I am stunned no more people have been bitten by this. Or at least, the Intarweb has not heard about it. Censorship perhaps? I haven't researched more into the causes, but anyway...
I was pushing a project I have had lingering for some time from Rails 2.0.x to 2.1.x (yes, 2.2 is already out there, but 2.1 is the version that will ship with Lenny) - The changes should not be too invasive, as it is a minor release, but there are some quite noticeable changes.
Anyway... What was the problem? Take this very simple migration:

The problem is that PostgreSQL refuses to create a hyperdimensional string field. I offer this here to you, line-wrapped by me for your convenience.

Beautiful. Now I can store strings not only as character vectors, but as planes, cubes, hypercubes, and any other hyperdimensional construct! Are we approaching quantum computers?
What is really striking is that... I found only one occurrence on tha net of this bug - one and a half years ago, in Ola Bini's blog. No stunned users looking for the culprit, no further reports... Strange.
Still, the bug was fixed in Rails 2.2 about half a year ago, although not in revisions of earlier versions. I will request the patch to be applied to earlier versions as well. Sigh.

I managed to go to FOSDEM in 2005. I enjoyed myself. I'd like to go again. No, really, I would.

In 2006 I drew the short straw while working for Black Cat; Simon and Dom went, I remained the person on the same landmass as the servers.

In 2007 I had a wedding to go to.

Last year I was too disorganised to sort out suitable transport from Northern Ireland.

I'd resigned myself to having to take off the Friday and Monday this year and fly. Except it's been moved to near the start of February, which thus conflicts with an annual dinner that gets to have higher priority. Bah.

Maybe I'll manage 2010, but I'll not be holding my breath.

After upgrading an Ubuntu mail server from Hardy to Intrepid, two users could no longer connect via SSL to send email though sendmail. One was using msmtp and the other was using Outlook Express. The msmtp issue was tracked down as a supposed deficiency in msmtp. However, this left Outlook, which is neigh-impossible to debug. From the Debian msmtp bug linked from the Ubuntu bug, it seemed that the root cause was the server sending too much data during the initial connection. Packet captures of an Outlook connection seemed to back this up: Outlook negotiated STARTTLS fine, and then just never responded to the SSL handshake. It seems that something (openssl? sendmail?) changed between Hardy and Intrepid so that instead of using the /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt file just for verification, its contents were now being sent during the SSL handshake. (I reduced the number of configured certs with sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates , and checked on the size of the handshake with openssl s_client -connect server:port wc -l .) It spewed 143 certs sent at every connection. Unsurprisingly, it seems some clients were choking on it (I would like to note that Thunderbird behaved correctly). In the end, I configured my CAfile to aim at just a single CA (the CA used to sign the server s SSL key), and that fixed both msmtp and Outlook. How fun.

Ok, so here s my obligatory Hello Planet Debian and I m now a Debian Developer post. So, yeah, I m now a Debian Developer - and have a shiny new email address. For those of you considering going through the NM process, or already going through it - don t give up hope, you ll get there eventually! Thanks to all those who ve helped me along the way. In other news, I ve been meaning to blog about a couple of sites for a while now. First of all, is Feedbooks.com - a nifty little site with lots of ebooks to download. Including a lot of the classics. You can also publish books on there, but I haven t got round to it yet. This is currently my homepage on my eeePC. I ve setup the custom PDF to be a good size for the eeePC (152mmx91mm, 10px font, 5mm all borders) and have been reading some of the Doctor Who books on there (and actually not finding it that uncomfortable curling up in bed with. The next site is Stack Overflow - I ve mentioned this briefly before, but it s a great site. A community driven Programming Q+A site. Kind of hard to describe, but go have a look, you ll soon get the gist of it! Anyway, I think it s time to head to bed for me!

I've previously mentioned my desire for a new smartphone. I'd been eyeing the G1 since its release, with the main factor stopping me from going ahead the need for a T-Mobile contract. They don't have any 3G coverage north of Belfast that I've seen and I'm very happy with my 20/month O2 Simplicity contract and don't have any need to pay twice that. Luckily Katherine decided to get me one for my birthday, and after some confusion involving it going to Norwich (always remember to update your Paypal delivery address as well as the card address when you move home, folks. Oh, and your Amazon wishlist address too; it's different than your primary address and I've been bitten by that myself in the past) it turned up the weekend before Christmas.

I have a UK spec T-Mobile G1. First step was to get it unlocked for use on O2. I used Unlock G1 - they weren't the cheapest, but I'd seen them recommended on a few G1 news sites and they had a helpful guide on their site about activating without a T-Mobile SIM. They claim a code within 2 business days. I ordered at 19:30 UTC on a Saturday night and had a code by 21:00 that worked first time.

Once the O2 SIM was working I needed to check if the phone was easily rootable. I typed reboot and was rewarded with a rebooting phone. I had the RC7 UK firmware release, which still had the bug. I followed the android-dls.com guide to keeping root and upgraded to the RC8 release. With that out of the way I could start to actually have a play.

The screen is lovely. I'm used to the high res E70 screen and have been disappointed at the number of phones that only do 320x240. 480x320 is probably the minimum I'd want (if I can't manage an 80 character wide SSH session I'm not really interested) though obviously if HTC ever get round to a Touch Pro with Android I might be tempted... Touch aspect is perfectly responsive, as is the interface in general - while I don't use a phone that much day to day my mobile is the only number I give out so it tends to be the only phone I use. This means that the ability to make/receive calls/sms is the most important feature for me (it's odd having to say this, but I know people who've claimed to love phones but on further probing reveal it's a great PDA but dire for calls and they have to carry something else for that). The G1 performs admirably for my needs.

The built in apps are good too. The browser is much better than the E70. I don't know if that's the bigger screen (though the resolution isn't much different) or a faster processor, but browsing on my mobile is a much more realistic proposition now. I've only played briefly with the iPhone browser and I wouldn't say the G1 was any better, but it's certainly good. Calendaring is functional too and copes with multiple Google Calendars as you'd hope. Shame it doesn't deal with anything else, but for the moment this suits my needs. I haven't used it for email; I prefer to ssh to my colo box and run mutt. Contacts are mostly ok, though I have a few gripes I'll mention later.

I haven't felt the need to install many apps. The connectbot ssh client was an obvious one and is pretty nice (main missing feature is UTF-8 and there's a feature request for it raised already). I've installed a few games off the Android Market, as well as Barcode Scanner (does what you'd think) and CellFinder (displays your location and which mobile cell you're using; it's a bit scary how few O2 masts there seem to be near my house). Installation from the market has been a breeze and it's nice to be able to flick through what's available. With my E70 it was always a real pain to go and hunt down Symbian apps (especially when S60 3rd Edition was new) and install them.

Before I start on my gripes, let me clarify that I am very happy with this phone. I wanted something with a keyboard that was functional and this fits the bill. It's a definite improvement over my E70 and I feel it's much more responsive than any of the recent Windows Mobile devices I've encountered. Also the battery life hasn't proved to be an issue - from articles I'd read I'd expected to have difficulty getting a day out of it, but in general I can easily get 2 and have had 3. Maybe my usage patterns aren't as heavy as everyone else, but that's fine for me (I remember my 9000i Communicator which really was a case of having to charge it every night).

The first issue I hit was the contacts system. Google have tied this into GMail and it really seems to have been a last minute thought process, perhaps along the lines of "Where can we stick this? Oh, hang on, people have email contacts, how about there?". Trying to move my contacts over from my E70 I was surprised to find that there's no way to import a vCard. The only option is CSV. WTF? I'm not saying vCard is perfect, but it's pretty much what we have as a standard method of contact interchange. I ended up writing some Perl to crudely parse the vCards and output CSV. I shouldn't have had to.

Then again, maybe the issue is that Google know their contacts system is a bit lacking. You'd think a company with online calendaring and contacts would be able to cope with things like birthdays, tying them together between contacts and displaying them in your calendar, wouldn't you? They can't. I can't see any way to store a birthday or anniversary with a contact. Nor a home page. The contacts system is the one area that the E70 outshines the G1.

I miss an onscreen keyboard more than I thought I would (ie at all). I understand this should be coming in the next release, which will make things like quick replies to SMSes much easier (there's no point opening the keyboard for a "Nearly there" response).

The use of only a single APN for internet access and MMS is a bit troublesome; I haven't managed to get this to work properly with O2 - either I have fully working 'net or fully working MMS with only web seeming to work. I haven't played with the settings very much though and I spent 7 months without MMS even enabled on my O2 account, so it's not high priority. Also something I understand is being fixed upstream.

I'd like a way to see the next calendar event on my home screen. I may just be missing how to do this, but it was a nice feature on the E70.

I haven't played much with the camera, but I get the impression it's pretty typical of the average mobile phone; ie not great. Not a problem for me, but don't expect this to replace a compact digital camera.

While I accept this phone isn't for everyone I think it's pretty much what I'm looking for in terms of what's on the market today. There's nicer hardware out there, but a large part of what makes this phone is the Android software. I look forward to seeing new phones in the coming year making use of it, hopefully leading to a decent selection by the time I need a new phone again. :)

Mail server isn't broken anymore. But the concept of email itself looks broken to me. I have 97391 unread e-mail in my inbox.

One annoying thing that happens regularly is Planet Flooding . This is when one of the many blogs that is syndicated by a public Planet installation changes it s time stamps and has 10 or more old posts appear as new. It s doubly annoying when the blogger in question knows about the problem. Planet Flooding is easy to solve. If you are changing your blogging software or doing something else that may result in old posts appearing to be new then all you have to do is configure your blog to include a small number of posts (maybe two or three) in the RSS feed. Seeing two old posts re-appearing plus a new post explaining it is not going to annoy anyone. If you run a Planet (or Venus) installation then configure it to have a maximum number of posts per feed. For a Planet that syndicates feeds from a number of individuals and only includes a few days of traffic (which is probably a category that covers most Planets) there is no need for more than four items per feed. For a severe case of Planet flooding (EG posts which always appear as being the newest and are therefore at the top of the list) the thing to do is to immediately remove the feed until the problem is fixed. Allowing a broken blog configuration to annoy other people is not doing any favors for the blogger in question, it simply drives people to filter the Planet to exclude the articles by that blogger. Yes it does take some work to adjust the configuration of the Planet, but that is surely no more work than replying to email rejecting requests for the configuration to be adjusted. The first aim of running a blog or a Planet should be to make it readable, Planet flooding breaks this for the Planet and for the blogger who caused it. It is a technical problem and needs a technical solution (which can be temporarily removing the blog from the Planet syndication list).

I have just had a need to install packages from Debian-Multimedia.org to correctly play .3gp files from my mobile phone (the stock Mplayer in Debian would not play the sound). As part of getting this to work in a way that I like I rebuilt some packages so that shared objects would not demand an executable stack and added them to My SE Linux Etch repository [1]. The liblzo2-2 package is in Debian so I filed bug report #511479 against it. Not that I expect it to be fixed for Etch now that Lenny is about to be released. But it s good to have the data in the bug tracking system for the benefit of all interested people. The lame and xvidcore packages are only in the Debian Multimedia archive. I ve sent email to the maintainer with patches. Not sure if he will accept them (again it s not a good time for filing bug reports about Etch), but there s no harm in sending them in. The lame package also required execmod access, but I don t have enough time to devote to this to fix it. For background information about execmod see my previous post [2]. See my previous post about executable stacks for more background information [3]. The next thing to do is to test this out in Lenny, hopefully I ll get time to work on this tomorrow.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/19/my-se-linux-etch-repository/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/11/execmod-and-se-linux-i386-must-die/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/08/11/executable-stacks-lenny/

I've been fooling around with "git" lately - it's useful for local projects where I don't want to have to set up a remote server, and it also seems to be "the way the wind is blowing" - lots of open source projects are starting to use it, so I might as well familiarize myself with how it works. The github service seems to be very popular at the moment, and it's not hard to see why. They've created a very useful service, and give it away completely free for open source use. That's a pretty good deal! It's also an easy to use site that's well integrated with git, so you can see lots of stuff graphically instead of fooling around with command line tools. However, I have a nagging doubt. Github apparently bases everything around the developer. In other words, projects hosted there are mostly attached to a developer who 'owns' the project, rather than existing on their own. There are a few exceptions - there seems to be a 'rails' role account to manage Rails, rather than having it belong to, say, DHH, so it's not impossible to do something in a project-centric fashion, but it doesn't seem to be very common either. What I'm wondering is what sort of effects this might have in the long term. Github, and git itself, make it very easy to 'fork' projects. Could, or will this lead to a situation where people don't try so hard to get their code in the 'official' branch? What happens when someone loses interest in their project? Sure, someone else can fork their repository, but if all the links were pointing to the first guy, because he was the main hacker on a project for X years, they're not going to switch overnight even if guy B takes over maintanance. And in the meantime, casual searchers might turn up the 'dead' branch, or simply be confused as to who's doing what. This could make things confusing for someone who just wants to check out some code and start using it.... trying to sort out various revisions and ancestry of a project could be quite discouraging. At the Apache Software Foundation, on the other hand, people are obviously very important, but projects are the organizational unit that people get involved with, and a lot of emphasis is placed on not having one big benevolent dictator, but on having a group of people who make decisions and act as arbiters of what goes into the project. People can come and go as they please, but the project, and, importantly, the links to it, remain the same over time (barring any big, unforeseen blowups). As far as I can tell, this is not a git problem, but something related to how github organizes their site. And, of course, it's possible that I have simply missed something due to my lack of knowledge of git, and not being more than superficially familiar with github. Even if I'm right, it shouldn't take that much effort for github to create a system where it's possible for multiple people to 'own' a project.

...and there was a distinct feeling of deja vu. At least the procedure itself was nowhere near as long (under 2 hours). On Thursday, Sarah had some day-surgery to have her sternal wires removed. The top one was causing her some discomfort because the skin there was the thinnest (whether that in itself was related to any of the previous incision complications remains uncertain). The surgical team popped in to pre-op to autograph their work (seriously, they initialled her chest) before they started, and asked if she wanted just the top wire removed, or all of them. We consulted the Magic Eight Ball application on my phone, and it gave a resoundingly affirmative response, so she got them all removed. Despite removing them all being a bit more surgically invasive, I think this is for the best. It means none of the other wires can cause any problems down the track requiring yet another trip to the operating room. They also did some scar revision on the top part of the scar, where it was a bit stretched (from the previous complications), so incisionally speaking, she's had almost as much incision work done as the original heart surgery. Ironically, this made the plastic surgery (laser treatment and steroid injections) she had late last year largely redundant. She took the dressing off the incision this morning, and we had our first look at it. It certainly looks a lot better than before, so fingers crossed it won't get infected this time, and the overall long-term result will look better.

The more I think about it, The more I m convinced that the both approaches that have been proposed to change the way we deal with Debian membership (Joerg s new statuses for non-developing contributors, and Lars counting of advocates) are both steps in the wrong direction. I really would like something simpler, and less technical, to become a Debian Developer. After all, what matters is that we trust new developers to make the right decisions (for example, not touch something that they are not confortable with). We currently verify that they know each and every technical bit about things that they may never encounter during their DD life, but that doesn t say anything about their ability to work with others inside a community, or their judgement when touching packages that they don t maintain. For example, we could have something inspired by the current process to become a Debian Maintainer: instead of going through 50+ questions, we could rely on advocations from existing Debian Developers to judge new applicants. The advocation wouldn t simply be +1 emails (as in Lars proposal), but would instead contain a detailed description of what the applicant did. A group of DDs (DAMs, basically) would then read the advocation emails, and decide whether there s sufficient proof that the applicant can be granted DD status. That would allow a much faster process, removing the load from the Application Managers and NM Frontdesk Members. And it probably wouldn t reduce the quality of new DDs, because of the need to collect advocation emails from several DDs. Probably the best way to move forward with that would be to work on a document (DEP?) that would list all the changes and explain them, and then ask all the developers to vote on it, like it was done for the Debian Maintainers GR. Are there some people interested on working on a first draft of such a document?

I got tagged. By splitbrain. With a really silly but funny meme. The basic rule is: Draw a bunny. So here s my bunny:

             /\ /\
             ,. ,. 
             
             \' /
            / . .\
           (   Y  )
          __\  v'/
       _-^      \
     ,'  _        
    /      \    /
 _ ;          , \\
/        __;__\ \\
\_,\___________;\_;;

Nobody said, ASCII art is not allowed and I drew it myself with aewan (Ascii art Editor Without A Name) in an xterm. But aewan was not really a help here, Emacs would have done the same job. In fact I had to fix some non-ascii characters later by using Emacs anyway. Ok, and since this are the rules:

1. Draw a Bunny (or more)
2. Post it to your blog with the rules
3. Name three other bloggers that should draw a bunny

You can draw your bunny however you like. Use pencil and paper, a drawing tablet or just your mouse. It doesn t matter. It also doesn t matter if it looks crappy or not. The important thing is the bunny!

here are the three blogger I m tagging. Ehm, that s harder than the bunny. Hmmm. I think, I ll stay with the DokuWiki on identi.ca crowd for tagging. So I herewith tag:

1. foosel,
2. chimeric, and
3. jaypikay

Hope, they don t mind and join the fun. ;-)

Yesterday evening I received a quite nice mail - the people behind Linux New Media and the LNM Award asked me if I want to participate in the Jury for the 2009 edition of it. Sure I want. :) The process seems to be a very simple one (good), the Jury members make nominations for the various categories and then later on vote on them. Now, while I already thought about it and know candidates I will nominate, what about you? I list the categories for this years edition below. Do you think something/someone/whatever should be nominated in those categories? Why? Note that only products/projects/people/organizations/whatever that have been very significant in 2008 should be nominated. This editions categories are - Outstanding Contribution to Open Source / Linux / Free Software

• Most Linux / Open Source-Friendly Hardware Vendor
• Most Innovative Open Source Project
• Best Open Source Contribution for Mobile Devices
• Best Open Source Programming Language
• Most Significant Contribution for Security in Open Source

If you want, feel free to tell me what you think should go in those categories. Leave a comment here or send me email. If you also add a little reasoning why, even better.

of Nova Scotia. My past and future colleague Trevor Smedley just lost his appeal to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia of his criminal conviction for having pet chickens. As the Supreme Court noted in Trevor J. Smedley and Her Majesty the Queen:

They are not just any chickens - they are special chickens. They are heritage chickens that are brought to this province from Quebec.

Indeed, the court agreed with Mr. Smedley that there was nothing wrong with the chickens:

The trial judge found that they are in every way inoffensive. There is no excessive or even noticeable noise, no odour. The way in which they are kept is not unsightly. The chickens remain on their property seemingly doing no harm to either the aesthetic qualities or the quiet enjoyment of the property of the immediate neighbours. So finds the trial judge.

As I haven t seen much news about this case in the mainstream media, I m posting a copy of the complete opinion here to shed public light on the matter. I know very little about Canadian chicken law, so I m not sure whether further appeals are possible, but I hope Mr. Smedley can keep up the fight.

I feel I should comment on the whole DebGem thing. About a week ago, the guys from that project mailed me, stating that they were about to go public, and if I would please have a look at it before they would do so and perhaps give some constructive criticism. So I did. I must say I wasn't very impressed, initially. What you get there is what the name suggests: a Ruby Gem, but then just repackaged as a Debian package. As in, files laid out exactly the same way. As in, still not FHS compliant. As in, many other problems. I came up with a list of problems that was quite long, and they've fixed most of them; but the fundamental problem that RubyGems are peculiar beasts, making it hard, if not impossible, for Debian people to package them so that they adhere to Debian's strict quality requirements remains, and this service does not (or cannot) solve that. To be sure, it's a step in the right direction, which will ease the maintenance of Ruby software on many a Debian system, and for that they deserve praise. However, it is not a solution; much more work needs to be done and it needs to be done within the Ruby community.

When I ran Black Cat we preferred customers to use role addresses (eg support@, sales@) rather than contact us directly. This had the advantage that more people got the mail, increasing the likelihood of it getting answered swiftly. However some people preferred to email one of us directly, even for trivial matters. Having a preference for using role addresses myself I can sort of understand why people did this; often there is a poor or non existant response from a company's generic email addresses, leaving no choice but to try and email a known contact. However in our case it would have led to a poorer chance of timely response.

These days I don't have to worry about these things in quite the same way, but there are a few things I'm on what could be considered a "role" address for. And still I get emailed directly about things. Which is still annoying. So please, if you are considering emailing me about something that isn't personal, consider whether you should be using a role address rather than emailing me directly.

(This semi rant brought to you as a way of testing if my MovableType upgrade worked)

I believe that most debian developers ignore discussions of possible general resolutions like the current one, until/unless they look like reaching the required number of seconds to trigger a vote. It s hard to prove that a group is ignoring something, but disproof is simple: please could all DDs who watch pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs please email mjr-possiblegr at debian.org. I ll count with from -f possiblegr.mbox wc -l in a week or so, after filtering out any emails from non-DDs. Feel free to ask other debian developers to email if they watch reasonably likely places (planet, non-technical lists, ) for pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs. Please don t spam debian-devel or announce lists about it, unless you re expecting future possible GRs to be sent there. I d welcome a quick comment if you post it anywhere. If you can see a way to prove that a group is ignoring something, let me know. I realise that failing to disprove this isn t the same as proving the opposite, but I think it would still be useful.

I'm working on designing a microformat that can be used to indicate the location of VCS (git, svn, etc) repositories related to a web page. I'd appreciate some web standards-savvy eyes on my rel-vcs microformat rfc. If it looks good, next steps will be making things like gitweb, viewvc, ikiwiki, etc, support it. I've already written a preliminary webcheckout tool that will download an url, parse the microformat, and run the appropriate VCS program(s). (Followed by, with any luck, github, ohloh, etc using the microformat in both the pages they publish, and perhaps, in their data importers.) Why? Well,

1. A similar approach worked great for Debian source packages with the XS-VCS-* fields.
2. Pasting git urls from download pages of software projects gets old.
3. I'm tired of having to do serious digging to find where to clone the source to websites like Keith Packard's blog, or cariographics.org, or St Hugh of Lincoln Primary School. Sites that I know live in a git repo, somewhere.
4. With the downturn, hosting sites are going down left and right, and users who trusted their data to these sites are losing it. Examples include AOL Hometown and Ficlets, Google lively, Journalspace, podango, etc etc. Even livejournal's future is looking shakey. Various people are trying to archive some of this data before it vanishes for good. I'm more interested in establishing best practices that make it easy and attractive to let all the data on your website be cloned/forked/preserved. Things that people bitten by these closures just might demand in the future. This will be one small step in that direction.

Some months ago, I got a phone call from Rafael Fern ndez Flores. He wanted to interview me for a book he was working on regarding the history of computers in Mexico. The first computer in Latin America was installed in 1958 at my University (UNAM), and last year there were several activities conmemorating it. One of said activities is the publication of the book Historias de la Historia del c mputo en m xico, by Rafael Fern ndez and Margarita Ontiveros.
The book was printed in November, and Rafael gave me my copy in early December. It is quite an entertaining read - I mostly enjoyed the archaeological parts of it, referring to the 1950s and 1960s, and with many people that I know first hand (as my father is one of the founding researchers of the Centro de Investigaci n en Matem ticas Aplicadas, Sistemas y Servicios, CIMASS, now IIMAS).
I do believe, anyway, the book is focused too heavily on what happened in the large-scale computer world during a fundamental point in time for me (late 1970s, early 1980s) - It shows that the authors were very involved in the important projects the University set foot on, but they overlook fundamental pieces of the history. Very important developments were made in smaller venues (it was shocking for me to find only one mention, and just as a reference, to Fundaci n Arturo Rosenblueth and its great Centros Galileo, where many hundreds of kids (me included) learned to love computers, to program, and had a thriving socialization place. I also missed mentions of the BBS scene in Mexico, for which there are various exponents. And, just to single out one person, I found it absurd to have me interviewed and not to include La Mancha de la Calabaza que Ladra.
One of the last chapters -there are over 40 chapters, stemming from over 30 individual interviews- publishes the talk I had with Rafael. I must say there are small errata in its transcription (the first example that comes to my mind: I told him that one of the fruits of the OLPC project was the appearance of the now-popular netbooks, partly due to the appearance of lower cost parts, but I must reiterate I didn't say the Asus EEE is a part of said project). You can I am attaching my interview (as scanned, low-res images) to this post, in case you are interested.
Anyway - If the topic interests you, you will find many interesting passages, many passages you will surely laugh with and probably remember. The book is very well laid out. And it is a great joy to be part of it!