New day, new luck... and next try... ;-)

Today I received two emails with even newer BIOS updates for my problem. The second, latest version 1.80p did actually fix the problem of not booting with 4 GB of RAM. I haven't tried the first, previous version 1.80k yet, so I can't tell if that worked as well.

Anyway, despite the fact that the machine now recognizes 4 GB dual-ranked memory, Linux uses 3.1 GB of it - at least when not using Xen... But first without Xen, standard Debian 2.6.26-1-686 kernel:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 18:29:31 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000140000000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 2048MB of RAM.
[ 0.000000] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[ 0.000000] WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mtrr/main.c:706 mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183()
[ 0.000000] Modules linked in:
[ 0.000000] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.26-1-686 #1
[ 0.000000] [] warn_on_slowpath+0x40/0x66
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_lock_irqsave+0x16/0x2f
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_unlock_irqrestore+0xd/0x10
[ 0.000000] [] release_console_sem+0x173/0x18c
[ 0.000000] [] vprintk+0x2d2/0x2de
[ 0.000000] [] generic_get_mtrr+0x2e/0x11e
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_bp_init+0x20c/0x214
[ 0.000000] [] setup_arch+0x254/0x6bb
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] start_kernel+0x62/0x2d7
[ 0.000000] =======================
[ 0.000000] ---[ end trace 4eaa2a86a8e2da22 ]---
[ 0.000000] update e820 for mtrr
[ 0.000000] modified physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000140000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] 2175MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 896MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 786224) 0 entries of 256 used

Now, when I try to boot Xen hypervisor & kernel, Linux recognizes 4 GB of memory:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-xen-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 22:52:47 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] Reserving virtual address space above 0xf5800000
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] Xen: 0000000000000000 - 00000000f5730000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] 3199MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 728MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 1005360) 0 entries of 256 used
[ 0.000000] Zone PFN ranges:
[ 0.000000] DMA 0 -> 4096
[ 0.000000] Normal 4096 -> 186368
[ 0.000000] HighMem 186368 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] Movable zone start PFN for each node
[ 0.000000] early_node_map[1] active PFN ranges
[ 0.000000] 0: 0 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 1005360
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 4064 pages, LIFO batch:0
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 1424 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 180848 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 6399 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 812593 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] Movable zone: 0 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMI 2.3 present.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 000F9BC0, 0014 (r0 ACPIAM)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT BFF30000, 0030 (r1 A M I OEMRSDT 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP BFF30200, 0081 (r2 A M I OEMFACP 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT BFF30360, 3417 (r1 P4V88 P4V88001 1 INTL 2002026)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS BFF40000, 0040
[ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC BFF30300, 0052 (r1 A M I OEMAPIC 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: OEMB BFF40040, 003F (r1 A M I OEMBIOS 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x02] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 2, version 3, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23
[ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override.
[ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information
[ 0.000000] Allocating PCI resources starting at c4000000 (gap: c0000000:3ffc0000)
[ 0.000000] PERCPU: Allocating 28552 bytes of per cpu data
[ 0.000000] NR_CPUS: 32, nr_cpu_ids: 2
[ 0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on. Total pages: 997505
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: root=/dev/md2 console=tty0
[ 0.000000] Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
[ 0.000000] Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
[ 0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[ 0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.000000] Xen reported: 2792.268 MHz processor.
[ 0.004000] Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
[ 0.004000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 0.004000] console [hvc-1] enabled
[ 0.004000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Software IO TLB enabled:
[ 0.004000] Aperture: 64 megabytes
[ 0.004000] Kernel range: c3bce000 - c7bce000
[ 0.004000] Address size: 27 bits
[ 0.004000] PCI-DMA: Using software bounce buffering for IO (SWIOTLB)
[ 0.004000] Memory: 3888208k/4021440k available (1843k kernel code, 124136k reserved, 742k data, 196k init, 3275968k highmem)

Sadly, the machine gets so slow that it needs >20 mins (1100 secs) to boot. Most likely something is broken with PAE on this machine so it get's awfully slow.
I'm curious what the Asrock support will say about this!? ;)

Side note: I'm really satisfied with the good response from Asrock Support. Asrock might not be the company with the best mainboards available, but its support seems very good to me: very responsive and care taking!

On Saturday (7 February), I should be attending both The Phone Co-op AGM and The Phone Co-op Members Workshop before it. I ll be asking a question at the AGM, if we can get the wording nailed down in time. Sadly, travel from Bristol to Chipping Norton by train is totally screwed by engineering works near Didcot and the usual poor connections from the cross-country line, so I ll be making a 2 hour car journey instead of a 5 hour train+bus combination. If you re travelling from the Bristol area and can car-share, please get in touch. Next Tuesday/Wednesday is Voice09 in Birmingham and I should be there if things come together in time. This is the Social Enterprise Coalition s annual conference. Conservative Party leader David Cameron MP will open as keynote speaker, with Liam Byrne MP, Minister for the Cabinet Office, opening on Wednesday. Would live-blogging or similar be interesting to people reading this? If you d like to meet up at either event, get in touch somehow - comments here, instant message, email, or phone. If you ve something you d like to send to either, also get in touch.

I'm supporting a class of high school students who are new to programming, and will be learning some python. Most of these students are comfortable with computers, but not hacker types, and few if any of them have written code before. I'm looking for an editor or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that won't be too scary for them, and will help them get used to the novel idea of writing code without simultaneously having to get used to the novel idea of an unfamiliar user interface. So i can't expect them to pick up my beloved emacs, for example. But on the other end of the spectrum, i'd hate for them to try to write python in an word processor (i've seen people do it!). Here's what i think i'm looking for:

• comfortable graphical interface -- these students have not used the command line before, and while they'll be introduced to the python shell, they should be able to write code and browse for files, etc. in the "normal" (sigh) way. This means, for instance, that tk-based interfaces are less good because they don't integrate with the common GTK-based UI.
• syntax highlighting -- the students will need to figure out what's a variable, what's a function name, what's an operator, what's a reserved word, etc. Visual indications like font-lock-mode from emacs would be really useful.
• whitespace management -- since python has syntactic whitespace, it would be great if there were convenient/intuitive ways for students to adjust the whitespace in their programs. Of course, it's hard to say what's going to be intuitive for other people. I like tab-cycling whitespace myself; are there other approaches i should be proposing?

Do you have suggestions for tools that work well for the above needs? Favorites? Are there features other than the "top three" i listed above that you think i should pay attention to? FWIW, they'll be working in a labful of machines running Ubuntu Hardy for the most part, but i'm willing to port and deploy programs (particularly ones that feel like a perfect fit) if they're not available in hardy.Tags: ide, python, recommendations, student

Theodore wonders about LUG activity - well, I have been very active over the years in the Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux User Group but the problem is that Debian (and more specifically Emdebian) is taking up the time that I used to put into the LUG. The LUG itself has remained very active, although geography means that meetings are actually difficult. The LUG continues to attract new members, existing members continue to contribute and learn new stuff themselves and a number of the long-standing members have joined free software organisations in their own right - including Debian. If there is going to be another DD in Devon or Cornwall besides myself, I'm pretty sure that the person will have been part of the DCGLUG before considering joining Debian.

I'm still webmaster for my local LUG, I get to some meetings although some do conflict with existing Emdebian meetings.

What do I get out of it? Local friendships and exposure to GNU/Linux issues outside Debian.

Debian can be a very insular world - we care about Debian, we talk about Debian, we get together as Debian but sometimes we lack comparative input. We don't really know how we compare with other operating systems and other distributions at a user level. Debian Developers, in particular, can easily lose touch with ordinary users of other systems. Debian, for me, is also a distant world geographically. I live a long way from other DD's in the UK who gravitate towards Cambridge, 300 miles away. It's just nice to have people within 10-50 miles, people I can contact about hardware issues and who have just the part I need because they kept it "just in case".

I still contribute on the LUG mailing list, although my contributions are generally related to licences, avoiding non-free rubbish and issues around embedded devices. I'm not as active as I'd like to be or as I have been in the past but I still want to be part of the LUG.

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

Have you seen the New American Passport? If you have, you know it is kinda creepy. First, the abundance of patriotic pictures (eagles, presidents, flags, you get the picture) is in fact so patriotic, it might burn a hole in your hand if you hold onto it for too long. Aside from the visual creepiness, well, it is also RFID enabled and depending on your take, this is creepy (or not). But whatever your view, here is a great example of how easy it is to crack, . RFID is, as Chris Paget puts it succinctly available to be queried by a suitable reader.

Emacs 23.0.90 was released yesterday, it's the first pretest for the upcoming 23.1 version. Debian packages for etch and lenny/sid are here; Ubuntu packages for hardy, intrepid and jaunty are here. If you find any bugs please use M-x report-emacs-bug (unless it's a packaging issue, in which case feel free to email me directly).

It took again one week and here comes new Gammu testing version. Again number of changes is quite impressive, to name the most important - new DBI backend for SMSD, which allows to easily support wide range of databases, SMSD now exports some information in shared memory segment, what allows monitoring of its state, python-gammu bindings now support some basic SMSD operations, libusb-1.0 based driver for Nokia cables (especially DKU-2) and last but not least, Gammu finally has fake phone driver, which can be used for testing and writing applications and performs all operations in selected directory on filesystem. Full list of changes:

• Fixed privileges dropping in SMSD.
• SMSD inject now properly uses PhoneID.
• Improve SMSD documentation.
• Translations improvements.
• Add ID for Nokia 7373.
• Do not try to use filesystem OBEX if IrMC access was forced.
• Fix possible crash in LMB decoder.
• Avoid string length overflow in Nokia phonebook encoder.
• Introduced backward compatibility of gammu.StateMachine.SetConfig.
• Experimental dku-2 userspace driver using libusb-1.0 (fbususb).
• python-gammu can now inject messages into SMSD (gammu.SMSD object).
• SMSD stores summary counts of sent/received messages in database.
• Added gammu-smsd-monitor program to monitor state of SMSD.
• python-gammu can now monitor SMSD state.
• Do not try to use OBEX 1.0 it's too old (bug #807).
• Better parse ATI replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Better parse CSQ replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Add small delays to SMS sending/saving (bug #794).
• SMSD monitor can now run for configured number of loops.
• Added DBI backend for SMSD, so we now support wide range of databases.
• SMSD does not delete SMS from phone when it's saving has failed.
• Added SQL structure for sqlite, which can be used through DBI.
• python-gammu can run and stop SMSD.
• Initial implementation of dummy phone driver for testing.
• Allow to configure path to config from command line.
• SMSD monitor allows output in CSV.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

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.

Keeping track with packaging software which is under heavy development can be time-consuming. I noticed this while packaging Conkeror, because there was quite a demand for up-to-date packages, especially from upstream themself. So recently on the IRC channel #conkeror the idea of automatically built Debian packages came up. After a few hours of experimenting and a few days of steadily optimizing, I can proudly present daily built snapshot packages of Conkeror for currently Lenny and Sid, ready to be included in your sources.list:

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main

The binary package conkeror-spawn-process-helper is currently only built for the i386 architecture, but other architectures may follow. The packages probably work also on any other Debian based distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) which includes XULRunner version 1.9. Surely they are not of the usual Debian quality, but they should do it for staying up-to-date with the Conkeror development just by using your favourite APT frontend. The script which generates those packages is also available in the Conkeror git repository at repo.or.cz. The APTable archive is generated with reprepro. Packages and the repository are signed with the passphrase-less GnuPG key 373B76B4 which is used only for the Conkeror nightly builds. (If anyone knows a better solution for automatic builds than a passphrase-less key, please tell me. :-) P.S.: I really like the new keybindings << , >> and G . :-)

This is a great little video/animation Steamboat Mickey, which references one or more events from each year, starting in 1928 and ends in 2008. The music, which accompanies the animation, is fantastic and is by Owen Chapman, an assistant professor of communication at Concordia and a great DJ/sound artist.

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 have been told that not enough information about the Plone user interface sprint at Informaat is getting out. That is not due to a non-disclosure agreement for attendees; all of us have just been too busy working and enjoying ourselves to get to such mundane things as writing reports or blog posts. This sprint is somewhat different than normal sprints: the goal is not to produce as much code as possible, but to lay a foundation for the user interface for future versions of Plone. This requires a lot of thought and prototyping to figure out the right concepts, both in the user interface itself and the backend code on top of which it is built. A lot of this work is done on top of the work done by the little known deco group. There are a few guiding ideas behind the work done at this sprint:

• separate all the knobs and toggles related to content editing and page manipulation out from the normal view.
• there are three different modi of interactiving with a page: view, edit, and construction (modifying layout, managing tiles). These require different types of user interface and should be handled separately.
• make the interface as simple as possible. If possible try to use a progressive complexity approach: keep things as simple as possible, and only expose more advanced options once users are ready to use them.
• always try to use simple semantic markup. There is very rarely a need to add extra elements of pollute the markup with layout or positioning-related information; that should all be done in CSS.

We divided the activities in five areas: content editing, control panels, page assembly, backend and tests. The first day was almost entirely spent on brainstorming, which is very rare for a Plone sprint. This was extremely useful, and provides us with a solid foundation for the rest of the sprint, and ongoing improvement of the Plone user interface.

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

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.)

So, on the one hand, I am not surprised about this news about a study which found that high fructose corn syrup, which is of questionable health value, is laced, with a significant amount with mercury. On the other hand, I am surprised that this is not splattered all over the front pages of all the major newspapers. This is serious stuff. Mercury is extremely poisonous and is known to cause all sort of health problems from immune system dysfunction to massive neurological damage. Might more of our foods be laced with heavy metals, aside from fish, HFCS. It is very likely. More on this, but later. update: Since the article I linked to did not mention the amount of mercury found, here is the original publication (and as a small aside, why newspapers don t link to these documents is beyond belief). Page 9 of the PDF is particularly telling because it reveals how it was difficult for researchers to obtain more samples so that they could enlarge the sample size .

People keep asking me about the beard thing... Here's my take on what happened and why. Just before I left for LCA 2009, my wife offered to send along one of the limited edition prints of her award-winning waterfall photograph. She knew from prior years that the LCA organizers often host an auction or raffle to raise money for some worthy charity at the conference banquet. Since the photo was taken at Milford Sound on the way to last year's LCA in Melbourne, there was a connection between the photo and LCA. We had no idea what this year's charity might be, nor did we anticipate that her photo would become the centerpiece of the evening's fund-raising activities. The charity selected this year was an organization that is trying to save the Tasmanian Devil from extinction. Professor Hamish McCallum, the chief scientist with the program, gave a talk after dinner and before the auction began. The native population is suffering from a fatal facial tumor disease that results in horrible lesions, and is likely to kill off all the Devils within a decade or three. My family and I all have a strong love of nature, and Karen and I had the pleasure of touring Tasmania after LCA 2003 in Perth, so this seemed like a great charity to raise money for with her photo. As often happens at LCA, the auction and related fund-raising activities got complicated. This year, the photo alone was bid up to $2500 (which was very cool!), before people started offering things for higher bids. For years, going maybe as far back as Perth, I've been cajoled about shaving my beard if the bidding hit some level, and have always said no. This year, someone offered $5000 if I would shave my beard, and again I said no. Much later, after more cajoling and many counter offers, when the bids and various matching offers had us approaching $20,000 in total donation to the charity, I relented and announced that if we hit a total of $25,000 going to the charity I would consent to a shave. The resulting frenzy, including the suggestion that if it went high enough Linus should do the shaving, and the formation of a bidding consortium that kept raising more money and bidding against itself, was completely unexpected! Others have tried to capture details of the insanity, but the bottom line is that by the end of the evening, the total had blown way past anything we could have imagined, and by the end of the conference the total going to the charity was on the order of $40,000! Why did I agree to let Linus shave my beard? To be honest, I'm not entirely certain. I only had one beer that evening, so I can't blame intoxication. The fact that it would yield a worthy charity something over 10 times what my wife's photo alone had drawn as a maximum bid seemed significant to me. In hindsight, I also think I was at least a little bit curious to see what my face looked like after having a beard since sometime around September of 1982! In any case, I made the offer, insane amounts of money were raised, and on the last day of the conference, over the lunch hour, Linus took trimmers in hand and removed my beard in front of an audience. The reactions have been completely overwhelming. A local TV station and a local newspaper in Hobart were both there and ran stories. The ripple of mentions in the blogosphere was and is just astounding. There's even a silly Shaving Bdale game created overnight by the "Mad Scientists" at Secret Lab! And from all over the globe, people I do and don't know have been sending emails and finding me on IRC to plead with me to grow my beard again! Right after the shave, my good friend Keith Packard said "Bdale, grow it back!". Before I left Hobart, my wife emailed saying she and the kids hoped I wasn't waiting until I got home to start. Joey Hess blogged a hairy tale about how I'd scarred the minds of young Debian developers. The leader of Debian-RS sent word by email that the group all hoped I would re-grow my beard. And on and on and on... I'm really not used to being the center of so much attention! Being suddenly without beard felt weird in lots of silly little ways. I was hyper-sensitive to drafts. The feel of cold beverages hitting my upper lip was downright strange. And I kept wanting to scratch what wasn't there! After making faces at myself in the mirror for a while, I decided I really wasn't happy, and do prefer being bearded. So I haven't shaved since Saturday morning in Hobart, and am pretty scruffy looking. My wife said today that I'm "already starting to look like Bdale again". At the current growth rate, I have high hopes of having at least some facial dignity back by the time I speak at FOSDEM. And no, I won't be shaving my beard off again any time soon...

Here s for the second installment of my review of this past year s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3). I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here ) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages. Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices Presentation There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+, If you don t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit. The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM. Student Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn t find time to dive in. Result This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff. Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code. Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages Presentation GNU R has become the preeminent platform for computing with data . The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation. R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages. The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R. Student Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects. Result This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It s working, we re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian. Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren t into Debian and it s not pretty. Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files Presentation FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great. The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing. The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal. UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal. Student Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects. Result This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it s dead, Jim. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian. PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time Presentation It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers. To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot. The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student. Student Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON. Result This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve Vorlon Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was the wrong solution to the problem . You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn t publicize his (enough). That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.