Or, if you really want to, be careful that, if /usr/lib/iceape/chrome is a directory (and not a symbolic link), your working directory is /usr/lib/iceape/chrome, or you will end up with the content of your current directory in /usr/share/iceape/chrome, which may be a big issue if you run apt-get from /. If /usr/lib/iceape/chrome is a symbolic link, no worry, just ignore this message. Thank you for your attention, and very sorry :( Update : That’s in such cases that you’d like special crafted tools to rebuild packages without the need to rebuild the whole thing when it comes to just change maintainer scripts (pre/postinst, pre/postrm…). Fortunately, I have pbuilder configured with ccache, but that doesn’t help the buildds with their build job.

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.

• I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
• For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
• Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
• On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
• In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!

Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.

(and I'm still catching up on my blogging backlog) So Sarah and I returned to Australia for two weeks at the end of November/start of December. The reason for the timing was my grandmother's 90th birthday, but we decided to spend 5 days on Heron Island for a belated honeymoon as well. We flew back with Qantas, who are always a pleasure to fly with internationally, directly to Sydney. I'm getting better at sleeping on that long-haul. We then flew domestically up to Brisbane on Saturday, after spending Friday in Sydney, checking out the Sydney Google office and catching up with as many friends and family as time permitted. Saturday was a bit of an "open house" at my parent's place for my grandmother's birthday. She now lives in Toowoomba, but lived in the Sandgate/Bracken Ridge area for the majority of her life, so it was easier for her to come down to Bracken Ridge, and for everyone to come around to my parent's place than for everyone to go up to Toowoomba to see her. I didn't keep count of how many people dropped in through the course of the day, but I'd hazard a guess at about 40 or 50. It was really good to see some relatives on my Mum's side of the family that I probably hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. It was also good to see my Aunty and Uncle and one of my cousins from Vanuatu (who is now in New Zealand), who I haven't seen for a while either. On Sunday, we went out for dinner with just a bunch of the more immediate family. On Monday we flew up to Gladstone, and then had a helicopter transfer out to Heron Island, where we stayed until Friday. Heron is a fantastic little island, and I highly recommend it if you want to relax and disconnect from the world for a while. It feels very isolated, there's no telephones in the rooms, and there's only really slow Internet access via a couple of coin operated kiosks. It's a really tiny island as well. Only about three kilometres in circumference. The snorkeling is absolutely fantastic. You can see so much marine life from straight off the beach. We also saw turtles coming up the beach to lay eggs in the mornings. I certainly felt very relaxed afterwards. Photos from the week are here. We had more time to spare on the way back, so we took the launch back to the mainland and then flew back to Brisbane for four days. Sarah and my sister organised a bit of a surprise dinner for my 30th birthday with a bunch of family and friends, which was a total surprise for me, and very nice of them. On Tuesday night we flew down to Canberra and stayed with our old neighbours and caught up with friends down there. I also spent a day racking and installing the new mirror.linux.org.au server, but wasn't able to cut over to it at that time. On Thursday, we drove off into the outback to find Alli and Rusty's new property, a 1000 acres near Braidwood. They really are living remote, but it sounds like they've got some very exciting plans for the place, and I look forward to checking out what they've done when we're next able to visit. Then on Friday morning, we drove out at an ungodly hour, headed back for Sydney, to fly out for San Francisco (via Los Angeles, unfortunately) again. I'm not sure when we'll be visiting Australia again. We're intending to get our respective parents over here to visit us during the year, this year, and not return for Christmas. I'm unable to attend linux.conf.au this year, but would like to go to Melbourne for it next year.

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because - as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out - they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 - and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC. By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios. Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.) Other interesting links regarding Vista:

• The Inquirer - Charlie Demerjian: Microsoft Vista is not an option
• The Register - Scott Granneman: Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
• Juha Saarinen: DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers… and fear the new content protection
• Techworld.com - Chris Mellor: Vista crippled by content protection
• The Register - Andrew Orlowski: Vista’s Suicide Bomb: Who gets hurt?

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies. Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies? Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video - if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

What a great day it was in the Bay Area today -- just beautiful. It's Rose Bowl weather, of course -- Nature blesses California on the day of the Rose Bowl, just so people in the rest of the USA say, "Damn those Californians and their great weather!" Still, there's something so rejuvenating every year around the 10th-11th of Niv se. I wonder what it is? Oh, and: no, we don't have the Rose Bowl in northern California. It's just one of the few times of year that San Franciscans are happy to share the state with their southern neighbors. tags: niv se rose bowl california weather

Fruitcake So, there's a comedy tradition around the holidays that marks the crappiest possible gift you can get for Christmas as a fruitcake. This is stupid; fruitcake is delicious. Candied fruit + nuts + cake + rum = hooray for fruitcake. My parents got a couple of fruitcakes for Christmas, and they tasted great. I've been noshing on them a bit at a time all week. Great stuff! Rumtastic. Anyone who says otherwise is full of malarkey. In conclusion, fruitcake is delicious and Carthage must be destroyed. tags: fruitcake christmas delicious carthage malarkey

New Year's Eve Maj, Amita June and I had a hard New Year's Eve. Our friends Earl and Sue have an NYE party in Walnut Creek every year, and a lot of our friends from Pigdog Journal are there every year. We had planned to have a room at the nearby Embassy Suites, and have friends over before the party to see Amita June (who needs to be asleep by New York midnight, i.e. 9PM PST). But Maj is feeling really sick -- flu-y and nauseous -- and we had to cancel this pre-event. Bad feelings about this; we've missed seeing this group of friends a few times since the baby was born, and some of them have never met her. Eventually, we all managed to go to Earl and Sue's party together, then left early so Amita could get to sleep. A pretty good solution all around. I got to see a lot of old friends, including Sam and Shannon who just announced that she's blogging for two now. (Congrats!) Tjames was there with his ladyfriend Robyn, which was really nice. They made out a lot, which makes me pretty happy. We saw Dan, Johnny, Randy, Dave, and of course Earl and Sue themselves. A really good party. tags: nye earl sue sick maj amitajune sam shannon pigdog

All is quiet I had a pretty mild shom-pan-yah hangover this morning, so we were fully able to go see friends Zach and Wendy in El Cerrito for brunch. We hit delicious Picante off of Gilman Street, which is a massive Mexican restaurant, near the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto and showing some of the foodie-ism of the weird East Bay scene. I had a really good plate of chilaquiles, and Maj had some huevos rancheros and made a pretty good dent in them -- the first food she's really eaten in a few days. Amita June got a great quesadilla with queso fresco that tasted really good. Then, everyone was ready for a nap, so we said goodbye and cut the visit short by heading back to Los Altos Hills. tags: zach wendy picante berkeley chilaquiles

Ads on Wikipedia So, there's been quite a dust-up on Wikimedia Foundation lists about their recent fund-raising drive. The WMF is having its annual fundraising drive (and, if you can, please help with a donation), and the Virgin Group's charity organization, Virgin Unite, set up a matching fund a few days ago so that all donations to the WMF were effectively doubled. All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice -- seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site -- was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising -- or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it. I'm not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I'm in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia's huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia's is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That's money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world. It's irresponsible to abuse that opportunity. Brion Vibber's defense of the logo on the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list is really interesting and instructive. tags: wikipedia wikimedia ads virgin unite

For the fifth time in a row, I started yet another year with 5k race by participating in the 22th New Year's Day 5k at the lakefront. The race had decent conditions. Chicago is currently having unusually mild weather, which is an extra bonus. It was well over 50 degrees yesterday, but a little cooler around fourty this morning, and unfortunately overcast. And luckily fairly little wind as it can be unplesant at the lake. Following some mild training runs both Saturday and Sunday, I took it relatively easy and finished around 20:15 or 20:20 -- I forgot to stop the Garmin at the finish, and the official results are not yet published. Not a bad time given that I haven't really trained since the last marathon.

I recently had an issue where a remote host would frequently run out of memory after a number of processes had been invoked from remote. I looked in the wrong direction first, but finally found out that each process invocation leaves two sshd processes hanging around, which are eventually exhausting the memory on the box. Next step was finding out what happened for the sshd processes not to properly terminate. Eventually, I remembered that the incoming ssh connections were not invoked directly, but via a third host with “proxycommand ssh other-host socket %h %p”. Looking on other-host quickly showed a number of socket processes being around, and killing them made the sshds on the low-memory host vanish as well. Short-term remedy was therefore to set ClientAliveInterval in the low-memory host’s sshd configuration. I then searched for reasons why ClientAliveInterval is not set by default at least in Debian’s sshd configuration. I didn’t find a reason and proceeded to file a wishlist bug request againnst openesh-server for this option to be set by default. Before filing this bug, I routinely visited the BTS, just to find out that the bug was already filed. By me. One year and 285 days ago. And that the openssh maintainer(s) didn’t even bother to reply to it yet. Guys, this is a textbook example how to discourage people from filing Bugs against your packages. Please, give them at least the appreciation of a short ACK if you don’t get around to fixing the bugs in reasonably short time. Having a bug rot away uncommented and unfixed in the BTS for two years is simpy not acceptable. Yes, that goes even for a wishlist bug.

The simple answer is, you can't. I didn't want cats while we were here in the US. And yet, we have three of them. We made the decision not to take our current cat with us from Australia, because of the length of the journey, and the fact that we were planning on being away a lot travelling, and because of the length of time she'd have to stay in quarantine when we returned to Australia. Then along came Stumpy, a cat we were supposed to be temporarily fostering, because she was hit by a car, had a broken pelvis and lost her tail. She was all sweet while she was convalescing, and Sarah really wanted to adopt her, so I caved in. Stumpy was probably less than a year old, so still at the boisterous kitten age, and sure enough, she recovered, and became a boisterous kitten again. To the point where she was so energetic, she needed a little friend to wear her out, and I was asked if we could get a second cat, and since I seem to have problems saying no to anything (but heck, I was getting attacked in bed by her in the middle of the night as well), along came Lily (wow, Sarah really needs to spot breaking all the image links in her blog posts). Sarah was taking Lily back to the shelter we adopted her from, for her shots, and was asked if she'd foster a tiny 4 week old kitten, that was going to have to be euthanized if a foster home wasn't found for her. We still have Smudge today, months later, technically still as a foster, but we intend to adopt her as well, because she's such a sweet little kitten, and of the three, she's the most affectionate towards me. Call this one "my" cat. Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we've got people coming round for dinner (it's been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried. After our last trip away, the cats got sufficiently bored that Stumpy thought chewing on laptop power adapter cables would be fun. My laptop no longer charges. (I'd just had said power adapter replaced under warranty not two weeks previously). Don't get me wrong, I love cats, I just so didn't want them right now, and especially right now, I'm wishing I'd stuck to my guns on that one. I think I'd have rather brought LC over from Australia, and not have her become obese by the new owner we found for her, than have so much of our stuff be destroyed by three kittens in a small townhouse that we're away from too often to give them the attention they need as kittens. Sigh.

The Debian project is afflicted with several damaging memes. One that is causing problems at the moment is the idea that life should be fair. Unfortunately life is inherently unfair, it's not fair that those of us who were born in first-world countries (the majority of Debian developers) have so many more opportunities than most people who are born in "developing" countries, and things just continue to be unfair as you go through life. Unfair things will happen to you, deal with it and do what is necessary to have a productive life!

When one developer has regular long-term disputes with many other developers the conclusion is that the one person who can't get along is at fault. We can debate about whether one or two significant disputes are a criteria for this or whether having a dozen developers disagreeing with them is the final point. But the fact is that if there is a large group of people who work together well and an individual who can't work with any of them then there is only one realistic option, the individual needs to go find some people that they can work with - they can resign or be expelled. The fact that something slightly unfair might have happened a year ago is no reason for pandering to an anti-social developer. The fact that expelling a developer for being anti-social is unfair to them is no reason for damaging the productivity of all Debian developers.

Another problemmatic meme is the idea that we have to tolerate everyone - even those who are intolerant (known as the Limp Liberal meme). When someone has no tolerance for others (EG being racist or practicing sexual discrimination) then they have no place in a community such as Debian. They need to be removed sooner rather than later. All Debian developers know the problems caused by deferring such expulsion.

The final damaging meme that I have observed is you can't force a volunteer to do any work. On it's own that statement is OK, but the interpretation commonly used in Debian is you can't take their job away from them either. The most common example of this is when a developer is not maintaining a package and someone else does an NMU (non-maintainer upload) to fix a bug, the developer then flames the person who did this (usually to fix a severe bug). It seems to be believed that a Debian developer owns their packages and has a right to prevent other people from working on them. This attitude also extends to all other aspects of Debian, there are many positions of responsibility in Debian that are not being adequately performed and for which volunteers are offering to help out but being refused.

The idea of the GPL is that when a program is not being developed adequately it can be taken over by another person. However when that program is in a Debian package the developer who owns it can refuse to allow this.

My brother Nate and his girlfriend Kristen live in the Laurel Heights area of San Francisco, just north of Presidio Heights, across the street from Laurel Village on California Street. They invited us up for dinner at their house last night, and since my Mom and Dad hadn't seen their apartment yet, they decided to join us, too. Maj, Amita June and I went up early yesterday afternoon, right after naptime. (That's our main measure of time -- before naptime, after naptime, before bedtime, after the baby goes to sleep.) We initially planned to go downtown and do some post-Christmas shopping, but we hit gruesome traffic getting off North 280 into China Basin. Friday afternoon traffic in San Francisco is pretty crappy any day of the month, but yesterday was Critical Mass, which really tangles things up downtown. So we juked west and headed out to Ocean Beach instead. I parked at the end of Golden Gate Park by the giant windmills. We all walked out onto the beach -- Amita at 0.5 mph, of course, and rarely in the correct direction -- just at sunset, which was great. It was our second beach day in a row, but it was great being out there. The baby chased dogs and waves, and we got to watch the sun go down. There were kites everywhere -- I explained to Amita how people had to hold their strings so that they could keep flying. It's so counterintuitive. We dropped into the Beach Chalet on the Great Highway for a late afternoon snack. Amita June had her trademark grilled cheese sandwich, Maj and I split a plate of calamari. The chalet does its own beers, so Maj had a Christmas ale and I tried the more than decent stout. We got to Nate's place just after 6, and they ordered Indian food from Rotee in the Lower Haight. It was excellent -- we got some tandoori fish and about 12 different curries. Maj's brother Brian came too, and we stayed up pretty late talking. Maj and I stayed over at Nate and Kristen's last night, then shared coffees this morning from Peet's. There's a really nice Cuban place, Caf Lo Cubano right up the street, but we wanted bagels from Noah's, so it's just natural to get Peet's, too. We had a long ride home, though -- Maj and I are both feeling sick, and the baby's not too happy about long car rides anymore. But we got home for a good nap and a radio interview. tags: san francisco laurel heights golden gate park rotee beach chalet cafe lo cubano kites beach

Get Connected Radio I did an interview today on Get Connected Radio about Wikitravel. It was pretty fun -- the interviewers were pretty clued-in about wikis, so we got to talk a bit more about the interesting travel aspects. Also cool that they emphasized the "open source" aspect, which is something a lot of media don't cover. tags: get connected radio wikitravel interview

Since I have been having a digital camera since a few weeks now, I've had a need for an application to manage my pictures. The two applications that people have pointed me to are f-spot and digiKam, which also seem to be the most popular applications in this category for Linux. Since I use neither KDE nor GNOME as my user interface, it doesn't matter much to me which I install; so I've tried them both. Their feature set is quite different; unfortunately, though, they both have some features which the other doesn't, which makes choosing for one or the other rather hard. Since their on-disk format is rather different, it's impossible to use them both at the same time—at least not if I don't want to enter commentary and tags each and every time; so I'll have to choose one or the other based on their features. Since that requires me to actually compare them, I thought I might as well make a blog post out of that. Note, though, that this comparison is in no way intended to be complete; it only compares those features which I really care about. Features digiKam

• Stores pictures in albums; these albums can be created hierarchically, and are created on disk as the directory lay-out in which to store pictures. One picture can be chosen as an example picture per album.
• Pictures can have tags, comments, and a score (on a scale of one to five stars) applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tagset is empty. Tags can be made to have icons that are otherwise available to KDE attached to them, to make them more immediately visually recognizable, but selecting pictures to fulfill that function seems impossible.
• Has an interface to manage pictures in gallery and gallery 2; it can view, add, and remove pictures in that gallery.
• The selector dialog which is used to upload pictures is rather spartanic; it allows one to select pictures by filename and by album; pictures aren't even shown before upload (bug filed).
• Pictures can be filtered by tag, album, or date; I haven't been able to find an interface to filter pictures by score (it is possible to sort them by score in any view, though).
• A KDE application, so written in C++, which is a compiled language; i.e., rather fast.

F-spot

• Does not know the concept of albums
• Pictures can have tags and comments applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tag set contains (amongst others) People, Places, and Events, suggesting that f-spot encourages the use of tags where Albums would be used in the case of digiKam. Tags can have icons which are otherwise available to gnome selected as their icon, or one can select a picture to fulfill that function (in fact, it selects the first picture which receives a tag to do that by default)
• Does not know the concept of scoring; instead, the default tagset contains a tag Favourites, suggesting a scoring system with a binary scale.
• Uploading pictures can be done by selecting them, and choosing the right option in the menu system. As a result, all filtering options otherwise available can be used to select which pictures to export (just filter the view, then select all pictures in the view).
• Uploading pictures will optionally also export comments that were applied to it.
• Since it does not know the concept of albums, pictures cannot be stored in a one-directory-per-album lay-out. Instead, pictures are stored in a one-directory-per-day layout, using a yyyy/mm/dd format. Unfortunately, this also means that no picture metadata (tags, comments) is easily available to command-line applications.
• Apart from the ability to upload pictures to gallery or gallery 2, does not interface with it in any way; gallery is a write-only storage medium to f-spot.
• Written for mono, a system that requires a runtime environment to translate instructions at runtime from some sort of virtual machine code, and which uses garbage collection all over; i.e., rather slow, especially after you've been using it for a while.

My opinion After having used f-spot for a few weeks before I tried digiKam, I have to be honest and say that I don't like the concept of albums. They do not add value; everything they allow you to express can equally well be expressed with tags. Additionally, one can categorize a picture in only one album, whereas it's possible to categorize pictures in as many tags as you would want. Just creating one album which contains all my pictures, with tagging used for categorizing, doesn't help either; that way, digiKam would store all my pictures in a single flat directory, which would become problematic when the number in the picture filenames wraps around. I do love the scoring thing in digiKam. A favourites tag just doesn't cut it; and creating five tags for scoring would make things like find all pictures that have a score of three or above rather cumbersome, and sort by score outright impossible. However, the fact that it's not possible to filter by score makes it all rather useless. The export to gallery function in digiKam is horrible. I have to select my pictures blindly; none of the metadata which I tack on them can be used to help select which pictures I want. Workaround: use whatever filtering is available to select the right pictures and add them to a temporary album from which I then upload all pictures, but that's silly (and requires disk space for no good reason). Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the interface, which means that I have to babysit an upload (with no workaround). And I can't even view my pictures to spend the time waiting. Bah. F-spot isn't without problems of its own. Due to a bug in mono, it crashes rather often on my PowerPC laptop. When that happens, it can't be restarted until the X server is restarted. Workaround: use Xnest, but that makes it impossible to view pictures in full-screen mode. Also, since f-spot is a GNOME application, its options dialog is as helpful as a pair of soccer shoes when you're out swimming. No surprises there. Conclusion Which one do I prefer? I'm not sure. The digiKam upload interface is positively annoying, especially the bug which requires me to click continue after every picture. For that alone, I might ditch it. On the other hand, it has a slew of interesting features (the scoring, to name one) that f-spot lacks, and that pull me more towards digiKam. I guess I'll have to give it a few days of thought. But hey, at least I know where I stand now.

Experiences with a Trac Server In the last few days after Xmas I set up http://trac.cs.unibo.it, a server for my CS department which will host a bunch of Trac instances, initially for academic projects only then it will be opened to student projects as well. The server set-up has been "powered-by" the following technologies:

1. Debian Etch
2. Apache 2.2 with FastCGI, SuExec, and WebDAV over TLS (for accessing SVN repositories without forcibly passing through Trac)
3. Trac instances backed by Sqlite databases and Subversion repositories
4. Some bits of Genshi templating for generating the projects index
5. Some shell scripts for automating creation and removal of projects

I'm quite happy with the result. From the overall experience I drew some observations though:

• installing Etch is more a dream than ever, in 15 minutes I re-installed the server (which previously was running Ubuntu) with a decent partitioning scheme and all that I needed to work remotely. The sysadm of the department saw me coming out from the server room and asked, unbelievingly, did you already finish?
• apache2.2 in Debian is now annoyingly missing the nice script for creating easily TLS certificates (i.e. apache2-ssl-certificate). I followed-up on #395823 attaching the same script took from Sarge and the needed configuration file. Worked for me
• SuExec is stupid. You have to put stuff under /var/www for it to work at all, the only way to change the path is rebuild apache .... or, you can mount --bind /srv/trac /var/www/trac!
• BTW I like /srv. According to the FHS it's the place where I want to put my Trac projects. Unfortunately the Debian installer neglects that path and per default you end up with a system where /srv is in the same partition as /, and hence with basically no free space. Hence I also bind-mounted /srv/trac from /home/trac
• In Etch we have no available implementation of FastCGI (which really improves Trac performances BTW). libapache2-mod-fastcgi is non-free and for some reason it was not autobuild everywhere and hence is missing from testing. I pinged aba on IRC about that, so the package should probably enter testing again in a few days. Go RMs!

Happy new year birthday trac.cs.unibo.it.

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area

Katherine's father bought her mother a laptop for Christmas. I am ashamed to admit that although I was responsible for the specification it was purchased from PC World. There is a lack of shops in Northern Ireland where you can walk in and purchase a reasonably cheap laptop unfortunately. The model we ended up with was an Advent 8111 (Dixons link as it's saner than the PC World one). It's not actually a bad spec; Core Duo 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, wireless/ethernet/modem, 15.4" 1280x800 widescreen TFT. I think it claims up to 3 hours battery life and I certainly had 2+ out of it though not under heavy use. I decided that it was getting Linux; Katherine's mum isn't used to any form of computer so there are no preconceptions about Windows to get over. While I'm a Debian person myself I felt it was time to give Ubuntu a chance; mjg59 (and others I'm sure) has spent a lot of time trying to get it happy on laptops and make sure things Just Work. I didn't have a lot of time to sit fiddling with the setup, so a shiny out-of-the-box distro seemed ideal. I downloaded ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso and burnt myself a CD. Dropped it in the drive and it booted into the live CD installer fine. The install process was simple and it managed to resize the Windows partition without problems (I would have deleted it but I couldn't convince the Windows rescue CD creator to work and I don't want to burn my bridges until I'm sure Linux works out ok for the owner). Rebooting into the freshly installed system I was surprised at the time the boot process took. It certainly felt a lot longer than it takes my (lower speced) laptop to boot to a GDM prompt under Debian. Also the display looked a bit fuzzy. Further investigation led to the discovery that although X correctly detected a panel size of 1280x800 it was only using 1024x768. Much searching found me i915resolution which did some magic that made things work. However this doesn't appear to be part of Ubuntu proper so I'm not sure if was the correct solution or if I should have done something else? Getting to the point where I could download i915resolution was interesting too. My parents have a WEP encrypted wireless network (to prevent casual use rather than because it's secure). I was expecting Ubuntu (which detected the Intel wireless card fine) to pop up some sort of dialog saying it had found a network and would I like to connect (if I provided the key). Something network-managery. But no. Even when I went to the network control panel and added all the details the connection didn't seem to come up. I gave up and did it manually with iwconfig and dhclient (I needed it to work quickly and at present it won't need wireless usually). Once I had the display working happily my other task was to tame the modem. It's an Intel HDA thing and I'd hoped sl-modem-daemon would drive it. Of course it didn't. Although it's an Intel chipset it has a bloody Conexant codec on it. Which of course there are no free or Free drivers for. I ended up trying the trial Linuxant driver, which did work fine at 14.4k, but that's really painful so I gave up and paid for the full version. I'd really rather have voted with my feet and ended up with some proper modem hardware, but it would have been an extra set of wires and cost more. I hate Conexant. Anyway, the drivers work (though seem to break sound; I haven't had enough time to prod this and the modem is much more important to have working). Hopefully in time I'll convince them they really want ADSL, but at present I think it would be quite hard as they don't have a high expected use. Once the modem was working I needed an easy way to dial up. I started playing with modem monitor, which had been installed by default. However I just couldn't figure out how to get it to allow me to dialup and dial down - the activate/disable options stayed greyed out. So I installed GNOME PPP which seems to work fine and be easy enough to drive - put a nice link to it on the desktop and stored all the details so it's a double click to launch and then a click of the "Connect" button. My final issue was that once I actually took the laptop to Katherine's house to show her mum how to use it it started hanging on boot. Booting into recovery mode showed a soft lockup error message around the point where it was setting up the network interfaces. I think this might have had something to do with me hitting the wireless kill switch (no point having it on when there's no wireless in the house), as disabling the device in the BIOS made the problem go away. I didn't have enough time to do a fully exhaustive check, but will look at it in the future. I wait with interest to see how use of the laptop goes. Expected usage to being with is mainly web and email (provided by the Ubuntu defaults of Firefox and Evolution) so hopefully it shouldn't be too problematic now I've fought the install process. I was really quite surprised at the problems I encountered (well, aside from the modem drivers); I'd expected a much smoother install that would leave me with everything working fine out of the box. I haven't yet filed any bugs or done more investigation - I only had about a day to setup the machine so couldn't prod it more just yet. I will of course try to do so when I get a free moment, but if I missed some obvious stuff please do point it out to me! (As if you wouldn't...) Oh, and here's some lspci output for anyone interested in some more details about the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
05:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
05:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
05:01.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
05:01.3 Class 0805: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803c (prog-if 01)

As of this writing, the DNS/infrastructure hasn't quite caught up, but ofbiz.apache.org ought to be live soon. "Apache Open For Business", aka OFBiz, has been promoted out of the incubator (the term the ASF uses for projects hoping to become full-fledged ASF projects) to its own top level project. As J Aaron Farr mentions, they managed most everything on their own, and were a project that wouldn't have looked out of place as part of the ASF even from the beginning of the incubation period, which made my job as a "mentor" pretty easy. What will be interesting is to track the project going forward. It has tremendous potential, because it focuses very much on providing not only the low level tools (which is still where most open source is), but also on creating good business models and processes, which is relatively newer terrain in the open source world. I think they face a couple of important challenges. First and foremost, a way to lower the barrier to entry. OFBiz is a big collection of code that in some ways tends to stand alone compared to the "mainstream" in that it uses its own tools in terms of the framework. Also, since it encompasses so much, it's a lot to come to terms with when you get started. This means that the initial step of the "learning curve" is pretty high, and I imagine that a lot of people stumble. Clearly, it's not a simple application, but I think efforts to make it more approachable will pay off in terms of attracting more users (and eventually, developers). The broader challenge is simply the fact that in some ways, this is uncharted territory for free software, so it remains to be seen what sort of "ecosystem" (if you'll pardon the buzzword) grows up around it. For instance, at this point in time, no one, least of all the core developers, sees it as a program that you simply download and run, but rather as a place to start from for integrators and developers who mould the code to fit the needs of the particular firm adopting it. That's working right now, but perhaps at some point it will be more of an out of the box system. Or maybe not - attempting to make it work well for a vague 'everyone' might just be chasing taillights and prove ultimately fruitless. Unfortunately, I still haven't had the opportunity to use it "in anger", as they say, so I don't have much to say about it technically, but from a business point of view, I really like their data model, and the system of processes they've put together, which allows you to capture a great deal of use cases in a very flexible way, which is no mean feat. In any case, a big round of congratulations to the core developers, and best wishes for the future!

I’ve been asked to keep my blog up to date with regard to Linux support of the MacBook Pro, so here are my latest findings. For more background, see the previous post on the same subject. Anything that I don’t mention here or in another post can be assumed to work (or I just haven’t tested that particular thing yet, though I’m doing some extensive tests).

• Sound: still nothing, none of the various patches floating are good enough
• Battery life: no news here, 1h30 is the max you’ll get. You need to suspend to disk if you want to swap the battery, it’s not possible to do that in suspend to ram like it was on the PowerBook (G4 500, at least). Sad.
• Heat/fan noise: catastrophic. Fans running at 4000-4200 rpm on a typical desktop or on my laps, down to 3000 rpm on a glass desktop. More on the SMC below.
• ATI drivers: still suck. No PowerPLAY support on amd64, which means the GPU is running at the highest clock rate, consuming a lot of power and generating a lot of heat. XVideo makes the X server segfault, watching a short movie using vlc’s OpenGL output managed to crash the box hard, corrupting part of the kernel memory. fglrx kills the machine on resume.

In a previous post, I was reporting a lot of timeouts from the applesmc “driver”. After a (very) quick look at the AppleSMC kext for OS X, I know why this happens. It looks like the OS X driver uses an interrupt and configures the SMC for that. So it probably doesn’t poll the SMC 20 times per second like the applesmc “driver” does. It also looks like the OS X driver uses SMC keys we know nothing about. I could also confirm that the SMC has access to temperature sensors for the CPU, GPU and memory, but it looks like we have no idea of the corresponding SMC keys. With this information, it’d be possible to switch the SMC to manual mode with a userspace governor. What probably happens when we run Linux on this machine is that the SMC stays in automatic mode, and it’s very conservative in this mode. It won’t hesitate to run the fans at high speed to keep the machine safe. It is highly probable that the OS X driver is taking over the fan control to keep the machine both cool and quiet. This is mostly speculation, as the better device power management in OS X plays a role too, and the SMC could very well still be in automatic mode under OS X keeping the fans at low speed just because the machine generates way less heat. Unfortunately, the AppleSMC kext isn’t released as part of Darwin, so we’ll have to wait until it is. Could be a long wait, though. The SMC handles a lot of things. I don’t feel safe running an OS without a proper driver for the SMC on this machine. The fans probably aren’t designed to run at 4000+ rpm for 3 years and will probably fail early or something.

Nice Christmas for us at the Prodromou homestead in Los Altos Hills. My brothers Nate and Ted spent Christmas Eve with us at the big house, and we hung out till late at night watching Leeroy Jenkins videos on YouTube. The next morning, Amita June woke up early, oblivious to the importance of the day. My nieces Elena and Tessa had their initial gift opening at their house in Mountain View then came over to my Mom and Dad's around noon. So the rest of us played and chatted and had a nice brunch. We had a good time opening presents, and Amita got her main wished-for gifts: lots of musical instruments, like drums, maracas, and a recorder. She also got some nice clothes, both from my folks and her maternal grandparents. Altogether a good holiday, and as usual a watershed of stress. We don't have too much to do between now and the end of the year, so it's a good time to get caught up on some projects that need some attention. And, y'know, just rest. tags: christmas prodromou family amitajune

Basecamp crazy So, I really like the Basecamp project management service. It's a really intuitive system, simple to use, without a lot of project-management mumbo-jumbo that makes tracking your time and planning work too hard to do. It's nicely implemented, has a great UI, and does lots of neato Ajax stuff, so it's easy to use. I crossed the rubicon from the gratis version to the low-volume personal version last year, making myself a whole-hearted participant in the freemium business model. A couple of days ago, I crossed another milestone: I had more than 3 concurrent projects going, so I had to upgrade to the Business version. Normally I'd be pretty P.O.'d to pay for a Web service, but for one that has shown me a lot of value, and that I've moved into incrementally as I've become dependent on it, I'm more willing to pay. I'm not sure what that says about my values, about this particular business model, or just about the quality of the Basecamp service. tags: basecamp freemium project management

One-time passwords So, I'll admit it: I think one-time passwords are pretty hard to understand. But Nick Moffitt gives a very good description of OPIE (One-time Passwords in Everything) in his blog this week. And, before you ask: yes, I am down with OTP. You know me. tags: nick moffitt opie one-time password

From a suggestion on my previous blog entry I decided to test out google reader.

The first problem was that it caused Konqueror to SEGV in etch, I filed a bug report and switched to Firefox.

Next to add my feeds I had to either export them in OPML format or add them one at a time, there is no support for pasting in a list of URLs. If I was writing a RSS syndication program I would also make it parse the config files of some of the common programs, parsing a Planet config file is pretty easy.

I added a feed for a friend who's server seems to be down. While doing so I tried to add another feed, the google reader accepted the command to add the second feed but didn't actually do so - it was fortunate that I was pasting it in not typing it...

The killer issue is that it seems to be impossible to merge feeds. I want to read both Planet Linux Australia and Planet Debian, there are some people who are on both planets (EG me). So it makes no sense to do anything other than display both of them in the same view.

At this time it seems that google reader is unsuitable for my use. However it is a fairly slick system and I imagine that it would work quite well for people who have different needs to me. If you want to read the blogs of a few friends then it probably works really well. It just seems not to work well for a set of meshed communities (Debian developers and Linux users in Australia for example).


Please let me know if I somehow missed some configuration options to make google reader do what I want.

Here's my contribution to the next DWN:

Some developers continue to whine in inappropriate places [1] about others being paid by Dunc-Tank for their work on Debian.
[1] http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/42/

Would you please cut down your childish behaviour a bit more? Can someone else maybe step up and do DWN instead? I'm sooo getting tired of this (and you). (Granted: at least you didn't claim that everybody is demotivated because of this, or that it delayed the etch release. Thats why I added the "more" in the previous paragraph; also what you wrote is likely correct - I can't judge your true motiviations, if you are actually demotivated or if you just don't like AJs hair color.) It's a very subjective point of view, and while somewhat marked as such ("because its editor can't ignore other duties while the Debian project is indirectly paying some developers"; however there are six editors listed at the end!) I find it inappropriate to put this into DWN (which should try to be obejctive). To me, it's just another lame attempt of you to voice your disagreement with Dunc-Tank (again, note that you have been heard by the whole community, there is no censoring being done) in an unfair way (because I couldn't voice my opinion in the same place). Did you at least talk about this paragraph with the other "editors"? (Note: I'm not directly pro dunc-tank, and I find the way AJ introduced it not too appropriate; my suggestion would have been to ask him kindly to step down from having a position in the dunc-tank board. However I'm certainly not demotivated by it, but I find it both good that key people of Debian are being paid without having additional responsibilities to some company, and that there is now a way to donate to Debian that won't just eventually maybe be used for something, but where I can clearly mark it for.)

Here's my contribution to the next DWN:

Some developers continue to whine in inappropriate places [1] about others being paid by Dunc-Tank for their work on Debian.
[1] http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/42/

Would you please cut down your childish behaviour a bit more? Can someone else maybe step up and do DWN instead? I'm sooo getting tired of this (and you). (Granted: at least you didn't claim that everybody is demotivated because of this, or that it delayed the etch release. Thats why I added the "more" in the previous paragraph; also what you wrote is likely correct - I can't judge your true motiviations, if you are actually demotivated or if you just don't like AJs hair color.) It's a very subjective point of view, and while somewhat marked as such ("because its editor can't ignore other duties while the Debian project is indirectly paying some developers"; however there are six editors listed at the end!) I find it inappropriate to put this into DWN (which should try to be obejctive). To me, it's just another lame attempt of you to voice your disagreement with Dunc-Tank (again, note that you have been heard by the whole community, there is no censoring being done) in an unfair way (because I couldn't voice my opinion in the same place). Did you at least talk about this paragraph with the other "editors"? (Note: I'm not directly pro dunc-tank, and I find the way AJ introduced it not too appropriate; my suggestion would have been to ask him kindly to step down from having a position in the dunc-tank board. However I'm certainly not demotivated by it, but I find it both good that key people of Debian are being paid without having additional responsibilities to some company, and that there is now a way to donate to Debian that won't just eventually maybe be used for something, but where I can clearly mark it for.) [Yes, I am aware that others are just as annoyed by my responses to Joey&co. Especially when they happen to agree with him. Nevertheless he maybe shouldn't be abusing DWN!]