Back in the Lenny release cycle, I published some statistics of the release critical bugs. As we are (try to) get nearer to a freeze of Squeeze I think it's time to start that again. But first, a small explanation follows, what these numbers actually mean. If you look at our official bug tracking system currently lists 750 release critical bugs affecting the next stable release. While this number is kind of true, it is not accurate to use it to measure the state of the release. The unofficial rc bug thingy at bts.turmzimmer.net is quite more powerful to actual get some interesting numbers, as you can ignore specific kinds of bug and filter them properly. Note, that at the very end of the detailed list of the bugs you get the total number. With that interface you can for example filter them by different distributions. For example it currently lists 650 rc bugs in total for any distribution, but if you filter for squeeze bugs, you get only 518. That's a different number as the official bug tracker shows; I'm not entirely sure why, but a part of that difference is that both the official and the unofficial web pages are only synced periodically. Should someone be able to give a good explanation about the differences, please step forward ;) But let's play more: You can filter for bugs valid in squeeze-only, but not in sid. These bugs are already fixed in sid, but the packages haven't yet migrated to squeeze. Currently that are 94 bugs. We can furthermore ignore bugs only in sid; when squeeze is unaffected, we just don't migrate the broken package from sid to squeeze. The number that is most interesting for contributors is the number of bugs affecting both, sid and squeeze, as these are the ones which really need to be fixed as no fix is known, yet. So filtering for bugs for both we are down to 424 at the moment. But of these 424 remaining release critical bugs, we can still ignore some (for now). For example bugs concerning packages in non-free or contrib (9 currently) won't stop us from release, will they? There are also many bugs marked as pending (32), meaning that the maintainer is aware of the bug has a fix prepared and is just waiting with the upload a moment. Some of this bugs have already a patch (64), but no one reviewed it and uploaded it by now. You'll also see that you can ignore merged bug reports (47). That are bug reports reporting the very same bug several times. Finally there are bug fixes already uploaded to the so called delayed queue (6). This are bug fixes which where uploaded by someone else than the real maintainer, but to give the maintainer a chance to act on himself or to comment, the upload is delayed by some days before it will actually hit the archive. Currently 6 bugs are fixed by uploads to delayed. 17 bugs are claimed meaning that someone already said he will take care of this bug (but they are not finished, yet). You could also ignore the bugs invalidated by today's britney bug category, representing bugs which will vanish after the next migration of packages from sid to freeze, but as we are only looking at rc bugs in both sid and squeeze, this number will always 0 ;) That leaves bugs somehow other marked as fixed which are bugs (39) where I honestly have no Idea what they are... If someone can explain them, please do so ;) Here is a small tabular showing the above numbers:

Total:	650
Affecting Squeeze:	518
Squeeze-only:	94
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:	424

Of these 424 bugs...

... are pending	32
... are patched:	64
... are duplicates:	47
... are in Non-free or contrib:	9
... are claimed by someone:	17
... are fixed in the delayed queue:	6
... are somehow marked as fixed:	39

Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
260 That's a pretty number, isn't it? There are only 260 bugs left which need our immediate attention :) But that is a rather optimistic view of the situation. We e.g. assume that all bugs having a patch are really fixed by the patch. We also ignored, that some bugs in squeeze are already fixed in sid, but the package can't migrate because the package in sid contains a new bug. (Which happens to release wizard Marc Brockschmidt quite often.) So if we take off the purple classes and take a more pessimistic view (release mangers must be pessimists to ensure high quality packages ;) we count the bugs in squeeze and ignore only those bugs, which are:

• hinted / delayed upload (hint means a package is forcefully migrated from sid to squeeze without waiting the usual time span)
• merged
• contrib
• non-free
• bugs invalidated by today's britney (fixed in sid, package will migrate soon)

With this release managers views, 424 bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release. As far as I know, we can freeze once that number is reliable under 300. So we better get working ;) When asked, what is the thing mostly needed to help the release, I was told: mips porter!
As you might have read we have some problems with the mips and mipsel architectures. It seems we have all the hardware we need, but it doesn't work very reliable. I have been told, that over 300 packages are only waiting to be build on mips* architectures. So if you can help us in that regard, please contact our mips porter mailing list. Update: Andreas Barth just told me, that he already send a couple of mails to the mips list describing the problem and asking questions. Answers to these questions would be most welcome and accpeted gladly.

Some of the participants of the BSP here in M nchengladbach asked me to put the blog post from blog.credativ.com on planet Debian. I think thats a great idea as the BSP was not only successfull, but also a lot of fun and it was very nice to meet a lot of Debian Developers and package maintainers. We were glad that so many people followed the invitation! So here we go - please leave your comments at the original blog post.

---

The 2010 Debian Bug Squashing Party turned out to be a great success: around 200 bugs were fixed, ready for the forthcoming version of Debian. The weekend of 22-24 January saw this year s Bug Squashing Party hosted yet again by credativ. The aim of the weekend was to find and fix bugs in the next Debian release. The results were as follows: Altogether that gives a grand total of 200 bugs. In addition, information was gathered on a further 100 bugs, which will help when they come to be fixed. A lot of time was also spent on quality assurance, an under appreciated but very important job. More gossip: it is rumoured that backports.org is not far off becoming an official Debian project and in the meantime it will be launching a brand new website running on ikiwiki. Our guests from far and wide were more than happy with the BSP party: Steve McIntyre: (Debian project leader)

Thanks to the folks at credativ for hosting and participating in the BSP - we got a huge amount of work done towards the next release and had a great time doing it!

Stefano Zacchiroli:

My 1st M nchengladbach BSP, won t be the last! Lots of cool people and hacking, and I ve enjoyed my 1st traditional Formorer s chilli too :).

credativ would like to thank all those who came and got involved - now you can lean back, relax and enjoy the photos of the event.

When users upgrade Firefox, they are shown a special web page after restart. As this was obviously very Firefox oriented, this was disabled in Iceweasel. Until a week ago. A week ago, I created a (quite raw) web page that users of Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 would see after they install or upgrade. The idea behind this page was suggested by Moritz Muehlenhoff during my BoF at DebConf 9, and consisted of displaying a call for help message in a splash screen. What most looked like this in Iceweasel is the Firefox feature mentioned above. I unfortunately wasn t able to implement it until now. So, a week after these pages were put online and Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 was uploaded, even though I can t say it s a huge success, it at least led to some movement: More than 12000 users (still growing) saw the pages, out of which almost 1800 (roughly 15%) followed the link for a new logo. While there was no contribution for a new logo yet, there has already been several translations contributions for the web pages, in german, spanish and italian. Next iceweasel upload will consequently send users to a localized version of the web page when it exists. The server logs also allow to have some figures on the usage of localized versions of Iceweasel, but as this is based on user agent strings, it is not totally accurate, though somehow interesting:

1. english: 58.3%
2. german: 15.2%
3. french: 7.9%
4. spanish: 3.8%
5. italian: 2.7%
6. polish: 2.5%
7. japanese: 2.2%
8. russian: 2.1%
9. portuguese: 1%
10. czech: 0.6%

Another interesting figure is that apparently 2.4% of users haven t upgraded xulrunner-1.9.1 and are not using version 1.9.1.6 with their Iceweasel 3.5.6. I m afraid of what this can mean for stable security updates, although, as being security updates, they may be followed better. Somewhere around 7% of users have, at some point, changed their user agent string to include Firefox in it, because web sites suck. This is a very interesting figure because despite that being quite significant, we haven t got that many complaints (I m not saying there weren t, but I would have expected more, considering the amount of users involved). Fortunately, this was changed recently, so all these users could reset their user agent string. And last but not least, except amd64 and x86 users, we saw 14 powerpc users and 7 arm users.

A new release of our Rcpp R / C++ interface classes is now out, the version number is 0.7.5. It comes on the heels of the release 0.7.4 and keeps with our semi-frantic schedule of releases every ten or so days going. The package is now on CRAN and Debian, and mirrors start to get the new versions. As before, my local page provides more details and Romain's blog is always worth watching too. The changes are summarised below in the NEWS file snippet, more details are in the ChangeLog as well.

0.7.5	2010-02-08
    o 	wrap has been much improved. wrappable types now are :
    	- primitive types : int, double, Rbyte, Rcomplex, float, bool
    	- std::string
    	- STL containers which have iterators over wrappable types:
    	  (e.g. std::vector<t>, std::deque<t>, std::list<t>, etc ...). 
    	- STL maps keyed by std::string, e.g std::map<std::string>
    	- classes that have implicit conversion to SEXP
    	- classes for which the wrap template if fully or partly specialized
    	This allows composition, so for example this class is wrappable: 
    	std::vector< std::map<std::string> > (if T is wrappable)
    	
    o 	The range based version of wrap is now exposed at the Rcpp::
    	level with the following interface : 
    	Rcpp::wrap( InputIterator first, InputIterator last )
    	This is dispatched internally to the most appropriate implementation
    	using traits
    o	a new namespace Rcpp::traits has been added to host the various
    	type traits used by wrap
    o 	The doxygen documentation now shows the examples
    o 	A new file inst/THANKS acknowledges the kind help we got from others
    o	The RcppSexp has been removed from the library.
    
    o 	The methods RObject::asFoo are deprecated and will be removed
    	in the next version. The alternative is to use as<foo>.
    o	The method RObject::slot can now be used to get or set the 
    	associated slot. This is one more example of the proxy pattern
    	
    o	Rcpp::VectorBase gains a names() method that allows getting/setting
    	the names of a vector. This is yet another example of the 
    	proxy pattern.
    	
    o	Rcpp::DottedPair gains templated operator<< and operator>> that 
    	allow wrap and push_back or wrap and push_front of an object
    	
    o	Rcpp::DottedPair, Rcpp::Language, Rcpp::Pairlist are less
    	dependent on C++0x features. They gain constructors with up
    	to 5 templated arguments. 5 was choosed arbitrarily and might 
    	be updated upon request.
    	
    o	function calls by the Rcpp::Function class is less dependent
    	on C++0x. It is now possible to call a function with up to 
    	5 templated arguments (candidate for implicit wrap)
    	
    o	added support for 64-bit Windows (thanks to Brian Ripley and Uwe Ligges)

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

RCBW - #20 With a couple of days of delay, here are this last week squashes, by yours truly:

• bug #567767 - nxml-mode - request removal, integrated into emacs23
• bug #546764 - d-feet - add missing dep on hicolor-icon-theme
• bug #566290 - php-wikidiff2 - add missing dep/substvar on phpapi-*
• bug #567860 - php-net-ping - sponsored fix (+ upstream release) for DM maintainer
• bug #248275 - anteater - proposed removal
• bug #536285 - mirage - avoid tricking users to delete the wrong file (patch by Evgeni Golov)

The delay is due to FOSDEM, it's hard to squash bugs when you are: (1) having fun (best FOSDEM ever, if you ask me), (2) connected with very poor network connectivity (let's say: FOSDEM-quality network). Also, there are just 6 squashes, but last week there were 8, so ... (I know, I suck). Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite Mehdi Dogguy: he was with me at JFLA 2010 last week and I've managed to grab him into the "RCBW tunnel". With a handful of well-targeted NMUs, he has fixed about 10 RC bugs in the few days of the conference. He is too shy to blog about that, but since I'm evil, I'm disclosing it here Welcome on board, Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue doing that!)

I do not like it when people tell Web 2.0 sites to send me invitation e-mail. I won t enumerate the reasons here. But there is one reason for why I don t like you passing on my address to those sites, which is subject of this article: Unlike popular belief, the Web 2.0 is not a money-printing machine. It s a long road until you can actually generate real money with user content. Therefore, some shadey sites are probably selling contact details to advertisers to make ends meet while hoping for the big cashflow. I don t have any data to back this up, and I want to change that:

Please tell all your Web 2.0 sites to send me an invitation! Please use an address in the signmeup.madduck.net domain for that, and make sure to include the domain name of the service to which you sign me up before the @ symbol. Also append a hyphen/dash and a random, short string. More on that in just a sec. For instance, if you are one of those people that believes that letting people know where you are (and have been) at any point in time, tell Foursquare to send an invitation to:

foursquare.com-ponies@signmeup.madduck.net

The reason for the random, short string ( ponies ) is simply so that I can later cross-check that a message receiving spam actually went through a social networking site I intend to catalog the invitation messages.

Thank you for your time. Keep in mind: the more, the merrier. I ll make sure to report back on the outcome of this little experiment right here, so watch this space. NP: Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

Two weeks ago I got myself a nokia n900 phone which is running maemo 5. So far I am quite happy with it, given that my previous phone was a sony erricsson p1i which is pretty crappy.
I've taken some notes about my experiences:

• under normal use the battery lasts for ~ 2 days, if I'm using 3G the whole day I need to recharge it daily though


• the terminal has a bug which results in the enter key not working under some conditions, ctrl-m works as a workaround though


• playing normal dvdrips in mplayer is absolutely no problem without downscaling, 720p doesn't perform though


• I somehow managed that my screen flipped and I wasn't able to flip it back, only a reboot solved that


• It is not clear to me which tools you will find in the list of installable packages and which are only visible with apt-cache search. I also managed to end up with a doubled launch icon in my application list for some application


• the termininal is not usable anymore after an ncurses program crashed, "reset" doesnt help either


• wireless uses less battery than umts, way less


• the back button in the browser is per default opening a fancy eyecandy browse history which is slow, so I mostly use backspace to browse back


• there is lots of useful tools in the extras-devel repository, e.g. I can control my mpd via mmpc from the phone which is great



• importing contacts works flawlessly, also merging existing contacts works as expected


• jabber (including xmpp calls) are integrated in the contacts information (you can merge a jabber uid into an existing contact)


• i've no idea yet what the internal video player is, but i wasn't able to play a non downscaled XviD file with it, mplayer does play it fine


• freely placeable widgets are awesome


• it's is really userfriendly and no geeky linux user phone


• i would prefer not having busybox per default, i can install bash but the libc is still from busybox which implies world readable password hashes in /etc/passwd, so no other user accounts on my mobile


• is there disk encryption available?


• n900fly can't cause any good


• gps with nokia maps is ok and I find it pretty usable even if a google maps client would be nice as well


• the mp3 mplayer sucks unless you have tagged your music properly, you can't just play some folder without having a playlist for it


• mplayer as an alternative from the console is no real alternative either, if you don't redirect its output to /dev/null it gets stuck in a loop when the display blanks,


• app manager locks dpkg lock even if you just list available programs, no idea why this is needed and no idea how aptitude and synaptic are doing this


• is there a good todo manager which comes with a widget listing todos?


• is it possible to install armel debian packages without having a debian chroot?


• sms are nicely organized per contact in an instant messaging fashion


• the builtin accelerator works nice and you can automatically flip the screen when you want to dial a number, sometimes happens by accident though


• the multiuser support works awesome and you get a nice overview of open applications in a compos fashion, it may be wise to have not 40 applications open though


• the list of processes is already huge (like 160 processes running in the background)


• i haven't checked out the sdk yet but I will do that soon as I need e.g. newsbeuter for RSS


• hardware feels robust, arm cortex a8 is imho a very good processor, RAM could be more (the phone is heavily swapping)


• you can not yet use the phone as a wireless access point without building your own kernel images, some people seem to be working on this


• you can manipulate all kinds of stuff through the sysfs, including the phone led and the vibration


• wireless certificates are sometimes shown to be invalid but there there is no details button, you can click only "done"

Those are the things I came up with while using the phone. The calling functionality and everything which is only phone related really works fine and the sound quality while talking to someone on the phone is also really good. So far I am really happy with the phone and I can only recommend it. I hope I'll have some time to port some applications to maemo soon.

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham s gift and this summer s Co-operatives Fortnight. As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

• Can people in the co-op pub smoke? No, there s a bit of drinking in meetings, but not smoking. Some heated debates in meetings are defused by a break to go refill the glasses.
• Gordon Brown and Labour are starting to talk about cooperatives more. What should we do? We need to stand on our own two feet, but expect to be treated equally. A Mutuals Manifesto will be out online next month. In regulation, having the telecoms networks opened up to co-ops and not be so limited would help. One interesting possibility is with football co-ops / supporters trusts: it s been suggested that a fan co-op should have the right to buy a club if supported by 75% of season ticket holders.
• With all the business collapses and Cadburys being bought, what is the temperature of interest in mutuals outside the movement? Good. The only AAA-rated bank in the world is the Rabobank co-op, but remember that co-ops are not immune to failure. Cadburys is not a co-op and was always vulnerable to the current investor-led rules changing its ownership. People are not necessarily thinking of co-ops, so we need to reach out. It s a cynical, apocalyptic age, so we need to prove what we re doing. coops14 is an opportunity. The co-op bank saw a surge in new accounts after it was highlighted in one newspaper as an alternative to excessive banker bonuses. We need to encourage people to act. Reminded of a quote that the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you re still a rat . Research shows that Britain today is a brutal and competitive place to grow up in, with only 45% of children trusting their friends. People have heard of cooperatives. We should try to build a more cooperative nation.
• Comment from the floor that the private sector won t take substantial cooperative competition lightly. We must look behind us and never give them a chance.
• Could the BBC become a co-op? Yes.

Questions about the annual report asked about:

• What is our target profit %? No hard target. This year s reduction was planned and it is still a profit.
• Why are we using UKMail instead of the Royal Mail? 10k price difference. It was a hard choice, debated by the board, but there is no co-op option and no particular preference for state ownership.
• Why are we considering energy supply? Telecoms is a deflationary market, so diversification is a wise move and energy supply is a top customer request.
• What is our churn rate? 1.5%/year, which is unsatisfactory to us, but still low by industry standards.
• Was the Avoco acquisition price too high? a good price by usual industry measurement (multiple of sales)
• Will we support coops14 Free and Open Source Software events, because there is an overlap? (I didn t catch the answer)
• Can we put leaflets in the shops? Matt Lane is working on this and other opportunities
• Can we encrypt bills and emails if customers want it? exec will take and deliberate on that
• Can we get some sales materials to Scotland? details taken to send them out next week

Quick public service announcement (which probably comes a bit too late, sorry): There's a coreboot developer room at this year's FOSDEM (Free and Open-Source Software Developer's European Meeting), which starts roughly... um... today. In 20 minutes, actually. Unfortunately I cannot be there, hopefully there will be video archives of the talks. If you're at FOSDEM already, here's the list of talks:

Sat 13:00-14:00 coreboot introduction (Peter Stuge)
Sat 14:00-15:00 coreboot and PC technical details (Peter Stuge)
Sat 15:00-16:00 ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 16:00-17:00 coreboot board porting (Rudolf Marek)
Sat 17:00-18:00 Flashrom, the universal flash tool (Carl-Daniel Hailfinger)
Sat 18:00-19:00 Flash enable BIOS reverse engineering (Luc Verhaegen)

Highly recommended stuff if you're interested in an open-source BIOS and/or open-source, cross-platform flash EEPROM programmer software.

The xulrunner test suite now passes on sparc, involving a fix for an existing bug, and a new bug report. Next target is powerpc, where, interestingly, the test suite only failed 3 tests on the porterbox, where the buildd failed 58 And contrary to sparc, the failures don t involve crashes. Update: powerpc is now fixed, too, with a little help from luck and good timing: the 3 failing tests had all the same origin, and it was fixed a few months ago in upstream trunk.

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

Finding a high quality mp3 converter
has long been a challenge. Happily, software developers have designed Factory Audio Converter. It converts audio files to MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, APE, MP4, FLAC, MPC, AAC. The array of input formats is even broader: MP3, RA, RMM, RAM, RPM, RM, RMVB, WAV, OGG, CDA, APE, APL, MPC, MP+, WMA, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, TTA, OFR, SPX, WV, XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX, AMR, MP3/OGG compressed MODs, MIDI, VQF, AU / SND, PAF, IFF, SVX, WAV, SF, VOC, W64, MAT4, MAT5, PVF, XI, HTK, CAF. If you are looking for a flexible audio conversion utility, this one is the best!

Good audio converters feature batch mode. If you have a lot of wma files and would like to save them as mp3, you need a fast-working and powerful wma to mp3 converter. Factory Audio Converter can convert hundreds of files within seconds. If you have gigs of music on your PC, you can set the utility to convert all of them and turn in. You will get up in the morning to see all your files saved in your preferred format!

By aid of Factory Audio Converter, you can convert wma to mp3 right from the desktop. Once installed on a PC, the program integrates into Windows seamlessly, and Convert to option appears in the right-button menu. All you need to do is right-click on a wma file and select Convert to. You can also run Factory Audio Converter from within other programs via command line.

Advanced users do not only want toconvert wma to mp3
. They want to do it easily! User-friendliness all but heads the top-importance list of characteristics. Factory Audio Converter has a robust and intuitive user interface. It does not take any background to understand how to use it. The program wizard will guide you through the whole procedure. It will help you select your settings. You may either skip it and leave the default settings or specify your own settings. Sound quality will depend on your choice of bitrate, samplerate and channel.

The more new features a program has, the more likely it is to enjoy demand. Factory Audio Converter incorporates a built-in audio player and CD ripper. You can listen to your tracks prior to conversion and compare output and input files. The CD ripper will rip your CD files and help you save them on any type of hard drive. Factory Audio Converter permits you to change wav to mp3
and save a lot of drive space. Now you can use any portable player and listen to your favorite musicians any time, wherever you are!

You can buy Factory Audio converter at a price comparable to that of any other converter. However, few converters are comparable to Factory Audio Converter in terms of user friendliness and productiveness. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="My Friend Audio Business Converter Product" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/05/my-friend-audio-business-product/"></script>

Sarah got a piece of mail today from USQ, with a very ominous "Do Not Bend" on it. It turns out because she averaged a 6.5 GPA in semester 2, she'd qualified for a special Dean's Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, and will get a mention on the University's website and in a bunch of newspapers. I'm really proud of her. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from semester 3 (the Summer semester) study because all of the baby's brain stuff came up right towards the end of semester, and that on top of moving and trying to renovate was just too much for her. She's intending to take Semester 1 off, because the baby's due right around exam time, and then resuming study in Semester 2.

According to an article in theWashington Post, Weekly Edition, 9 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, companies that employ more women in upper level management are more profitable than those that rely heavily on male talent to run their businesses.

This exciting (but not surprising) news is not limited to the United States, but is true throughout the world.

And it s not only one study, but at least half a dozen, from a broad spectrum of organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University, that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success. By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.

One of the points made in the Washington Post article was that men may naturally be more prone to risk taking and competition (thanks to the hormone testosterone), but women are better collaborators and better at achieving long-term results.

So men, if you want your businesses to flourish, hire and promote more qualified women. The results are in, the statistics speak for themselves. Men are the hares and women are the tortoises, who will win the race steady and slow. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="More Women in Management, the More Profitable the Company" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/04/more-women-in-management-the-more-profitable-the-company/"></script>