My last post discussed the year-to-year budgeting of DebConf. This post discusses what makes budgeting difficult within one particular DebConf. Since every DebConf is unique in its arrangements, the particular difficulties always vary year-to-year. For example, DebConf10 was easy in that Software in the Public Interest was in the same country so that we had easy access to bank accounts, but more difficult venue payment logistics. I'll use DebConf10 as an example below.
For DebConf10, we get our venue "for free" thanks to the support of the Columbia Computer Science department. However, we had to pay for guard costs after building hours, and custodial costs. For custodial costs at least, we had to go through many layers of bureaucracy, and people kept insisting it would be more than they quoted. (It ended up being about half, since DebConf attendees were so responsible!)DebConf sponsors many attendees. This means that all their food and accommodation costs are paid by us. We have sponsored registration and reconfirmation deadlines to set a maximum of the number of people we have to sponsor, but people are continually dropping out and it's hard to know just how many people to reserve for. Sponsored people won't always eat every meal with us, and usually won't decide until the day before - so figuring out food amounts is hard, too. Furthermore, we have unsponsored people who will want food and accommodations (paying themselves) which we must somehow plan for.Different venues operate on different payment rules. This year, CU Housing was fairly strict on asking for attendee counts and room assignments two weeks in advance. Then, as time gets closer, they got more flexible, and in the end told us that they will, in fact, only charge based on number of people actually attending - a huge win for us. Similarly with CU Dining, we had to go through great lengths to make sure that we would pay only for meals we ate. At CU, food had to be paid in advance, but accommodation and other costs are paid afterwards.We have to guess how much will be spent on miscellaneous supplies once DebConf starts. We have to then decide how much to spend on extras such as the day trip or conference dinner, and how to sponsor those, if possible.Debian (and thus DebConf) has money held in trust in many currencies in different accounts. Different sponsors will pay to different currencies, depending on what is convenient for them. This means that we need to consider fluctuating currency conversion rates, and decide if and when to transfer money. In general, DebConf hasn't transfer money just to make sure the DebConf-tagged money gets spent first. Some surpluses are best left in other countries to help pay future travel sponsorship since it is expensive to move money out of the country. Some conferences may result in a net movement of money from USA to Europe (more donors in one, more expenses in the other), some the other way around.Travel sponsorship is in the form of reimbursement. These can take many months to have the documentation received from attendees and the reimbursements all sent out, and thus finalizing the budget and surplus for next year.The overall principle we've tried to stick to is plan for a balanced budget in the worst case scenario, and then be happy when it ends up better than that.
At the DebConf&Debian BOF, someone mentioned how budgeting for any (free software) conference is hard. I think that's certainly true. Some of the registration fluctuations could be made easier by being less flexible, but DebConf wants to serve our attendees even if it is a bit of extra work for us. Each DebConf will have its own ways budgeting is difficult, but things have always work out, and usually with a bigger surplus than we were expecting.Tags: debconf

Urban Honking has an insightful article about the Arduino and suggests that it is one of the most important factors for the development of the computer industry in the near future [1]. It compares the Arduino to the Altair. Wired has an interesting article about a company that provides a satellite kit and a launch into low Earth orbit for $8000 [2]. Arduino in space? Linux Journal has an interesting article by David Rowe about the Mesh Potato which is a Wifi mesh router that also runs VOIP [3]. One particularly interesting aspect of this article is the explanation of the way they designed and tested it. Susan Shaw gave an informative TED talk about the toxic effects of the attempts to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [4]. It seems that trying to disperse the oil just makes it worse, and the chemical companies are refusing to disclose the chemicals that are being used. The New York Times has an interesting article by David Leonhardt about the value of pre-school teachers [5]. Some research on the difference that good teachers can make in economic terms suggests that the make an economic difference to the children to the value of $320,000 per annum (IE a class of 16 children who were taught for a year would on average each receive a benefit of $20,000 over their lifetime). Also there are social benefits which aren t counted by that study. While I can t imagine pre-school teachers getting paid $320,000 any time soon, it does seem obvious that good teachers deserve significantly better pay. Of course one problem is how to determine which teachers are good, better test results are not a reliable indication. Paul Krugman describes America as being on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere due to the policies of saving money by cutting funding for schools, street-lights, and roads [6]. The Chive has an amusing post about how to quit a bad job [7]. It would be good if someone really did this, I m sure that there are enough creative people who don t like their job. Hell Pizza in New Zealand published a zombie themed choose your own adventure on Youtube [8]. Unfortunately the options to choose the next segment don t work on HTML5 with Chromium so if you don t have flash you miss out. AskThePilot.com has an informative essay about airline security written by a commercial pilot [9]. The anecdote about the pilot not being allowed to take the type of knife that is issued to first and business class passengers is rather amusing. FredOnEverything.net has an interesting analysis of Wikileaks and why the Pentagon and Fox News hate it [10]. Fred is a very skillful writer, while he s not the first person to say some of these things he may have said it best. The Wikipedia page on Borosilicate glass (which is best known under the trademark Pyrex) is really interesting [11]. Borsilicate glass was formerly known as Duran and it s main characteristic that makes it suitable for lab use is resistance to Thermal Shock, but it s also harder and has a higher melting point. Apparently you can get Pyrex drinking glasses, I want some! Eben Moglen gave an interesting talk Freedom in the Cloud about the development of free servers to manage personal data and replace Facebook etc (among many other things) [12]. The Debian Wiki has an articla about designing such a system [13]. The APNIC published an interesting paper on IPv4 background radiation [14]. Apparently some /24 s receive so much random traffic (from broken applications and viruses) that they can t be delegated. IPv6 will solve this problem by making it infeasible to scan all IP addresses. Also it s interesting to note the excessive amounts of traffic to 1.0.168.192 which is from applications too broken to correctly send data to 192.168.0.1 which have been installed by sysadmins who are too incompetent to watch what is being sent out of their network.

• [1] http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/05/why_the_arduino_matters.html
• [2] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/07/tubesat-personal-satellite/
• [3] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10604
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_shaw_the_oil_spill_s_toxic_trade_off.html
• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/economy/28leonhardt.html
• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09krugman.html
• [7] http://thechive.com/2010/08/10/girl-quits-her-job-on-dry-erase-board-emails-entire-office-33-photos/
• [8] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p1yBlV7Ges
• [9] http://www.askthepilot.com/essays-and-stories/terrorism-tweezers-and-terminal-madness-an-essay-on-security/
• [10] http://www.fredoneverything.net/Wikileaks.shtml
• [11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borosilicate_glass
• [12] http://www.isoc-ny.org/?p=1338
• [13] http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox
• [14] http://meetings.apnic.net/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/23398/ipv4-background-radiation.pdf

If you're following me on identi.ca you probably already know that I've been designing a small PCB for a USB-based SPI chip programmer named openbiosprog-spi. The main use-case of the device is to help you recover easily from a failed BIOS upgrade (either due to using an incorrect BIOS image, due to power outages during the flashing progress, or whatever). The device only supports SPI chips, as used in recent mainboards (in DIP-8 form factor, or via manual wiring possibly also soldered-in SO-8 variants). It can identify, read, erase, or write the chips. Of course the whole "toolchain" of software tools I used for creating the hardware is open-source, and the hardware itself (schematics and PCB layouts) are freely released under a Creative Commons license (i.e., it's an "Open Hardware" device). The user-space source code is part of flashrom (GPL, version 2), the schematics and PCB layouts are licensed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and were created using the open-source Kicad EDA suite (GPL, version 2).
The schematics, PCB layouts, and other material is available from gitorious:

  $ git clone git://gitorious.org/openbiosprog/openbiosprog-spi.git

You can also download the final Gerber files (ZIP) for viewing them, or sending them to a PCB manufacturer. Some more design notes:

• The device uses the FTDI FT2232H chip as basis for USB as well as for handling the actual SPI protocol in hardware (MPSSE engine of the FT2232H).
• Attaching the SPI chip:
  • There's a DIP-8 socket on the device so you can easily insert the SPI chip you want to read/erase/program.
  • Optionally, if you don't want a DIP-8 socket, you can solder in a pin-header with 8 pins, which allows you to connect the individual pins to the SPI chip via jumper wires or grippers/probes.
• The PCB board dimensions are 44mm x 20mm, and it's a 2-layer board using mostly 0603 SMD components.

Basic usage example of the device on Linux (or other OSes supported by flashrom):

  $ flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=A -r backup.bin (reads the current chip contents into a file)

Over at the main projects page of openbiosprog-spi at http://randomprojects.org/wiki/Openbiosprog-spi I have put up a lot more photos and information such as the bill of materials, the Kicad settings I used for creating the PCBs, the Gerber files and the Excellon drill files and so on. The first few prototype boards I ordered at PCB-POOL.COM (but you can use any other PCB manufacturer of course), the bill of materials (BOM) lists the Mouser and CSD electronics part numbers and prices, but you can also buy the stuff elsewhere, of course (Digikey, Farnell, whatever). I already hand-soldered one or two prototypes and tested the device. Both hardware and software worked fine basically, you just need a small one-liner patch to fix an issue in flashrom, but that should be merged upstream soonish. In order to make it easy for interested users to get the PCBs I'll probably make them available in the BatchPCB Market Place soonish, so you can easily order them from there (you do still need to solder the components though). Note: I'm not making any money off of this, this is a pure hobby project. All in all I have to say that this was a really fun little project, and a useful one too. This was my first hardware project using Kicad (I used gEDA/PCB, also an open-source EDA toolsuite, for another small project) and I must say it worked very nicely. I didn't even have to read any manual really, it was all pretty intuitive. Please consider not using Eagle (or other closed-source PCB software) for your next Open Hardware project, there are at least two viable open-source options (Kicad, gEDA/PCB) which both work just fine.

One of the most debated points at the DebConf&Debian BOF was money management. Let's talk about how it works in an ideal world, and then how it tends to work in practice. This post only talks about year-to-year management, I hope for another post talking about the complexities of budgeting within a single year.In an ideal world, DebConf fundraises all the money it needs to go on. There is a DebConf sub-team for fundraising, since Debian doesn't have its own fundraising team. This team make brochures and solicits sponsors - there will be another post about this by someone on the fundraising team.We do our best to raise enough money to cover the conference, but it's long and hard work. In the months leading up to the conference, we are almost always running short. However, in the end, somehow, it comes through by a combination of cutting costs and continued fundraising work.The money is held by various nonprofits like SPI in the USA and FFIS in Europe. They hold it in trust for Debian. I think most people on the DebConf team agree that this money belongs to Debian, but is earmarked for DebConf since it was fundraised for DebConf. In the past, the DPL has not been asked for permission to use DebConf-fundraised money to put on a DebConf, since that's always been kind of obvious that it's for DebConf.Planning how much it will cost is hard. Venue costs aren't always known in advance, and we don't know our number of attendees until late. There are many uncertainties, which will be described later. These questions are hard to answer, but not impossible. Most of they time things work out in our favor.At the end of the conference, we tally everything up. Usually(=always, as far as I know), there is a surplus. This surplus is important, since DebConfN+1 usually needs a little seed money to get started before the new funds start rolling in. Historically, this seed money has been used for DebConfN+1, since it was raised earmarked for DebConf.In practice, it works out mostly like this. We keep track of the money, and try to stay within our budget, and cut things when we need to.For the last two years (coinciding with the recession), we have expected a deficit in the months and weeks leading up to DebConf. In these cases, we asked the DPL for some money to be given from Debian general funds for DebConf, and we provide background on our fundraising and budget status for use in making that decision. Both times, the Debian funds went to ensure that we could get travel sponsorship out. Debian general funds are not used without DPL approval.Also, keeping all the paperwork straight is a hard task. We have limited people, and the budget-trackers are always doing many other jobs, too. Personally, I'm not convinced that we always know how much the exact post-DebConf surplus is and where it is (SPI, FFIS, ...) each year. It sort of gets morphed into the general Debian money, and then we know "we have (about) XXX surplus" and then use that amount as our starting seed for the next year, taken from wherever is convenient. If Debian gives money to help make DebConf happen, it's usually as a loan. However, this loan isn't tracked carefully year to year. Someone looked up numbers during the BOF and reported that Debian has given/loaned 50,000 USD to DebConf over the years, but it's hard to know just how accurate that is. For comparison, the total DebConf budget over those years has been close to 1,000,000 USD, as best I can figure.We've tried various types of accounting software with mixed success. They are a lot of overhead, and we usually revert to keeping track of things in spreadsheets.
Our goals for budgeting (being self-sustaining) are good and well agreed on, but the implementation is hard.However, it's a place where it is easy for dedicated volunteers to get involved. If you wanted to help to make this better, you could do a lot of good by watching #debconf-team and lists, making careful records of our cash flow and where it comes from and goes to. All money we spend is announced and documented on the lists, so the information is there. To really do a complete job, this person would need to remain motivated in the months after DebConf and wrap up all of the final payments. Preferably, we'd have the same person year after year.There are many more suggestions that both others and I could make, but I'll save those for later.Tags: debconf

MJ Ray has said that he needs occasionally to concatenate MP3 files and he wants those files to be free of junk in their middle. There are some nice things to say about this problem:

• Just using cat with MP3 files work because those files are headerless : the metadata in form of ID3v 1,2 tags is an addendum to the format. MP3 is also a format that can be conveniently used without containers/wrappers.That is not the case with AAC files, in general: AAC files that are not inside a container (e.g., Matroska or MPEG 4) are usually useless, unless you know (and can inform) some properties of them to th software that you are using. This is especially the case with AAC files that were compressed with some advanced things like spectral band replication (SBR).
• The tags for MP3 files (at least those in ID3v2) are supposed to be unsynchronized , so as to not be interpreted as audio data. What this means is that some byte sequences (a byte 255 followed by a byte with value at least 224) that are allowed as audio to say hey, I am a marker, process the
  next chunk of data, now have to be escaped if they are present in tags (so that you don t listen to garbage in the middle of a file i.e., you don t play the tag).

Related to this second point, the MPEG standards have a guideline that, if some data is not known by a decoder, for resilience purposes, it should be ignored. This obviously allows some newer features to be
implemented in a backwards-compatible manner and is nice. In other words, decoders should just skip those data and be done with it. Also regarding the second point, apparently, some versions of popular music players/manipulators have problems with unsynchronized data. There are many tools that one can use for removing unwanted, unsynchronized data from an MP3 file. For instance, you can use mp3diags, which is already conveniently packaged in Debian s repository. It is a recommended program for those purposes, indeed. There is another tool that serves that purpose as a side effect: mp3packer. Its purpose is, naively speaking, to losslessly shuffle the data inside an MP3 file so that it can be stored with fewer bits (saving more space for portable players, for instance). In the process of regenerating a new MP3 file, it discards some junk data and solves the original problem. Despite not being part of our repository yet, it is already packaged and
even a RFP bug exists.

This post concerns Romanian politics, internal affairs and improper direction of public funding for new hideous churches in spite of education, culture, health, technic development and old monuments. Thus I will write this in Romanian. Curious foreigners can try to read the text via Google's translation.

---

Din cauz c suntem n secolul XXI i consider c e o prostie imens s b g m bani n biserici n detrimentul educa iei, culturii, s n t ii, dezvolt rii tehnice i a vechilor monumente, iar politicul din Rom nia pare dornic s dea bani cultelor, am ajuns la concluzia c este cazul s -i scriu reprezntantului meu (teoretic) n Parlament, Deputatul Florin Iordache. Am aflat de ce colegiu apar in uit ndu-m aici i apoi n lista oficial cu deputa ii.




I-am trimis textul de mai jos:

M numesc Petri or Eddy i sunt unul dintre cei pe care i reprezenta i n Parlamentul Rom niei. Este pentru prima dat c nd scriu unui parlamentar care m reprezint n conducerea statului rom n i o fac pentru a-mi exprima n mod clar i r spicat ideile i opinia n ceea ce prive te subiectul pe care l voi discuta mai jos. Am 30 de ani, sunt programator, am muncit i mi-am pl tit taxele de c nd am fost angajat, din anul 4 de facultate p n n prezent, adic de vreo 6-7 ani. Nu, acest mesaj nu este un strig t de ajutor, nu a tept pomeni, nu am milogit niciodat , mereu am muncit de i v d c pentru unii parazitismul fiscal a devenit un mod de via . Din acest motiv sunt revoltat.

Sunt revoltat pentru c :
- de i pl tesc taxe i impozite care ajung la peste 60% din venitul brut, nu primesc n schimb nici un fel de servicii, nici un fel de infrastructur , nici un fel de respect, nici un fel de eficien
- de i lucrez de ceva timp, am observat c pe unde am lucrat competen a i performa a erau o necesitate; n aparatul de stat nu este cazul
- de i sunt destui ca mine care pl tesc taxe i impozite, vocile noastre sunt ignorate i banii no tri sunt arunca i pe fereastr de cei ce administreaz fondurile colectate.

Domnule deputat sunt revoltat c de 15 ani de zile dispar n medie aproximativ 4 coli zilnic i apare, tot n medie, o biseric la fiecare 2 zile, iar asta se nt mpl cu accep iunea aparatului politic. Spitalul din Caracal, ca orice alt spital din Rom nia, e prost dotat, nu exist personal suficient, nu are fonduri pentru medica ie pentru pacien i, pe scurt, este un dezastru care e pe cale s se nt mple. i cu toate astea, banii se duc spre biserici. Se fac dona ii de coli i terenuri c tre biseric , n mod ilegal i abuziv chiar n jude ul Olt.

Ultima perioad n care religia a condus lumea s-a numit Evul Mediu i cred c orice om care a tr it m car 5 ani n secolul XXI poate s observe c nu religia ne-a adus mari beneficii, ci tiin a i tehnologia. n Evul Mediu tratamentul se f cea prin s nger ri , t ieri sub limb , scoaterea argintului viu i tot felul de alte supersti ii f r nici un efect pozitiv sau chair cu efecte negative.

ntre timp umanitatea a progresat i am descoperit medicina, curentul electric, am explorat universul, am aterizat pe Lun , am pus zeci de sateli i artificiali pe orbit , am aflat foarte multe despre univers i lumea care ne nconjoar , am inventat noi materiale (plasticul, p nzele impermeabile, kevlarul), am investigat lumea f r idei preconcepute dup metoda tiin ific , iar lucrul acesta ne-a mbun t it via a n toate aspectele ei. Sperant de via a crescut de la aproximativ 30-40 de ani n Evul Mediu, la 70-80 de ani n prezent, totul datorit tiin ei aplicate. Datorit tehnologiei i tiin ei pot s v scriu aceste cuvinte i tiu c vor ajunge la dumneavoastr , nu datorit unor incanta ii sau ritualuri, nu datorit telepatiei, de i mediul sta de transmisie se apropie foarte mult de ceea ce define te ca fiind telepatie :-) . Cu toate astea, unii consider c religia trebuie finan at pentru c e religie, nici m car pentru c ar avea programe sociale, contribu ii cuantificabile reale, nu, doar pentru c este religie.


Am citit foarte multe articole din pres , articole bine documentate, i am senza ia c tr iesc ntr-o lume incon tient c nd v d cum banii care ar trebui s ajung n drumuri, coli, spitale, cercetare, medicamente, programe sociale cu real impact, ajung n noi i noi biserici de beton n timp ce monumentele istorice, bisericile din lemn, m n stirile cu adev rat valoroase sunt l sate n paragin . Asist cu o senza ie de dezgust continuu la felul n care ne batem joc de cei ce ne salveaz vie ile, medicii, de cei ce ar trebui s ne fac educa ia, profesorii, de cei ce ne sting casele dac iau foc, pompierii, i, de felul n care ridic m misticismul religios la rang de virtute. Este de-a dreptul jignitor i aberant ca alfabetizarea tiin ific n secolul XXI s fie at t de joas nc t s avem 42% din popula ie care cred c Terra este centrul universului, s avem oameni care cred c astrologia este tiin ific , s NU avem nici m car o universitate n top 500 n lume, este jignitor s fim n permanen n coada tuturor clasamentelor pozitive i n fruntea tuturor celor negative.

Recent money.ro a publicat un articol n care esitma foarte conservator c averea Bisericii Ortodoxe Rom ne se nv rte la peste 3 miliarde de euro, are scutiri de impozite, are zeci de afaceri i cu toate acestea, statul continu s scuteasc cultele de impozite, ba chiar le ofer bani ntr-una. La o asemenea avere nu cred c mai poate fi vorba de necesitatea finan rii de c tre stat. Oamenii pot decide s doneze direct c tre bisericile lor bani i nici nu mai implic pierderile inerente ce apar datorit administr rii fondurilor de c tre stat.


Statul nu este un organ aparte, statul trebuie s munceasc pentru mine, cet eanul, iar eu sunt mpotriva acestui tip de batjocorire i napoiere voluntar a noastr ndreptat mpotriva noastr . Alexandru Ioan Cuza a secularizat averile m n stirilor nchinate celor de la muntele Athos, deci unor ter i extreni rii, a a cum afl m din scrierile istoricului A.D. Xenopol, deci nu exist nici o obliga ie a statului s finan eze o institu ie anacronistic :

A.D. Xenopol Domnia lui Cuza Vod Vol.I , CAP. VIII. AI doile minister Cogalniceanu Secularizarea , pagina 291:

Nu vom atinge de c t mprejur rile care au condus la redob ndirea averilor, ajunse n st p nirea c lug rilor str ini, ating nd chestiunea nchin rei m n stirilor p n ntene c tre acele din R s rit, numai ntru c t va fi de nevoie, spre a n alege m sura seculariz rei nsu i.

Din aceste motive i multe altele, deoarece sunte i i reprezentantul meu n Parlamentul Rom niei, v cer ca s vota i pentru proiectul de lege ini iat de domnul Prigoan n ceea ce prive te t ierea finan rii personalui clerical de c tre stat i c t i a altor legi care ar putea duce la eliminarea privilegiilor pe care le au cultele, n condi iile n care singurul motiv real i corect pentru care o entitate ar putea beneficia de scutiri de taxe sau privilegii fiscale sunt doar cele ce nu urm resc interesul financiar i, totodat , au un impact social cuantificabil n mod clar.


Dac dori i, a fi bucuros s v r spund la eventualele ntreb ri sau neclarit i n ceea ce am scris, dac este nevoie.

V mul umesc anticipat!

L-am trimis joi, nc n-am primit r spuns de nici un fel. Pasul doi e s sun. M car s nnebuneasc dac tot sunt nesim i i. A a c , pute i afla de ce colegiu apar ine i i apoi pute i identifica pe cel/cea ce v reprezint n Parlament. Scrie i-le, suna i-i, a venit momentul m car s se enerveze, dac nu s - i fac m car o poleial de datorie.

Late last night my first NMU (not counting patches sent to BTS, but only actual NMUs done) entered the archive (after the appropriate DELAYED/xx wait). It even fixes one RC bug If you wonder why is my first NMU, and why it took me so long the answer is that finding RC bugs that I can actually fix is not trivial. Yep, I know about http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php and about rc-alert, but:

• all the easy ones (e.g. packaging, etc.) are usually already pending
• all the old ones are usually hard bugs, requiring greater context switch, and familiarity with the upstream software
• many are platform specific (e.g. mips/arm/etc.)
• many are about actual upstream bugs, again requiring familiarity with the software
• etc.

So my usual attempt at trying to fix RC bugs is to spend 30 minutes scanning the RC bug list, trying to find some bugs I can tackle, then give up in despair. Assuming I can dedicate only a few hours per week towards fixing RC bugs, how should I proceed? Is it possible with such a small time budget? Comments welcome, even if telling me I'm just lazy and should try harder

Even in the modern times of AJAX, Web 2+ and what not, Elinks is one of my favourite browsers, at least for browsing some sites. The reasons are simple: it cuts the unnecessary distractions, and allows you to digest text based information rather quickly. In addition, since it doesn't display any images or flashy elements like Flash, pages load lightning fast even on poor connections, making it an excellent option.Unfortunately, some sites don't really work very well with Elinks, and for those, I do one of two things. For the ones which are really complex, such as secure login sites with too much AJAX, I just resort to one of the "standard" graphical browsers. For some others, I try to work around the problem using Elinks' rich scripting interface available in many programming languages including Perl and Ruby. I chose Lua, since it seemed simple enough to learn. I wanted to share with you some of the simple workarounds I implemented for some sites I visit often.The first quirk is with the Debian BTS, whose CSS isn't properly interpreted by Elinks (see 593804 and 593840 for details). The short story: the BTS renders like this:So, I grabbed the CSS, and made some small changes (described in the above mentioned bug reports), and got a new CSS file. I put it in /home/kumar/Kumar/bugs.css, and added the following to my ~/.elinks/hooks.lua:

-- Use an alternate CSS for the Debian BTS to work around some quirks
function debian_bts_format_html_hook (html)
   return string.gsub(html, "/css/bugs.css", 'file:///home/kumar/Kumar/bugs.css')
end
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
   if sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
      return blonnet_format_html_hook(html)
   end
   return nil
end

and with it, the BTS renders like this:Much more readable!The second simple example, for which I won't include images, is the Mobile Twitter interface. The mobile Twitter interface is very convenient and functional in Elinks; however, by default, the text font seems to be a light grey, which is not discernible in the bright background. A default user.css file would be a possible solution, but I have not decided whether to go for it just yet. So, for the Twitter site, I add a function like this:

-- Make the status messages black on Mobile Twitter
function mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
   return string.gsub(html, ".status.- ", '.status  word-wrap: break-word; color : #000; ')
end

And alter the actual hook function to:

function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
   if sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
      return debian_bts_format_html_hook(html)
   elseif sstrfind (url, "mobile.twitter.com") then
      return mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
   end
   return nil
end

Finally, a more complicated example. I like reading the Indian business newspaper the Hindu Business Line. However, if you try browsing to the site with Elinks, you'll notice that, barring the top hyperlinks in each sectcion, the links on the left are not "linked" at all.In addition, there are some other irritants which are easy to remove, such as the navigation bar on the top, and the text colour being too light for my taste etc. So, I write the following Lua blurb. Why I write this is left for the interested readers to figure out, though it shouldn't be surprising if you open the page. The workaround for the missing links is interesting, though; it is because the website authors have put a hyperlink (<a>) tag before a list item (<li>) tag, and Elinks seems to not like that too much. So, I just swap the two around, and Elinks is happy.

-- Reformat the Business Line website
function blonnet_format_html_hook (html)
   html = string.gsub(html, "<body ", '<body text="#000000"') -- I like the text in black on the white background
   html = string.gsub(html, "<[Ff][Oo][Nn][Tt] class=leftnavi color=brown>.-</[Ff][Oo][Nn][Tt]>", '') -- An ugly hack to remove the navigation bar
   html = string.gsub(html, "<TD align=left vAlign=top width=\"500\"><IMG.-</FONT><BR>", '', 1) -- Remove description
   html = string.gsub(html, "<A class=groupnavi href=\"http://epaper.thehindubusinessline.com/\">.-</FONT><BR>", '', 1) -- Remove other group links
   html = string.gsub(html, "(<[Aa] class=navi.-)<li>(.-</[Aa]>)", "<li>%1%2</li>") -- Fix the erroneous section sidebar
   return html
end
function pre_format_html_hook (url, html)
   if sstrfind (url, "blonnet.com") or sstrfind(url, "thehindubusinessline.com") then
      return blonnet_format_html_hook(html)
   elseif sstrfind (url, "bugs.debian.org") then
      return debian_bts_format_html_hook(html)
   elseif sstrfind (url, "mobile.twitter.com") then
      return mobile_twitter_format_hook(html)
   end
   return nil
end

And here's the old and new rendering:

The Debian Women project aims to get more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.

The Mentoring Program, allows men and women that want to contribute to Debian but aren t sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps.

There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. We d like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012.

There are some other interesting statistics about the current female participation in Debian.

We are also interested in getting more women to file and fix bugs, translate debconf templates or package descriptions, contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions in the near future, to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we ll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled.

For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the IRC channel #debian-mujeres on irc.oftc.net.

Contributed by: Margarita Manterola

This fragment of code was extracted from a direct-to-MX PHP spam cannon installed on a customer server. Yes, it contains a real DNS stub resolver written in PHP (which abuses the promiscuous cache of a local large ISP).

function dns_get_list($dns,$domains,$type=1)
 
        $sockets=array();
        foreach ($domains as $d=>$domain)
         
                $dns_packet = chr(0).chr($d).
                                chr(1).chr(0).
                                chr(0).chr(1).
                                chr(0).chr(0).
                                chr(0).chr(0).
                                chr(0).chr(0);
                $dns_packet_len=12;
                list($qname_len,$qname)=make_QNAME($domain);
                $dns_packet .= $qname.
                                chr(0).chr($type).
                                chr(0).chr(1);
                $dns_packet_len+=$qname_len+4;
                $sockets[$d]=fsockopen("udp://$dns", 53);
                fwrite($sockets[$d],$dns_packet,$dns_packet_len);
         
        foreach ($domains as $d=>$domain) socket_set_timeout($sockets[$d],3);
        $result=array();
        foreach ($domains as $d=>$domain)
         
[...]

Selecting a DebConf location hard, and can certainly get intense at times. This is an area where the DebConf team and the Debian project can work to improve our processes. There is a wiki page to collect our thoughts in preparation for a discussion later, as planned during the DebConf&Debian BOF.
First off, there is a time at DebConfN-2 for interested localteams to describe their rough plans. These are videoed, and you can view the events online if you would like: for dc11 at dc9, for dc12 at dc10 .There has been a nominal deadline of December 31, 20XX-2 for submitting a bid (not finalizing), but this has been bent in the past.While teams are preparing their bids, they should look at the location checklist. This summarize what past organizers know to look for in a location. There are questions sorted by category and priority.To organize their information so that people can understand, teams prepare bid documents on the wiki (DC10, DC11, here are the winning bid documents: DC10-New York City, DC11-Banja Luka). These start off by just answering all of the questions in the location checklist, but then get a lot of work to make the pages clear and complete. Anyone can browse the pages and ask questions of the teams anytime.There are several mini-meetings where teams describe their progress, and organizers and other interested people can ask questions. In these meetings, the channel is not moderated. Questions tend to be about the location checklist criteria related things.In February/March, there is a big selection meeting. This is the only DebConf meeting where the channel is moderated and only voiced people can speak. The voiced people historically are two moderators who keep things moving, two other past DebConf organizers to ask questions and relay questions from the audience discussion channel. (These facilitators have been self-selected in the past, usually in the minutes leading up to the meeting.) Then, there are two people per location whom are voiced. There is a audience channel for everyone else to discuss, and the moderators/helpers will look there for questions and relay them to the main channel. There have been unvoiced Q&A periods and periods which are designated for relaying questions from the discussion channel.These meetings are logged (dc10 selection, dc11 selection)Teams are rated based on the priority list. There has been a simple point list the last two years, -1 to +1 for each point on that list. For each item, there are debates on how many points each location should get. Points are added up, and a result appears. In the past, this has been a simple arithmetic sum, so all items are weighted the same (despite nominally having different weights). In the case of a tie or close call, there is more discussion. For DC10, there was a tie, and NYC won after opening the meeting to the audience and getting their opinions. I didn't pay enough attention to the DC11 selection process to be able to say how that close call was resolved.While this isn't really part of the selection process, local teams can give presentations at DebConfN-1 about their location and encourage attendance: dc10 at dc9, dc11 at dc10
So, there it is. Overall, there is a lot of openness in the process, but the exact rating schemes in the decision meeting could use discussion. The criteria are established, but can be refined each year based on what we learn.If you would like to comment on how to improve this in the future, please use the selection process wiki page (first person create it). We can follow up with a list discussion after our ideas have been fleshed out.Tags: debconf

During DebConf, I managed to squeeze out of the middle of everything for long enough to write a column, a short article for a participation I have every three months, for Mexican Software Gur magazine. All in all, I liked the resulting text The current number's main topic is alternative user interfaces. I find it sometimes hard to define what Software Gur 's audience is Probably, project leaders in software development; not the actual developers, but people who actually understand about coding... but care more about The Big Picture, Processes, Architecture Engineering and Buzzword Compliance. It is an interesting magazine, all in all, but with a focus and viewpoint I often feel myself not precisely comfortable with. So, if this trimester's topic was alternative user interfaces, I decided to write on the history and future of the man-machine interface (Spanish only) (version in the magazine's site). My viewpoint comes from the fact that I do not believe we are in a state of so great, innovative changes that everybody is trumpeting, and I'd rather get others to really think on whether user interfaces have gone different in the last decades. Yes, there are many changes, but in form rather than essence. Anyway, I shared this text with some friends. Some days later, when I was back in Mexico, Pooka/Alejandro Miranda lent me a very interesting book: Hacer clic: Hacia Una Sociosemiotica De Las Interacciones Digitales (Do click: Towards a Socio-semiotics of Digital Interaction (Cibercultura)), by Carlos Scolari. I am not yet even halfway through it, but I am enjoying it This book speaks, so far, about the meanings of interfaces, and of the history of interfaces themselves, even forgetting that nowadays we (mostly) refer to interfaces as what we have between the man and the machine. Sadly, I cannot find this book in English, as it is very well worth a read. But if the topic sounds interesting and you can understand the language, don't hesitate and pick up the book. It gives an interesting insight on the topic, for a group of people (us techies) used to looking at things in a much more human-cognitive-process-oriented way. [update] I found this nice overview of the "Hacer clic" book, written as a presentation for the book. It explains precisely the part I am currently reading - The four metafora for interaction: Conversational, instrumental, superficial and spatial.

Now that I've mentioned the general timeline of a DebConf, let's talk about the "global team", "local team", and decision processes.Who is the "global team"? Basically, it is the active people on the debconf-team IRC channel and mailing list. Anyone can contribute, but we know who is who. Those with the most moral authority tend to be those who have organized a past DebConf or been involved for many years, and their opinions always have a high weight. Many of them are still around.So then how are decisions made? It's a combination of consensus-based and "whoever want to, do it". We discuss ideas based on what experienced people have seen work/not work, what new people want to try, and perhaps most importantly, who can make it happen. (this is where you fit in). There aren't necessarily leaders picked beforehand, instead leaders develop themselves. Overall, this is similar to any other team in Debian.There aren't formal gatekeepers who can veto anything, but if someone sees a problem, they should speak up and get critical mass of people to fix things. Those who hold the money (SPI, FFIS, the DPL) of course will monitor our processes and would intervene if someone started going off course.Typical global team tasks are fundraising, travel sponsorship selection, talks, registration.The local team starts out as the winning bid team. They started out figuring out local logistics for their venue, and up until arrival, they are the ones who are handling the local tasks (venue, food, accommodation, entertainment, day trip, Debian Day outreach). They should keep the global team updated on their status and what they are arranging, so that the experienced ones on the global team can give feedback. Global people will, of course, get involved here where they see fit and can help.The local team shouldn't exist in isolation though, anyone local is highly encouraged to get involved in "global team" tasks. The more coordination and bi-directional help we have, the better.It isn't the job of the local team to put on all of DebConf themselves. They aren't selected and left with free reign, they should integrate with and understand the history of DebConf, and then work on whatever improvements they want, whether they are local or global.
So in short, there are the names "global team" and "local team", but really, it's all one big Debian team. Those who are interested work and make things happen through a consensus-driven process. Things aren't always perfect: we have conflict, disorganization, leadership turn-over, lack of volunteers, lack of time, all the usual things that happen in volunteer organizations. I think most people want to work towards this ideal, and we hope that this series of posts will help us to improve. Most importantly, when you see something you'd like to work on, you can get involved.Tags: debconf

Did the global climate change in 1975? Tamino has a nice blog entry on statistical analysis of temperature changes, showing a kink in the upward curve at 1975. This has been seen in a number of places, but no clear atttribution to a climate-state-change has been physically identified: perhaps its due to cleaner air, with aerosols removed in the 1970's. Recently, a colleague Dr. Shiyu Wang at ICHEC did some work on a more local problem: has the climate changed recently in Ireland ? Over the last three years we've seen record-breaking rainfall during the winter: in November 2009, many parts of Ireland saw twice the usual rainfall, in some places threefold increases. After three miserable winters, people were asking: is this the new norm? So Shiyu did some analysis for the Environmental Protection Agency, and the short answer is: it appears to be just a statistical fluctuation, for the moment. More would be needed to confirm a trend (you can see a poster presented on this here). But as part of this, he demonstrated that we did shift to wetter weather from about 1978 onwards. How can clearer skies over Europe cause this? another piece of the global warming attribution puzzle? Tags climate, ichec, precipitation, rainfall

Bah, sorry, I've just noticed that Planet was spammed with an old post, because of me changing the font to the default (which appearently also didn't work, lol).
Sorry for that.

Since I started using Linux I've used several window managers. I felt used to blackbox and fluxbox and eventually used enlightenment and some others in the past, but nowadays its been a while since I became the user of an Desktop Environment. I'm using GNOME because it provides what I need and I don't need to spend an hour to configure it before it suits my needs. After all I'm lazy.
With respect to the fact that I'm quiet satisfied with GNOME, there is one feature I were always missing.
Because I spend much time with tiling and arranging windows on my desktops I noticed that I could need
a tiling feature. Something which was already a feature back in Windows 3.11.
GNOME/metacity does not have this features and given that a wishlist bug about this is open since almost 7 years
its unlikley that this will ever change. There are separate tools, which I recently learned about that can assist me with this. For example the perl script 'wumwum'. But this seems to be the wrong solution to a real problem. Additional wumwum does not work properly with metacity and so I'd need to another WM anyway, which lead to the point where I started thinking about integrating a true tiling wm into GNOME... once again.

First, I looked into awesome, which is a window manager I used some time ago.
But documentation about configuring it is basically an API documentation, with no obvious entry point.
It seems to be the best to study the whole API just to set some simple settings (e.g. a padding for the GNOME panel and some always-floating applications). I even thought about learning LUA, because it seems like a language which is quick and easy to learn, but honestly if I need to study a programming language and a whole API documentation just to configure a window manager then IMHO there is something conceptionally wrong with that piece of software.
After all I came to Xmonad. This window manager is using Haskell and I fear I need to learn this language as well if I want to configure weird things. But the wanted scenario is well documented and documentation for more common configuration settings exists all over the place so that I don't really feel inclined to learn more then needed.
Remember? I'm lazy.

Now I'm feeling quiet happy with this combination. It didn't cost me much time to get used to the most basic keyboard shortcuts or setting the whole thing up. GNOME and Xmonad work together like a dream team. I feel more productive now. As an additional plus I reinstalled the vimperator firefox plugin, because with my new desktop environment I more often use the keyboard for ordinary tasks like switching between apps or desks and I felt beeing able to quickly operate firefox with the keyboard, too, would be a plus. Well, it is.

When we were going on holiday lately we took some 2-3 hours of videos. It's a Panasonic HDC-SD600 camcorder we bought for that matter. Usually I'm connecting the camera to my Mac and import the videos into iMovie or such. During the holiday I copied the clips to an external USB drive to save the space on the 16 GB SD card. The plan was to copy it back to the card and import it later. This usually works, but somehow it did not for one backup. Sadly iMovie is so dumb that it can't import directly from those file. So I needed another way to import the movies. Kdenlive is able to import the movies as well as Handbrake on OSX is able to convert them. In the end I used ffmpeg on Debian to convert the clips:

for i in *.MTS ; do echo $i ; ffmpeg -i $i -deinterlace -threads 4 -sameq /srv/video/iMovie/ffmpeg/$ i .mp4 ; done

This converts the MTS files from the camera into some MPEG4 format that iMovie is able to import by itself. The quality seems to be ok on a first quick view. Or do I miss something and there's a command switch that will result in better quality? Basically I want the same video and audio quality as the source files have.

long time no RC bug posting. in july I was at the Munich BSP, & during DebCamp/DebConf I had the excuse of being one of the judges of the RCBC (which was the only reason for the freeze, I'm sure :)).

to keep up with the tradition of posting about my other RC bug activities, here comes a short list. as you can see most of the work was done in or around the pkg-perl group; luckily I often only have to upload packages prepared by ansgar, carnil, & others.

• #560634 src:libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload NMU prepared by Ansgar
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  use different backends for different architectures - didn't work :/ (pkg-perl)
• #580479 libdbd-mysql-perl: "libdbd-mysql-perl can access out of string and call craches"
  upload new upstream release, prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #582410 libgtk2-perl: "libgtk2-perl: FTBFS on mips: Failed test 'callbacks encountered'"
  don't run tests that need an X server (pkg-perl)
• #585471 webgui: "webgui: License of www/extras/yui/examples/treeview/assets/js/json.js is considered non-free"
  upload new upstream release prepard by SquOnk
• #588118 libmoose-perl: "libmoose-perl [ia64]: test failures"
  upload with patch from Niko (pkg-perl)
• #590409 src:libdbd-anydata-perl: "libdbd-anydata-perl: FTBFS: Can't call method "params" on unblessed reference at /usr/lib/perl5/DBI/DBD/SqlEngine.pm line 721."
  upload NMU prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #590453 libgtk2-perl: "libgtk2-perl: Gtk2::Dialog and descendents signal produces different response to ->run()"
  upload new version prepared by Jeffrey (pkg-perl)
• #591108 src:jabref-plugin-oo: "jabref-plugin-oo: FTBFS: package org.antlr.runtime does not exist"
  add .jar to classpath
• #591113 src:libwebservice-youtube-perl: "libwebservice-youtube-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload fixed package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)
• #591120 src:libhtml-formfu-perl: "libhtml-formfu-perl: FTBFS: failed test"
  upload fixed package prepard by carnil (pkg-perl)
• #591166 src:nama: "nama: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #592981 src:jifty: "FTBFS: failed tests t/TestApp-Plugin-SetupWizard/t/001-basic.t with libyaml-syck-perl 1.12-1"
  upload patched package prepared by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #593012 src:libdevel-ebug-perl: "FTBFS: test t/pad.t fails with libyaml-syck-perl 1.12"
  upload patched package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)

I hope we as a project can keep up the momentum to fix the remaining RC bugs, & see a release in a not so far future.

DebConf launched with a bang the day I arrived by bike I was up until 3am meeting and greeting in the basement lounge of the Carmen Columbia dormitory, where I was staying. No idea how I managed to be so awake for that. The rest of the week alternated between hacking like crazy on code for my talk and spending a lot of time socializing with Debian folks new and old. For the day trip to Coney Island, I joined the dkg-led bike expedition which ended up running to nearly 30 miles, which was a bit more than expected. The fact that this was all in actual dense city really drove home the scale difference between Boston and New York (I'd never been to NYC before this). We took several breaks to lounge around and eat and drink, so it took quite a long time even given the distance. I hadn't planned on seeing the baseball game that was a part of the trip, but I ended up going anyway and it turns out that a bunch of geeks at a minor league game is actually quite a lot of fun! I hope someone else will put some pictures from the bike ride and game online soon, since I didn't really take any myself. This was the first DebConf where I gave a talk, which resulted in me skipping almost all of the other talks, because my talk was on the last day and I reaaally wasn't ready at the start of the conference due to the rest of life being pretty crazy this summer. I missed some things I would have liked to see because of this, but ultimately I think it was worth it. The good news is: it went well! I was nervous until I actually started talking (never given a talk at a conference before), and then it was fine. If you missed it, the talk video is on the web in low and high quality; slides are here. The audience was great there were excellent questions and people were excited and interested in the project. I couldn't have asked for a better reception. After the talk finished I spent some time aisle-chatting with some folks, and totally failed to recognize Joey despite having met him before, because he'd shaved off his hair. DebConf was, like usual, both inspiring and exhausting. I haven't managed to follow up on much that happened during the conference yet. I definitely plan to do so, though, now that real life is calming down again. I'd hate to waste the post-conference buzz about SD. My todo list includes:

• Working more on the SD debbugs bridge to make it more stable.
  • I ran into Jesse soon after coming back and now have a better idea of how I'm going to handle a lack of history properly.
• Getting my patch to the Debbugs SOAP interface merged.
• Looking into the read-write SOAP interface work that was done as a Summer of Code project.
• After talking with Jesse I also kind of want to hack up a RESTful interface that could be used alongside the SOAP interface. It seems like doing so will make development of and using the Debbugs web API less painful in the future. This may be a rabbit hole that I don't actually want to jump down, but it's an idea.
• Maybe other help on Debbugs proper!
• Fixing SD bugs and generating more documentation.
• Thinking about and thanking people for talk feedback!
• Playing around with monkeysphere for authentication on my personal machines.
• Watching videos of talks I missed (this includes basically everything that didn't have to do with bugtracking).

DebConf10 ended 2 weeks ago, I m back in Bosnia and I needed some time to recalculate everything that happened to me in last month This was my third time in NYC, and NYC as a city never left me empty handed, in every possible sense! And am seriously considering option of moving back one day, whether to get my Masters/phD or just do work we ll see what future holds for me DebConf10 I was in organization team for DebConf10, but if you put me aside, what s particularly interesting is that there was a total number of 7 Bosnians on DebConf10, two of which were government officials. I must note this wasn t our complete team, and what s most important of all is that they all pretty much volunteered as much as they could, of course, besides good will to help Debian, but also to at least somehow prepare themselves for organization of DebConf11. It s also worth noting that this was their first DebConf, and I as a leader of the team must say I m proud on how well they performed. I m sure by being highly active in volunteering they have learned as much as they could when it comes to how it s done and were able to see good and bad sides of DebConf10 organization team. Of course, I d also like to thank DebConf10 team for their superb work, perfect Venue selection, their hospitality and being incredibly friendly and helpful to all of us. As I said in one of my lectures, it s kinda unwritten rule that every next DebConf has to top the previous one, and that being said it s going to be almost impossible to compete with this year bid, but being Bosnians we re up for the challenge My DebConf10 Pictures: Semi-private album FaceBook public link (no registration required) DebConf11 DebConf10 was busy period for all of us, but I don t want to start complaining since even though we ve done enormous amounts of work so far, the real challenge lays ahead of us. With DebConf10 behind us, the thing we should process now is it s our turn now, we re next Before anything, I d like to thank Government of Republika Srpska for their full financial support, which was one of the preconditions to even get this bid. With their full support + sponsors, we ll be able to get great amount for sponsorships, for you to come to Banja Luka from the most remote places, and also in case you need visa for them to help you in getting one. Government support is just too precious in any way you want to take it. We would also like to invite you to DebConf11 in Bosnia (Banja Luka) next summer, we also invite all of you to our communication channels (mailing list, irc) since we would really like to get involved as many people as we can. Besides all of you enjoying DebConf11 next year, we would like you to help us in giving directions since we re a young team Besides Debian people, I d like to invite anyone who think he/she could help, or want to get involved, especially individuals/organizations/LUG from whole region! It s also important to stress that in all of our communication means, we do speak English, so please do not hesitate if you have any sort of question/suggestion/whatever. For those interested in next DebConf11, most important page you should follow is our wiki page, where you can find all information and which we keep updated in timely manner: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka Communication/Links Languages we officially support are: English, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian Mailing list:
http://lists.debconf.net/mailman/listinfo/debconf11-bosnia IRC:
#debconf11-bosnia on irc.debian.org / irc.oftc.net Twitter:
#debconf11 tag
http://twitter.com/absinthesyringe (shameless self promotion ) Facebook:
Official DebConf11 FaceBook group DebConf10 Adnan Hodzic DebConf11 in Bosnia (Introduction and Invitation):
Lecture video high quality (205mb)

See you next year!