, or a proprietary closed-source add-in. They are still welcome to produce GPL add-ins, if they want to, as well. Mono won t run random Microsoft.NET apps anyway, so isn t really cross-platform Actually, this one is often true. When developers write apps for Windows primarily, they rarely take the time to think is this the correct way to do it? and will often plough on with an assumption about the Windows way of doing things. It might be simple things like filesystem assumptions (assuming a case-insensitive filesystem, or assuming a backslash is used to separate directories, not a forward slash). It might be more involved, such as using P/Invokes into Windows-specific C libraries, when a more cross-platform alternative is possible. So, often, random applications for Microsoft.NET won t run on Mono. The reverse is also true F-Spot or GNOME Do are fairly heavily tied to Linux (or to UNIX-like OSes with X11, at any rate), through the libraries they invoke being fairly platform-specific. You can write platform-specific Java, with one quick piece of JNI, too. It should be noted, however, that Mono makes the chance of .NET applications being ported to Linux (and/or Mac) much more likely, since even in the worst case scenario, a company only needs to fix a portion of their source to make it cross-platform. The Mono team have a tool called MoMA, which will scan an application and its libraries, and give you detailed reports on the app s portability. This info is used at both ends by app vendors who want to become more portable, and by the Mono team who want to fill in the most frequently encountered blanks. And, it should be stressed, writing cross-platform apps is entirely possible if one desires it e.g. the IRC client Smuxi is pure cross-platform C#, and the executables compiled on Mono on Linux will run fine on Microsoft.NET on Windows. Portability in this direction is important too consider how many people have been introduced to Free Software thanks to availability of Free apps on Windows like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Pidgin or GIMP. You can download Tomboy for Windows, and work is ongoing on fixing Banshee portability issues (which are mostly caused by gStreamer). Mono on Android is a terrible idea which will be super slow There are two efforts to enable developers to write Android applications with Mono a paid proprietary product from Novell called MonoDroid, and an untitled porting effort by big-name Android hacker Koushik Dutta. I have no insight into MonoDroid since it hasn t been released yet, but Koush did some benchmarks of his work which exhibited some remarkable figures compared to Dalvik (and even compared to Sun Java for ARM). Those numbers haven t been updated to reflect the Froyo Dalvik JITter, but Mono on Android is still very exciting from a performance perspective. Mono isn t really Free Software The source code is all available under Free Software licenses. So, um, yes it is. We don t need Mono because we have $LANG By the same logic, we don t need $LANG because we have Mono. By all means, use the language of your choice other developers will use the language of their choice too. If you want to use Vala or Python or Java, then by all means, go ahead. It doesn t mean there s no room for more languages, better suited to other usage patterns. Haskell is great for some types of development, so is Fortran, and so is C#. You might not need Mono because of $LANG, but there are others in the world with different needs. Mono apps are all slow, and crash your computer, and stuff No userland app can crash your Linux system, unless there s a bug in the kernel, or you have some severe problems with your hardware. If you ve ever observed a crash as a result of running a Mono app, then it s really coincidence that Mono is tickling whichever part of your system is busted. As for slow startup time may well be slower than for apps written in C or Vala. There s a delay due to the JITter needing to compile all the libraries used by the application (we may AOT the most common libraries in a future Mono package version, at upstream s recommendation). Once an app is running, it should be fast compared to a Python app, and memory-light compared to a Java app. The new garbage collector in Mono 2.8 should also offer significant improvements to performance, especially under heavy workloads. Ubuntu s default GTK+ themes require Mono This is my favourite recent nonsense to emerge from the Internest. There are reports mostly restricted to IRC and blog comments, that (paraphrasing here) removing Mono removes the Ubuntu themes . Here s the reality: in Ubuntu 10.04, a new visual style was implemented throughout the distro. As part of this, small icons (e.g. notification area icons) were set to be black-and-white by default, and colourised when attention is needed (e.g. the power-off icon turns red when a reboot is needed, the messaging indicator turns green when there s a new message). All of these new monochrome icons are in a package named ubuntu-mono . Removing the ubuntu-mono icon package will also remove the new Ubuntu GTK+ themes, in the light-themes package. So there s your explanation: the themes have a dependence on some monochrome icons, not on the Mono framework.

I announced it some while ago on debian-project, we have a FTPMaster meeting this weekend. It started out with a little workout session View image before we started discussing some things from our agenda. In the middle of the discussion we took a little sidestep, looking for a victim to promote to ftpmaster. So we selected someone not attending, he can t run away screaming. And for that: Send your condolences over to Torsten Werner. Or maybe congratulations, your call :) Right now Mark is fixing up our byhand processing and Alex is doing some other Debian work, while I m merging patches from Luca. Thats it for now, sometime soon we are going to eat, after which we put some more discussions on our agenda. Still two more days to go :)

Is Low Quality in Italian Academia related to the choice of Low Quality Software? Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi wrote an interesting paper titled L-worlds: The curious preference for low quality and its norms [1]. The paper describes how in Italian universities (and large portions of Italian life) there are covert agreements that both parties in a transaction (the employee and the employer or the buyer and the seller) will deliver less than agreed while pretending that they are offering the agreed exchange. People who offer high quality in exchanges are discriminated against because they make people who offer low quality in exchange feel guilty. Nathan suggests that this is the explanation for people choosing to pay for inferior software from Microsoft instead of getting superior software for free [2]. Now it does seem quite plausible that someone who is offering low quality goods in the manner of Italian academia would refuse to consider software from any company other than Microsoft, after all the easiest way of selecting software is to phone a MS representative and be told exactly what to buy. But I don t think that this explains even a significant fraction of the people who refuse free software. There is no direct analogy between bilateral agreements to produce low quality and the choice of MS Software because MS Software is quite expensive (they demand what would be considered a high quality trade in the jargon of the paper). If someone was to buy one of the cheaper laptops in Australia (around $650 new) and upgrade to the full version of Windows 7 along with purchasing the home version of MS Office then the cost of software would be almost as much as the cost of hardware. If they wanted one other MS product then the cost of MS software would probably be greater than the cost of hardware. Hardware costs are steadily falling and MS prices are only increasing, for people who use MS software we should expect that soon the MS tax will be the majority of the costs of running a typical PC. Good Reasons for Choosing MS One thing we have to consider is that there are people who have good reasons for using MS software. One example is the companies that depend on proprietary applications which are central to their business. When the entire company s data is stored in an undocumented proprietary database it s really not easy to change to a different application even when everyone in the company knows the software to be of amazingly low quality. If the vendor of the proprietary application in question decides to only support MS Windows then it s customers (victims?) have no choice about which OS to use. One interesting thing to note about such companies that are locked in to proprietary software is that the amount that they spend per year on license and support fees is usually greater than the cost of hiring one good programmer. If a few such companies formed a consortium to develop free software to manage their business where each company paid the salary of one programmer then after a couple of years of development they could move to the free software and reduce their operating expenses. Another category of users who have a good reason to choose MS is the people who play games seriously. If you want to play games then MS Windows does offer some real advantages. The price of games will usually be a fraction of the hardware cost (the serious gamers spend a lot more on hardware than most people) and MS Windows is apparently the best PC OS for commercial games. Personally I ve found that there are more than enough free games on Linux to waste my time, Warzone 2100 [3] is one that I currently play, and I ve tried Battle for Wesnoth [4] in the past and found it too time consuming and addictive. How a Preference for Low Quality could lead to Microsoft I think that everyone who has any significant experience in the computer industry has encountered companies that have large areas of low quality. This generally tends to be in large corporations as small companies can t afford the waste. In some large corporations Linux on the desktop is never considered, even when people are hired as Linux sysadmins and there are obvious productivity benefits to having the same OS on the desktop as on the servers (even if two desktop PCs are required so that proprietary software can be run on MS-Windows). Major wrote a good satire of the corporate IT non-working culture with a comparison to medical work [5], it illustrates the principle of a coalition to ensure low quality. He later documented how he was sacked by the low quality coalition at a company that uses a lot of Microsoft software [6]. So it does seem that when customers don t care at all about the quality of the result it does help drive some sales for Microsoft. But that doesn t explain the market share that they have. It takes a lot of work to get Market Share without Quality Microsoft has spared no effort in gaining market share. Every possible effort including buying out small competitors, aggressively FUDing competition, using all manner of legal attacks (including the threat of patent suits), and deliberately breaking standards has been used. I think it s reasonable to assume that the MS senior management are not entirely stupid, they do so many things that are unethical and possibly illegal because they know that they need to do so to maintain their market share. The result is that the market capitalisation of MS is almost as high as that of Apple and Apple makes vastly superior products. Given the amount of effort that MS uses to keep market share it seems apparent that they aren t just relying on customers not caring about quality. Should users have to Understand Computers? My observation is that most users don t want to know much about how their computers work. The desire to understand computers seems to be about as common as the desire to understand cars, people just want to buy one that looks good and have it work. The difference is that cars are very compatible while computers aren t. Cars have the same controls in the same places and large parts of the design are specified by law so that they can t differ between models. Proprietary software is usually intentionally incompatible with other software (both open and proprietary) to try and gain a competitive advantage. Hardware is often incompatible due to the rapid developments in technology and the requirements for new interfaces to take advantage of new features. In concept it seems reasonable for someone who is about to spend $30,000 on a car and $1000 on a computer (for hardware and software) to spend 30 times longer considering which brand of car to buy. One could argue that more than 30 times as much consideration should be given to the car as most people can t afford to discard a car that they don t like. As people spend a few minutes considering which brand of car to buy they can be excused for spending a few seconds considering which type of computer to buy. But once a choice has been made about which software to use it s very difficult to change to something else, while in comparison it s easy to drive a car that was manufactured by a different company. So a poorly informed choice made at an early stage can have costly long-term affects when buying software. If we had mandated open standards for file formats and data interchange then users would be able to make choices that don t result in their data being locked in to some proprietary format. Such standards could be set through government tender processes, if every government agency was to only buy software that complies with open standards then the proprietary software vendors would scramble to make their products less incompatible. The result would be that bad choices in purchasing software could become learning experiences that result in better purchases in future instead of being a lock on users that forces them to keep using the same software that doesn t satisfy their needs. Conclusion I think that the best thing about the paper by Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi is that it highlights the issue of low quality. No-one wants to be considered a loser, so maybe this can encourage people to strive for high quality (or at least try to make their work suck a little less). Regardless of the conclusion they eventually reach, it s probably good for people to occasionally wonder do I suck? .

• [1] http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/documents/working-papers/2009/2009-08.pdf
• [2] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=405
• [3] http://wz2100.net/
• [4] http://www.wesnoth.org/
• [5] http://blog.ninbtma.org/2007/10/will-i-miss-it.html
• [6] http://blog.ninbtma.org/2007/11/just-forward-fucking-ticket_6090.html

I use the following python script to choose a random background on login:

#!/usr/bin/python
import os, os.path, random, gconf
startdir="PUT YOUR FOLDER HERE"
gkey="/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename"imgs=[]
for root, dirs, files in os.walk(startdir):
  for file in files:
    base, ext = os.path.splitext(file)
    if ext.lower() in [".jpg", ".png", ".svg"]:
      imgs.append(os.path.join(root, file))img = random.choice(imgs)gconf.client_get_default().set_string(gkey, img)

It's fairly simple, but shows the power of the python libraries. It "walks" the directory tree, collects all files of the given extensions, chooses one at random, then updates the gconf key for the Gnome background image.P.S. Yes, I know a couple of ways to do that in a shell script, too. However, then one I used failed with whitespace in file names, so I decided to rewrite it in a much more sane language ... the random involved was also a hack.

I'm a keen amateur photographer and have been since I was at school. Of course back then it involved smelly chemicals, strange lights and dark rooms. The expense and hassle of film eventually did it in for me and in 2000 I bought my first digital camera. After a series of increasingly sophisticated devices, back in 2007 I bought a Nikon D80 and soon thereafter I discovered that you can do things with raw camera files that have some analogies to the darkroom processing of my youth. For most of the time since then I've used UFraw for processing my raw images, combined with increasingly sophisticated batch files to harass it into shape. It has increasingly frustrated me that UFraw doesn't do several things that are essential to processing most files, since once the image leaves that programming it usually ends up in an 8-bpp processing path. It seems to me that the saving the processed image into an 8bpp format like jpeg is the last step before leaving the image alone. Of course this can't always be the case since sometimes a judicious use of the 'Resynthesizer' plugin can make some unsightly elements just disappear, or one needs to carefully apply some censorship to the 14 year old in the background so that the 7 year-old's parents can put the photo on the mantelpiece without worrying about what Granny will say about how much better children's manners were in her day. I'm hoping too, that when I have grandchildren I'll be able to tell them that 'in my day we only had 8 bits per pixel, and we were lucky', but The Gimp isn't there yet, no matter how much promise Gegl seems to offer. The thing that has particularly annoyed me is sharpening. UFraw doesn't, and as a result my workflow has either involved applying some blanket sharpening, much like the camera does, or moving the image into a second tool just to apply some sharpening. This week has been particularly demanding, as the school asked me to 'take some photographs of the production'. So of course that's a thousand-odd photos that I want to do a cull down to a hundred or so, and then I want to quickly do justice to the good ones so I can move on to other stuff. Well this time my frustration with UFraw hit that ceiling that got me to try something else. I've done this in the past, and found myself going full circle and ending up right back at UFraw with a few extra lines added to my script, but this time I tried rawstudio and in processing the 'can you do the class shots overnight please' test it produced much nicer results in much less time than I have ever been able to with UFraw. So I've switched, and the more I use it the more convinced I am that UFraw will be getting uninstalled pretty soon. That's not to say that rawstudio is perfect: it isn't. In particular it has some user interface failures that are kind of annoying to me, but they aren't enough to stop me using it. In fact I liked it so much that I immediately had to pull the nightly repository and build that, just to get the new saturation handling. The user-interface niggles that do get to me are:

• The keyboard key to switch between zoom 1:1 and zoom to fit is '*', which I have to access with 'shift' down since I'm on a laptop. This was less bad when I discovered I could right-click, but it's still annoying. 'z' would be a much better choice for right-handers, or '/' for left-handers. Or perhaps they could both be made to work. When working on an image I often want to switch between some particular area and the whole image when checking colour balance, sharpening, noise, etc, so this is one of the most used keyboard functions.
• Using the mouse wheel to adjust sliders varies greatly in it's effect. A single detent for contrast or saturation often overshoots the useful range, so I have to drag the fiddly slider a fiddly pixel-and-a-half to go from a contrast of 1.00 to 1.03.
• Not all modifications to an image show in the UI. When I crop or align an image RawStudio remembers the settings for these things (which is fantastic) but if I come back three months later I might not realise I'm looking at a cropped image. I can see all of the hue, saturation, sharpening and so forth, but there should be something in the UI to indicate that the crop and alignment have happened also.
• It confuses me what settings get applied to a fresh image. I seem to get some kind of random selection of which DCP profile is being applied, and there's no way to set a default sharpening or noise reduction. Of course some of this is hard: noise reduction defaults really need to change depending on camera & ISO, and sharpening defaults probably should vary by lense and aperture too, to some extent.
• The icon view runs across the top, taking up important screen real-estate. On my widescreen laptop I'd like the option to run it vertically where otherwise there's wasted space.

Things that I immediately love, over what UFraw gave me:

• Sharpening.
• Straightening images.
• Cropping images (in some versions of UFraw this works, and in some it's broken, but the UI is useless in all of versions I've seen).
• Colour profiles.
• Lens corrections.

Things that I immediately miss from UFraw:

• White balance presets.
• Wavelet noise reduction.

There are a bunch of things that RawStudio also does that I haven't particularly found a use for yet, but which I suspect I will quite like when I do. The image classification and stuff seems likely to be useful, for sure. In choosing to switch RawStudio I also looked at RawTherapee, which has recently relicensed under the GPL, but I chose RawStudio because it has vastly better performance on my laptop, and because I found the interface much more immediately accessible. RawTherapee also exceeds what UFraw can do in many ways, and looks like it might be useful for the really difficult cases, but learning to drive it with any facility could take some time. Especially if you only have an i7 740QM with 6G RAM, it would seem.

Usage of accelerated BLAS libraries seems to shrouded in some mystery, judging from somewhat regularly recurring requests for help on lists such as r-sig-hpc (gmane version), the R list dedicated to High-Performance Computing. Yet it doesn't have to be; installation can be really simple (on appropriate systems). Another issue that I felt needed addressing was a comparison between the different alternatives available, quite possibly including GPU computing. So a few weeks ago I sat down and wrote a small package to run, collect, analyse and visualize some benchmarks. That package, called gcbd (more about the name below) is now on CRAN as of this morning. The package both facilitates the data collection for the paper it also contains (in the vignette form common among R packages) and provides code to analyse the data---which is also included as a SQLite database. All this is done in the Debian and Ubuntu context by transparently installing and removing suitable packages providing BLAS implementations: that we can fully automate data collection over several competing implementations via a single script (which is also included). Contributions of benchmark results is encouraged---that is the idea of the package. The paper itself describes the background and technical details before presenting the results. The benchmark compares the basic reference BLAS, Atlas (both single- and multithreaded), Goto, Intel MKL and a GPU-based approach. This blog post is not the place to recap all results, so please do see the paper for more details. But one summary chart regrouping the main results fits well here: This chart, in a log/log form, shows how reference BLAS lags everything, how multithreaded newer Atlas improves over the standard Atlas package currently still the default in both distros, how the Intel MKL (available via Ubuntu) is fairly good but how Goto wins almost everything. GPU computing is compelling for really large sizes (at double precision) and too costly at small ones. It also illustrates variability and different computational cost across the methods tested: svd is more expensive than level-3 matrix multiplication, and the different implementations are less spread apart. More details are in the paper; code, data etc are in the package gcbd. The larger context is to do something like this benchmarking exercise, but across distributions, operating systems and possibly also GPU cards. Mark and I started to talk about this during and after R/Finance earlier this year and have some ideas. Time permitting, that work should be happening in the GPU/CPU Benchmarks (gdb) project, and that's why this got called gcbd as a simpler GPU/CPU Benchmarks on Debian Systems study.

I have always liked learning and understanding history. Since I discovered him, for a couple of years already I always try to catch Javier Garciadiego's program Conversaciones sobre historia, Saturday 9AM in the Horizonte 108 radio station (can be listened to online). This program started by going over the events just before the beginning of the 1910 revolution in Mexico - and along slightly over five years, one hour per week and following different threads, the program has reached the end of the Cristiada, in the early 1930s. Garciadiego has a very nice, followable, amenable way of telling history, and I have recommended his program to many friends. This last June, I spent some days in Guatemala City, for DrupalCamp Centroam rica. I stayed with my good Colombian friend, Dilson, and at his house he had framed a poster of the History of the Civilizations. Of course, I got my nose close to it, guessing as many faces as possible in the lot. And he showed me his last Christmas present: Two books, each of them with 6 CDs. One is Historia de las Civilizaciones, the second one is Historia de las independencias. They are made by Colombia's very well known and well regarded historian Diana Uribe. I copied the CDs in order to listen to them later And wow, was I impressed! Diana Uribe makes a great narrative about topics that to some people would seem boring and dry. As I said, I have always found passion in understanding the human processes that have shaped civilization and brought us all the way to where we stand now. Well, Diana Uribe manages to bring more "normal" people to this passion. While looking for information on her to share in this blog post, I found so many places offering download of her disks, with apparently young people talking about how she has got them all so excited and interested in history... That's, I think, the best "thank you" any academician can get: having non-specialists say how her work has opened up the passion of one of the world's least sexy professions to them. And yes there are so many "thank you" and "I want" commentaries, so much of what I would call "fan mail", that it took me a bit to find an online library carrying both works. And yes, at ~US$50 each, I do intend to buy them. Now, why am I writing this today? Well, yes, because I finished listening to the series today, but besides During this year, most of Latin American countries conmemorate their 200 years of existence. Most of the independentist struggles in the continent started in 1809-1810. And today is the "partying" day in Mexico Says the legend that in the night between September 15 and 16, 1810, a priest who is always painted as old and charismatic called on his small town urging the people to rise and fight for independence, and as a result of that, only 11 years later Mexico was a fully independent country, spanning from Costa Rica to California, and... well, a nice and very idealized myth. A century later, in 1910, after a very long stability and growth period (attained mostly through repression, the same abstract thing named as "the people" rose against the dictator Porfirio D az, who had been Mexico's president for 30 years. The revolution deeply changed the social face of the country, but politically... After ~15 years of fighting, the result was that a 30 year long dictatorship was replaced by a 70 year long one... And our political system still has not evolved beyond that model. Now, comparing what has not improved nor even stayed the same but went backwards... A century ago, the festivities of the hundred years of independence were a time for showing pride, for showing to the guests from more "civilized" countries how ours was by then a modern, thriving country worth believing in, worth investing in: Besides the important, majestic and well built monuments that were erected and still stand today (i.e. the Column of the Independence or Hemiciclo a Ju rez, many institutions that would socially shape the next century even after D az's death, even after he had been declared not the role model we wanted after all were born: The National University (nowadays the most important university in Latin America), the National School for Professors, the Railroad Technical School and many others (see Javier Aranda's note for some more details)... The celebration was well-thought and planned. Of course, it didn't go into some darker corners, the country was as uneven and unfair as it can be for the poorer indigenous population (which back then was a majority), and what not. But this year? Well, we are expecting an impressive show tonight (which I won't see, even though I'd like to, as I no longer have a TV and even if I had wanted to go downtown for the celebration, different government branches are insisting we should just sit and watch it by TV at home as it can be too crowded... so not even that was well thought out Of course not every Mexican can go to the same square and see the same de-facto president do the ritual, but some more redundancy could be thought, spreading acts through all of the city instead of concentrating the festivities all along Reforma. But anyway Leaving aside our current de-facto ruler's inabilities to do anything worthy, which are already well known and documented... I took this opportunity to listen to a great work, and am most happy to do it, and to be able to share it with you.

Last month I gave a presentation on the interaction between Android and kernel upstream at Linuxcon. The video for that is now available here (requires registration). Contrary to stories you may have heard, I do not dropkick anyone through a window.

There's some parallels between the Android/upstream scenario and Canonical's approach to upstream. Mark wrote a lengthy defence of Canonical's focus on components that they feel need development, while not putting development effort into things they feel are good enough already. That's pretty consistent with the discussions I had with him at the Ubuntu development meeting in Oxford over six years ago. Back then the focus was on taking all the excellent software that already existed and concentrating on providing it as a single polished and integrated product. It was successful - what's easy to forget now is that the first release of Ubuntu was massively more usable out of the box than any other Linux distribution available at the time, and it's absolutely undeniable that its release spurred increased efforts on the part of competitors. But I don't think the same focus is being applied any more.

The most obvious (and most controversial) example is the Ayatana project. Ayatana's a pretty explicit statement that Canonical don't view the existing Gnome UI as being suitable for their vision of the Linux desktop. That's absolutely fine. However, unlike many of the papercut projects, Ayatana is a set of complete reimplementations of functionality that behave differently to their upstream equivalents. There's no meaningful sense in which that's not a fork of Gnome. And, let me emphasise, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Let's go back to Android. While we talk about how much we'd have preferred it if Google had interacted with upstream before implementing wakelocks, the realistic outcome is that there's no way that we'd have accepted them even if they'd been posted years before hardware shipped. If there'd been a productive outcome to that aspect of the conversation it would have involved Android having a very different power management policy. Sometimes you're not going to convince people that something is better without implementing it and seeing how well it works. The problem with wakelocks is not that they exist or that Google feels they work better than the alternative, but that they end up integrated into drivers in a way that can cause divergence between mainline and Android.

Ayatana potentially has the same outcome. At some level, well-integrated applications have to be aware of the environment in which they're running. The application indicator patches are an example of that. Carrying conditional code increases maintenance burden, reduces test coverage and is a net loss in the long run. If upstream Gnome never gains support for this functionality, and if Ubuntu continues to depend on it, then Canonical have a delta that they'll have to carry forever. That benefits nobody.

Forking because you believe that your approach is better is a completely valid development model, but in the long run can cause problems if you don't have a long-term strategy for how to resolve that fork. For all we criticise Google's ability to get Android code into the mainline kernel, they've put orders of magnitude more effort into doing so than Canonical have in terms of getting Ayatana's code into mainline Gnome. This isn't a function of Google's relative size - the Android kernel team is on the order of 10 people. It's not enough of a difference to explain the disparity.

Canonical would be perceived as much better team players if there was an indication of their long-term plan in terms of Unity and the Ayatana projects and getting that code into mainline Gnome and integrating with the Gnome shell. It's completely unsurprising that they're viewed with distrust until that happens.

I was asked for advice on how to start learning Linux. Rather than replying via email I m writing a blog post for future people who ask such questions and also to get comments from other people which may provide information I missed. Join a LUG The best thing to do is to start by joining your local Linux Users Group (LUG). Linux International maintains a list of LUGs that is reasonably comprehensive [1]. Even if there isn t a LUG near enough for you to attend meetings you can learn a lot from a mailing list of a LUG that s close to your region. There is usually no great reason not to join the mailing list of a LUG in a different region or country, but a local LUG is that the advice will often be tailored to issues such as the local prices of hardware and the practices of your government. Also note that Linux International doesn t list all LUGs, the MLUG group in Melbourne [2] and the BLUG group in Ballarat [3] aren t listed. Anyone who joins LUG (the group based in Melbourne, Victoria that I m a member of) will be advised of the smaller groups in the region if they ask on the list. As an aside it would probably make sense for the main LUV web page [4] to have links to local LUGs and to the LI page of users groups and for other LUGs to do the same. It s pretty common for a Google search to turn up the web site of a LUG that s near the ideal location but not quite right. Also it would be good if LUV could have a link to the Victorian Linux Users Group in Canada this should reduce the confusion a bit and they have a link to us [5]. Play with Linux Get a spare PC (with no important data) and try installing different distributions of Linux on it. Make sure that it never has anything particularly important so you can freely try things out without worrying about the risk of losing data. Part of the learning process usually involves breaking a system so badly that it needs to be reinstalled. Linux can run on really old hardware, an old system with 64M of RAM will do for learning (but 128M will really be preferred and 256M will be even better). Learn with other Beginners LUV has a very active beginners group, with a beginners mailing list and special beginners meetings. A group that has such things will be more helpful as you can easily learn from other people who are at a similar level to you. Also you can spend time learning Linux with friends, just spend a weekend with some friends who want to learn Linux and play with things you can often learn more by trying things than by reading books etc. Do some Programming One of the advantages of Linux (and other Free Software OSs) is that it comes with a full range of programming languages for free. You can get a much greater understanding of an OS by writing programs for it and a typical Linux distribution gives you all the tools you need. Any other Ideas? Does anyone have any other suggestions? Please leave a comment.

• [1] http://www.linux.org/groups/
• [2] http://www.mlug.org.au/
• [3] http://www.blug.asn.au/
• [4] http://luv.asn.au/
• [5] http://www.vlug.org/linux/lugs.html