So there are times that I think of course anyone remotely interested in Free Software, virtual projects, and similar endeavors knows about Debian and its strange rituals. I am pretty mistaken, actually. Recently I have attended various events where it has been made clear to me that there are hordes of folks interested in the politics of openness, access, and free software who have heard about Debian but don t really know what it takes, socially and politically, to manage such a project. Luckily I had the chance to spread some of the esoteric knowledge during a talk at MIT for the Knight News Challenge winners and I have received many emails, excited and some surprised about the governance structures of Debian. If interested, here is a video of my talk, which is quite short, so I don t go into as much detail as I would like. There is a great audio quote from a Debian developer, taken from this class visit for which there is a podcast and which I recommend as well. If you can t play flash, you can download the a video of the talk here (look at the right hand side of the page for download link). update: Interesting blog post on Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way that explores some of the issues I raise in the panel talk. I don t think it always trumps open source but it is certainly a niche form of production that is useful in some cases but all too often confused with expert peer production in quite unproductive and empirically wrong ways.

Currently I own and use an iPhone 3G. I bought it almost two years ago, when the local phone provider LMT started offering the iPhone legally. I had a pretty good experience with it most of the time, but now it is showing its age:

• The two year warranty will run out in September
• The iOS 4 update left out most of the new features my model cann t have multitasking or backgrounds or any of that new cool stuff that is exclusive to the new iPhone 4
• The hardware itself is starting to wear the speaker stopped working a few weeks ago (so I have to use the loudspeaker function or headphones) and also approximately around that time the phone stated to randomly lock up approximately one a week or two it freezes and after a few minutes reboots and demads to be connected to iTunes and restored from backup
• Also the battery does not last as long as it used to

I will try to send my iPhone in for repair hoping to extend its usefulness, but frankly it looks that I might have to get a new phone at or before Debconf. So I am considering my options for a new phone and so far I have 3 main options each with some sub-options. The main options are: iPhone 4, MeeGo and Android. Each choice has its benefits and drawbacks and each also has several sub-options related either to specific phone models or to purchase methods. What I need is a phone with: calling function, contact information synchronised to Google, support for Google Mail/Contacts/Calendar simultaneously with one Exchange account also providing mail/contacts/calendars, music, audiobooks saving my place in the audio book and in the list of books, fully featured Twitter client with Twitpic and location support, encrypted password storage application (preferably open source), GPS with maps, ability to download maps for offline use, Geocaching support with offline cache info and logging, Skype client, ability to write in Latvian, English and Russian in all applications, reliable backup and restore of phones data including settings and data of installed apps. Optional features: last.fm streaming and reporting support, ebook applications with purchasable ebooks, high quality video and photo recording (for a phone), ability for me to write applications on the phone, ssh client, wireless data upload to the phone, ability to change the phones battery without loosing data in the phone (on the go), compass, physical keyboard, confidence in getting software upgrades and developer interest for the next 2 years. I ll try to describe all of the options here to organise my thoughts and maybe also help someone else make the choice. Option 1: iPhone 4 To get the iPhone 4 I have two options: LMT and unlocked. The official arrival of iPhone 4 to Latvia is expected in September and it will likely be sold by LMT for the same prices as iPhone 3GS is now. If I choose this scenario, I will need to survive with my semi-broken iPhone for 2-3 more months. Total price over 2 years (LVL): 131 (purchase price) + 24 * 8 (surcharge) = 323 LVL. Note: the surcharge is the extra cost of the iPhone call plan compared to a comparable regular plan (Vien dais 7 + Internets telefon 5). If I go and purchase an unlocked iPhone 4 in a country where such units are sold (UK is the most easily accessible choice, because a few of my workmates travel weekly to and from UK) then the total price over 2 years would be the purchase price: 499 GBP + 65 GBP (2 year warranty extension) = 505 LVL Now lets go over the general benefits and downsides of the iPhone 4, first the positives:

• It is a simple to use device that I am used to over the two years
• The screen resolution is higher than any other option
• It is smaller and lighter than Nokia N900 and the bigger Android devices
• There is a huge number of free and paid apps as well as accessories for the iPhone docks, headphones, chargers,
• I know that it can do every thing that I need it to do (with apps) and most of the optional features too, except (see drawbacks)

Drawbacks:

• The first thing that I hate about the iPhone is its umbilical cord like link to iTunes. iTunes is the sole purpose I still have a real Windows installation on my main computer (in a Sun VirtualBox, thankfully). iTunes is slow, clumsy and generally unusable piece of dog excrements. It can only do one thing at a time, mostly: if you are adding a folder to your library, you can t switch to another tab and see how the backup of your iPhone is going. The actions do happen in the background, but more often than not you cann t switch away from some actions. If you try to do multiple things in parallel, instead of resolving any process conflicts and queueing the actions iTunes will simply silently fails to do something, often leaving remains of the half-finished actions. It also does not bother to check if the backup or restore of the phone is complete before using it in this way I have many time gotten into a situation where I connect the iPhone to the iTunes, it starts backing it up, then crashes and next time happily offers this half-done backup copy as a valid restore point. Or it crashes during restore and only writes some files and settings to the phone other settings stay at their default values. It is also very cryptic, for example if you have a lot of music it can take hours to import it into iTunes (it spent 2 hours Analysing gapless playback information of 5000 songs) and then you will be puzzled about how to put some of that on the iPhone. If you just tick the checkbox to sync your music you ll get an error stating that there is not enough free space, which is not very helpful. The magic combination was to check Manually manage music and then go to music tab and choose Autofill option. At that point iTunes will spend half an hour choosing which songs to put on the phone, before it even starts copying. And god forbid that you would use that AppStore application on the iPhone to actually install apps sooner or later you will run into a backup bug where creating or restoring a backup of your iPhone might take 2-3 hours instead of more normal 5-15 minutes. Only a factory reset of the phone followed by selective reinstallation of applications (loosing all their settings in the process) can work around this bug currently.
• The closed nature of the iPhone means that I cann t install unapproved software unless I jailbreak the phone and even then it is rather problematic to develop for the phone unless you have a Mac and shell out 99$ a year for participation in the developers program
• The iPhone is a consumption device and not a productivity device. I would like to have a device on which I could be creative as a software developer as well

Option 2: Maemo/MeeGo Some of my colleagues at work (in the Riga office of Accenture) have N900 phones and I have been exposed to people with raw enthusiasm towards the Maemo platform ever since the Debconf in Helsinki, where we saw the first N700 devices in the hands of some lucky Debian/Nokia people using it as an Internet tablet. N900 has been a strong leap forward for the platform, before its head was teleported sideways by the whole MeeGo merger/debackle. Again I have two options here: Get a N900 either here in Latvia for 325 LVL (that would be the total cost over 2 years) or get it from USA during Debconf for 399 USD (+129 USD for 2 year warranty) = 317 LVL. And additional option would be to wait until October/November and then buy the new Nokia MeeGo device, rumoured to be N9-00 and likely to be around the same price as N900 was when it was introduced (around 500 LVL). Benefits:

• A fully open and rooted Debian Linux based device with apt-get, X, pusleaudio, d-bus and Qt as core technologies
• I can install software from anyone and can also write my own software either in Qt/C++ or even in Python
• There is (or was) a significant hacker community that develops applications for N900
• As far as I know most of the features that I need do work on N900, but I am unsure about:
  1. audiobook support how easy it is to put a MP3 on the device and tell it is an audiobbok so that the device would remember position when playing the file and save it even if the player is stopped and the device is rebooted or backed up and restored from backup?
  2. can I have Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar and at the same time also have an Exchange account with mail and contacts and calendar active?
  3. how is the Geocaching.com support is there an app already that makes it easy to geocache while offline?
  4. Multilingual keyboards I ve seen people having to reimplement the on-screen keyboard in their programs, and naturally they do not bother to add support for all language. So support for multilingual keyboard input is an open one.

Drawbacks:

• All the uncertainties above while I could write all the above software, it would be better if I would not have to, so that I could focus on something more productive
• Also the whole position of Nokia on the MeeGo support on the N900 is kinda backwards. I am now used to the Apple way that if I get a device, then it will get software updates for at least next two years and will get the new software features developed in the next two years at least. If Nokia would have said All phone-oriented MeeGo releases will have a version for N900 until at least the end of 2012. Then this drawback would not have been there, but currently it is a mayor sticking stone for me. I don t want to buy a device that will be on a dead-end software platform that will die before the end of this year.
• N900 is the largest and heaviest of all the options

Option 3 Android After looking trough the options for Android phones, I ve narrowed the selection to the ones that are either available from local carriers or can be easily gotten unlocked also the phones need to have announced plans to have at least Android 2.2 version. Currently the choice is limited to HTC Desire (from carrier or unlocked) and Samsung Galaxy S (unlocked). The prices over 2 years break down as follows: HTC Desire (locked to LMT): 69 + 9*24 = 285 LVL
HTC Desire (locked to Bite): 199 + 2*24 = 247 LVL (Note: only 500Mb of data per month available)
HTC Desire (locked to Tele2): 179 + 6*24 = 323 LVL
Note: all the above options would also require me to pay a 45 LVL early termination fee on my current iPhone contract if I choose to do this before September.
HTC Desire (unlocked): 311 LVL
Samsung Galaxy S (unlocked): 350 LVL (import from Germany) Benefits:

• As far as I could find, the features I need are out there in one way or another there usually is an app for that!
• Google looks poised to continue development at a rapid pace
• There is an active hacker community and also an active commercial software community that offers cool applications for a few bucks
• As far as I understand the phone backups onto itself a backup of the phone is created onto a SD card in the phone and you can then copy that off the phone for permanent backup, it is a nice concept
• There are literally thousands of sources for Android applications: from the official Market to Google Code to individual web pages and forums
• The hardware looks solid, powerful and generic enough to last for a couple of years
• It is likely that knowing how to program Android app will be useful for me at work
• It is cheap and simple to start writing Android apps on Linux

Drawbacks:

• Typical usability of Android apps is pretty low compared to iPhone
• The Android environment is very unique and is not like anything else it s not really much of a Linux system from an apps perspective
• I would be relying on HTC to provide OS updates in a timely manner it is quite likely that after a year or so the updates to new version will come slowly or even stop altogether and I will have to use hacked ROMs
• I have a dislike for Java. I wish one could write fully featured Android apps in Python

Please correct me if I am wrong with something!!! And also it would be cool if you expressed your own opinions in the comments. Currently I am very undecided about what I am going to do, but after completing this entry I am leaning towards an unlocked HTC Desire. Update:
Olivier Cr te shares a N900 vs. Nexus One experience Edit 01-07-2010: Handed my iPhone in for a warranty repair, got a dumbphone Nokia as a loaner during repairs. Very surprised about how long a battery can last on a low powered and cheap phone. In the mean time from all the comments here and elsewhere I am starting to see that I am too annoyed with the iPhone platform (mostly iTunes) to stay there and that I am also not convinced in the direction MeeGo is going (a lot of community developers are annoyed and are jumping ship), so N900 is also out. I will need to see 2-3 MeeGo smartphones and also see how Nokia will treat their smartphone users and developers on this platform, in the long term, before I ll be ready to trust them with my money. Therefore, my choice is becoming pretty clear look for the best Android phone (after my iPhone dies). We have this thing at Accenture, where we can get company phones at a discount and HTC Desire is on that list. If I can get that, it would slash 100 LVL (almost a third of the price!) off it, but to get there I either need to get a promotion (rather rare after just one year with the company) or prove the necessity of the phone for the needs of my project (kinda hard currently). Well, the situation will be a bit clearer next week when I get my iPhone back. (Apparently the Latvia s largest holiday Midsummer Festivities or J i/L go with tons of traditional outdoor activities, caused a lot of phones to become broken and there is a backlog of warranty service ) So at this point my plan is: get my iPhone repaired and get a promotion or a project where I can justify a company-paid HTC Desire and then hope that Nokia/Intel really get their stuff together and make MeeGo a great smartphone platform over the next year or two. Update: Got my iPhone 3G back from the warranty . It is in quotes because they just gave me a new iPhone 3G. The battery lasts for 3 days of minimal use and it has not crashed yet. The recovery process was a pain again caused by iTunes: iTunes refused to restore my backup onto the new phone, because my backup was made on a iOS 4.0, while the new phone I got from the warranty has 3.1.3 on it. So I had to set this phone as a new phone, initialise it, make a backup, upgrade to 4.0, restore from the (empty) backup, then reset the phone to factory settings again and only then I could start restoring data from my original (pre-warranty) backup and start copying my data on to the device. All in all it took nearly 3 hours if iTunes doing something and almost a dozen reboots of the phone. Almost half of that time was spent doing completely unnecessary steps to work around the fact that iTunes is braindead. I ll continue using my iPhone for now, keeping my eyes on the newest Android phones and also waiting for the long-promised first MeeGo phone from Nokia.

Last weekend (2010-07-02 2010-07-04) nine people met at the FAI developer workshop at Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. If you can t remember: FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. The participants of the FAI meeting: second row from left to right: Michael Goetze, Michael Prokop, Andreas Schuldei
first row from left to right: Sebastian Hetze, Manuel Hachtkemper, Thomas Lange, Mattias Jansson
missing on the picture: Thomas Neumann (left on sunday midday) and Stephan Hermann (only part-time) Friday afternoon started with getting to know each other, continuing with discussions all around FAI. On saturday we started to hack on FAI. Between the hack sessions and discussions the attending people presented their FAI usage and approaches. Some notes from the presentations:

---

FAI Manager webfrontend / Stephan Hermann Stephan \sh Hermann presented his FAI web frontend which should be released under the GPL license in those days. The frontend uses qooxdoo whereas the backend is based on django, rpc4django and python-tftpy. A demo video is available at blip.tv. Currently Stephan is searching for a nice name for his FAI management tool please send suggestions either to him or to the linux-fai-devel mailinglist. Grml / Michael Prokop Grml is a Debian based Linux live system specially made for system administrators. Grml uses grml-live for building the ISOs, whereas grml-live itself uses FAI s dirinstall feature to build the live system. This provides the Grml team with a nice way to autobuild 18 ISOs per day, known as daily.grml.org. Mika also presented Grml s netscript bootoption and the ethdevice bootoption of live-initramfs which is useful for booting Grml/FAI via PXE. Host Europe / Michael Goetze Host Europe uses FAI for installing Debian and Ubuntu (32+64 bit) in the support center. They have ~20 FAI classes and use a Debian lenny NFSROOT as base for all deployed systems. Their main problems with FAI aren t related to FAI itself, but instead e.g. broadcom NICs with lack of support for it in Lenny s kernel. They are not using softupdate (yet) and currently use Kickstart for deploying CentOS but are working on deploying CentOS with FAI as well. LIS AG / Sebastian Hetze Linux Information Systems AG (LIS AG) are using FAI 3.2.17 and provide a luma and PyQt based GUI to their customers. They use DHCP, LDAP and DDNS for inventory, configuration and deployment. Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn / Manuel Hachtkemper The Mathematical Institute of the University of Bonn uses FAI 3.1.8 and 3.3.5 for managing ~150 systems. They are automatically running softupdates every day, reporting how many hosts actually did run the softupdate and how many didn t run. The involved failogwatch tool supports two regex files, one for excluding specific hosts and the other one for grepping for known problems in the logs. Spotify / Andreas Schuldei + Mattias Jansson Spotify is a peer-to-peer music streaming service and the operating people at Spotify use FAI for deploying the systems. Currently they are using FAI 3.3.3 to deploy ~400 bare metal machines and ~150 virtualised machines. They have their class names in DNS using the txt/Text record entry. They are using a self written prepend_class script to manage dependencies between classes. University K ln / Thomas Lange Thomas uses FAI s trunk version (of course ), managing ~25 machines with less than 20 FAI classes. He s not using softupdates as Lenny s aptitude ignores the hold status of packages (this bug should be fixed for Squeeze). $COMPANY One of the big telecommunication providers in Germany uses FAI 3.3.3 for installing their bare-metal and virtual servers, providing Debian, Ubuntu and SLES. They are using Debian NFSROOT as a base for all systems as well and their main problems with FAI wasn t FAI itself but how to manage installation of virtual machines.

---

On Saturday evening we had a nice barbecue which included beer and K lsch *d&r*. On Sunday we continued with discussions and development. Our work-log of the weekend:

• identified important packages for the Debian/squeeze release
• discussed features that should be available (important packages and bugreports, missing features, )
• fixed several bugs (wrong exit codes, error handling, variable handling, )
• discussed FAI packaging for Ubuntu (packages for lucid are available at ppa at launchpad)
• implemented support for grub2 in fai-cd (will be merged soon)
• implemented initial support for retrieving sources with FAI (available in svn s trunk)

Important decisions made:

• next major release will have version number 4.x
• we want to continue to provide a stable version 3.x (no new features, just bugfixes and maintenance) side-by-side with version 4.x
• deprecated setup-harddisk will be dropped, setup-storage is well established, works fine and is properly maintained by FAI developer Michael Tautschnig (who sadly couldn t attend the FAI developer meeting)
• a FAQ section will be created on the FAI homepage

We noticed that many FAI users implement their own way how to handle dependency management between classes, we will re-consider how we could provide such a mechanism through FAI s core. We also noted that it s important that any self-written scripts used within FAI are fully idempotent and users should be aware of this. Last but not least many thanks to the sponsors of the FAI developer workshop 07/2010! The workshop wouldn t have been possible without our generous sponsors, namely being:

• Debian
• Linuxhotel
• Linux Information Systems AG
• Netways
• Spotify
• Thomas-Krenn.AG

Some time ago, someone posted to a development mailing list about a piece of code, Cc:ing some people who had modified the code in recent past. Within hours, the original author replied to complain about not being Cc'd. Several thoughts went through my mind:

• Is this man a walking colostomy bag?
• Why is this clown proud of his code? It is sloppy and riddled with bugs, and half of the changes made to it by other people have been obvious fixes.
• Why did his parents not raise him better? Doesn't he realize that demanding recognition in this way makes him a bad person?

This is Free Software, and people are motivated by all kinds of factors. Some bad reasons include

• Recognition, praise, or other Community ego-stroking
• Gaining a competitive advantage for one's for-profit business
• Line items on one's CV
• Finding a husband
• Accumulating increased influence in other communities

Looking at it through an Open Source lens, all these bad reasons are good reasons. For whatever motives, people are getting work done and accomplishing things. Of course, there are always an irritating number of hangers-on, and people who do not actually achieve much but are filled with such self-importance that they believe they deserve to be highly influential through sheer force of will, and the majority of the Community will concede this influence to them due to a variety of flaws in the Human Condition, but I digress. It would be nice if everyone had motives that were pure and good, especially since at least 90% of problems in Free Software projects are due to ego issues, but when the world works, the world works. So I am happy to get code contributions for whatever reason (assuming there are no strings attached). The problem I have is when people insist that their bad reasons are legitimate and should be catered to and accommodated by others.

I am staring at three different plug computers and wondering how many more will appear. They are in varying states of Debianness: all are running squeeze, but the GuruPlug is the only one that's pure . The SheevaPlug is running a wacky version of U-Boot, because the u-boot package in Debian can't cope with the SD card device. Hopefully this can be fixed some year. Worse yet is the FreeAgent DockStar, which is running a foreign kernel and two (TWO) foreign U-Boots (the first one chains to the second one which then boots off a USB stick). Unfortunately I'm afraid to correct these things because, unlike the other two, it is not a developer board, and messing it up would mean trying to deal with 3.3V RS-232 or something equally unpleasant. As it is, bricking one of the plugs where I actually have serial/JTAG causes enough emotional turmoil.

% sudo fw_printenv sed 's/^/sudo fw_setenv /;s/=/ "/;s/$/"/;'

sudo fw_setenv bootcmd "setenv ethact egiga0; $ x_bootcmd_ethernet ; setenv ethact egiga1; $ x_bootcmd_ethernet ; $ x_bootcmd_usb ; $ x_bootcmd_kernel ; setenv bootargs $ x_bootargs  $ x_bootargs_root ; bootm 0x6400000;"
sudo fw_setenv bootdelay "3"
sudo fw_setenv baudrate "115200"
sudo fw_setenv x_bootcmd_ethernet "ping 192.168.2.1"
sudo fw_setenv x_bootcmd_usb "usb start"
sudo fw_setenv x_bootcmd_kernel "nand read.e 0x6400000 0x100000 0x400000"
sudo fw_setenv x_bootargs "console=ttyS0,115200"
sudo fw_setenv x_bootargs_root "ubi.mtd=2 root=ubi0:rootfs rootfstype=ubifs"
sudo fw_setenv stdin "serial"
sudo fw_setenv stdout "serial"
sudo fw_setenv stderr "serial"
sudo fw_setenv ethact "egiga0"
sudo fw_setenv ethaddr "00:99:99:99:99:99"
sudo fw_setenv eth1addr "00:99:99:99:99:98"

Today, virtually all of the free software available can be found in packaged form in distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. Users of these distributions have access to a library of thousands of applications, ranging from trivial to highly sophisticated software systems. Developers can find a vast array of programming languages, tools and libraries for constructing new applications. This is possible because we have a mature system for turning free software components into standardized modules (packages). Some software is more difficult to package and maintain, and I m occasionally surprised to find something very useful which isn t packaged yet, but in general, the software I want is packaged and ready before I realize I need it. Even the long tail of niche software is generally packaged very effectively. Thanks to coherent standards, sophisticated management tools, and the principles of software freedom, these packages can be mixed and matched to create complete software stacks for a wide range of devices, from netbooks to supercomputing clusters. These stacks are tightly integrated, and can be tested, released, maintained and upgraded as a unit. The Debian system is unparalleled for this purpose, which is why Ubuntu is based on it. The vision, for a free software operating system which is highly modular and customizable, has been achieved. Rough edges This is a momentous achievement, and the Debian packaging system fulfills its intended purpose very well. However, there are a number of areas where it introduces friction, because the package model doesn t quite fit some new problems. Most of these are becoming more common over time as technology evolves and changes shape.

• Embedded systems need to be pared down to the essentials to minimize storage, distribution, computation and maintenance costs. Standardized packaging introduces excessive code, data and interdependency which make the system larger than necessary. Tight integration makes it difficult to bootstrap the system from scratch for custom hardware. Projects like Embedded Debian aim to adapt the Debian system to be more suitable for use in these environments, to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, smart phones will soon become the most common type of computer globally.
• Data, in contrast to software, has simple requirements. It just needs to be up to date and accessible to programs. Packaging and distributing it through the standardized packaging process is awkward, doesn t offer tangible benefits, and introduces overhead. There have been extensive debates in Debian about how to handle large data sets. Meanwhile, this problem is becoming increasingly important as data science catalyzes a new wave of applications.
• Client/server and other types of distributed applications are notoriously tricky to package. The packaging system works within the context of a single OS instance, and so relationships which span multiple OS instances (e.g. a server application which depends on a database running on another server) are not straightforward. Meanwhile, the web has become a first-class application development platform, and this kind of interdependency is extremely common on both clients and servers.
• Cross-platform applications such as Firefox, Chromium and OpenOffice.org have long struggled with packaging. In order to be portable, they tend to bundle the components they depend on, such as libraries. Packagers strive for normalization, and want these applications to use the packaged versions of these libraries instead. Application developers build, test and ship one set of dependencies, but their users receive a different stack when they use the packaged version of the application. Developers on both sides are in constant tension as they expect their configuration to be the canonical one, and want it to be tightly integrated. Cross-platform application developers want to provide their own, application-specific cross-platform update mechanism, while distributions want to use the same mechanism for all their components.
• Virtual appliances aim to combine application and operating system into a portable bundle. While a modular OS is definitely called for, appliances face some of the same problems as embedded systems as they need to be minimized. Furthermore, the appliance becomes a component in itself, and requires metadata, distribution mechanisms and so on. If someone wants to install a virtual appliance, how should that work? Packaging them up as .debs doesn t make much sense for the same reasons that apply to large data sets. I haven t seen virtual appliances really taking off, but I expect cloud to change that.
• Runtime libraries for languages such as Perl, Python and Ruby provide their own packaging systems, which manage dependencies and other metadata, installation, upgrades and removal in a standardized way. Because these operate independently of the OS package manager, all sorts of problems arise. Projects such as GoboLinux have attempted to tie them together, to varying degrees of success. Meanwhile, each new programming language we invent comes with a different, incompatible package manager, and distribution developers need to spend time repackaging them into their preferred format.

Why are we stuck?

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Abraham Maslow

The packaging ecosystem is very strong. Not only do we have powerful tools for working with packages, we also benefit from packages being a well-understood concept, and having established processes for developing, exchanging and talking about them. Once something is packaged, we know what it is and how to work with it, and it fits into everything else. So, it is tempting to package everything in sight, as we already know how to make sense of packages. However, this may not always be the right tool for the job. Various attempts have been made to extend the packaging concept to make it more general, for example:

• Portage, of Gentoo fame, offers impressive flexibility by building packages with a custom configuration, tailored for the needs of the target system.
• Conary, from rPath, offers finer-grained dependencies, powerful revision control and object-oriented build recipes.
• Nix provides a consistent build and runtime environment, ensuring that programs are run with the same dependencies used to build them, by keeping the relevant versions installed. I don t know much about it, but it sounds like all dependencies implicitly refer to an exact version.

Other package managers aim to solve a specific problem, such as providing lightweight package management for embedded systems, or lazy dependency installation, or fixing the filesystem hierarchy. There is a long list of package managers of various levels which solve different problems. Most of these systems suffer from an important fundamental tradeoff: they are designed to manage the entire system, from the kernel through applications, and so they must be used wholesale in order to reap their full benefit. In other words, in their world, everything is a package, and anything which is not a package is out of scope. Therefore, each of these systems requires a separate collection of packages, and each time we invent a new one, its adherents set about packaging everything in the new format. It takes a very long time to do this, and most of them lose momentum before a mature ecosystem can form around them. This lock-in effect makes it difficult for new packaging technologies to succeed. Divide and Conquer No single package management framework is flexible enough to accommodate all of the needs we have today. Even more importantly, a generic solution won t account for the needs we will have tomorrow. I propose that in order to move forward, we must make it possible to solve packaging problems separately, rather than attempting to solve them all within a single system.

• Decouple applications from the platform. Debian packaging is an excellent solution for managing the network of highly interdependent components which make up the core of a modern Linux distribution. It falls short, however, for managing the needs of modern applications: fast-moving, cross-platform and client/server (especially web). Let s stop trying to fit these square pegs into round holes, and adopt a different solution for this space, preferably one which is comprehensible and useful to application developers so that they can do most of the work.
• Treat data as a service. It s no longer useful to package up documentation in order to provide local copies of it on every Linux system. The web is a much, much richer and more effective solution to that problem. The same principle is increasingly applicable to structured data. From documents and contacts to anti-virus signatures and PCI IDs, there s much better data to be had out there on the web than down here on the local filesystem.
• Simplify integration between packaging systems in order to enable a heterogeneous model. When we break the assumption that everything is a package, we will need new tools to manage the interfaces between different types of components. Applications will need to introspect their dependency chain, and system management tools will need to be able to interrogate applications. We ll need thoughtfully designed interfaces which provide an appropriate level of abstraction while offering sufficient flexibility to solve many different packaging problems. There is unarguably a cost to this heterogeneity, but I believe it would easily outweigh the shortcomings of our current model.

But I like things how they are! We don t have a choice. The world is changing around us, and distributions need to evolve with it. If we don t adapt, we will eventually give way to systems which do solve these problems. Take, for example, modern web browsers like Firefox and Chromium. Arguably the most vital application for users, the browser is coming under increasing pressure to keep up with the breakneck pace of innovation on the web. The next wave of real-time collaboration and multimedia applications relies on the rapid development of new capabilities in web browsers. Browser makers are responding by accelerating deployment in the field: both aggressively push new releases to their users. A report from Google found that Chrome upgrades 97% of their users within 21 days of a new release, and Firefox 85% (both impressive numbers). Mozilla recently changed their maintenance policies, discontinuing maintenance of stable releases and forcing Ubuntu to ship new upstream releases to users. These applications are just the leading edge of the curve, and the pressure will only increase. Equally powerful trends are pressing server applications, embedded systems, and data to adapt as well. The ideas I ve presented here are only one possible way forward, and I m sure there are more and better ideas brewing in distribution communities. I m sure that I m not the only one thinking about these problems. Whatever it looks like in the end, I have no doubt that change is ahead.

My project. This post assumes that the reader has read my last post. This week I could get my focus on the project again, since most of my classes are already over. I ve investigated the segfault that was happening in GHC with +RTS -w -DS, and I noticed that the code in rts/sm/Sanity.c assumed that all objects in the allocated area of the block are being used.

    for (; bd != NULL; bd = bd->link)  
	p = bd->start;
	while (p < bd->free)  
	    nat size = checkClosure((StgClosure *)p);
	    /* This is the smallest size of closure that can live in the heap */
	    ASSERT( size >= MIN_PAYLOAD_SIZE + sizeofW(StgHeader) );
	    p += size;
	    /* skip over slop */
	    while (p < bd->free &&
		   (*p < 0x1000   !LOOKS_LIKE_INFO_PTR(*p)))   p++;  
	 
     

Since this is true for copy collection and mark compact, it was only with mark sweep that the error happened. The only way I could manage to make the segfault disappear by now was marking the swept blocks with a new flag, and avoid running this code in them. So I went back to my old problem with the allocation of memory in lines. I noticed that (one of) the problem(s) may be that the object that is allocated in the free line is not scavenged after the evacuation. When the object is allocated in a block, using the current allocation method, it will eventually be scavenged, because all blocks that were being used to allocation are scavenged. I m planning to implement a list of lines that need to be scavenged and code to scavenge the lines in this list, and the current line. It ll be very similar to the code that does this with blocks.

During the last three months and since my last blog-post about gimp-plugin-registry a lot happened: Mainly a large number of new plugins was added, but also various enhancements and bugfixes went into the package, together with updates for various already included plugins. For those who don't know gimp-plugin-registry yet, it is a collection of scripts and plugins for The GIMP. The name is based on the webpage GIMP Plugin Registry, where most (new) plugins and scripts are listed. So far the package ships with 170 scripts/plugins. Most of the scripts are written in TinyScheme, but there are also several plugins in C or Python. Probably most noticeable is the inclusion of the GIMP FX Foundry, which is an awesome collection of 124 scripts. Below follows a list of all scripts and plugins as shown in the long description of the Debian package. New plugins are marked with a bold fontface.

• Add Film Grain (2.4): Helps adding realistic film grain to BW images.
• btn4ws (0.8.0.1): Generates a series of buttons in three states (passive, active, pressed) with various selectable effects on them, as well as XHTML, CSS and JavaScript code for using the buttons.
• Black and White Film Simulation (1.1): Converts the selected layer into Black and White using the channel mixer. Tries to produce results resembling tonal qualities of film.
• CMYK Tiff 2 PDF for Gimp (20090321): This plugin completes the prepress workflow of using Separate+ to generate CMYK Tiff images by allowing you to convert the saved CMYK Tiff image into a PDF file.
• Contact Sheet (2.02): Generates a contact sheet(s) for a directory of images.
• David's Batch Processor (1.1.9): A simple batch processing plugin for The Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files.
• Diana-Holga2 (c): Diana/Holga Toys Cameras effect simulator.
• El Samuko GIMP Scripts:
  • Antique Photo Border Script: This script simulates a yellowed and slightly jagged border like these of old photographies.
  • Che Guevara Script: This script generates a poster like the famous Che Guevara one from Jim Fitzpatrick.
  • Cyanotype Script: This script simulates the Cyanotype printing process.
  • Difference Layer Script This script generates two difference layers from the two layers on the top. It's similar to GIMP's built-in Grain Extract/Merge function, but the tonal range is bigger. Now you can apply further editing and "switch on/off" the adjustment by switching the visibility of the subtractive and the additive layer. Also you can change the modification intensity by changing the intensity of these two layers.
  • Escape Line Script: This script creates escaping lines from any point. It's similar in function to the built-in Line-Nova Script, but much more flexible. So you can chose the center, the thickness, the angle, the length, the offset and the randomness.
  • Film Grain Script: This is yet another script which simulates the typical film grain of high ISO pictures.
  • First Photo Border Script: This script simulates the cut-off of the first picture of a film roll of cheap cameras like Lomo.
  • Lomo Script with Old Style Colors This script simulates the Lomo effect.
  • Movie 300 Script: This script simulates the color style of the movie "300".
  • National Geographic Script: This script simulates a high quality (portrait) photo like these from the National Geographic.
  • Obama "HOPE" Script: This script generates a poster like the famous Obama "HOPE" one from Shepard Fairey.
  • Rainy Landscape Script: This script changes a dry landscape to a wet one.
  • Photochrom Script: This script simulates a photochrom image, a lithographic printing process from the 1890's.
  • Sprocket Hole Script: This script simulates complete exposed 35mm film strips with frame numbers, lettering, overexposed sprocketholes and DX film edge barcodes.
  • Sunny Landscape Script: This script changes a rainy landscape to a sunny one.
  • Technicolor 2 Color Script: This script simulates the 2 Color Technicolor effect.
  • Technicolor 3 Color Script: This script simulates the 3 Color Technicolor effect.
  • Vintage Look Script: This script simulates a 70s vintage look.
• EZ Perspective: Specialized tool for easily correcting or changing perspective.
• Fix-CA (3.0.2): Corrects chromatic aberration in photos
• Focus-Blur (3.2.5): This plugin tries to simulate an out-of-focus blur
• GIMP FX Foundry (r111): Probably the largest script collection available for The GIMP.
• GIMP-Mask: Do and undo several popular image masking (that is, censoring) methods (CP, FL, Q0, MEKO).
• Warming and Cooling Filters (May 24, 2010): Warm or cool an image using one of several methods: Wratten, Roy's Warm, Brauer's Warm, Pasty Cadaveric Look
• Layer-Effects (2.4): This is a series of scripts that implement various layer effects: Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Outer Glow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, Satin, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay, Pattern Overlay, Stroke
• Liquid Rescale (0.7.0): Content-aware rescaling. Keeps the features of the image while rescaling along a single direction.
• Normalmap (1.2.2): Allows you to convert images into RGB normal maps for use in per-pixel lighting applications.
• Planet Render (1-2): Creates a planet. Color, size and sun orientation can be set.
• Refocus (0.9.1): The GIMP plugin to refocus images using FIR Wiener filtering. During image processing operations such as scanning and scaling, images tend to get blurry. The blurred impression of these images is due to the fact that image pixels are averaged with their neighbors. Blurred images don't have sharp boundaries and look as though they have been taken with an unfocused camera.
• Save for Web (0.29.0): Allows to experiment with various popular web format options. It shows an automatically updated preview and file size statistics.
• Separate+ (0.5.6): Separate+ is a plug-in that generates color separations from an RGB image, proofs CMYK colors on the monitor and exports the CMYK TIFF file.
• Smart Sharpen (redux) (2.4): This script implements the redux version of smart sharpening. It utilizes the Unsharp Mask or Refocus plugin to sharpen the image.
• Streak-Camera simulation (0.6): A streak camera images an object through a slit - thus getting a "one dimensional image". This image is propagated along the second dimension of the image plane at a constant speed. The result is a picture of the time dependency of the object.
• Traditional Orton: This is an effect invented by Michael Orton in the 1990 s, which consists of taking two copies of an image, one blurred, and one sharp, and mixing them to produce an image with a dreamy quality. It is especially well suited to landscape and flower photography.
• Wavelet Decompose (0.1.2): The wavelet decompose plugin decomposes a layer of an image into layers of wavelet scales. This means that you can edit the image on different detail scales (frequencies). The trivial recomposition of the image can be done by GIMP's layer modes so you can see the results of your modifications instantly. Among the applications are retouching, noise reduction, and enhancing global contrast.
• Wavelet Denoise (0.3.1): The wavelet denoise plugin is a tool to selectively reduce noise in individual channels of an image with optional RGB<->YCbCr conversion. It has a user interface to adjust the amount of denoising applied. The wavelet nature of the algorithm makes the processing quite fast.
• X11 Mouse Cursor (XMC) plug-in (2.0.6): Enables GIMP to import and export X11 mouse cursor files.

If there is any interest from other distributions to include the package, I'd be happy to help out to make an integration as easy as possible. The few interesting parts could be ripped out of debian/rules and shipped as a normal Makefile, so they could be used easily. More complicated is the generation of the package description and copyright information, but I guess instead of writing debian/coyright and debian/control, it should be possible to integrate the information into a rpm spec file template or similar files. So in case you're interested to port the package to Fedora, OpenSuSE or some other distribution, don't hesitate to contact me! The sources are available via git, see git.recluse.de for details. For wishes, suggestions and bug reports either use the Debian BTS or Launchpad. While I prefer bugs via the BTS, it might be easier for non-Debian users to file bugs in the Ubuntu Launchpad.

I was planning to attend DebConf New York this year, but for a number of reasons I decided not to go. Fortunately, Ferdinand Thommes organized a MiniDebConf in Berlin at LinuxTag and I managed to attend. Thanks, Ferdinand! There were a number of interesting Talks. I especially liked the talk of our DPL, and those about piuparts and git-buildpackage. In contrast to the other LinuxTag talks, we had a livestream of our talks and recorded (most) of them. The kudos for setting this up goes to Alexander Wirt, who spent quite a few hours to get it up and running. I have to apologize for being late in bringing my Notebook, which was intended to do the theora encoding of the livestream. This was a misunderstanding on my part, I should have known that this is not going to be setup in the night before show time So to compensate the extra hours he had to put in for me, I offered to do the post processing of the videos. Basic approach for post processing The main goal of post processing the videos was (of course) to compress them to a usable size from the original 143 GB. I also wanted to have a title on each video, and show the sponsors at the end of the video. My basic idea to implement that consisted of the following steps:

1. Create a title animation template.
2. Generate title animations from template for all talks.
3. Use a video editor to create a playlist of the parts title talk epilogue.
4. Run the video editor in batch mode to generate the combined video.
5. Encode the resulting video as ogg theora.

As always with technology, it turned out that the original plan needed a few modifications. Title animations Originally I wanted to use Blender for the title animation, but I knew it is quite a complicated bit of software. So I looked for something simpler, and stumbled across an article that pointed me towards Synfig Studio for 2D animation. This is also in Debian, so I gave it a try. I was delighted that Synfig Studio has a command line renderer which is just called synfig and that the file format is XML, which would make it simple to batch-create the title animations. My title template can be found in this git repository. Batch creation of title animations I used a combination of make and a simple python script to replace the author name and the title of the talk into the synfig XML file. The data for all talks is another XML file talks.xml. Basically, I used a simple XPath expression to find the relevant text node and change the data using the ElementTree API of lxml python module. The same could be done using XSLT of course (for a constant replacement, see this file) but I found it easier to combine two XML files in python. Note that I create PNG files with synfig and use ffmpeg to generate a DV file from those. Originally, I had synfig create DV files directly but those turned out quite gray for some reason. I am now unable to reproduce this problem. Combining the title animation with the talk For joining the title animation with the talk, I originally went with OpenShot, which somebody of the video team had running at the conference. My idea was to mix a single video manually and just replace the underlying data files for each talk. I expected that this would be easy using the openshot-render command, which renders the output video from the input clips and the OpenShot project file. However, OpenShot stores the video lengths in the project file and will take those literally, so this did not work for talks of different play times I considered working with Kino or Kdenlive but they did not look more appropriate for this use case. I noticed that OpenShot and Kdenlive both use the Media Lovin Toolkit under the hood, and OpenShot actually serializes the MLT configuration to $HOME/.openshot/sequence.xml when rendering. I first tried to read that XML file from python (using the mlt python bindings from the python-mlt2 package) but did not find an API function to do that. So I just hard coded the video sequence in python. I ran into a few gotchas on the way:

• it s easy to segfault MLT from Python (something is wrong with the refcounting)
• generating ogg theora using MLT from Python (which uses libavformat) resulted in a bad audio/video synchronisation of the output (more than 1 second for 1 hour of video)
• generating dv from MLT and running ffmpeg2theora on the result is disk-bound on my quad core system so use a pipe to ffmpeg2theora

Things to improve While the results look quite okay for me now, there is a lot of room for improvement.

• What bothers me the most is the unequal audio volume between talks. We should apply something like replay gain for normalization. I did not find an easy way to add this to the processing pipeline, otherwise it would have been included already.
• Original recordings have different aspect ratios, so after combining them, there is a letterbox added. This is the case for Goswin s talk on Multiarch for example. I d rather have the title distorted or letter boxed, if I get around to it, I will fix it in the script.
• Most of the recordings concentrate on showing the slides. As we did not keep the raw camera data, but recorded the DVswitch output, we missed the opportunity to show the speaker more often in full screen. Looking at the same slide becomes quite boring after half a minute, so it would be better
  to show the speaker more often. That would require quite a bit of man power for post processing though, I have to admit that I did not watch all the hours of video.
• We could cut a bit off the talk at start and end, when the speaker discusses where he is available for questions. It is not of interest anymore after the conference is over.

Availability

• git repo (browsing): http://www.landschoff.net/git/?p=mdc-video.git;a=summary
• git repo (clone): git://landschoff.net/mdc-video
• Videos: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2010/minidebconf-berlin/ (note: most of these are in german, apart from the DPL and the LXDE talk)

Here is a short update on my my Debian Lenny->Squeeze upgrade testing. Here is a summary of the difference for Gnome when it is upgraded by apt-get and aptitude. I'm not reporting the status for KDE, because the upgrade crashes when aptitude try because of missing conflicts (#584861 and #585716). At the end of the upgrade test script, dpkg -l is executed to get a complete list of the installed packages. Based on this I see these differences when I did a test run today. As usual, I do not really know what the correct set of packages would be, but thought it best to publish the difference. Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

at-spi cpp-4.3 finger gnome-spell gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs libatspi1.0-0 libcupsys2 libeel2-data libgail-common libgdl-1-common libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgtksourceview-common libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libservlet2.4-java libxalan2-java libxerces2-java openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed svgalibg1 xserver-xephyr zip

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

bluez-utils dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop epiphany-gecko gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common swfdec-gnome totem-gstreamer wodim

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

gnome gnome-desktop-environment hamster-applet python-gnomeapplet python-gnomekeyring python-wnck rhythmbox-plugins xorg xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nouveau xserver-xorg-video-nv xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

deskbar-applet xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-openchrome

I was told on IRC that the xorg-xserver package was changed in git today to try to get apt-get to not remove xorg completely. No idea when it hits Squeeze, but when it does I hope it will reduce the difference somewhat.

Since a few months, I have been playing around with Isabelle, a theorem prover system. I find it very intriguing to have proofs of mathematical statements checked by something as pendantic and comprehensive as a machine. Mathematicians always claim that their statements are true in all eternity, but the proofs are just checked by error-prone human beings. Especially with complex, large proofs that are only read by a handful of people, I doubt that these are always fully correct. Note that this does not imply that I doubt that the results are correct. They probably are. But a bit of doubt remains. A computer-checked proof, in contrast, can not accidentially omit corner cases, leave out seemingly trivial assumtions of used theorems or be misled by slightly differing definition from different sources. I was hoping to check at least parts of my diploma thesis using Isabelle, but it turns out that the standard algebra library shipped with Isabelle is not complete enough. Even free groups were missing. This was motivation enough to try to formalize them and prove the universal property and some isomorphisms (The free group over the empty set is the unit group, the free group over one generator is the additive group of integers and free groups over sets of same cardinality are isomophic). I submitted the resulting theory to the Archive of Formal Proofs and it was accepted. You can view the complete document or the document without proofs. I did not formalize the fact that isomorphic free groups have bases of same cardinality. As far as I know there is no simple argument that works directly with free groups. The proofs I have seen pass to the abelianization of the free group, i.e. the free module over and apply the well known proof from the analogous statement about vector spaces. But if someone knows an elementary proof of this fact, I d like to hear about it.

The inofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	498
Affecting Squeeze:	397
Squeeze only:	72
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	325

Of these 325 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	22
Patched in Squeeze:	50
Duplicates in Squeeze:	51
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	12
Claimed in Squeeze:	4
Delayed in Squeeze:	11
Can fixed in a security Update:	30
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	31

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 166 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, the with the view of the Release Managers, 306 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Another day, another bill Like most countries, the UK has been valiantly trying to force consumers to reduce their paper usage. Let's set aside the fact that most paper is not generated by consumers. And that, it isn't about reduce usage but reducing expenses relating to delivery of this paper. Let's us also leave aside the fact that most airlines want consumers to print out their boarding cards at home. Because it reduces expenses incurred in maintaining staff at airport check-in counters. Anyway, most communications providers have taken up this challenge by making it more expensive to obtain a paper bill. But I don't want a paper bill, per se, what I am really after is a copy of the bill I can keep for my own records. And print if I so need to. Both Vodafone and Talktalk will send you notifications, via email, that you have a bill. But neither of them allow you to obtain a copy of the PDF that would have been printed and sent to you. Instead you have to fart-arse around with their systems to get (at best) a CSV file. Why, oh why, can neither of them just send the PDF that was going to be generated? That have a bill run process anyway, it generates the PDF, sends the emails, and then promptly discards the PDFs. That would mean I have an immediate archive of all my bills from both companies in my email. Just Broken.

Funny how life brings those A-HA moments in the least probable of circumstances. Take my career's development, for instance. I'm currently taking a training to become a government bureaucrat. During this training, each student goes through a thorough skill assessment to help the trainer select an appropriate training place in some government office. Asides from covering the obvious aspects of formal education and employment history, we also reviewed achievements and accumulated skills. My A-HA moment came as a result of our trainer asking me to completely rewrite my CV to match some known template. Additionally, she requested that I emphasize my technology background more. I countered by pointing out that the word "technology" tends to mean "engineer" to the average employer and yet I've have always been in Product Management or Business Development, which are more Sales-oriented roles than anything else, hence why I emphasize the Sales aspect and deflate the technology aspect in my CV. Still, while she conceded that difference in emphasis, she insisted that having worked in technology probably influenced my skills or my preferred workflow in one way or another. At the moment, I simply could not think of how it might have. Boy, was I wrong! Where do I begin? First of all, it dawned onto me that I simply cannot claim to know Microsoft Office anymore. Until recently, my Open Office skills were easily applicable to Microsoft Office, because Open Office borrowed a lot of concepts from its Microsoft counterpart. However, following the recent redesign of Microsoft Office, I found that I cannot navigate my way around Microsoft Word's menus anymore. While this new user interface paradigm indeed removes a lot of clutter, it also hides too many features in less than obvious places, which resulted in me concluding that I simply have to downgrade my Microsoft Office skills to medium. Given the progressive conversion of several Finnish agencies and ministries to Open Office, I'm not in such an uncomfortable position but, then again, other agencies and ministries fiercely cling on to their Microsoft licenses and have recently upgraded them. As such, should my practical training take place in one of those offices, I would essentially be unable to perform at my job. Redeeming factor: a friend who only knows Microsoft products faced similar frustrations last year when she got back from her summer vacations, after she realized that their network administrator had upgraded her workstation. It took her the whole autumn before she felt comfortable using Word again. Another aspect of working in Free Software that influences my workflow: telecommuting and teleworking. As anyone working on Free Software projects knows, teams tend to be distributed around the globe, which means that there's always someone somewhere pushing a commit or answering bug reports, at any given time of the day. Simultaneously, work quickly becomes location-independent and flexible schedules are the norm; whatever and wherever works for a given developer, as long as the work gets done. Without anyone really noticing, this work methodology has permeated the whole technology ecosystem, even at fortune-500 companies. Employees come in and out of the office at whichever time suits them, while others choose to work from home and only show up whenever face-to-face meetings are called. Others even adopt a nomad lifestyle, constantly roaming the globe for adventures and connecting to the office network via VPN, from the comfort of their hotel room or from a friend's couch, on the other side of the globe. In my case, having twice worked for Estonian companies while living in Finland, it meant taking the ferry twice a week to visit the office. This brought in more benefits than one might initially think: first of all, the quick walk between the metro station and the harbor in Helsinki meant that I arrived on the ferry with blood pumping adrenaline and fully alert. Being on the ferry gave me 2 hours of quiet time to grab my first coffee and plan my day. Getting out of the ferry in Tallinn meant another quick walk, this time between the harbor and the tramway. By the time I arrived at the office, I had exercised twice and planned all my workday. It's probably the most productive that I've ever been in my whole career. Additionally, I was frequently on the road, meeting customers and following on sales leads, which meant that I got to close many deals using my laptop in my hotel room. As our CEO used to joke, "I have no idea where in the world Martin- ric is today but, just as long as the purchase orders keep on pouring in, it's all the same to me." As a result of this reflexion, I had to explain to our trainer why I am extremely well-suited to government jobs that require a lot of traveling and where Free Software is used on the desktop and, vice-versa, extremely unsuited to back-office jobs where whatever Microsoft products of the day are the norm. I've had to put particular emphasis on what Open Office is all about, because many homeworks were supposed to be submitted in Microsoft Word format. While Writer indeed offers the option to import and export Microsoft formats, it doesn't come with any WYSIWYG guarantee, which is why I took on the habit of sending her PDF documents. Sadly, this did not always work out so well, especially in cases where the intention was to forward selected parts of a document to third-parties. Conclusion: working in the Free Software industry, even in non-engineering roles, indeed has a strong influence on someone's choice of methodology, tools and workflow. In some cases, it can even disqualify someone from making certain career choices. Who would have thought?

Neil Williams recently commented on the lack of smart-bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium and since the post doesn t accept comments, counter-post FTW.
Maybe I didn t understand exactly what was meant, but I m personally trying to see the advantage of having a smart-bookmark sit on the toolbar as opposed to just being a used via a label. Both FF/IW and Chrome can do the label thing, where you bookmark something like http://bugs.debian.org/%s with a shortcut like bugs and can then simply Ctrl-L to the address bar and type bugs 999999 . Done.
Can the way Epiphany does this be more effective? (actually this is the way Galeon did it way back then and I used to love it before I found out I could be way quicker with the keyboard+shortcut thingy. Not to mention having less clutter in the toolbar.) And granted: Chromium s interface doesn t allow the editing of this shortcut and they only work when imported from FF/IW, but I expect this to be fixed eventually. Doesn t make much sense to have such a hidden feature. [UPDATE: nevermind. As handily pointed out by Chris Butler, you can edit the shortcuts under Options Basics Default Search Manage. It might not be the most intuitive of places to put it, but it's there.] As for the rest of the reasons for switching mentioned in the original post, I can certainly see where they re coming from. No real solid counter-arguments there.