Given the recent brouhaha in Debian, and General Resolution regarding Lenny s Release policy as it relates to Firmware and Debian s Social Contract, which has led to the resignation of Manoj Srivastava from the position of Secretary for the Debian Project, I m reminded of the following passage from Gordon Dickson s Tactics of Mistakes (part of Dickson s Childe Cycle, in which he tells the story of the rise of the Dorsai):

No, said Cletus. I m trying to explain to you why I d never make an Exotic. In your calmness in the face of possible torture and the need to kill yourself, you were showing a particular form of ruthlessness. It was ruthlessness toward yourself but that s only the back side of the coin. You Exotics are essentially ruthless toward all men, because you re philosophers, and by and large, philosophers are ruthless people. Cletus! Mondar shook his head. Do you realize what you re saying? Of course, said Cletus, quietly. And you realize it as well as I do. The immediate teaching of philosophers may be gentle, but the theory behind their teaching is without compunction and that s why so much bloodshed and misery has always attended the paths of their followers, who claim to live by those teachings. More blood s been spilled by the militant adherents of prophets of change than by any other group of people down through the history of man.

The conflict between idealism and pragmatism is a very old one in the Free and Open Source Software Movement. At one end of the spectrum stands Richard Stallman, who has never compromised on issues regarding his vision of Software Freedom. Standing at various distances from this idealistic pole are various members of the Open Source Community. For example, in the mid-1990 s, I used to give presentations about Linux using Microsoft Powerpoint. There were those in the audience that would give me grief about using a non-free program such as MS Powerpoint, but my response was that I saw no difference between driving a car which had non-free firmware and using a non-free slide presentation program. I would prefer to use free office suite, but at the time, nothing approached the usability of Powerpoint, and while dual-booting into Windows was a pain, I could do a better job using Powerpoint than other tools, and I refused to handcap myself just to salve the sensibilities of those who felt very strongly about Free Software and who viewed the use of all non-Free Software as an ultimate evil that must be stamped out at all costs. It is the notion of Free Software as a philosophy, with no compromises, which has been the source of many of the disputes inside Debian. Consider, if you will, the first clause of the Debian Social Contract:

Debian will remain 100% free We provide the guidelines that we use to determine if a work is free in the document entitled The Debian Free Software Guidelines. We promise that the Debian system and all its components will be free according to these guidelines. We will support people who create or use both free and non-free works on Debian. We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component.

This clause has in it no room for compromise. Note the use of words such as 100% free and never make the system require the use of a non-free component (emphasis mine). In addition, the Debian Social Contract tends to be interpreted by Computer Programmers, who view such imperatives as constraints that must never be violated, under any circumstances. Unfortunately, the real world is rarely so cut-and-dried. Even the most basic injunctions, such as Thou shalt not kill have exceptions. Few people might agree with claims made by the U.S. Republican Party that the war in Iraq qualified as a Just War as defined by Thomas Aquinas, but rather more people might agree that the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler would be considered justifiable. And most people would probably agree most of the actions undertaken by the Allied Soldiers on World War II battlefields that involved killing other soldiers would be considered a valid exception to the moral (and for those in the Judeo-Christian tradition, biblical) injunction, Thou shalt not kill . As another example, consider the novel and musical Les Mis rables, by Victor Hugo. One of the key themes of this story is whether or not Thou shalt not steal is an absolute or not. Ultimately, the police inspector Javert, who lived his whole life asserting that law (untempered by mercy, or any other human considerations) was more important than all else, drowns himself in the Seine when he realizes that his life s fundamental organizing principle was at odds with what was ultimately the Right Thing To Do. So if even the sixth and eighth commandments admit to exceptions, why is it that some Debian developers approach the first clause of the Debian Social Contract with a take-no-prisoners, no-exceptions policy? Especially given the fourth clause of the Debian Social contract:

Our priorities are our users and free software We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system.

This clause does not have the same sort of absolutist words as the first clause, so many Debian Developers have held that the needs of the users is defined by 100% free software . Others have not agreed with this interpretation but regardless of how needs of the users should be interpreted, the fact of the matter is, injuctions such as Thou shalt not kill are just as absolute and yet in the real world, we recognize that there are exceptions to such absolutes, apparently unyielding claims on our behavior. I personally believe that 100% free software is a wonderful aspirational goal, but in particular with regards to standards documents and firmware, there are other considerations that should be taken into account. People of good will may disagree about what those exceptions should be, but I think one thing that we should consider as even higher priority and with a greater claim on how we behave is the needs of our users and fellow developers as people. For those who claim Christianity as their religious tradition, Jesus once stated,

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Even for those who do not claim Christianity as their religious tradition, most moral and ethical frameworks have some variant on the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you . I would consider, for example, that the Golden Rule is at least a high priority claim on my behavior as the notion of free speech, and in many cases, it would be a higher priority claim. The recent controversy surrounding Josselin Mouette was started precisely because Joss has taken a something which is a good thing, namely Free Speech, and relegated it to a principle more important than all else, and claiming that any restraint on such a notion was equivalent to censorship. I think the same thing is true for free software, although it is a subtler trap. Philosophical claims than 100% free software as most important consideration is dangerously close to treating Free Software as the Object of Ultimate Concern or in religious terms, idolotry. For those who are religious, it s clear why this is a bad thing; for those who aren t if you are unwilling to worship a supernatural being, you may want to very carefully consider whether you are willing to take a philosophical construct and raise it to a position of commanding your highest allegiance to all else, including how you treat other people. Ultimately, I consider people to be more important than computers, hardware or software. So over time, while I may have had some disagreements with how Mark Shuttleworth has run Canonical Software and Ubuntu (but hey, he s the multimillionaire, and I m not), I have to give him props for Ubuntu s Code of Conduct. If Debian Developer took the some kind of Code of Conduct at least as seriously as the Social Contract, I think interactions between Debian Developers would be far more efficient, and in the end the project would be far more successful. This may, however, require lessening the importance of philosophical constructs such as Free Speech and Free Software, and perhaps becoming more pragmatic and more considerate towards one another.

After having orphaned (and QA uploaded) the last group of WM dockapps I was maintaining, time has come to remove even that old friend of mine.

How many adventures we've passed together? Will we ever meet again?

But the past is past, so let's move forward, with no regrets.

1Password is a very powerful application for OSX to keep safe your passwords and identities. It works as a standalone application and as a series of plugins for several Internet browsers. It is capable of, among other things, autofill registration forms and save you a lot of time filling in the same personal information again and again. To autofill a login form, just click the 1P browser menu bar icon, choose a previously recorded identity and voila, 1Password logins in automagically with no further interaction. All the harvested information is stored in a different keychain unlocked by a master key placed in the login keychain (See Keychain access.app for more information). Macheist, in collaboration with Agile Web Solutions, is offering free licenses as a Christmas present here. You only have to create and account and click in the links below the tree to get your free license.

A few years ago, I had some ideas about a real-world trading game. In short, a combination of the game play of Settlers of Catan , the cute pseudo-medieval world of The Settlers (the computer game), which you can play in your every day live along, without having to sit in front of the computer for a long time. I then started some code, lost motivation and let it sit there for a while.Recently, I re-developed interest in the idea and started from scratch, using Haskell and HAppS. To avoid losing interest again, I m now putting the code online and set up the server. I invite everyone to play around with it, maybe have a look at the code, send me patches or comments. As you can see, the web user interface is plain ugly HTML and could need some love. Some CSS is definitely needed, some AJAX would be nice. Also, the resource tree is very small at the moment there are a lot of things to work on, even if you don t want to touch Haskell!You can register at http://mumer.net/. You will be either given a forest (a source for wood) or a source of stone. You can reap your source, and trade on the Free Market , which is where you can always trade online, at bad prices. The idea is that you find real trade partners, to get better prices.For now, trading without physical contact is possible. You can create so-called issue ids, which represent stips of paper. You can then load resources on them, and give the paper (i.e. the number) to other players, who can then redeem them. Eventually, it is planned that these pieces of paper are provided centrally and (sufficiently) unforgeable, so that it is clear who owns a resource.You can also bid on certain stuff, such as a sawmil, which allows you to turn wood into boards. It will regularily be re-leased to the highest bidder.You can get the code (in a darcs repository) from http://darcs.nomeata.de/mumer2 and also browse the code.If you happen to be at the CCC right now and would like to talk about it, please do so!

For various reasons (which in the end boil down to lack of manpower), we are quite late in the process of packaging GNOME 2.24. (This is almost finished now, I ll keep you informed.) Which is why I may sound coming a bit late on noticing this one, but I was really speechless. The problem: session management has flaws Currently, a session manager uses XSMP (the X Session Management Protocol) to talk to applications. What it means is that for applications supporting this protocol, it is able to do more than simply starting and killing them: it will also remember their state, and offer them a way to shut down gracefully. However, XSMP is really a shitty protocol I won t explain why here, you will find tons of better explanations on the intarweb. The gnome-session developers, being quite aware of this issue, did what anyone interested enough would have done: they designed a new protocol, based on D-Bus, and implemented it. The new protocol is not considered stable yet, but it is simple, efficient and above all, reliable that s a giant leap forward. For this reason, I was very excited to see what gnome-session 2.24 would look like, since it brings major cleanups in the code. The solution: remove session management! When I first started it, it did not restore my saved session. I simply supposed that the format of the saved session had changed, and that writing a conversion tool would be in order. Wrong. Let s bring the session preferences: The UI of this dialog hasn t changed since 2.22. However, I do not resist the urge to show you the code behind the Remember Currently Running Applications button:

static void
on_save_session_clicked (GtkWidget           *widget,
                         GsmPropertiesDialog *dialog)
 
        g_debug ("Session saving is not implemented yet!");
 

As for the check box on top of it, it sets a GConf value that is never read anywhere. If you know the long term plans for GNOME, it makes sense: when gnome-shell replaces the panel and the window manager, it will also be responsible for starting the visible applications, while gnome-session will deal with what s happening behind the scenes. But gnome-shell is still far from ready, and you need something in the meantime for the basic requirements of a session manager! Backwards compawhat? The surprises don t stop here. I also noticed that logout was much faster instantaneous instead of the usual 2-3 seconds. The reason why logging out is this long currently is not because it takes long to kill applications; it s because the session manager kindly requests applications supporting XSMP to shut down before killing them. If a document isn t saved, an application will be able to prevent the logout process. Guess what? Now gnome-session completely ignores XSMP applications. Since it doesn t need them to register for saving the session, it also saves the time to ask them to close cleanly. The result is that you will see a lot of such dialogs: It s very nice to replace a flawed protocol ; and really, the new protocol goes in the correct direction. But let s be realistic, it s impossible to immediately port hundreds of applications to a new protocol without having a transition time during which both protocols are supported. You also need to consider your protocol as stable before asking other developers to port their applications. And to get it accepted, you need to standardize it; freedesktop.org would have been the correct body. (Currently, the protocol lies in the org.gnome namespace, not org.freedesktop.) Release management at its best Wait aren t there some distributions out there which already released stable versions with GNOME 2.24? The answer is yes. At least Ubuntu Intrepid and Fedora Core 10 ship with a session manager that:

• is unable to restore applications;
• kills applications without letting you save your work.

It s good to see such improvements on the session manager coming, and I m really thankful to the gnome-session developers to work on it. What I wonder is:

• How could it slip into a stable GNOME release?
• How could two major distributions let it slip into a so-called stable release?

It definitely looks like we re not the only ones who could improve our release management processes. So what? This is a very good example of a lack of big picture thinking. On one side, there is a brilliant design and its good implementation. On the other side, two major regressions from the user s point of view the kind of regressions that make people fly away. If there s one thing that I ve learned from working in IT, it s that you must often keep your brilliant designs as long-term goals. In the short term, you will run a bastardized version of your brilliant design that will make you cry; but it will work. When you need to talk to shitty applications or with shitty protocols, you need to write shitty code.

This is a continuation from part 1 but can be enjoyed on its own too, like a good red wine. It s a bit early for me for red wine, though.

May

• BBC TV: Click: Free=beer and facebook-flaming - my letter was never broadcast, as far as I know
• Fuel Price Bleating and Biking - one of the last non-work articles to appear before I split them off into their own page last summer.
• Told You So: Exhibitions and Spammer Registrars and Quick Question: opticaljungle.com = publicdomainregistry.com? - these were about similar topics and I may have new developments to report early in 2009.

June

• BBC website, TV and Technology - some background comments on the BBC as they try to figure out what to do with new media. Auntie is a bit clueless about new things.
• 7 Reasons Why Firefox 3 Download Day Sucks - the big news for web development was a new major version of the almost-free-software web browser. It s a big improvement on version 2, but still had some brown paper bag mistakes and the download day marketing idea put clueless news media (see previous item) before users. Continued in FF3 day 3: first impressions, FF3 day 6: security flaw and banks and FF3 day 10: security flaw 2, more banks, looking for a new browser.

July

• Standing for Election to SPI Board Again - my most popular page ever, by number of page views anyway. It was spammed to hell so often that comments are now switched off. I suspect the US Election had more to do the popularity of this article than my unsuccessful candidature for the Software in the Public Interest board.
• Batting Against Three Strikes through the Back Door - I m a member and ambassador for ThePhoneCoop and TTLLP are agents/resellers for them, so this misguided EU law-making was worth some of my time. Writing about it here got me a response from Neil Parish MEP that I don t think I would have got otherwise. It s a terrible shame he never sent a reply from Malcolm Harbour.
• LugRadio Live Event Review - a review of one of the most populist UK free software events by one of their most vociferous critics (back before they went all Creative Commons warm and fuzzy) was always going to be popular, which is partly why I wrote it, but not the whole reason: I m delighted that the event should return in the future. It s not perfect, but it s pretty damn fantastic. A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people.
• Good News on the Koha 3.0.0-final Approach - another surprisingly popular marginal comment. I ve currently broken/desynched/something my local git tree. I m going to repair it by New Year and then start writing up more Koha explorations and sending patches upstream.

August

• SPI Meeting Announcement and Why People Don t Join SPI - I think this summary is still relevant today and I hope that I can help improve things in 2009.
• Is Yahoo Now Even Worse On Spam? All of the big unpaid webmails have problems, but Yahoo (and so BT Internet) are worse than most.

More to follow in a couple of days

A reel from Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations contains the following dialogue between the 22-year-old pianist and the recording engineer after a take of the 30th variation, a quodlibet:

By the way, I have a quodlibet of my own which came to me in the bathtub the other night. One of these days I will be asked to perform on the fourth of July, I'm sure, and when I do I figured out that by leaving out the repeats in the Star Spangled Banner and starting your entry on the thirteenth bar of God Save The King and then playing God Save the King over again and altering the harmony in the second half of The King to modulate to the supertonic region, it has the most marvelous effect. Listen to this.. (202KiB Ogg Vorbis).

Over the next few days, I m looking at the most popular articles from this site and my previous news website during 2008. I ll be doing it in three parts. Popularity is measured by page views from local access logs, but some articles were actually more popular in the months after they were first posted, so it s not completely accurate, but let s be forgiving over the holidays, OK?

January

I must have been writing rubbish because nothing got that popular at the start of the year, but some of my older pages continued to be popular throughout 2008:-

• Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software (started in 2007) - I really should move that list to another address because I think it s going to be around for a while.
• alt.satellite.tv.europe Frequently Asked Questions (first posted in 2006) - again, could do with a better home.
• Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images - until people recognise the limitations of CAPTCHA , this is probably going to be a popular page.

February

• SPI Meeting Wed 27 Feb 1900Z irc.oftc.net/#spi - I think this started my regular meeting announcements, which has been a surprisingly popular series and has expanded into a whole category of SPI articles here.
• The Myth Of Deregulation - this was meant to be a marginal rant. Its popularity (and the subsequent comments - some of which were unpublishable or their authors requested removal) surprised me and so I started writing more about social enterprise, cooperatives-sw member businesses and how they interact with GNU/Linux software and web development.

March

• Annoying Judge Resurrects Software Patents in the UK - notable only for pointing out that Symbian is not a UK company. It was probably news to some software developers, which is probably why it made my popular articles list.
• Debian Project Leader IRC Debate or it might have been Random recent threads from planet debian - for the first part of the year, I m looking at what page spiked on which day, but I posted twice a few days apart, so I can t tell which article on the page was popular.

April

• UK mobile micropublishing choices? - for the trip that motivated that article, I used twitter, but I m actually updating identi.ca over XMPP from my mobile now.
• Better Free Software Organisations? - I ve read the Yunus book mentioned in the comments on the Advogato repost of this article and I ve a review which will appear on this site later. It includes a bit of a flaming of the simplistic and IMO factually-incorrect dismissal of cooperative businesses, so I wonder if it will get a few responses from Yunus-fans.
• Explaining web site improvements: what s important to you? It seems that April was a good time for asking questions: this is a third popular question-based article. The website discussed has now been approved and ordered from TTLLP, but the work is not yet scheduled.

That s the first few months of 2008 done. I ll post the next few months in a couple of days. Hope you re enjoying the holidays if you re having them. I m sure I am

The title of this post sucks, so that's up to you help me come with an alternative. It's also a bit sarcastic to remember that Debian is around for ages, Internet was smaller and poor, web wasn't a hit on the streets. Debian GNU/Linux is successful being an universal operating system. The question is: What's next? Lenny is the short term answer, but we can do more...

Do we really need to stop and discuss everything? Let's discuss everything yeah, but always do the fun work in parallel. Let's force ourselves to much higher standards.

Please remember that in many cases it isn't that easy to contribute with more than ideas when an alternative implementation requires additional privileges. Higher standards doesn't mean lock everything even more, no. It involves release the keys and make sure we can revert any changes that are clearly bad.

Flame a new installer idea (remember that? nobody does...) or initial code is easy. Give it some room and see what happens later... Ask yourself now: Do I have any privileges in Debian that may be forbidding people to help this project? Well, if you answered yes please post in your blog, come out on IRC and talk to others. Make sure you act as an useful bridge not as a blocker. If you don't have enough time, share your privilege with a secondary (hint: Maintain a package is a privilege).

I'm on vacation from my regular job and committed to help Debian full-time on the following tasks, if folks from the respective projects are interested, drop me a comment. Those who disagree, please keep working on whatever you are. It will be much more productive to us. There we go:

RC bugs - Do downgrades/removals from packages with less XXX users (as in popcon) now. Higher standards! I can't do that by myself since I have no access, if you are a release team member and is happy with that, we define the number and I prepare the list based on BTS.

Site - I would like to help the team working on the web site to split it in two. "current" and "legacy". current would be a very small one with content related to a few topics such as: Lenny, download, documentation, how to contribute and more. It would have a new UI (multiple languages yes), use XHTML or whatever the team feels ok. The key detail is that current would be www.debian.org on the day we release Lenny and after. current would have a link (or multiple links) to legacy website. People are free to cross-post current content to legacy website as well, but the best would be move from legacy to current.

I have some more ideas, but let's focus on a few things so I can deliver. release team and www, it's your turn now.

It looks like I messed up few things in yesterday Gammu release so here is hot fix version. Changelog is quite small and fixes all regressions found so far:

• Fix model name parsing.
• Fix reading of IrMC phonebook.
• Fix visibility of HAVESTRUCTTMTMZONE in header files.
• Increase some timeouts in OBEX driver.
• Fix compilation on s390.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Binary packages will be available soon on all usual places (Debian Unstable, OpenSuse build service, Ubuntu PPA repository).

Ciar n O'Riodan blogs about how to blog, and his post is a good read. Most of it is solid advice, and I find there's little I disagree with; if you want to get a blog that's well-read by many people, then his advice is probably sound. So why am I posting this in my 'retorts' category? Because I feel that blogging isn't something that should be taken too seriously. A blog is an outlet, a place to get your thoughts out; it is a bit of a combination between a column and the readers' letters section in a newspaper. The writing style of a blog should reflect that; when I write a blog post, I don't care about what the truth is, I only care about my opinion. If I want to write the truth, I'll write a wikipedia article. If I want to read about the truth, I'll go and kill myself because I'm not naive enough to think something like "the truth" exists in this life. And if I want to read a magazine-style article, how about I'll go buy a magazine instead of reading a blog post? A blog post doesn't require references (beyond, perhaps, what you're replying to); a blog is a reference, one to the personal opinion of the author. If you think something is great, then as far as your blog is concerned, that something may be the best thing since sliced bread. If you think something is ugly, crap, and should be forgotten about, then on your blog it is. In more than one sense, blogs are like opinions: everybody has one. That doesn't mean I disagree with most of what Ciar n wrote; on the contrary. Points 1 through 3, and 6 through 10, will help you develop a good writing style. I couldn't agree more on point 11, that you have to push for publication yourself; and it's certainly true that being aggregated is a good way to put your thoughts in context, and to expose yourself to a larger readership. But I vehemently disagree with his point 4:

It can take time. A good article-style blog entry can take six hours to write!

Not that I think writing a blog post should take no time at all this particular one has been almost an hour in the making, now but because I feel that, simply, articles, with all their references, scientific or other background, and whatnot, simply do not belong on a blog. A bunch of articles with an RSS feed is not a blog, plain and simple. So while I do agree that it can take time, I do think you're doing fundamentally wrong if your blog post takes more than, say, an hour and a half, to be written. So, in the interest of being constructive, here are my own suggestions:

1. Don't think too much, just write. It may sound stupid, but the most important part about blogging is actually doing it, and not wondering about how or why.
2. Do reread if possible. While blog posts are usually read in a few minutes, they take much longer to write; it's easy to lose track of your line of thinking during that process, in which case you may end up with a completely incoherent post. That certainly is to be avoided.
3. Ciar n's argument that if it's worth doing, it's worth blogging about certainly holds merit, but I'd go one step further: if it's worth thinking about, it's also worth blogging about. After all, a blog is mostly a braindump, so why not?
   That's not to say every thought can be turned into a coherent blog post, and I have a bunch of half-finished unpublished blog posts on my local hard disk which I may revisit at some undefined point in the future; but the principle is there.
4. And last, but not least: don't care about what other people are doing. Your blog is your own, not someone else's; if you get an email that your content sucks, ignore it. If you get an email that you should be writing about something else instead, ignore it. You're not getting paid for your blog, are you?

today: illegal graphology ; tomorrow: illegal facebook query Join two dots and obtain a line. The first dot. A few days ago, on the blog of an italian journalist I've found a reference to an old article about facebook originally from the guardian (even equipped with an italian translation, just in case ...). The article is quite long, but I found it a worthy read. (Well, at least it is one assuming you can skip over the initial rhetoric about "social networking = autistic geeks". Similar arguments were as annoying as untrue already 10 years ago about the Internet, and even more so 20 years ago about role playing games.) In the article you can find interesting facts about who are the creators of facebook and even more interesting ones about who has been more than happy to finance it more recently. All is topped with a fun re-reading of facebook's "privacy policy". The second dot. This late afternoon, speaking with Ralf in the lab, I got introduced to the practice of some companies to ask for an hand-written curriculum vitae as a regular practice to be considered as a candidate. Why so? Well, because they can then ask a graphologist to draw a psychological profile and take a more "informed decision" about whether to hire you or not (assuming you believe in graphology, of course). Sure, it's illegal. But still it seems to be common practice in Japan and a not yet completely vanished practice in specific employment fields in France. The line. Guess what? Tomorrow it will become easier (and already is for all the places where the facebook penetration is sky-rocketing): instead of paying a graphologist for a (possibly inaccurate) profile, you can just pay the faceboook guys to get a record of a lot of your private life wanderings, pictures, past relationships, ... Sure, it will be illegal. But still ..., and it will be way more efficient! I'm every passing day more and more proud of having closed my facebook account more than 1 year ago (and trust me: closing a facebook account ain't easy).

---

Now, anyone of you can drop by on my homepage, spot a shiny linkedin logo, and call me a cheap talker. I'd concur that in a sense every social networking has bad privacy implications, but that's trivial, we all know that. Still, I think linkedin is somehow better. Why? Because it is specifically geared toward professional information. While giving information to them, I'm usually thinking about my professional "figure" and I've high barriers that are likely to inhibit me to leak personal information, or at least make me think about that. On the contrary, with facebook you have low barriers and you are encouraged to provide personal information, and that's exactly the point of the facebook owners. (And here I'm even assuming you do have some barriers while providing information to facebook, which I'm convinced is not the case for most of its users.) I see a parallel with the early days of blogs, where the euphoria of blogging made a lot of people mistaking their public blog with their personal diary; stuff which will strike back. While experienced bloggers develop defenses against the initial foolish attitude, people do not develop similar defenses on facebook, because that defenses will defeat the purpose of the network.

Currently, varnishlog does not support very advanced filtering. If you run it with -o, you can also do a regular expression match on tag

• expression. An example would be varnishlog -o TxStatus 404 to only show log records where the transmitted status is 404 (not found).

While in Brazil, I needed something a bit more expressive. I needed something that would tell me if I had vcl_recv call pass and the URL ended in .jpg.

varnishlog -o -c   perl -ne 'BEGIN   $/ = "";  print if
(/RxURL.*jpg$/m and /VCL_call.*recv pass/);'

fixed this for me.

So I replaced my Latitude D410 with a shiny new Latitude E4300 (Intel Core 2 Duo SP9400 2.4 Ghz with 4 Gb RAM). Here are some notes about this laptop that might be interesting for others. SSD disk I now use an SSD drive for my main disk (Dell Ultra Performance SSD, it s the second generation of Samsung SSD) and I m satisfied with that choice, I can boot (an unmodified Debian desktop install) from the SSD in less than 30 seconds while the same system booting from a traditional hard-disk takes more than 45 seconds. X server The Intel GM45 graphic card is not auto-recognized by Xorg 7.3 (or rather by xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.3.2 which is in lenny) so you end up with the vesa driver by default. It s possible to force the usage of the intel driver by adding a Driver intel line in the device section of xorg.conf but I have opted to use Xorg 7.4 (available in experimental). With this version, I can successfully use the DVI output in the associated dock and I have working suspend/resume. It does create some interesting problems however since that version of the xserver relies on HAL to detect the keyboard layout and doesn t use the Keyboard section of xorg.conf. You have to create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-keymap.fdi by using /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-keymap.fdi as template and reload HAL then restart X. Wifi support The Intel 5100 Wifi chipset requires Linux 2.6.27 at least for the new iwlagn driver. This driver also needs a new firmware (the iwlwifi-5000 one) that is not yet integrated in the non-free package firmware-iwlwifi (see #497717). Sound support It works ok with alsa and the version integrated in linux 2.6.27 but it still has some rough edges when used in combination with the dock. Using the output jack connector on the dock doesn t stop the output in the integrated loudspeakers and the volume on that connector is so low that you could think that it doesn t work at all if you don t pay attention. Using the microphone works fine. For reference, if you play in the mixer, Front mic means the microphone connected on the dock while Mic means the one connected on the laptop. Each Analog loopback X option goes pairwise with the corresponding Input source X setting. In order for the recording to work, I have to set Digital Input Source to Analog Input , Digital must be activated and Input source 1 defines the default input used for the recording. Bluetooth support Contrary to the previous laptop, Dell offered no choice on the bluetooth chipset, they only propose the Dell 365 Bluetooth Card so I took it but it doesn t seem to work out of the box. In fact I can t even see it with lspci or lsusb so I wonder if they did something wrong during the assembly. Googling on the topic didn t gave me any good result, let me a comment if you know how to get this working. Update: so apparently the bluetooth component is there (ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp.), it just appears as an USB hub so it s somewhat difficult to guess that it s effectively a bluetooth card. Freezes, in particular with an amd64 installation I first installed the system in 64 bits mode (amd64 architecture) but I had very regular freezes of the system (I couldn t finish a single kernel compilation for example). Since I switched to an i386 installation, the system is more stable but I still get an occasional freeze every other day. It might be that a more recent kernel fixes this or maybe it will be fixed with a future Dell Bios update we ll see, but it s my biggest complaint with this laptop so far. Links Lucas Nussbaum bought the same laptop, you might want to read his remarks as well. More details Load the full article only if you want to see the lspci and lsusb output on this laptop.


rhertzog@rivendell:~$ lspci -nnk
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
Kernel modules: intel-agp
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: e1000e
Kernel modules: e1000e
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
Kernel modules: ehci-hcd
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 [8086:2946] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
Kernel modules: shpchp
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
Kernel modules: uhci-hcd
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
Kernel modules: ehci-hcd
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller [0104]: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller [8086:282a] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: ahci
Kernel modules: ahci
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller [8086:2930] (rev 03)
Kernel driver in use: i801_smbus
Kernel modules: i2c-i801
02:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 05)
Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci
Kernel modules: firewire-ohci
02:01.1 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 22)
02:01.2 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev 12)
0c:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
Kernel modules: iwlagn
$ lsusb
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 019: ID 046d:c03d Logitech, Inc. M-BT69a Pilot Optical Mouse
Bus 004 Device 018: ID 0424:2228 Standard Microsystems Corp. 9-in-2 Card Reader
Bus 004 Device 017: ID 0424:2602 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 004 Device 016: ID 0424:2502 Standard Microsystems Corp.
Bus 004 Device 007: ID 045e:00dd Microsoft Corp.
Bus 004 Device 006: ID 0c45:63fe Microdia
Bus 004 Device 004: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 413c:2513 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 413c:8162 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 413c:8161 Dell Computer Corp.
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:5800 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
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That is the sledgehammer argument people bring up when others dare to criticize the current release process. I think this question is nonsense. While the bug-fix rate was more or less the same since the last two releases, it looks like in this release we simply started the freeze with much more open RC-bugs than before (~3 times more RC-bugs than with Etch). So it was foreseeable that the freeze would take longer this time. We can t solve the problem by trying to fix bugs faster, we ve tried it several times with mediocre success. That doesn t mean we shouldn t keep up fixing bugs, but we should probably accept that a certain number of people can only fix a certain number of bugs in a given time. In our case roughly 30 RC-bugs per month. So what s the point of asking how many RC-bugs one has fixed? Does that mean only those are allowed to make suggestions, who fixed an RC bug? That pressure doesn t help anyone. I believe unstable being frozen for several months is a very important problem which can have drastic consequences regarding the number of our users, and we will not solve it by suggesting to fix our bugs faster.

I use exetel for a number of services in Sydney. I have always found them to be the cheapest, even if their ability to support their service is sub-optimal. An example is right now, they are currently totally offline.

a2@eve:~$ dig +trace exetel.com.au
; <<>> DiG 9.5.0-P2 <<>> +trace exetel.com.au
;; global options:  printcmd
.           338458  IN  NS  G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  H.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  I.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  J.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  K.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  M.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  B.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  C.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  D.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  E.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
.           338458  IN  NS  F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET.
;; Received 228 bytes from 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1) in 58 ms
au.         172800  IN  NS  ADNS2.BERKELEY.EDU.
au.         172800  IN  NS  AUDNS.OPTUS.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  NS1.AUDNS.NET.au.
au.         172800  IN  NS  NS2.AUDNS.NET.au.
au.         172800  IN  NS  DNS1.TELSTRA.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  SEC1.APNIC.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  SEC3.APNIC.NET.
au.         172800  IN  NS  ADNS1.BERKELEY.EDU.
;; Received 413 bytes from 2001:503:ba3e::2:30#53(A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET) in 620 ms
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns1.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns2.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns3.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns3.melbourneit.com.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns4.ausregistry.net.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  dns1.telstra.net.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  au2ld.CSIRO.au.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  audns.optus.net.
com.au.         259200  IN  NS  ns1.audns.net.au.
;; Received 354 bytes from 2001:dc0:2001:a:4608::59#53(SEC1.APNIC.NET) in 1302 ms
exetel.com.au.      3600    IN  NS  ns2.exetel.com.au.
exetel.com.au.      3600    IN  NS  ns1.exetel.com.au.
;; Received 99 bytes from 128.242.113.189#53(ns3.ausregistry.net.au) in 193 ms
dig: couldn't get address for 'ns2.exetel.com.au': not found

This is something I reported (ticket #853640) to them around Oct 2008 (when they last had a failure), that the auDA has no in-balliwick glue for their DNS. I was told by their support supervisor, Dylan Friedewald, via email:

The DNS for helpdesk.exetel.com.au is operational and valid, I do not see the point in discussing that further.

It is interesting to note that Steve Waddington has blogged many times about customers being unable to identify issues, but it is even more interesting that when a customer does it is explicitly denied as being a problem and then ignored. Apart from no in-ballwick DNS glue, their nameservers are also open recursive ones. Great if you would like to perform a DoS attack against some unsuspecting person. I have raised other issues with them that warrant further investigation and corrective action, lest they affect all their customers. But I no longer have the time to continually ping them about things.

Well, following some other posts on Planet debian, I decided to also publish my vote on the GR regarding Firmware blobs in Debian. Here is my vote:
V: 7112113
In other words, I rank the first option as low as possible (7, below further discussion), ranked all options I think make sense above further discussion (which is at rank 3) and put all other options (except for the one empowering the release team to decide the issue) at the same, highest rank. The option empowering is ranked at the second level. My priority really is to get Lenny released. While I think we should do as much as we can removing non-free stuff from Debian, I really don t think it is sensible to delay Lenny because of this. Lenny has far less non-free bits in it than Etch, and I m also not really sure wether I really want to consider firmware (which doesn t run on the CPU Debian is for) as software in the sense of the DFSG. The reasoning here is that I don t see any difference between a hardware manufacturer A who embeds a (non-free) firmware in the hardware (for example in the sense of storing it in a flashable memory) and a hardware manufacturer B who allows us to distribute the firmware blob (and avoids storing it in the hardware). In my opinion, both are equally (non-)free. And following this, I don t see why we should support hardware created by A natively while not directly supporting hardware made by B. One could of course argue that we are providing more of a service for B (as we are distributing the firmware for them, while they save some money otherwise spent for the flash memory), but I would like to remind everyone that our foundation documents also include the following: Our priorities are our users and free software This puts free software and our users at the same level. So to cater for one, we might have to make sacrifices on the other priority. In my opinion, the best compromise here is to not consider firmware blobs as software in the sense of the DFSG, but alternatively, I would accept saying we want to remove all such firmware from Debian, but not to delay Lenny because of this process. Additionally, we should make it easy for users to add all effected drivers/firmwares before/during installation of a system (or even include them on our installation media as some proposed, with a short question to the user wether he wants those firmware blobs to be installed). Apart from my opinion on the subject itself, I must also mention my concerns about how this vote was written in a very manipulative way. Additionally, those wanting to get Lenny released were proposing too many different options. This is generally a bad idea.

Once again Debian is close to release. And once again we're trying to find ways to avoid doing so. Using a technique we've employed before; firmware.
Social Contract #4 states that "Our priorities are our users and free software". The hard liners believe that it's in our users' best interests that we ensure Debian is 100% Free, whether that be regarding software, documentation or firmware. In the long run I think they're right. Access to firmware source (assuming that there's also access to
suitable tools for building it and producing an image the hardware will accept, which is a fairly big assumption) enables us to continue supporting and improving hardware support long after a manufacturer has discontinued a device. It enables us to understand the behaviour of a new device better (allowing better support which makes it a more attractive purchase). It potentially lets us appropriate a device for new and exciting purposes the manufacturer never imagined (which may again increase the sales of the device). Access to firmware source is a good thing in the long term, for the consumer, the driver author and the manufacturer.
In the short term we I think we need to be pragmatic. We can say that we won't release until all non-free firmware is purged, but who knows how long that will take, and once we've done so how much hardware will we actually be able to support out of the box? What benefit is it to our users if we ship them a distribution that doesn't support their hardware and is already out of date because we spent so long removing that support? Wouldn't we be better to say "We're aware of some firmware issues. We're going to keep working on spliting such blobs out to their own easily installable packages that live outside main. We promise to continue improving the situation for each release (as we have already done since etch), but in the interests of our users we will not hold up a release at this stage of the process." Obviously plenty of people disagree with that, but I don't believe that pragmatism is against the Social Contract and I'd like to think that even our users who are fervently against firmware blobs would accept that there's a tradeoff to be had against release dates.
Anyway. I doubt I've changed anyones mind with the above, so I'm going to go and destack the dishwasher and reply to the latest mail from my NM.