And the award for worst-addressed post yet goes to COLT Telecommunications for:

"TTLLP
Qewstoke (should be Kewstoke)
Summerset (should be Somerset)"

The dangers of using foreign call centres for data collection, I guess. At least they got the name, street and postcode correct, so it arrived. The post itself was pretty interesting. It said that 0870 numbers will stop being revenue-shared from February 2008, which seems to be confirmed by this Ofcom press release from April 2006 which I hadn't noticed. TTLLP trades its revenue-share for hunt, voicemail, fax termination and so on, so I wonder what will happen to that service after Feb 2008? We recently signed up for numbers where we get outbound SIP to PSTN calls too. I was undecided about which number to use in future, but I guess this means TTLLP will switch to 0844 or 01934. There's a bit of flaming going on at Say Not to 0870 which reminded me to update our entry there. The COLT mailshot came with a calendar to try to persuade you to move your 0870 numbers to them and you can order your own calendar on their site - pictures are holding hands, walking under an umbrella, Brussels Grand-Place (I think), tulips, rowers maybe on Lake Ontario, a diver, a boardwalk, dandelion seeds, walking through fallen leaves, the Millenium Wheel with fireworks, illuminated pine tree, starting an avalaunche and London commuters. Can anyone spot a theme there? I don't.

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 17 days of "blitz l10n NMU". As expected, we are going down because of an uncoordinated upload of viewvc. I even went a little bit more annoyed because the maintainer did some changes to the debconf templates, updated *his* Spanish translation...but didn't care to warn other translators. Next time, I'll use my rubber cluebat, damog..:-) We will be hit again becacuse the sing package was re-uploaded by its maintainer iummediately after I NMU'ed it. Unfortunately, he did then correct some typographical errors in the templates and then fuzzied 9 formerly complete translations. Sad. (update as of 09:32 UTC: this will be corrected by the maintainer) Yesterday, I continued working on Thomas Huriaux dynamic status page:

• bindgraph to be uploaded today
• openssl097 due out Feb 6th
• prc-tools due out Feb 6th
• ipsec-tools due out Feb 7th
• libpam-ldap dues out Feb 7th (with a call for updates running)
• php4-rrdtool due out Feb 7th
• glide still waiting for news
• ifhp needs the removal of debian/po

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 16 days of "blitz l10n NMU". The re-introduction of debconf templates for viewvc with incomplete translations will lower the stats as of today...:-( I already notified its maintainer who is very l10n-aware so I'm confident we will fix this soon. However, that's kind of a disappointment for me, of course, as this will delay the day we will reach 100%. Yesterday, I worked on the oldest bugs mentioned on Thomas Huriaux dynamic status page:

• courier has been uploaded, unfortunately without the Swedish translation as the maintainer wrongly assumes this shouldn't be a target for Etch
• efingerd has been NMU'ed
• squidguard has been NMU'ed
• ssl-cert has been NMU'ed
• apt-proxy has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• defoma has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• qmail is ignored because of an obnoxious maintainer who is in my kill file
• gdm is ignored because #261086 is marked wontfix for reasons I don't want to dig into now (I'm pretty sure that something better could be done for that package, oh well)
• icedove is likely to be examined at some moment
• glide maintainer has been notified
• arb is ignored on request of its maintainer
• others are my targets for today..:)

PS: the title of this blog entry comes from a bug report from Joey Hess for ssl-cert. I didn't fix that because it certainly requires too invasive changes at this moment but these debconf templates are definitely not the best worded ever and the underlyign debconf code is pretty weak.

During the Solutions Linux 2007 event, the .Org pavillion had the (good) surprise to get the visit by M. Fran ois Bayrou, one of the candidates running for the French presidential election (mostly located in the center of our political scenery, between the ultra-liberal Nicolas Sarkozy and the socialist S gol ne Royal. He's given about 12% of votes for the first round by polls). As far as I know, he is the only candidate who visited SL2007. He even visited the .Org pavillion and had a breif talk, on the Ruby France booth, with my old friend Ollivier Robert (longtime FreeBSD activist and committer, security expert and author of calife, a light alternative to sudo). Another old friend, namely Thomas Parmelan is visible at the back of this picture. As far as I have heard, M. Bayrou unfortunately didn't stop at the Debian booth. I suppose that M. Bayrou visited the APRIL booth who launched the candidats.fr initiative, requesting the candidates running for the presidential election to publish their stance about Free Software and Digital Liberties.

XSLT's principle of greatest surprise Ruby and Python both claim to adhere to the principle of least surprise, that is: things should work as the human coding in them expects to. But for today the rants about that are on hold. Still, in the last few days I made up my mind on something related: XSLT adheres to the principle of greatest surprise.

• XPath's data model is based on 4 data types: string, number, boolean, node-set. XSLT adds to it one more: document tree fragment (DTF). When you define a variable (or, better since XSLT is a functional programming language, when you bind a value to a name) you play with a value and a name. No matter the type of the value, that value is automatically casted to a DTF after the binding. Guess you can avoid it? Wrong. Guess you can cast it back to another data type when needed? Wrong, unless the desired data type is a string. The only other thing you can do with it is output to the final document.
  • Sure, you say, but you have the wonderful EXSLT extensions which standardized exsl:node-set() to cast back a DTF to a node-set (which probably has been previously automatically casted to a DTF by binding it to a variable name). Then, after crossing your fingers in the hope your XSLT processor implements the given extension, guess with me: since a node-set is automatically converted to a DTF with a dummy root node and one children for each node in the node-set (as it is according to XSLT specs), what do you expect exsl:node-set() on that node set to return? The original node-set? Wrong. You will have back a node-set with the dummy node as only member. ... enjoy tons of exsl:node-set($var)//* expressions in your code
• Being node-sets the only sequence-like data type in the language, what would you do in case you need to first create a list of strings and then pack them with a join-like function intermixing a textual separator? I personally would go for recursively creating a node-set of strings and then join them. Nice try, but wrong. Adjacent strings in a node-set are automatically joined during processing: bye-bye hope of joining them later. The solution? Wrapper elements around each string in the node-set ...
• So you have other wonderful extensions like the set module of EXSLT which implements set-like operations on node-sets. Having seen the following functions: set:difference(), set:intersection(), ... and knowing that for booleans there are true() and false(), wouldn't you expect to have set:empty-node-set()? I would, but unfortunately the problem is not I was unlucky in guessing the name, there is no such function in the language or in the extensions at all. Everyone in using hacks like /..
• AFAIK the most popular XSLT processor on Unix-like systems is xsltproc, which also implements several of the EXSLT extensions. Yay! Of the modules you see listed on the EXSLT web page, what's the one, out of heart, you think you can't live without. . . . . Regular Expressions!, precisely the one xsltproc is not implementing. I had to switch to 4xslt: nice and Pythonish, but not exactly as fast as a lighting bolt.

/me stops at 50% of my ~/Desktop/xslt-sucks.txt If only CDuce had a syntax I'm able to remember ...

I just learnt about the Free my nano! (Porting iPodLinux to the 2nd Generation iPod Nano) project, and it actually looks like there is some activity (and progress). Emmanuel Fleury reveals what is so far known about the 2gb 2nd Generation Ipod. Way to go!

Quoting from the site: 2nd gen iPods are great hardware platforms. Unfortunately, this is protected hardware! Apple has protected the firmware of the latest iPod through encryption. Our goal is to collect and publish as much information as possible about software&hardware and then try to use our own Operating System on that platform.

Owning this little device has been quite frustrating so far, but I still have some hope that I will not need to sell it on ebay, or exchange it for a model supported by either Rockbox or iPodLinux.

I've just noticed that some debconf7 registrations close this week. Yes, this week - a full two months before national rail advance tickets go on sale. What's that about? [...] Jon Dowland replied

"MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights."

International travel does not necessarily require flights. Intercontinental travel probably does, due to time constraints, or maybe even cross-continent, but I've seen DDs from nearby countries posting about booking their flights, and putting the deadlines before land tickets are even on sale is really shameful.

"It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself."

As I've posted elsewhere, it's a mediawiki rather than a wiki, so once I get around to installing mvs, I can sign up and edit it. (Bring back patches in the mail...) However, I'm not sure how best to get to Edinburgh without flying yet, because most tickets aren't on sale yet, which is where I started, remember? David Moreno Garza replied

"in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. [...]"

Sure, if people are travelling from 3rd world countries to Edinburgh, then flying is probably the only practical way, but surely people from nearby countries can get to Scotland without dumping CO2 into our sky?

(Almost all links in this text lead to German sources. Sorry, but this is a local topic and there aren't any English sources.) Unfortunately, Hildesheim is home to some rather prominent figures of the German neo-nazi scene. One of them has now registered for a protest march through Hildesheim on the 24 February 2007. The reason for this is, that an other neo-nazi event, that had been disguised as a "birthday party", but was in fact a propaganda event featuring talks by "contemporary witnesses" and "an evening of ballads" and was arranged by "National Forces of Hildesheim and the Association of German Women" had been prevented by the Hildesheim police. As a reaction to this, the aforementioned gentleman has now registered for a demonstration with the Hildesheim city council. (In Germany you need to register demonstrations.) Official head of the whole thing is this other gentleman, who has a history of trying to organise nazi demonstrations. He occasionally does so in Leipzig, where he tries to organise such demonstrations about twice a year. Their attendance is dropping though and they are usually met with about ten times as many counter demonstrators and thus have to be ended prematurely, exposing them as the unwanted and ridiculous farces they really are. However, the fact that people still try to register demonstrations such as this one is worrying. And the fact that this one is meant to be in the town I live in makes me pretty angry. Fortunately the demonstration is met with broad opposition. An alliance has been formed, consisting of the German adult education centre of Hildesheim (VHS), the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), Verdi, our public services union, Attac, the Antifa, the refugee council of Lower Saxony and the political parties with the Hildesheim Greens as the most active part at the moment. It is good to see, that such neo-nazi endeavours are met with such a broad opposition, and that this opposition does not only originate from the "usual suspects", but from the centre of society. (The VHS for example is usually a non-political organisation, and seeing them engage in such an alliance and even hosting its meetings is pretty cool!) It's not sure yet, whether the demonstration will be approved. It probably will, but with a bunch of extra conditions. If it is approved, it is even more important to meet it with the resistance it deserves! So, if you are living near Hildesheim, watch this space for announcements of the planned counter measures.

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn't get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well.
I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we were in Amsterdam, but that was back in 1996. Since then, I cannot recall using a bike - So, of course, I was quite shaky and afraid to begin with. I must admit, I envied Nadezhda, as she seems to be natural - While I was still trying to get the bike moving without crashing into something, she was literally making circles around me.
On Sunday, we went for a short ride in the main circuit of UNAM. On Monday night, we went most of the way to the gym/running lanes where we go to make our excercises - Yes, mostly uphill, and I managed! (she had already done that road earlier the same Monday). Thursday and Friday, I rolled early to do my excercise, and we basically crossed each other on the way. On Saturday, finally, we came all the way to the new Institute.
Sunday was amazing: We went with her family (two sisters, one brother and five pedalling nephews, plus one nephew in a basket in his mother's bike) along the Ciclopista. The Ciclopista goes on the path that used to be the Mexico-Cuernavaca railroad, and starting at Contreras, it goes uphill to cross the Ajusco/Chichinahutzin ridge. I cannot find a decent map, and I don't have a clue on what distance we rode, but it was just great - We crossed basically all of the Magdalena Contreras part of the Ciclopista and part of Tlalpan, until maybe 500m past the market at Calle 8. Of course, after the ride, we feasted with quesadillas at the market, plus some tacos of a delicious chicharr n prepared by Nadezhda's mother. It was a long ride anyway - I got quite tired, and the way back (fortunately, downhill) was still long. We had promised the four year old nephews to take them to the zoo that same day, although we counted on them being tired by that time - Well, a child's will is stronger than being tired, so we still went to Chapultepec to dive in a sea of people and look at some nice animals ;-)
...Finally, yesterday and today I have come by bike to the Institute. There are a couple of hard parts, and I still have not mastered the techniques for being an effective rider, but the way back is just delicious. Besides, yesterday I made 15 minutes on my way back, today it was 20 minutes coming here - almost the same time that going by car! Oh, and on the way back, I get to enjoy a beautiful view of my beloved volcanos, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl. And, as Mauricio already pointed out, thanks to the light rains we had in the previous days... They just look amazing, covered in snow from their very bases.
Not much to add to it... But I'm delighted :)

MJ, in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. When some of the basic needs for humans to live are easily covered and people do not have to worry about, suchs as daily eating, it’s way more easy to develop a country and have people concerning about unimportant stuff. Even free software is a luxury matter on some countries! You know, human beings have an stupid custom acquired since they were born, most of them, and that’s the need for eating, how weaks! I think you get my point. Yours, an international traveller flying between the UK.

I finally completed a longstanding project converting this blog from Blosxom to Wordpress. Five years ago when I transitioned from a self-coded blog to blosxom, I loved the low tech “hackable” nature of Blosxom. Unfortunately, it hasn’t scaled well. I can imagine using Wordpress five years from now, but the Blosxom filesystem-only style organization just won’t hold up. At some point soon while it’s still fresh in my memory I will document the transition. Since nearly every Blosxom user has a unique set of quirks, each transition will have its own special problems. I’ve made every effort to preserve permalinks from the old blog, but I’m not sure they all made it over. If you are looking for something and can’t find it, please drop me a line. I also suspect that my most recent entries will repeat themselves for everyone who subscribes to this RSS feed. I apologize for any inconvenience.

I bought a Sansa e280 last weekend to replace my aging and bulky Neuros (the last straw was when I lost the charger for the Neuros). It's nice to have such a small, light music player, and having 8GB of space is a big bonus. But when I went to the Sandisk web site to get a new firmware, I discovered that they only provide a .exe of a magic firmware download program. This is despite the fact that, as you can find by searching on the Web, the actual firmware upgrade procedure is just "copy the firmware file onto the device".

So, I wrote to support, mentioning that I don't have a running Windows installation and asking if they could provide an alternate means of updating the firmware. Here's the response:

Please be informed that your Sansa e280 is supported on Windows XP. If the operating system of your computer is not Windows XP, if you have just bought your Sansa e280, we do recommend that you contact the store where you purchased it and inquire about replacements that can be supported on your operating system or if that store honor refunds, please do ask for it. Please do provide the proof of purchase and packaging for verification purposes.

Now, I can work around this problem -- but after reading that brush-off I think I might just take their advice; as it happens, I saved the packaging just on the offchance something like this came up. Can anyone recommend a decent, small, flash-based media player that works well with Linux? Must-have features are:

• FM radio (this eliminates, e.g., the Archos).
  
• Some support for non-encumbered file formats.
  
• Support for installing firmware upgrades from Linux.
  
• Support for syncing music from Linux.
  
• Either .ogg support or a lively (even if unfinished) Rockbox port. (Rockbox is actually preferred, since I'll probably just switch over to it if possible; this was one of the deciding factors in my purchasing an e280)
  

I still haven't made up my mind: I might hang onto the e280 out of inertia and wait for the Rockbox guys to figure it out (it looks like they're making pretty good progress). But if there's a better vendor out there that actually wants my money, I'd love to hear about them.

When I built my PVR a few years I bought a OneForAll URC-7562 6in1 remote control; with a surround sound amp, TV, NTL cable box, DVD and PVR the number of remotes around the place was getting a bit ridiculous. The main reason for choosing this remote was its ability to control the NTL box, which uses some odd IrDA based format apparently that even lirc has difficulty making sense of and learning remotes mostly ignore. It also had the ability to be upgraded remotely by phoning up a support line and they'd squirt some noise down the phone that the remote would understand. I had call to use this to enable my Scan DVD player when I first got the remote and it worked fine and I was quite impressed. However the remote also features another neat way to do upgrades. It has a 6 pin header in the battery compartment that is know as the JP1. This exposes the I2C bus that the configuration EEPROM lives on and there is a good amount of information out there about understanding the memory layout and adding support for new remotes etc. I'd been meaning to build the adapter to connect up since getting the remote but until recently hadn't really had a reason. However although my new TV is vaguely supported I'd really like to be able to remap the keys more sanely. So last weekend I discovered I had the appropriate bits lying around and built one. Unfortunately most of the software is for Windows; there's a Java app that will generate the appropriate data to feed to the remote, but the main communication tool is a Windows app. I found a couple of old Linux tools, but then I had a thought: it's just i2c. Why not tie it into the proper i2c subsystem? Turns out the i2c-parport driver makes this sort of thing easy; all you add is a single entry defining the appropriate parallel port lines to wiggle and it all magically works. So now I can talk to my remote using the eeprom driver talking to the i2c subsystem which talks to the remote over the parallel port adaptor I built. Which feels wonderfully sick. :) Now I need to actually have a closer look at getting all the buttons working for my new TV...

I was fortunate enough to attend lca2007 last week and to meet Bruno Cornec, the Mondo Rescue project leader, for the first time in the flesh.

The conference was pretty cool, and I found the quality of the program to be generally impressingly high: Excellent topics, superb presentation skills, humor and genuine passion for the topic at hand. The atmosphere and organisation were great, too - extremely well done, 7 Team!

My personal two highlights were:

• Andrew Tanenbaum's keynote because he really sticks to his guns and even after 20 years or so finds new aspects that could make microkernel architectures appealing. This time it is system self-healing and robustness. Even though I yet have to try out the Minix 3 CD I found in my conference bag, I guess he may have a point (and moving functionality into user space has been a happening thing for years now). I found the keynote to be both amusing and instructive and dealing with a pressing topic. Also, even though it probably is far from usable in real-world scenarios, at least with Minix 3 there is code and an actual system to demonstrate the ideas and concepts.
• Christopher Blizzard's keynote about OLPC, his participation in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion and a conversation that we had over lunch after. (Admittedly, I was so excited during parts of the latter that I couldn't decide what topic to bring up, oh well.) My impression is that Chris is a person of integrity and real compassion for Free Software. He appears to have a very positive attitude and comes across as genuine. Chris may not have said that much new during his keynote, but I think he worked the subject of relevance for projects well. More importantly, Chris was the only one in the Debian Miniconf distribution discussion to make a firm stand for Open Source as an ideal and against binary drivers. (Not 100% true, AJ was as well, but really more appearing to report what Debian does. And a question for openSUSE: Do you really think a marketing guy on a discussion panel will appeal to people?)

Apart from the conference as such, it was super cool to meet Bruno. We had a number of good conversations and did some nice hacking, burning the midnight oil a couple of times. And HP gave me a (used) zx2000 (which Bruno carried all the way from France to Sydney!) to enable me to work on the (Debian) Itanium port of Mondo Rescue - thank you HP and Bruno! Bruno's talk was well received, and it was great to actually meet people that use the software that I spend quite a bit of time on. :-)

Finally, there is the Linus phenomenon (so you can tell this is my first
Linux conference) - he amazingly is basically left in peace: People who know him obviously talk to him and he participates vividly in discussions and so forth, but everyone else does the business as usual thing - no autographs, no photos, no nothing. I was (positively) impressed and refrained from asking him to sign my copy of Just for Fun (just kidding).

Finally, finally, I propose to find an alternative for the term 'awesome' next year. ;-)

I suggested in a previous blog entry that conferences should provide computers that speakers can use for their presentations. The reason for this is that getting one computer working with the beamer in each room is an easy task, while getting the laptop of every speaker to work is much more difficult.

It seems that my idea has been rejected by almost everyone who read it, so I'll document some tips for getting a laptop working.

 SZ:    Pixels          Physical       Refresh
*0   1400 x 1050   ( 474mm x 356mm )  *50
4    640 x 480    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
5    800 x 600    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
6   1024 x 768    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
8   1280 x 960    ( 474mm x 356mm )   50
9   1280 x 1024   ( 474mm x 356mm )   50

Firstly there is the command xrandr which can be used to change the resolution without logging out. Above are the most useful lines produced by running xrandr with no options on my Thinkpad T41p. The left column is the index to the list of resolutions. For example I run xrandr -s 9 to use mode 1280x1024 and xrandr -s 0 to use mode 1400x1050. This takes much less time than editing an X config file!

The next thing to note is that my Thinkpad has a refresh rate of 50Hz, apparently most beamers expect at least 60Hz, this explains why I have had ongoing problems in getting my Thinkpad to correctly work for presentations for the entire time that I have owned it. If you own such a Thinkpad then I recommend that you just bring another laptop to do your presentation on the assumption that the display possibly won't work and probably won't work properly! I had developed this habit anyway after repeated problems in getting my Thinkpad working (occurring on a number of occasions in several countries). It's good to now know the reason for this (thanks Keith).

When setting the resolution there are often tweaks that can be used. For example in my talk for the Debian Miniconf of LCA 2007 I used mode 800x600 (I think - Keith set it up and I didn't look closely after verifying that things basically worked). Even though the beamer didn't have good support for a low refresh rate it worked when the resolution was low enough. Fortunately the xrandr program allows changing resolution fast enough that all 13 resolutions could be attempted in about a minute.

The support for better display detection and configuration is steadily improving. Hopefully this year the problems will be solved (which means that for the Debian and RHEL releases in 2008 the problem will be solved).

A possible work-around is to use Xephyr (the replacement for Xnest). In a previous blog entry I described how to get Xephyr going for use by Xen images. It seems to be a common symptom of display synchronization problems that the edges of the screen will be clipped. The most common work-around for this is to not use the full-screen mode of OpenOffice - which means that instead of having a small amount of text clipped there is a large amount of OpenOffice menus etc on the screen. As Xephyr accepts any resolution it should not be difficult to arrange for it to use 98% of the screen space and then run the presentation full-screen in the Xephyr window. This will be particularly useful for programs such as MagicPoint (my favorite presentation program) which don't support a windowed mode of operation.

If you have any other suggestions on how to solve or work around display problems with laptops then please leave comments.

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely Nicolas Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April. Update: M. Mouette had a point about this original blog post, so I corrected its title. Now he can answer on the content if he likes to..;-)

As I was "predicting" around myself as soon as Segolene Royal was designated as the socialist party candidate for the French presidential election (and thus becoming the very first woman in position to be elected as president here), the days of shit would come. They are coming now. Todays "small sentence" was an half-stolen sentence taken ex-abrupto in a live discussion during a visit to Canada. She expressed some "support" and "sympathy" for the ideas of Quebec autonomy. Of course, this became a big pleasure for the media around to emphasize this story, with the precious help of our right-wing parties supporters, especially those of the UMP dwarf, namely M. Sarkozy. Last week, the shit was about a trip to China (with many care to not interfere in internal politics...apparently, this time she should have interfered....but not when going in Canada, strange...). The week before, this was about a trip in Middle East (a place where Sarkozy will never go during the campaign, will you bet). One woman already experienced this in the past, the only woman that has ever been Prime Minister in France, namely Edith Cresson. When Segolene's popularity was raising, some said that, in these Edith Cresson days, "minds weren't ready" and the like. Minds are still not ready. Our country, with the invaluable help of most of our political staff, does not want a woman to be our international representative. It's pretty likely that she will lose the election, and lose it by far. "They" are way too much powerful. Yes, I will regret it. Yes, I will still support her and though this becomes "ringard". I do want a woman as president and I do want *this* woman (and this party, by the way). Not only because I hate these UMP guys, with a special note for Sarkozy, but also because I really think this can change things. Yep, that may sound stupid, but I sometimes believe in politics. We suck. A lot. I just only hope to be proven wrong in April.

This is a never ending story for me. The first time I’ve had problems with Linux’s handling of serial UART dates back to 2005 (see my previous blog post on buffer overruns). At that time I could improve the situation by applying two patches (kernel-preempt and low latency). One year later, I have a situation where the buffer overruns are again easily reproducible at slower baudrate (54 kbauds), arguably there’s more than a serial application running this time, and it looks like the load generated by other processes (mainly watching digital I/O) renders the system less reliable with respect to its handling of serial ports. This time I follow the advice to try out the 2.6 kernel because many “real-time improvements” (coming from the -rt branch, check its wiki) and “embedded improvements” (coming from linux-tiny) have been merged. So I tried the stock kernel with very bad result. Results are better than the stock 2.4 but they are worse than the patched 2.4. So I decide to try the -rt patch on 2.6, but this patch doesn’t work on my CPU card and my bugreport didn’t lead to any fix (nobody responded even though I tried hard to include the necessary information and I was ready to do whatever I would have been asked to try). At the same time I explain my problem on the linux-kernel mailing list. The discussion doesn’t answer my questions but still brings two ideas to try out. In the end, with two simple tweaks to the stock 2.6 kernel (mainly configuring the UART to send the interrupt as soon as the first character arrives, instead of waiting for 8 chars to accumulate in the FIFO) I have been able to get something better than the patched 2.4. And it turns out my first choices for the 2.6 kernel configuration have not been very wise so the comparison between stock 2.4 and stock 2.6 above doesn’t mean much. Unfortunately, even if better than the patched Linux 2.4, it still doesn’t give good results in some conditions. So my primary question remains: is there a way to patch my kernel so that it will handle the serial related tasks (servicing interrupts from the UART mainly) as its primary job ? I don’t mind if such a change impact negatively the speed of the system if I can make sure that my serial exchanges are reliable. And by reliable I mean of course no buffer overruns, but there’s a second similar problem that has been discovered: when using software handshake, the system can send out between 10 and 25 characters after the partner has sent its XOFF. Sending up to 6 characters after the XOFF is ok, more is asking for troubles because the UART on the other side will probably encounter a buffer overrun… If you have any idea on how to resolve my problems, by any means, let me know.