As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files):

• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.1 and Debian release 1.9.0.1-1: 85 files changed, 1163 insertions(+), 644 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.16 and Debian release 1.9.0.16-1: 86 files changed, 1177 insertions(+), 634 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and Debian release 1.9.1-1: 70 files changed, 770 insertions(+), 363 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.6 and Debian release 1.9.1.6-1: 76 files changed, 796 insertions(+), 380 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.5 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 165 files changed, 3094 insertions(+), 1387 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 1263 files changed, 64322 insertions(+), 67376 deletions(-) (though more than half of that relates to upstream bump of sqlite3 and the vorbis stack)

A few observations on the above data:

• There are less changes between upstream and Debian than between two consecutive upstream versions.
• Debian changes only account for changes to the xulrunner package, i.e. it excludes changes to Iceweasel itself, or to nspr or nss, but these are far less important in number.
• The number of changes applied decreases when switching to a new upstream branch. This is mostly due to patches getting applied upstream.
• Debian patches on a given branch are pretty stable. In other words, most of the work is done on the first release of the branch.

The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458631
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519468
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525047

Many others were sent:

• Test suite issues (2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543441
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543438
• make clean/distclean issues (10 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541767
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541768
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541769
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541770
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541774
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543464
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543469
• Other issues (8 files changed, 112 insertions(+), 49 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535990
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538933
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542468
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542789
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542999

A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538929
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542749

A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)):

• Disable python-xpcom tests for now.
• Disable javaxpcom tests at build time when DEB_NO_JAR is unset.
• Synchronize config/rules.mk and js/src/config/rules.mk for check-sync-dirs.py (we used to localize the changes required in each config/rules.mk, but as we now run <core>make check they need to be synchronized)</core>
• Workaround for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455238
  

Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)):

• Remove enable-system-lcms check, which somehow resisted merges with upstream
• Properly clean xulrunner/installer/*.system.conf

Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331779 (this one was applied on Fennec)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442196
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444918
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481350
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491617
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491646
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501241
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502369
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510040
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=514151

Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331776 (the part that remains in Debian needs to be sent in a new bug as this one is closed)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349985
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356011
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428765
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434190 (we actually don t have a patch for this one, but a workaround is in bz#486681 below)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435683
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440908
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444440
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444477
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486681
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501300
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506224
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530534

Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445128
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501434
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528687

Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)):

• xulrunner-config: Give more appropriate cflags and libs
• Install applications in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib
• Unhide release notes link in about: but only if app.releaseNotesURL is defined
• In about:, Don t put an about:blank link when there is no vendorURL defined
• Don t use static strings when setting environment variables
• Exec instead of uselessly forking in xulrunner launcher script
• Disable optimization on alpha for the url-classifier component (this will probably wait for the test suite failures on various architectures to be fixed)
• Build js shell and xpcshell against system libreadline
• Don t export js_SetTraceableNativeFailed, which is only used internally
• Increase stability and performance on mips and mipsel

And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below):

• Feature changes:
  • Disable APNG support when system libpng doesn t support it (6 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) ; mostly #ifdef ing parts of the code related to animation)
  • Use application.ini from where the xulrunner-stub lies (1 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) ; This one may be dropped and replaced by something totally different, possibly upstreamed)
  • Don t register plugins if the MOZILLA_DISABLE_PLUGINS environment variable is set (1 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; very useful to isolate plugin-related crashes ; I don t think it s worth upstreaming considering the upcoming plugin-in-separate-process work)
  • Remove (un )registering system (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-) ; xulrunner versions that are installed by a package manager don t need to be registered, since the package does it already ; a variant that conditionally removes it may be upstreamable)
• Preferences changes:
  • Set javascript.options.showInConsole (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Set DPI to system settings (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
• Cosmetic changes:
  • Install loading_16_grey.gif in classic.jar, and add an override for loading16.png (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; Since we don t support APNG, we replace the most used one by its (ugly) GIF equivalent)
  • Add links for about:bugs and about:README.Debian in about: (3 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; I d like to make that something living in debian/extra-stuff)
• Integration changes:
  • Add another preferences directory for applications: defaults/syspref (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Add an rpath to libpyloader.so and _xpcom.so (2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; allows python xpcom to work out of the box)
  • Forward-port nsIBadCertListener from 1.8 (4 files changed, 266 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) ; This is necessary for at least galeon and kazehakase, because the new interface is useless for embedding applications)
• Build-related changes:
  • Allow to override the PYTHON_SO variable (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Put the crmf library before the NSS libraries (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Allow to build java jar files in 2 pass (2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))
  • Avoid libxpcom being excluded from linked libraries by -Wl, as-needed (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Ignore system libjpeg, libpng and zlib version checking (1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-))
  • Force to not use -fshort-wchar (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Add soversion to libmozjs (2 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) ; useful for couchdb, libjavascript-perl and others)
  • Don t build example component (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Don t install system profile (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))

Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

The first time we looked at this condo that we ended up buying, I looked at the cupboard under the stairs, and could visualise a small 19 inch rack in the lower part of it, with all of my computer gear in it. When we got structured cabling installed, I had the CAT-6 cabling terminated onto a basic 19 inch patch panel, with the intent of mounting this in a rack. Then it became a case of trying to find a rack. My favourite junk shop, Weird Stuff, didn't have anything that wasn't full height, so I started looking around online. There's certainly a lot of variance in price. I settled on a 26U Intellinet rack from New Tech, because based on the dimensions on the website, it would fit in the space I had in mind. When we assembled it, it became obvious that the dimensions quoted were the inside dimensions and not the outside dimensions, and it was about 4 centimetres too tall. In hindsight, I should have figured that out. 26 x 1.75 is 45.5. This is where I must give a shout out to New Tech. Sarah called them up, explained the situation, and they agreed to take the rack back, and sent us some shipping labels to ship it back. We managed to find a more simple rack, a 20U Middle Atlantic, which arrived today, and was significantly easier to put together. The only downside: no rear mounting holes. I don't think it'll be a huge problem, though. All I'm planning on mounting in the immediate future are the patch panel, some sort of cable management, a Catalyst switch, and a power strip. At some point in the future, once we stop spending money hand over fist, I'll look at getting a rack mountable server to replace the hodge podge of computers I'm currently running. What I wish we'd discovered about two days ago, was the Lack Rack. This would have been perfect (and so much cheaper).

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days). The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks. The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time. We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone. When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive. The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line. Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately. But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here:

• Google executives are on trial because some sorry excuses for human beings picked on a retarded person and posted the video to youtube: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8115572.stm - this one is simply preposterous. Going after the execs of a company who did nothing to aid, abet, condone or in any way facilitate the abuse in question is absurd, and if extended to other industries would mean that you could pretty much attack any company whose products happened to figure in a crime somehow. Kitchen knives, hunting rifles, golf clubs, even automobiles would seem fair game.
• Italy is going after "user generated content" sites like Youtube and wants to force them to register with the government if they wish to operate: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/italy-preparing-to-hold-youtube-others-liable-for-uploads.ars
• And last but not least, this hit piece in the normally respectable Corriere della Sera: http://www.corriere.it/economia/10_gennaio_28/mucchetti_4de4be8a-0be8-11df-bc70-00144f02aabe.shtml
  - it's in Italian, but the gist of it is that Mr Mucchetti really has it in for Google because they operate out of Ireland in the EU, whereas he believes they should be registered in Italy as a publisher, and subject to Italy's myriad rules, regulations, and, of course, taxes regarding publishing. Despite, well, not really publishing much of anything themselves. He mentions "tax evasion" charges that had been considered, because the Italian division of Google is not where the adsense revenue in Europe goes. I suppose he figures that since the ads are bought by residents of Italy, the money should somehow stay in Italy? He also huffs and puffs about Italy's antitrust laws, which, in the same piece, he admits were created with the express purpose of not touching existing companies (the market share limit was set higher than the share of the largest existing company). Perhaps he would do well to reflect on political schemes and carve-ups like that and think about why companies like Google go to Ireland, rather than Italy. He also makes some quick mentions of network neutrality, and rambles on a bit about how it's a battle between the "Obamanian, Californian, search engines" versus the telecommunications industry, in "the rest of the world and above all in Europe". And of course he uses a liberal sprinking of keywords like "globalization", "multinational corporations", and "deregulated" to attempt to paint Google in terms of being a big, evil company throwing its weight around. One wonders if there aren't more pressing problems with the Italian media industry, such as the prime minister owning a large chunk of it?

One way of seeing things is that politicians and businessmen in Italy noticed Google was actually making quite a bit of money, and even if they don't quite understand this internet thing, they want some of the loot. And while Google certainly is becoming big enough to be cause for worry and discussion, the moves against them in Italy do not seem anything like a rational response calculated to offset severe failures in the market. In any case, it will be interesting to see what happens. Maybe, after China, we'll see Google quit Italy as well?

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

Andrew Dowdell and Michael McGuire have an interesting article in the Adelaide Now about censorship in the South Australian election [1]. The South Australian government wants to force everyone who comments on the upcoming SA election to provide their name and postcode. Attorney-General Michael Atkinson said the law was all about honesty . However a law that forces someone to not comment as Anonymous and instead forces them to use a name that sounds like something that might appear on a birth certificate and a postcode is not going to increase honesty at all. I think it s much better to honestly say I m not telling you my name than to lie and claim to be revealing your name. When the government forces people to give precise but totally inaccurate information it seems that it s going to be bad for everyone. It s even bad for the people who want to be identified, if most people who comment on a blog post are anonymous then I d like to be distinguished as the person who uses their real name! In the vast majority of cases the effort of determining who is using their real name will not be worth the effort. If someone comments on my blog under the name John Howard from Bennelong I will be very suspicious that they are using a fake name. But probably the vast majority of the English speaking population of the world wouldn t immediately identify such a name as fake. If someone wants to comment on my blog and they don t have a published phone number then I won t have any good way of identifying their address. If their name and postcode match an entry in a phone book then they still might be faking it they could take a random name from a phone book. If I was to demand that people who enter blog comments provide their phone numbers then I would have to pay the expense of phoning them as well as dealing with cases of people who are away from home, should I delay a blog comment for a month until the author returns from their European vacation? I have had a moderate amount of experience in writing letters to the editors of newspapers, and I have only once had an editor phone me to verify my details. In all other cases I guess I could have fooled them if I wished. I believe that there are already precedents regarding libel, if I approve a blog comment (or fail to unapprove it in a reasonable amount of time if it meats the automatic approval criteria) then I could be sued for libel if the contents of the comment are deemed to be suitably damaging. So if I was to try to get the real names of people who make comments on my blog then it wouldn t make it any easier for an idiot who wants to sue also anyone who wants to sue regarding an Australian political issue will probably find me a better target than most people who comment on my blog (a significant portion of whom are from the US and have much greater legal protections of their freedom of speech). Extending such a law to US based services such as Twitter is just silly. The stockholders and employees of a US based corporation can freely laugh at Australian censorship laws. Also it s pretty stupid to have a global scope on such laws, as a Victorian why should I care about the South Australian state laws? Implementing laws that can be easily broken inadvertently and can never be enforced against anyone who cares is just pitiful and will result in the MPs who vote for such laws being the object of derision. Vote for the small parties and independent candidates. Both Labour and Liberal want to censor us, put them in the second last two spots on your vote card! Now this law doesn t take affect until the writs for the March 20 election are issued. I encourage Australian bloggers to write bad things about the Liberal and Labour parties after the writs are released which are not libelous and which don t include your postcode. If they try to apply the new law then your blog post gets wide attention. If you plan to be a professional blogger then you could consider the $5,000 fine to be an advertising fee. If you don t want to be known then you can use a US based blogging service. I m going to continue to write political blog posts whenever I feel like it and I won t be telling anyone where I live. I will rely on the Streisand effect to save me. Update:
The politicians in SA have surrendered, the law in question won t be enforced and will supposedly be repealed after the election [2]. It will be interesting to see whether they really do repeal that law.

• [1] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-e6frea6u-1225825708827
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175

So, I just went to register for a SeeSaw invite, I entered my usual e-mail address, which is iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk, and got told it was not a valid e-mail address... erm, yes it is, I use it rather a lot, dammit! So, I changed the localpart from iDunno to one of my less used aliases, and that it accepted... this means that they're checking the localpart and rejecting things with a localpart of idunno, I don't know what other localparts they're rejecting, but that seemed a little harsh... Ah well, now I'll wait for the invite then I can test :) Update: Apparently if you put the e-mail address in all lowercase it accepts it fine. sigh.

There is a *very important* patent case being deliberated tomorrow in NYC. I am SO tempted to ditch some important work to go. We will see Whatever case, I will be following it closely. Does anyone know if you are allowed to bring a laptop into federal court?

ACLU attorneys Chris Hansen and Sandra Park will argue the case before Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Court. Other co-counsel in the lawsuit, including Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT, as well as some plaintiffs and expert witnesses will also attend the hearing. WHEN:
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
10:00 a.m. EST WHERE:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse
Judge Robert Sweet s Courtroom 18C
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007

There is a *very important* patent case being deliberated tomorrow in NYC. I am SO tempted to ditch some important work to go. We will see Whatever case, I will be following it closely. Does anyone know if you are allowed to bring a laptop into federal court?

ACLU attorneys Chris Hansen and Sandra Park will argue the case before Judge Robert W. Sweet of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Court. Other co-counsel in the lawsuit, including Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT, as well as some plaintiffs and expert witnesses will also attend the hearing. WHEN:
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
10:00 a.m. EST WHERE:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse
Judge Robert Sweet s Courtroom 18C
500 Pearl Street
New York, NY 10007

Yesterday, and about nine days after release 0.7.3 of Rcpp (a set of R / C++ interface classes), Romain and I released version 0.7.4. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should already have new versions. As before, my local page is also available for downloads and some more details. The release once again combines a number of necessary fixes with numerous new features:

• Building on OS X did not support multi-arch, and we are grateful for Simon who once again came to the rescue. Things should be fine now. The big take-away is that under no circumstances, include either a file configure or src/Makefile if you want multi-arch builds for free. As Rcpp is effectively a library to be used by other packages, this mattered.
• We added a file NEWS from which I include the relevant section below.
• Much more code re-organisation and enhancement making passage of various C++ types even easier -- see the NEWS entry below.
• More unit tests, now including ones for the 'old Rcpp API'.

Post-release, I also reworked the doxygen setup slightly so that all examples are now browseable, and the whole documentation is now searchable as well. Lastly, we had a remaining Windows build issue. Also, Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges kindly sent us a small patch supporting the new Windows 64-bit builds using the new MinGW 64-bit compiler for Windows -- so release 0.7.5 may follow in due course. The NEWS file entry for release 0.7.4 is as follows:

0.7.4	2010-01-30
    o	matrix matrix-like indexing using operator() for all vector 
    	types : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector
    	LogicalVector, GenericVector and ExpressionVector. 
    o	new class Rcpp::Dimension to support creation of vectors with 
    	dimensions. All vector classes gain a constructor taking a 
    	Dimension reference.
    o	an intermediate template class "SimpleVector" has been added. All
    	simple vector classes are now generated from the SimpleVector 
    	template : IntegerVector, NumericVector, RawVector, CharacterVector
    	LogicalVector.
    o	an intermediate template class "SEXP_Vector" has been added to 
    	generate GenericVector and ExpressionVector.
    o	the clone template function was introduced to explicitely
    	clone an RObject by duplicating the SEXP it encapsulates.
    o	even smarter wrap programming using traits and template
        meta-programming using a private header to be include only
        RcppCommon.h
    o 	the as template is now smarter. The template now attempts to 
    	build an object of the requested template parameter T by using the
    	constructor for the type taking a SEXP. This allows third party code
    	to create a class Foo with a constructor Foo(SEXP) to have 
    	as<foo> for free.
    o	wrap becomes a template. For an object of type T, wrap<t> uses
    	implicit conversion to SEXP to first convert the object to a SEXP
    	and then uses the wrap(SEXP) function. This allows third party 
    	code creating a class Bar with an operator SEXP() to have 
    	wrap for free.
    o	all specializations of wrap :  wrap<double>, wrap< vector<double> >
    	use coercion to deal with missing values (NA) appropriately.
    o	configure has been withdrawn. C++0x features can now be activated
    	by setting the RCPP_CXX0X environment variable to "yes".
    o	new template r_cast<int> to facilitate conversion of one SEXP
    	type to another. This is mostly intended for internal use and 
    	is used on all vector classes
    o	Environment now takes advantage of the augmented smartness
    	of as and wrap templates. If as<foo> makes sense, one can 
    	directly extract a Foo from the environment. If wrap<bar> makes
    	sense then one can insert a Bar directly into the environment. 
    	Foo foo = env["x"] ;  /* as<foo> is used */
	Bar bar ;
	env["y"] = bar ;      /* wrap<foo> is used */    	
    o	Environment::assign becomes a template and also uses wrap to 
    	create a suitable SEXP
    o	Many more unit tests for the new features; also added unit tests
        for older API

As always, even fuller details are in the ChangeLog on the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

I have been playing a bit around with Maemo and writing Qt apps for n900. I ended up needing a rotation aware QMainWindow a couple of times, so I ended up abstracting it away in my own MaemoMainWindow, which I just wanted to share. It has enough ifdefs to also build against normal Qt, outside Maemo. Have fun. Available under any license. maemomainwindow.h:

#ifndef MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H
#define MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H                                          
#include <QMainWindow>
class MaemoMainWindow : public QMainWindow
 
  Q_OBJECT
  public:
    MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent = 0, Qt::WindowFlags flags = 0);
    virtual ~MaemoMainWindow();
  protected:
    virtual bool event (QEvent* event);
  Q_SIGNALS:
    void orientationChanged(Qt::Orientation newOrientation);
  private Q_SLOTS:
    void orientationChangedSlot(const QString& newOrientation);
  private:
    Qt::Orientation m_orientation;
 ;                                                                   
#endif // MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

maemomainwindow.cpp:

#include "maemomainwindow.h"                                         
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <mce/mode-names.h>
#include <mce/dbus-names.h>
#endif                     
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <QDBusConnection>
#include <QDBusMessage>
#include <QEvent>
#endif
MaemoMainWindow::MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent, Qt::WindowFlags flags) : QMainWindow (parent, flags)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  QDBusConnection::systemBus().connect(QString(), MCE_SIGNAL_PATH, MCE_SIGNAL_IF,
                                       MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_SIG,
                                       this,
                                       SLOT(orientationChangedSlot(QString)));
#endif
 
MaemoMainWindow::~MaemoMainWindow()  
 
void MaemoMainWindow::orientationChangedSlot (const QString& newOrientation)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  if (newOrientation == QLatin1String(MCE_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT))  
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForcePortraitOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Vertical);
    else  
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForceLandscapeOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Horizontal);
   
#else
Q_UNUSED(newOrientation);
#endif
 
bool MaemoMainWindow::event (QEvent* event)  
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  switch (event->type())  
    case QEvent::WindowActivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_ENABLE_REQ));
      break;
    case QEvent::WindowDeactivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_DISABLE_REQ));
      break;
    default:
      break;
   
#endif
  return QMainWindow::event (event);
 

Update: reformatted code. Thought wordpres and <code> was smart. Thanks Ken.

On Wednesday I got DAM approval and since Saturday late evening I m officially a Debian Developer. Yay! :-) My thanks go to

• Christoph Berg (Myon) whom I know for more than a decade since we studied together, and who s career in Debian was way faster than mine, but who on the other hand probably knows me better than nobody else in Debian which made him the perfect advocate;
• Bernd Zeimetz (bzed) whom I know from my times at DaLUG and who was the friendliest Application Manager I could imagine he s probably also one of the fastest (8 days from application to AM report :-);
• Luca Capello (gismo), who was the most demanding but also most inspiring sponsor I ever had and who became a very good friend after we found each other over my package conkeror.
• Arne Wichmann (Y_Plentyn) for being my first drop-in center for Debian questions (like can I directly dist-upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0? :-);
• Martin Zobel-Helas (zobel) who was always encouraging me to continue exploring new sides of Debian;
• Gerfried Fuchs (Rhonda) just for being there (and for being a package maintainer with good relations to upstream ;-);
• my coworkers at the IT Services Group of the Department of Physics at ETH Zurich, who always found new challenges in Debian for me to solve;
• and all those others who offered to also advocate me (e.g. Otavio Salvador) or sponsored my packages so far (or at least offered to do so), e.g. Alexander Wirt (formorer), Martin F. Krafft (madduck), Robert J rdens (jordens),

As Bernd cited in his AM report, my earliest activity within the Debian community I can remember was organising the Debian booth at LinuxDay.lu 2003, where I installed Debian 3.0 Woody on my Hamilton Hamstation hy (a Sun SparcStation 4 clone). I wrote my first bugreport in November 2004 (#283365), probably during the Sarge BSP in Frankfurt. And my first Debian package was wikipedia2text, starting to package it August 2005 (ITP #325417). My only earlier documented interest in the Debian community is subscribing to the lists debian-apache@l.d.o and debian-emacsen@l.d.o in June 2002. I though remember that I started playing around with Debian 2.0 Hamm, skipping 2.1 (for whatever reasons, I can t remember), using 2.2 quite regularily and started to dive into with Woody which also ran on my first ThinkPad bijou . I installed it over WLAN with just a boot floppy at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. :-) Anyway, this has led to what it had to lead to a new Debian Developer. :-) The first package I uploaded with my newly granted rights was a new conkeror snapshot. This version should work out of the box on Ubuntu again, so that conkeror in Ubuntu should not lag that much behind Debian Sid anymore. In other News Since Wednesday I own a Nokia N900 and use it as my primary mobile phone now. Although it s not as free as the OpenMoko (see two other recent posts by Lucas Nussbaum and by Tollef Fog Heen on Planet Debian) it s definitely what I hoped the OpenMoko will once become. And even if I can t run Debian natively on the N900 (yet), it at least has a Debian chroot on it. :-) A few weeks ago, I took over the organisation of this year s Debian booth at FOSDEM from Wouter Verhelst who s busy enough with FOSDEM organisation itself. Last Monday the organiser of the BSD DevRoom at FOSDEM asked on #mirbsd for talk suggestions and they somehow talked me into giving a talk about Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. The slides should show up during the next days on my Debian GNU/kFreeBSD talks page. I hope, I ll survive that talk despite giving more or less a talk saying Jehova! . ;-) What a week.

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month:

• Jakub Wilk (jwilk)
• Axel Beckert (abe)
• Vagrant Cascadian (vagrant)
• Albert Huang (ash)
• Iustin Pop (iustin)
• Thorvald Natvig (thorvald)
• Marco Silva (marcot)
• Marcelo Vieira (metal)
• Thorsten Glaser (tg)

Congratulations!

My dear Ubuntu, I think the time has come that I make a confession. You may be wondering why I haven t spent much time with you those last months, and you have the right to know. The case is, I have another one. She s called Debian. No, it s not because of you. It s also not because of your parents; while they aren t perfect, they are great in many ways and I certainly don t want to run away from then. Just wait and let me explain this. You surely remember that I spent a week with her some time ago? Well, now that I want to join Debian s family, I decided that after all that wasn t much time to get to know here, so I gave her another chance, and with this second experience I fell in love with her unstable character. Ubuntu, you are really extraordinary, and I m still telling anyone who wants to listen about your wonders, but you just can t appease my desire for trying out new things as well as Debian does. Now, this doesn t mean we won t see each other anymore. I ll still take you with me whenever I travel, and I ll continue helping you with the household. In fact, all this wouldn t signify a big change at all, if it wasn t that at the same time I also decided to refocus most of my efforts on raising children, which is what really reduced the time I spent helping you. So, while currently I m not seeing you as much as before, I hope you all the best, and I ll still try to help you advance, be it indirectly (1, 2) or, while probably to a lesser degree, continuing with direct contributions. By the way, hello Planet Debian!

---

3 comments
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags:

My dear Ubuntu, I think the time has come that I make a confession. You may be wondering why I haven t spent much time with you those last months, and you have the right to know. The case is, I have another one. She s called Debian. No, it s not because of you. It s also not because of your parents; while they aren t perfect, they are great in many ways and I certainly don t want to run away from then. Just wait and let me explain this. You surely remember that I spent a week with her some time ago? Well, now that I want to join Debian s family, I decided that after all that wasn t much time to get to know here, so I gave her another chance, and with this second experience I fell in love with her unstable character. Ubuntu, you are really extraordinary, and I m still telling anyone who wants to listen about your wonders, but you just can t appease my desire for trying out new things as well as Debian does. Now, this doesn t mean we won t see each other anymore. I ll still take you with me whenever I travel, and I ll continue helping you with the household. In fact, all this wouldn t signify a big change at all, if it wasn t that at the same time I also decided to refocus most of my efforts on raising children, which is what really reduced the time I spent helping you. So, while currently I m not seeing you as much as before, I hope you all the best, and I ll still try to help you advance, be it indirectly (1, 2) or, while probably to a lesser degree, continuing with direct contributions. By the way, hello Planet Debian!

---

4 comments
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. Permalink License Post tags: Debian, Programari lliure, Ubuntu

I have recently been evaluating small laptops, and wound up purchasing the Thinkpad X200s. It arrived a few days ago, so here are some first impressions. The Hardware The X200s is, in a word, awesome. It is light and portable, built solidly, and very fast. With the 6-cell battery, it feels light. The 9-cell makes it physically bigger and heavier, but even so, it is still a light unit even then. The fans run only rarely, and battery life looks to be towards the upper range of what I was expecting, so I am pleased with that. The screen is a very high-DPI one, and quite bright. However, it is also one of the only drawbacks: its vertical viewing angle is quite poor compared to most other screens I ve used recently, meaning I m frequently adjusting it to get the best angle relative to my head. The keyboard is a pleasant change after having using the Eee 901 for so long. I hadn t realized just how much of a pleasant change it would be. I was concerned about the lack of a touchpad, but it appears that the touchpoint device is a lot better than it was on the Thinkpads I used a few years back. I miss a touchpad, but not very much, and far less than I thought I would. Debian Squeeze Of course, one of the first things I did with it was to wipe off Windows 7 and install Debian. Now a word about Debian. I rarely do fresh installs. I normally tar up my machine and move it over to new hardware when needed, and upgrade the software over time. However, I wanted to make this a 64-bit install and had no suitable image to move over. I decided to try the default Gnome install in squeeze since I hadn t tried Gnome in awhile and was about due to give it a shot. I was very impressed. Squeeze will make an awesome desktop OS. Everything worked perfectly out of the box. It suspended and resumed. X came up in full resolution without me having to do anything. Ethernet worked, and I was helpfully invited to supply the non-free firmware for the wifi on a USB stick during install time. Hardware brightness and volume keys work. The docking station is fully compatible with Linux. Sound works. The hardware lock screen key even works. Bluetooth works out of the box. It is a well-integrated, extremely fast, and smooth setup. Cups is installed out of the box by default, and accepts network printer broadcasts by default too. So I snapped in an Ethernet cable, and when I went to print a few minutes later, I just could. It didn t even strike me as special until later. Yes, that s right I plugged it into the network and, with absolutely zero action on my part, could print to all the printers at work or at home. The update-manager that Gnome uses by default (I wonder if Debian s KDE installs yet use one? I have never seen one in KDE) is a wonderful work of simplicity compared to Windows 7 s madness. You click the update icon, click the button to start updating, and 30 seconds later get a message that 45 updates have been installed. With no ominous reboot now message. This is no surprise to me as a long-time Debian developer, but I just wanted to highlight it here. I think I should file a wishlist bug on update-manager asking them to improve the wording in the box to say There is no need to reboot your computer :-) I still have my gripes about Gnome. It only lets me choose some pre-defined settings for screensaver timeouts, for instance. I still feel that KDE gives me more control. But Gnome seems to be better integrated with the entire system, faster, and less buggy. This difference is especially acute at login time. This laptop logs me in far faster than my Core 2 Quad machine at home running KDE (from sid) does. So, of course, my next task is to integrate xmonad with Gnome. Should be fun. Now, a final word on why I wrote this. None of these components have been a surprise really to me (aside from the completeness of the hardware support for this laptop). But what I want to bust is the myth that somehow Debian is difficult to use on the desktop. It isn t. This setup was easier by far than the Windows 7 install I did on a different machine recently. Although it has less eye candy than Windows 7, it exudes solidity, performance, power, and yes, ease of use in every way.

... please try to prevent your upload from hitting the NEW queue (by changing your binary packages). While we try to process the NEW queue as soon as possible, it would be a shame, if your release critical bug fix is delayed, because all ftp-foo are busy. PS: That's especially true, if you NMU a package...
Update: I stand corrected: The NMU I had in mind was a legitimate addition of a new package due to library changes. In these cases a ping in the #debian-ftp channel would be welcome.

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University,
and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law
Center, will speak about Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom,
Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing on Friday,
February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm. This event will be webcast live. * What: ISOC-NY Public Meeting: Eben Moglen Freedom In The Cloud
* When: Fri. Feb 5 2010 7pm-9pm
* Where: Room 109, Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner
of West 4th) (See note below)
* Webcast: http://www.livestream.com/isocny * Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the
Mercer Street entrance. Must bring ID.

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University,
and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law
Center, will speak about Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom,
Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing on Friday,
February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm. This event will be webcast live. * What: ISOC-NY Public Meeting: Eben Moglen Freedom In The Cloud
* When: Fri. Feb 5 2010 7pm-9pm
* Where: Room 109, Warren Weaver Hall, 251 Mercer Street NYC (SW corner
of West 4th) (See note below)
* Webcast: http://www.livestream.com/isocny * Note: Use the entrance on the west side since construction blocks the
Mercer Street entrance. Must bring ID.