So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

Since late 2008 WebKit/GTK+ has been advancing in a better pace than earlier that year. Patches are being reviewed and committed actively, mostly by Holger Freyther (zecke). This last month, among other goodies such as better keyword searching for the WooHoo bar in Epiphany and enabling WebKit s Soup backend to upload files, I have been working on getting download support into WebKit/GTK+ so that we can use that API in Epiphany. Most of the heavy work was done by Marco Barisione and Pierre-Luc Beaudoin early last year. I brought the patch up-to-date and modified it with input from various people into something simpler and handling some more use cases. Tonight I finally reached a milestone, being able to download a Debian ISO with Epiphany/WebKit:

This is work in progress. There are many rough edges to sharpen, still, but this work should be ready for merging very soon. If you want to help take a look at the WebKit bug report we are using to track this work, and the corresponding Epiphany bug report. Anyway, I ve been using both Epiphany and WebKit/GTK+ from trunk for about a month now, and the number of things I am missing is going down quickly. Come help us test and get a regressionless Epiphany with WebKit/GTK+ for GNOME 2.28!

Bruce Schneier is very sceptical about the new hard drive encryption standards released by a group composed of virtually all major storage vendors. He points out that the established software solutions have worked just fine, while this new standards adds complexity (and probably flaws, too) at the hardware level. I'm not so sure myself in which direction the balance goes:

• Encryption (without the key management, which I do not suppose the standard covers) is not that complex to get right and it can easily take advantage of hardware acceleration. (Yes, I don't quote numbers here. Schneier claims he hasn't had problems with encryption speed, but doesn't have numbers either ...)
• It should be a lot easier to subvert a software component than it is to subvert a hardware component.
• It is a lot harder to correct errors in hardware / firmware than in software and get users to apply the updates.
• In many cases the key management is the weak point, not the encryption itself. And key management is hard to get right regardless of where the encryption sits.
• I'm sure the abysmal track record of encrypted drives affects only the cheap USB drives and not the type of hardware we're talking about here. But, can I really be sure? (Serious) software solutions come from companies where security is the main business, whereas the hardware encryption will be implemented by storage companies which so far haven't had to care much about these issues.
• Finally: This standard should replace a number of proprietary solutions since some vendors already do offer encrypted drives anyway. Assuming the standard is sane, this should certainly be a Good Thing in any case.

My home file server, Asterisk PBX, firewall and general router is apparently dying. I am looking forward to replacing it, because it s old and eats too much power anyway. Now I just need to figure out what to put in its place. Basically I need a low-power machine that ll be always on, with at least two LAN ports (three would be better, but I can also connect the cable modem with USB), and a means to connect at least two harddrives with at least 1Tb capacity. I d rather use SATA for the drives than USB, but I would be willing to investigate eSATA and external drives too. However, I want to have direct access to the drives and not be forced to use some sort of proprietary RAID. At the moment, I am investigating the Thecus N3200PRO, which has quite a reasonable hardware selection. The device has a low-power AMD Geode processor, but for some reason I have it stuck in my head that the ARM would be a better choice. Does anyone have experience with this device? Or maybe someone would like to make a different suggestion? Mail me! I d prefer a device that I can get working without too much learning or frickling. The less I have to learn/know about and touch hardware, the better. It would help if the machine booted off the harddisk, for then I could install Linux elsewhere and move the disks. Alternatively, network booting and a serial console would work, although I hear that USB makes that unnecessarily painful. I d like to avoid flashing ROMs or other black magic just to get it working. NP: AC/DC: Powerage Update: The folks at EXSYS kindly replied and filled me in with some information regarding the N3200PRO. Thanks! First of all, Thecus officially claims that it is not possible to install Linux on the device (although the device is running Linux, according to the hardware list). Second, the machine boots off a Flash-ROM, which makes the installation more difficult than I d like it, and apparently also one-way: once the Thecus firmware has been overwritten, there seems to be no way to get it back. I am looking elsewhere now, because even though the hardware is exactly what I want, I won t give money to a company who impose shackles on their customers and force them to use software that may not be up-to-date, and which is probably castrated I d be surprised if the N3200PRO spoke IPv6, for instance. Nevertheless, I ve asked about installing Debian in the Thecus User Group forum and I also dropped a message to Thecus itself. I ll keep this post up-to-date, so come back for more.

Everytime I see people talking about "BSG", I think of the Brotherhood of Saint Gregory.

It's all Thomas Bushnell's fault.

Ted T'so wonders about the LUGs over the world, seeking to answer a conversation he recently had at the Linux Foundation. He quotes a blog posting in Lenovo, Local User Groups - gone the way of the dinosaur? . I think this is an interesting point to gather input from others. In Mexico City, we did have a strong LUG several years ago, holding not-very-regular-but-good-quality-wise meetings, roughly monthly, at Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares. I was active there ~1996-2001.
By 2001, however, the group stopped acting as one - Maybe one of the main factors is that we had a very strong, unquestionable group leader and cohesion factor (Miguel), who worked at Nucleares and regularly got said auditorium. Once Miguel left to form Ximian, the group slowly disgregated. In one of the last LUG meetings, we started working towards the National Free Software Conference (CONSOL)... Nowadays, in Mexico (as a country) we have several conferences around the year, although I'd be hard-pressed to say whether any of them really fills the needs of a LUG (and my answer would probably be negative). Now, there are several smaller groups that have popped up in the void left by the Mexico City LUG - Mainly LUGs local to universities or faculties... And yes, a 25-million-people city is too large to have a single, functional LUG - Just the geographical size of the thing is too daunting. Besides, we are too many people, even though few of us are contributing any real work. But I also recognize that a local *users* group should care about making the users better, before focusing on making the world a better place ;-) Anyway... My intention with this post, besides writing what I see, is to ask to other people that read me (I know this blog is syndicated at Planeta Linux Mexico, maybe even people reading in other Latin American countries through Planeta EDUSOL) to write what they see at their local communities. To make this a bit more useful, please leave a comment (in English, if possible) at this blog, so this can be used as a summary for Ted's request as well.

ldapvi is so wonderful. No Java/Python/PHP for browsing LDAP trees and the power of vi for LDAP administration. Nevertheless, today I had difficulty for deleting a facsimileTelephoneNumber attribute:

$ ldapvi
Action? [yYqQvVebB*rsf+?] y
ldap_modify: Inappropriate matching (18)
additional info: modify/delete: facsimileTelephoneNumber: no equality matching rule

Here is the LDIF change tried by ldapvi:

dn: uid=foo,ou=people,dc=evolix,dc=net
changetype: modify
delete: facsimileTelephoneNumber
facsimileTelephoneNumber: 0000

After a little search on the web, I find the reason on openldap-bugs list archives:

Since the schema definition of facsimileTelephoneNumber has no matching rule
defined, the only modifications you can make are Replace or Delete w/ no
values.

facsimileTelephone attribute actually doesn t have SYNTAX definition. See in core.ldif file:

Number olcAttributeTypes: ( 2.5.4.23 NAME ( 'facsimileTelephoneNumber' 'fax' )
  DESC 'RFC2256: Facsimile (Fax) Telephone Number'
  SYNTAX 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.22 )

By default, ldapvi tries to delete a specific value (even if there is only one value) for an attribute. But according documentation, it s impossible to delete only one of values for facsimileTelephoneNumber attribute! Note: for deleting all values of facsimileTelephoneNumber attribute, the LDIF change must be:

dn: uid=foo,ou=people,dc=evolix,dc=net
changetype: modify
delete: facsimileTelephoneNumber

It has become a hidden tradition for me to watch Superbowl every year, despite disappointment in the game and coverage quality in the years before. It started as before: pre-game show, pre-pre-game show, coin toss show and kick-off show It is clear that the show is planned by and for advertisers and not for the viewers. That is a shame and a disgrace - the viewer must be the master of the TV programming and NOT the advertisers. In soccer the program starts, you see the captains exchange a handshake, you see the referee throw a coin and 10-15 seconds later the game is going full steam. Why do you need 3 ad breaks and 2 songs before the game is beyond me - get to the game! The camera work and NBC commentary is MUCH better than last year - stable shots with good close-ups and explanations that actually make sense even to people that are not American football experts. Oh and they actually use units - saying they won x out of y games this season and not they are x in y this season , mostly at least. The game had more fun than usual in the beginning, but the legal things slow it up again - it is weird that a guy got over the line but was called beck because of the knee touching and then a penalty for a false start ? Too much rules and regulations. Soon you ll have a team of lawyers on the sidelines and lawyer drafts will be more important than player drafts. And then again holding and chopping - isn t that what the blockers are supposed to do? Is that some kind of sissy sport? Maybe not. 100 yard interception return run I am speechless. Now that was a great, great play. That episode alone made watchig this thing worth it. Not the best sport thing I ve seen, but the best American football moment for sure. I like the basis of the game, it is a good game, but there is way too much fluff on it. That game needs to be cut down - less rules, less breaks, less interruption, less advertisements, less time to think and relax for the players. 10 seconds of play and 5 minutes of players chatting is not a sport, even curling has more action. The whole Superbowl should be over in 1 hour real time. If the TV transmission starts at 17:00, it should be done before 18:00. There is no content there to justify anything longer than that. Why is there a limited number of challenges? Do the referees make only a limited number of mistakes per game? No. Illogical. And when I though it was done and sealed, Arizona does a great drive and get a great touchdown. One more drive like that and the game could go either way. Now that is a good game. But again penalties spoil the whole game Fitsgerald gets a touchdown, another great play to turn the game around, but only because of the holding penalty giving Arizona safety score. Not deserving in my opinion. And the Steelers drive back AMAZING game! Now this is actually close to the best sports game that I have ever seen. I sure was not expecting that. And Arizona tries to drive back again. I was sleepy when I started to watch this, no sleep now. That was a great game. Despite all the commercialization, it is still a great game and it is very watchable if you download it from the Internet or watch it with TiVo and can skip the adds and the slow parts.

Welcome back for the last part of the reviews. You may want to look at the previous parts : part 1 and part 2. Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client Presentation Debian CDs and DVDs take up a huge mount of space on download servers. Using jigdo to download those images can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and space needed on the central servers. Unfortunately, jigdo currently needs special client software to be downloaded/installed first. Adding support directly into a browser-based application could potentially make a very big difference for first-time users here. Jigdo was created in 2001. It allowed to create ISOs from .debs grabbed from regular mirrors. It eliminated the need to duplicate the entire contents of the package repository into ISO files for each release, or even more importantly, for weekly snapshots of testing/unstable/whatever. You may find the complete proposal from the student here. The original idea originated from the Debian-CD people, who wanted to explore ideas about creating a light web client. The project was mentored by Steve McIntyre, who developed a new version of the Jigdo tools, jigit, which is much more efficient. Student Dustin Rayner was a 5th year senior undergraduate student at the Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I studied Computer Engineering for 3 years as a Computer Engineering student before deciding to pursue a Mathematics and Computer Science degree. Result This project was unsuccessful due to numerous issues. First, because of an inadequate technical preparation of the original proposal. The Debian-CD people were too optimistic with the possibilities of Javascript. In the end, the copying and checksumming part of the Jigdo process were implemented but the checksumming (with a Javascript implementation of md5) was so slow that it was unusable (think 50kb/s on a regular laptop at full CPU charge). The student did the right thing to investigate Java and ActiveX but it was too late unfortunately and he ultimately lacked the experience and knowledge in the relevant technologies. If the proposal is tried again, the student would be requested to have much more experience with Java (and possibly ActiveX). Those would be much more efficient for the task, as they are the most used technologies among on-line anti-virus scanners, which have a workload somewhat similar to Jigdo. I could not find further public involvement of Dustin Rayner within Debian. Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager Presentation A GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality. Debian currently supports multiple non-command-line package managers, the most used being Synaptic and Aptitude. Synaptic uses a GTK+ interface but offers no command-line mode. Aptitude offers a command-line mode but no X interface, although it offers a ncurses interface.
Comparing the interfaces of Synaptic and Aptitude reveal many design differences. Although Synaptic may be more accessible to beginners, Aptitude offers many interface behaviors and functions that are useful to the regular to advanced users : fully hyperlinked tabbed navigation between packages and versions of packages, mostly modeless interface, interactive dependency conflict resolver The proposal was introduced by the student in coordination with Daniel Burrows, the mentor and developer of Aptitude. Student Obey Arthur Liu was a 22 year old french student of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Grenoble Institute of Technology - ENSIMAG, in France. Did I mention that he s also yours truly ? If you want to know more, you might be interested in my previous post. Result This project was successful. The interface was mostly done and functional by the end of the summer. Daniel merged the code into the main post-lenny branch. Development is still ongoing and packages are released into Experimental. For further information, just read the rest of my blog. I could find some further public involvements of Obey Arthur Liu within Debian. Doh! Lintian for fuller automated setups Presentation lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can t be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity). This project would make lintian errors much more fine-grained and help in maintaining pertinent quantitative analysis of package quality. The project was mentored by Marc Brockschmidt. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the Lintian team. Student UPDATED: Jord Polo Bard s has done a lot of work with translation in Catalan, his native tongue. He can usually be found on #debian-catalan. He also maintains a few packages as a DM. Result This project was successful. The classification was entirely done. Jord also helped with the new lintian.debian.org website. The Lintian team was very satisfied with the revamped errors list and new website. They have an immediate impact on packages quality reporting. Jord is still active within Debian, helping package a few games. Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository Presentation mentors.debian.net is currently a very specialized web-based repository that allows everybody to contribute software packages to Debian without the need to be a Debian Developer (or Debian Maintainer). It has successfully helped simplifying the sponsoring process in the last years. However it needs to be refactored and in the process should be turned into a generic piece of software that can be used for other Debian source/binary package repositories, too. Mentors is a very good initiative to recruit new packages maintainers (and needs your help!) and the software underlying it could be reused for many different purposes (think PPA). The project was mentored by Christoph Haas. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the mentors team. Student Jonny Lamb was a Computer Science student in the United Kingdom. He was already quite involved within Debian, maintaining a lot of significant packages. Result This project was successful. The whole proposal was perfectly executed. Jonny now continues to develop debexpo, with the mailing-lists and commit logs showing interesting activity. Of course, help for debexpo is appreciated to get it into full shape. Jonny has since become a Debian Developer (here is his AM report). Congratulations to him. It s nice to end on a nice note isn t it ? Now that we re done with the individual reports, I m going to write down my recommendations report. Hopefully it will help with next year s Summer of Code.

After everybody though that Midnight Commander is dead and the next release of it will be released together with hurd, it is very cool to announce that a new team of developers are active again. We've taken over officially the development in December and now, after two months of work a new version of mc is available: 4.6.2. This is mostly a bugfix release addressing several very nasty bugs which are also present in the debian package. Here the notes what has changed in this release:

• MC Core
  • Changed HQ url to point to new website www.midnight-commander.org (Closes: #137, #138)
  • Added a micro helper library in order to go slowly avay from glib (Closes: #157)
  • Use static strings as section entries in ~/.mc/history WARNING!: This will break old files (Closes: #50)
  • Fixed a repaint issue when clicking on the "View" Button instead of using F3 (Closes: #35)
  • Removed obsolete autoconf macros (Closes: #133)
  • Fix escaping for command line completion (Closes: #147)
  • prevent mc from segfaulting when getting invalid timestamps on files (Closes: #96)
  • Fixed a keybord issue when running mc via a putty console (Closes: #203)
  • setted pty fd to closeonexec (on subshell) (Closes: #174)
  • Fixed file renames, when copying/moving is performed into deleted directories. (Closes: #181)
  • Add an option to show executables first in the panels (Closes: #173)
  • Fixed concatdirand_file if there is a parameter = NULL (Closes: #180)
  • Allow out-of-tree builds (Closes: #224, #208)
• Editor
  • Syntax highlighting for:
    • debian files (debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, ..) (Closes: #142)
    • updated sh syntax highlighting (Closes: #143)
    • updated pascal syntax highlighting (Closes: #65)
    • differentiate between c and cpp files for highlighting (Closes: #16)
    • updated python highlighting to support python 2.6 (Closes: #216)
  • Removed some unneeded variables (Closes: #168, #151)
  • Do use a ro test if a file exists (Closes: #206)
  • Fixes some missbehaviour in regex matching (Closes: #207, #211 )
    • start at front of line and not on cursor position
    • . shouldn't match a newline
• VFS
  • Fix some bashisms in some extfs scripts (Closes: #146)
  • Fixed various problems with symlinks and files with chars which needs escaping over fish (Closes: #10, #87, #149, #53)
  • Added 7zip extfs descriptor (Closes: #92)
  • Switched from o3totxt to odf2txt as o3totxt is outdated (Closes: #218)
• Locale
  • Updated german translation (Closes: #167)
  • New Belarussian translation (Closes: #170)
  • Updated russian translation (Closes: #159)

As you see.. quite a long list of fixes Have fun and check the new release out right here!

Paul Wayper has said that he only wants to work for companies that will send him too LCA [1]. While that criteria is quite reasonable it seems overly specific. Among other things the varying location of LCA will result in the expense for the employer varying slightly year by year - which employers generally don t like. I believe that a better option is to have an employment package that specifies a certain amount of money (related to the gross income of the employee) should be set aside for training, hardware, or other expenses that help the employee (or their colleagues) do their job. Such an option would probably only be available to senior employees who are most able to determine the most effective way of spending the money. For example an employee who earns $100,000 per annum might be permitted to assign 10% of their income ($10,000) to training or hardware that assists their job. Modern PCs are so cheap that any reasonable hardware requirements could fit within that budget with ease. There are several benefits to such a scheme. On many occasions I have had colleagues who had inadequate hardware to do their work, slow PCs with small screens really impacted their productivity, in such situations buying a $400 PC and a $400 monitor for each person in the team could make a significant direct improvement to productivity before the impact on moralle kicked in! Some years ago Lenovo ran some adverts for Thinkpads which said demand one at the interview . That made sense when a Thinkpad was an expensive piece of hardware. While there are still some expensive Thinkpads, there is a good range of cheap models, two which cost less than $1200AU and another eight which cost between $1200 and $1800. Now it makes more sense to allow each employee to choose their own hardware (both desktop and portable) and not even bother about issues such as whether the IT department blesses them. As Tom Limoncelli suggested in his LCA keynote, users are going to take more control over their environment whether the IT department like it or not, so it s best to work with them rather than fighting them. For training a common problem is that management can t correctly determine which conferences are worthy of the expense of sending their technical staff. Then when a conference is selected they send everyone. It seems to me that when there are a number of conferences in a region (EG AUUG, LCA, OSDC, and SAGE-AU in Australia) there is a benefit in having someone from your team attend each one. Planning at the start of the year which conferences will be attended by each team member is something that appears to be beyond the ability of most managers as it requires knowing the technical interests and skill areas of most staff. If each employee was granted one week of paid time per year to attend conferences and they could determine their own budget allocation then they would be able to work it out themselves in a more effective manner.

• [1] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2009/01/23

Content analysis details:   (5.9 points, 3.8 required)                          
                                                                                
 pts rule name              description                                         
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------  
 1.0 NO_REAL_NAME           From: does not include a real name                  
 1.0 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message                      
 0.0 BAYES_50               BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%        
                            [score: 0.4956]                                     
 1.4 HTML_10_20             BODY: Message is 10% to 20% HTML                    
 1.5 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts         
 1.1 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag         

That's the registration verification email from the National Do Not Call Registry.

Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1]. He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable - it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability. I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don t expect anything different this time around. Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn t know what OS is running). I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away. Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks . I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength). As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010. One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012. Predicting that technological developments won t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won t break frequently) won t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years. One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won t be for at least five years. I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced. I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.

• [1] http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/09/technology-predictions/


• [2] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [3] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/11/09/technology-predictions


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport

I've recently read Michael Crichton's controversial "State of Fear": A book where radical environmentalists stage terror attacks to promote the idea of catastrophic climate change. I read this book as a counterbalance to a few other things I have consumed recently: Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent ecological series "40 Signs of Rain", "50 Degrees Below" and "60 Days and Counting"; as well as Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". I can also kid myself that I don't exclusively read Science Fiction (It's filed under "literature!" honest!) Given these points, I was not expecting to enjoy this book. It's been a while since I last read a Crichton, so it might just be lack of familiarity with his style, but I found the beginning of the book to be a bit frustrating: he doesn't spend much time detailing the world and situations that his characters find themselves in. Some of the early characters are typical Star Trek-style red shirts who exist soley to be killed off. Eventually I either meshed gears with it pacing-wise or the main characters stopped being cardboard because I started to enjoy it. Sometimes it gets a bit preachy and I can see why climate scientists and global warming activists got so wound up about it, although I think some of the reactions are very knee-jerk. At the end of the book, Crichton has a short essay about his feelings regarding climate change, followed by some references. The message I took away from the book was not "global warming is all a farce" as many of the reviews and descriptions suggested to me, but rather, evidence-based science is crucial and don't take things for granted: including either stance on climate change, two points I strongly agree with. There are some other points he raises which I think are really good ideas and hope to write more about soon.

There is currently a lot of discussion about how to protect marriage , such discussion is based on the issue of whether Gay Marriage should be prohibited to protect Straight Marriage. Some straight people believe that their own marriage would be better if homosexuals were allowed to get married, some have even declared that they won t get married until discrimination in this regard is ended. I don t believe that whether some other people get married will make any difference to my marriage. I believe that any two consenting adults who are not closely related should be allowed to get married, but I am not going to write about that today. What I will address is some positive steps that can be taken by a government to protect Straight Marriage without regard to Gay Marriage. By the most objective criteria, death is the greatest obstacle to marriage. To protect someone s marriage you should first protect them from becoming a widow or widower for as long as possible. Also protecting the lives of children (both biological and adopted) is important for protecting marriage. Here are some of the many ways of preventing needless death:

1. Don t start wars except in the most extreme situations. Wars inevitably involve the death of soldiers (some of whom are married) and any war that is anything other than the smallest border incident will involve the death of civilians (married people and children).


2. Protect the food supply and the environment. When toxic chemicals, heavy metals, or radioactive material are released in the environment it results in a statistical increase in the death rate from cancer.


3. Increase the funding for medical research. Today there are many medical situations which can be routinely and safely resolved which would have been likely to be fatal 10 or 20 years ago. More medical research will lead to more diseases being cured.


4. Spread positive technology around the world. Protecting marriage should have a larger scope than your local region, therefore life-saving medicine needs to be affordable in all countries. Patents that prevent this need to be voided in the poorer regions of the world.


5. Increase the research on car safety. Car crashes are one of the largest causes of death and significant injury in the first world which can be easily reduced. Unfortunately there has been little research on making cars safe for women and children (crash-test dummies for woman and children are to a large extent scaled-down models based on research on men due to the lack of female and child cadavers for research [1]). Also I believe that the majority of car safety research in regard to crash test dummies was done in the US and therefore is biased towards caucasians and afro-americans - I believe that research on other races is needed to give equal protection to all races (caucasian and afro-american races are in a minority in the world).

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it does cover some issues that are current and well known. Now the next objective way to analyse this issue is to look at statistics related to divorce. It seems that money is an issue related to divorce and therefore protecting the finances of married people is a way of protecting marriage. The first thing that can be done is to give people more continuity of employment. Being in a situation where you could lose your job at short notice is stressful and has to have a negative impact on a married couple. Recently the supposedly conservative Liberal government in Australia was trying to ban Gay Marriage while also introducing legislation to make it easier to lay off employees who have done nothing wrong (based on business issues). Among other things the Work Choices legislation made it more difficult for such employees to take out bank loans (which means that they often pay higher interest rates). A final issue that causes stress for married couples is the school system (which is broken in many ways). I m not going to try and cover this in detail here, but I will note that installing flag-poles (as the Liberal government wanted to do) is not the solution to problems with the education system. Addressing these real issues will take some government funding, but it s not a lot and a much greater amount of money could be saved by ending the war on drugs . If the people who claim to be protecting straight marriage can address these other more serious problems that threaten straight marriages then I still won t agree with calls to ban gay marriage. But it would make then seem less hypocritical.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_test_dummy

I received quite some feedback on my dlhack() post. Most of it negative. For clarity: no, I do not consider such practices to be the best of ideas. I called it a 'hack' for a reason I fully expect this mechanism to be replaced by the time I eventually release the code. It was just fun to do it this way, that's all. Having said that, There's one comment from a xine developer that deserves a followup:

I'm sure I have seen a few different software that can simulate keypresses from the keyboard through the user event interface of the kernel with a joystick, and thus you should just need to wire it down with the original xine-ui. Or use gxine and the gxine_client program to control it.

While this will work, there are several problems with this approach:

• The kernel can't know which application currently has the focus. With this approach, you may be sending joystick-generated keypress events to your IM client because it popped up while you were watching a DVD, and you hit the table (causing the joystick to move) while trying to click it away.
• A keyboard and a joystick are fundamentally different devices. While a keyboard can only tell the difference between 'the button is depressed' or 'the button is not depressed', a joystick has a much wider range; the Linux API will give you a signed 16-bit integer for the position of the stick. This can be useful to skip forward or backward in a much more detailed manner than the traditional 'chapter, 5 seconds, 30 seconds' approach; or one could use it to set the volume to a particular level (activate 'set volume', push the stick somewhere between fully-forward and the idle position for a volume level over 50%, or somewhere between fully-backward and idle for a volume level under 50%, then push a button to confirm). This kind of UI comes naturally with joysticks, but is impossible to implement through a keyboard-emulated UI.
• Some of the functionality I have in mind will require some visual feedback (e.g., the volume setter described above). I could do a separate window, of course, but that has its own set of problems; e.g., you need to ensure that it is on top of the video window; it will also be opaque, which is not as nice as transparent overlays on the xine window itself.

While all of the above is not a problem if I write a xine plugin, and indeed I might eventually convert the code to a one, the problem with that is that I don't know the xine plugin API yet; and writing a standalone application makes for easier prototyping. For the time being, at least. Oh, and in case you wonder why I don't just buy a LIRC-capable device and use a regular remote control: I have my gamepad. I do not have such a LIRC-capable device. My budget is not unlimited. 'Nuf said.

On the risk of repeating myself... While I do understand aseigo's dismay at the recent Linus-goes-to-GNOME-land media hype, caught by LWN amongst others is anyone taking bets if and when Linus will return to KDE? and I share LWN's (Jake Edge's) view that Red Hat/Fedora (I have no idea how far the latter really is a community project nowadays) has a long history of questionable release decisions regarding its inclusion of newer than bleeding edge software in releases, ultimately it's still KDE's fault for releasing KDE 4.0 with that ominous 4.0 version number in a move to get as many testers as possible for this public beta program (at least users didn't have to pay lots of money for this KDE Vista.) Why not just call it 3.9, if a beta label should be avoided? It would have been a release and avoided the bad press of staying in eternal beta, but the dot nine version would have made clear that it's not finished. Leaving the ranting aside, I congratulate the KDE crew for getting 4.2 out of the door, and the Debian KDE team for their decision to stay with KDE 3 in Lenny and providing KDE 4 via backports. I'm very happy with KDE 3 on my office workhorse, and have KDE 4 on the home machine and am quite impressed, but with reservations since I see parts of it crashing far too often for my taste (in the latest version I have installed, kmail rarely survives longer than 10min.)

Dhanapalan writes about the small number of voters for Linux Australia elections [1]. I guess that blacklist-voting is partly to blame for my inactivity in this regard. Linux Australia is running pretty well so I don t think there s a great need for me to go out of my way to vote. One thing that could be done given that LCA is an LA event is to give a voting session keynote status at LCA. Have it happen just after a keynote speech and have some prize given away to a random person who attends - the free laptops that were given away one year are not required, a free lunch voucher would be more than enough to increase the attendance. A final factor that needs to be considered is the number of elections that we may vote in. I vote in Australian elections (state and federal), Debian votes (General Resolutions and DPL elections), and sometimes my local LUG. The amount of attention that I can focus on political issues is limited and divided with other elections that are more important.

• [1] http://www.dhanapalan.com/blog/2009/01/27/participation-in-the-nation/

Sarah was discharged today. I decided to scrap trying to go to work, as I'd just have to leave at some point to pick her up. The hospital had to ensure that the nurse from Critical Care Systems was able to come to our home before they could discharge her, so that the IV antibiotics could be continued. We left the hospital at about 11:30am, and he got to our place just after 1pm. He whizzed through the whole process, as she was due for more antibiotics at midday and he wanted to get the IV started. She's on a four hourly course. Fortunately, that doesn't mean we have to change the IV every four hours. The way it works is the bag has enough antibiotics in a (presumably saline) solution to last six infusions on a four hourly frequency, and it's hooked up to a pump (that'll cost us $5000 if we don't give it back at the end), which takes care of everything. So once a day at around noon, Sarah has to disconnect the old bag, flush the line with saline, do something with some Heparin to prevent clots in the line, and hook up a new bag. The bag and the pump fit into a carry bag that can be worn like a bum bag or slung from her shoulder and looped through a belt. It'll be her permanent companion for the next (hopefully only) two weeks. The PICC has two ports (and I don't think that's the correct term) on it, and the IV is only hooked up to one, so the other one should be flushed and "Heparinised" regularly as well. The nurse comes back in a week with more supplies and to do some maintenance on site where the PICC line enters her arm. Critical Care Systems seems pretty impressive. They provide all the gear, fill the prescription, and bring it all out to you (by a nurse). They provide a 24 hour hotline to call if there's any problems, questions or concerns, and can dispatch somebody to us if necessary. We've got syringes preloaded with saline and Heparinised saline, more alcohol swabs than you can poke a stick at, and the fridge is full of IV bags. It's awesome that medical technology has progressed to this point, where Sarah can go about her business almost as normal, instead of being stuck in a hospital for another two weeks just because she has to have a tube in her arm. To prove this, the little trooper was back at her CNA course this evening, and starts clinical training tomorrow night.

Arthur Liu is doing a great series of posts following up on the results of Google Summer of Code '08 projects in Debian. (post 1 post 2) Most of them failed to produce code that's actually used in Debian, though there were some very successful projects, too. My experience with ikiwiki in '07 parallels that: latex Patrick Winnertz produced a working teximg (latex -> image) plugin that's in ikiwiki. The initial proposal also included doing latex -> html and wiki page -> latex conversions; that work never happened. file upload and image gallery Ben Coffey had an ambitious proposal to add file upload support to ikiwiki and also write an image gallery plugin using that. Ben did produce a working file upload interface, but that code never got into ikiwiki. This was due to a combination of at least three things:

1. The only outside communication with the ikiwiki community was doing a design proposal at the beginning, and a code dump toward the end of the project.
2. There was an existing complex spec for how to limit who could upload what files, but Ben didn't choose to implement those access controls.
3. The code dump was not even noticed until much later, when I was putting the finishing touches on my own implementation of an attachments plugin.

By the way, since I happened to do that attachments plugin as a paid consultant, I have an interesting data point: It took me 19 hours total to implement it, vs roughly a summer of work for the GSoC project. I don't mean this to reflect poorly on Ben, it just shows that someone who is familar with a code base and has thought a lot about a problem can work on it much more efficiently than a newcomer. AFAICS, Ben never did get to the gallery part. His involvement in SoC was cut short for personal reasons. Wiki WYSIWYG Editor Taylor Killian produced a working interface to Wikiwyg, but it tragically never made it into ikiwiki. This seemed to be going swimmingly -- Taylor set up a subversion repository for his work and produced several revisions of the wikiwyg plugin in response to feedback. At the end of the summer, it was close to ready to be included in ikiwiki. Then we lost contact with Taylor, and his site fell off the net. Subversion repo: Gone. Tarballs: Gone. The final tragic part of this story is that I had a local copy of all of Taylor's work. And when I moved ikiwiki over from subversion to git, I set up a wikiwyg branch, and put his work into it, and happily deleted my other copies of his work. But I made some kind of newbie mistake pushing that branch, and so his work never made it onto my git server, and at this point seems completly lost. (I still hope to hear from Taylor..) gallery Arpit Jain produced a working gallery plugin for ikiwiki. But that code never made it into ikiwiki. The main stumbling block seems to be that it used the lightbox javascript library, which, at least at the time was licensed under a non-free CC license. The code is present in a branch in ikiwiki's git repo, but at this point there is still no image gallery plugin in ikiwiki, though others are now working on other implementations. Conclusions I learned some important things from participating in the '07 SoC:

• There needs to be a well-defined place where students check in their code regularly, and where it is regularly reviewed. Either give them each accounts and branches in the project's main subversion repository, or better use distributed VCS. Ikiwiki switched to git as a direct result of the problems I saw with students publishing their code in the ad-hoc ways that resulted from not having that. And I keep backups of every ikiwiki git repo I am aware of, because any could fall off the net at any time.
• If your goal is to have a student develop something that is included in your project, that needs to be one of up-front success criteria for the SoC project. Otherwise, most of them will fail to get all the way there. Students need an incentive to deal with licensing issues, to respond to maintainers' feedback, and to keep following up until their code is merged. I suspect that requiring students leap over this sometimes very tall bar will scare a lot of them away though. You have to decide whether your goal is indeed to get working code in production, or if it's more to mentor a student for the summer.
• Just because one is very familiar with a code base and very productive in working on it, and has had lots of success getting others to contribute to it in the usual free software manner, does not mean that one will be a good mentor for a student working on that code base. In fact, it probably means you won't be, unless you have some prior experience teaching students. Which is why I've not participated in SoC since. :-/