Search Results: "cas"

27 November 2009

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 12

RCBW - week #12 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly: The funniest part of this RCBW issue is probably that Luk has started handing over RC bugs to me: from time to time I just get a /query from him with bug numbers :-) In fact, this is more useful than one can imagine, because a considerable amount of time in periodic RC squashing is taken by triaging the RC bug list to choose your targets. Of course there is no guarantee that I'll be willing/able to fix handed-over bugs but, as a RM, Luk has evidently well-trained feelings about how hard would be to fix a given bug. All in all, for this week it worked well: 4 of the above 7 came from SchindlerLuk's list. ... and of course, let's welcome Simon on board! He is definitely doing a better job at spotting packages that should be removed from the archive rather than resurrected (potential negative effect that a NMU can indeed have on a package, de facto "saving" it from testing/release exclusion). In fact, the dilemma of "NMU vs Request Removal" raises various tricky questions. For instance, while we currently have pretty clear guidelines on how and, more importantly, when doing NMUs, we are more stringent on "Non-Maintainer Removals". Quoting from the Package Removal Requests wiki page: 
    In all cases, if there is a maintainer and it's not you, mention the
    maintainer's opinion or, if you don't know it, mention how and when you
    tried to contact him.
It is of course reasonable to be more stringent on a measure that is way more invasive than a "simple" NMU. But if we start to rely on NMU-time as an important trigger for removal requests, then we could probably use a more aggressive and more distributed process for removals.

Vincent Sanders: Here comes the weekend

Well that was an unproductive week. Maybe I can do something interesting over the weekend? Nope, looks like I get to run around after the kids and do household chores.

Fortunately the interweb is here to entertain you! I am sure most of you have already seen it but the Muppets doing bohemian rhapsody is fun. The Nottingham university scientists explaining the small hotrod collider is amusing and two girls, one uke is safe for work.

Unfortunately there have been other happenings this week which are not so amusing, the extensive flooding in parts of the UK has caused many people a great deal of harm and in one case a policeman, protecting others, was swept to his death from a collapsing bridge.

Unfortunately due to a confluence of events I will not be able to attend the Bug Squashing Party (BSP) in Cambridge this weekend as I had originally intended. I do hope to be able to contribute some work on Sunday from here.

Russell Coker: Who Should Edit Wikipedia and Where Should they Do It?

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting little column for Make magazine about Wikipedia and the way that it contains facts about facts [1]. One of the issues with this is that you can t (or at least shouldn t) make corrections based on your own knowledge of a subject, you need to cite references. Cory gives a hypothetical example where a world renowned expert couldn t simply fix an error in Wikipedia, but they could give an interview with the New York Times decrying the quality of Wikipedia and citing the correct data then once the NYT article was published it could be referenced as an authoritative source and the page updated. Mako wrote about the Wikireader (an offline reader for Wikipedia) and advocated a facility for writing changes while offline and uploading them [2]. From the perspective of improving the state of the art in computer science and making new features available for more users this sounds like a great idea. But in terms of fitting in with the way Wikipedia works it doesn t seem viable to me. Any time that you need to use an offline Wikipedia reader it seems that it will either be impossible or unreasonably difficult to gain the net access necessary to find the reference that Wikipedia requires. Sure you could fix spelling errors, reformat paragraphs, etc but not do anything serious. I wonder how many people actually put any serious effort into Wikipedia with the sole purpose of making it more readable. In terms of my own editing I have made a number of changes that improve readability, but all of them were due to reviewing pages for technical accuracy. One of the comments on Mako s post suggested that instead of having an option to directly edit pages there be an option to take notes on pages which could then be used for later editing. Maybe something like a two button combination to flag a particular paragraph as being of dubious accuracy so that the user could later do some Google searches for references. Of course another problem with this is the delay in updating a Wikireader. For most reading of Wikipedia it doesn t matter if the content is 6 months old, so we should expect that most users of the Wikireader don t have the latest data. The Wikireader company offers an update service of posting a new memory card twice a year [3]. Given postage delays etc we should expect that the average age of the content is about 4 months for people who subscribe to the update service, and probably a lot greater for people who download the updates. The popular pages of Wikipedia change fast, in the space of 4 months a page can change significantly. In terms of general Wikipedia operation I wonder if it would be beneficial to have a button to flag content as possibly not meeting the Wikipedia guidelines. It seems that the number of people who can recognise low quality pages is going to be significantly higher than the number of people who have the skill and time to fix them. I m sure that there are many people who would just love to be able to choose from a list of Wikipedia pages that have received many negative votes. Such votes could be stored offline and uploaded later, but again that would rely on having recent content on the reader (it would be annoying for a recently fixed page to keep getting voted down). One area where offline editing of a Wiki would work well is that of niche Wikis. For example if I downloaded a copy of the Debian Wiki (which would only take a tiny fraction of the space in a Wikireader) then I could easily update it every week and the incidence of other people editing a page in the mean time would often be low. I could write long updates that make significant changes to SE Linux related pages while offline without needing any references and in many cases without much risk of conflicts. Implementing a distributed version control system to manage such updates shouldn t be difficult in principle, although the VCS might have to run on a laptop or desktop system after taking raw data from the Wikireader (tools like GIT seem memory hungry and might not fit on a small device). Also Mako refers to the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia . Like Mako I don t have a TV watching personality. I agree that it is desirable to facilitate read-write access for everyone, but that doesn t have to involve write access to Wikipedia. I am not convinced that there is a difference between the number of readers and editors of Wikipedia that indicates a problem here. As something becomes more popular the number of people who use it without being committed to it increases, and it also becomes more integrated into society. I don t think it s a problem that many people use their writing time for other tasks such as blogging rather than editing Wikipedia. Wikipedia makes a great reference for blog posts and blog posts drive readers (and thus potential editors) to Wikipedia. Finally I think we should consider the fact that different people have different skill sets. Maybe the Wikipedia reader base gained a significant portion of the people who have the skills to make good editors a long time ago and now the majority of new users just don t have the skills. If that is the case then having the ratio of readers to editors change in favor of readers while the number of readers expands would be a good thing. I don t think that I am being elitist in acknowledging that different people have different skill sets, and that some portion of the population will lack the skills necessary to make good contributions to Wikipedia (good enough to outweigh the mistakes that they make). I think that valuing the contributions of all people in society does not require that we value all contributions to Wikipedia.

26 November 2009

Josselin Mouette: The new faces of Europe

This is it. We know the faces of people who will count in Europe during the 2009-2014 period. And we can count on them to make the EU weigh even less than it did until now. Jos Manuel Dur o Barroso, president of the European Commission. For 5 years, this ultra-liberal brought in his fanatic views of the free market, leading to unprecedented removals of regulations and legislations that could prevent large corporations to extort money from citizens. He holds a non-negligible responsibility on the (still unsolved) bank crisis of 2007. Yet, citizens voted en masse earlier this year for the EPP all across Europe, leading to his renewal. You get the commission you deserve. Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council. This is no secret that this transparent non-leader was the choice of Sarkozy after Tony Blair turned out to be an unsustainable choice. Yet, none of the 26 other members of the Council dared to raise a single finger against this choice. Sarkozy has completely lost his credit in France, but that doesn t prevent this council of cowards from trusting him, apparently. It s not as if there weren t good candidates, like Jean-Claude Juncker or Vaira V e-Freiberga. But having a competent, Europe-friendly president who actually knows his files and speaks many languages would have cast shadows on those who don t (see below). Catherine Ashton, foreign ministry of the EU. If there was any worse possible choice, I don t know which. This was the only position supposed to be affected to a socialist. And since the Labour party is still member of the PASD, despite their insane liberal economic policy and their full-scale paranoia leading to unprecedented freedom hunting in the UK, the position was given to someone from this party. And among them, they chose a person with a reputation of sloppiness and incompetence, who doesn t speak correctly a single foreign language. It is probable that, just like Van Rompuy s going to be Sarkozy s puppet, she s going to be the UK Foreign Office s servant. And we continentals all love the Foreign Office s policy, which is often in complete opposition to what the rest of Europe feels like. Jerzy Buzek, president of the European Parliament. You don t know him? Neither do I. A weak parliament goes with a weak parliament president. This way, the European Council has its hands free for behind-the-curtains arrangements, rather than letting the citizens representatives take action. Martin Schultz, president of the PASD group at the European Parliament. In order to ensure his place as president of the Parliament for the second half of the period, he betrayed his own people, and accepted any rotten compromise the EPP would propose for the key positions. Socialists have never been so weak in Brussels, and the total absence of leadership has something to do with it. Makes you proud to be European, heh? And of course you already know the real faces of Europe for the next years. Sarkozy, Merkel, Berlusconi, Brown. The main leaders from Western Europe, with their rotten governments who swore to slay any of the remaining personal freedoms in each of their countries. What a great image for EU in the world. What a great example to set. But again, you get the leaders you deserve. That s the whole point of democracy.

Tim Retout: My favourite Ubuntu patch

I thought I should share my current favourite Ubuntu patch. While hunting for easy RC bug fixes yesterday, I stumbled across mit-scheme_7.7.90+20090107-1ubuntu1.patch [roughly 9MB]. It contains a Debian .deb to bootstrap the Ubuntu mit-scheme package (bug filed). Nice. Now, to be fair, Debian has a bootstrapping problem for mit-scheme as well - it requires itself to build, but is currently uninstallable in unstable (although zack's on the case). Having looked at the problem, I think the best thing to do in the long term would be to package mit-scheme-c (which appears to be a superset of the upstream tarball for mit-scheme?) and then use that to build the other package. This would also provide a version of mit-scheme for arches other than i386. If maintainer-built binary packages are going to get thrown away at upload time, that would have been the only way to solve the bug, I think. (I don't mean to fuel the Debian vs. Ubuntu flames; it would have been nice if the MOTUs could have fixed this in less of a hacky, license-violating way, but they did at least get the package to build, which is more than Debian can do at the moment. I intend to keep a closer eye on Ubuntu bugs and patches for the various packages I work on, because keeping divergence to a minimum should benefit both distributions.)

Vincent Sanders: Sometimes it don't come easy, sometimes it don't come at all

My work sometimes causes me to have reason to change small things in open source projects which I then have to submit for consideration upstream. Often this is as simple as providing a patch on the relevant mailing list and moving on.

Sometimes however the change is larger and I really would like to see the feature or bug fix accepted by the project. I am fortunate that my employer is enlightened enough to not only accept this but actively encourage participation in open source communities.

Most of the time the patches are accepted, with changes or updates, in a reasonable timescale. Certainly for kernel work I have got used to a submission/accept time measured in hours!

On occasion the change gets dropped on the floor or missed and you have to resubmit (even if its just to get told its uninteresting and to go away ;-). Unfortunately there are a small number of projects where getting something merged is an experience in frustration.

The particular project which has caused me the most trouble along these lines is Qemu. Daniel and I did the work to support the Samsung ARM based 2410 and 2440 System on Chip (SoC) and a couple of boards they were used on. Of course we then presented the patch to the Qemu mailing list. That was in November...No, not this year, or even last, we are talking 2006!

Unsurprisingly there were numerous issues with our first cut, we improved the patches and resubmitted them and received absolutely no feedback. Eventually we provoked the maintainer to respond, we took his feedback into account and resubmitted. After a year of so of this Daniel got bored and gave up.

Being a complete idiot and apparently sucker for punishment I decided to re-try. I completely restructured the port and started by just trying to get the absolute minimal core changed accepted. It took some time to provoke a response (oh and they altered RCS which meant I had to change my submission again, but they did change to git so that is acceptable ;-)

Earlier this year resulted in my all time favorite maintainer response. Eventually I managed to find out he actually objected to the patch because the SoC we were using actually required a slightly different processor capability set (the emulation is ARMv5 by default and the SoC in question is ARM v4te, hey I had not noticed any practical difference, and Qemu is an emulator not a simulator...but OK)

Remember this is the first time this objection has been raised in 30months of patch submission. Fine, I create a patch which adds V4te emulation and submit that. I eventually get a response, to which my reply is a little frustrated I will admit.

I have since resubmitted the patch with the corner cases fixed, it has been ignored, and I never have received a reply to my direct questions. On this three year anniversary of the original submission I am simply going to give up, something I detest doing.

I am one of those dull people that finishes what he starts, that is pretty much my role in Simtec these days, ensuring stuff we start gets finished or at least drawing the line and calling it complete. To end up with a complete failure offends my personal values.

Now please do not think I hold any ill feelings towards anyone concerned, open source maintainers perform their roles without pay and, by extension, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. I am sure people are too busy to care about the itch I wanted scratched and that overall their project has not really lost all that much by not having me as a contributor.

I know I could have forked the project, or maintained my own tree or any number of other technical solutions but at the end of 1,100 days I have finally exhausted my enthusiasm and can move on. Speaking of which, time to resubmit a kbuild change which got dropped ;-)

Michal Čihař: Ubuntu bugs for second time

It looks like my post about bugs in Ubuntu has received a bit more attention than I expected for few lines of ranting :-). Most interesting reactions came to Lucas Nussbaum's blog. There were nice explanations how it is supposed to work, but the problem is that people out there can not manage that amount of bugs. It is possible, that for some core packages, they manage to do the job. However most bug reports will probably go to some leaf packages, which are not that important, but lot of people use them. I started to interest in bugs in Ubuntu when I noticed that there is some huge number of bugs linked on phpMyAdmin's PTS page. There was something like 50 too much bugs. After quick look I could see that most of them are duplicates. After little fight with ajaxy interface, I even managed to mark most of them as duplicates and fix it in Debian package. But as somebody with no knowledge of Ubuntu (and not willing to learn internals of yet another distribution, I think Debian and OpenSUSE is enough), I really have no idea what could be done to push some bug fix to existing release. So once some Ubuntu release (The Lucid Lynx in this case) got new version, I marked the bug as fixed. This is probably not that nice to users, but somebody from Ubuntu community should take care of them. Off-topic PS: If anybody is interested in Google Wave invitations, just write me an email, I currently have 15 without any use.

25 November 2009

Erich Schubert: Lost an ext3 filesystem

These days, something happened to one of my external USB drives that I so far only knew from ReiserFS (which I since called ReisswolFS, German word play on "shredder" ...). But, it's not ext3 which I blame.Short story what happened: What I will do now: As you can see, something was wrong with the system, not with the file system.I have a strong suspect to have caused this. In case you wondered why I included "resumed from suspend" above: I've been having system stability issues with resume ever since upgrading to the Intel driver 2.9.0 and KMS (Debian unstable+testing) with kernels up to 2.6.31. In about 1 out of 5 resumes, I get a Xorg or system lockup after anything from 1 to 60 minutes. Sometimes I also experience video corruption after a few minutes, trashing some terminal emulation until the next redraw. Just before writing this email I had a typical lockup: when scrolling the terminal emulator. This has been a typical trigger for lockups. On contrast I havn't seen any such crashes (or screen corruption) on a fresh boot.Freedesktop bug reporting the same issue closed as "not our bug, blame it on the kernel".Note that 2.6.32 release candidate Changelog contain many changes for the intel DRI kernel driver. So the bug might already be fixed in the RC kernels.Same report in Kernel Bugzilla is still 'NEW' though.Related bug report in Debian, blaming it on KMS.

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: Ubuntu Bugs

(Context: Michal iha complains about bugs filed in Ubuntu not being looked at nor forwarded to Debian or upstream) Michal, I think that your complaint is caused by a misunderstanding of how package maintenance happens in Ubuntu. I ll try to clarify it, based on what I understand (if you know better than me, don t hesitate to comment). The part of Canonical maintaining the distribution is organized into teams (full list here), like Kernel, Foundations, Desktop, Mobile, Server, etc. Most of those teams have mirror-teams in the community, like the Ubuntu Desktop team. Those teams take care of subsets of packages in Ubuntu, of relevance to the respective teams. (This is orthogonal to package upload rights, which are managed with the Ubuntu Core Development Team, and the Ubuntu Development Team ; there s a proposal to change that so that package upload rights are based on the first set of teams). However, there are some packages (probably more than 70% of the packages in Ubuntu, including main+universe) that are of no interest to any particular team. Those packages are maintained on a best-effort basis by all the Ubuntu developers (inside the loosely defined MOTU team), and focus is usually on not diverging from Debian, to make their work as easy as possible. It s very similar to what we do in Debian with orphaned packages: sometimes, important bugs get fixed, because someone complained loudly enough or a developer ran into the bug and did a QA upload ; but usually, we don t really do any bug triaging. Of course, there are some packages in Ubuntu that are not maintained by any core team, but still have someone that cares about them. They are more the exception than the rule. So, yes, obviously, you will run into packages with lots of untriaged bugs, sometimes even with patches. And those bugs and patches are rarely being forwarded manually to Debian, simply because nobody cares about those packages in Ubuntu. In an ideal world, with infinite resources, this would not happen, of course. But realistically, this is not going to change anytime soon. There s a link on the PTS to the bugs of your packages in Ubuntu. The idea is to allow an easy access to the bugs reported in Ubuntu, which are likely to be also relevant to the Debian package. You should probably feel welcomed to triage the bugs against your package in ubuntu, if it makes it easier for you to monitor them. There s some noise in the Ubuntu bugs, of course, but more and more often, by looking at the Ubuntu bugs, I find important bugs in my Debian packages that are not even reported in Debian yet.

Gunnar Wolf: Source format 3.0 (quilt) for teh win!

My Debian QA page shows what I consider to be a huge amount of packages I am currently uploader for 207 packages. Why so many? There are many factors The main one is group maintenance (I'm directly responsible only for 19; of course, this should not mean I disregard the rest of them), the second one is regularity. By far, most of my source packages (177) match lib.*perl, followed by lib.*ruby with 20. Anyway A strong factor that allows the pkg-perl group to be successful in maintaining 1411 packages is the regularity of the task: Packaging Perl modules is usually as easy as running dh-make-perl on them (of course, not taking away the merit of packaging the few strange corner cases In Ruby-land, the landscape is quite different. The developer community is quite anchored in agile worldviews, which go beyond coding practices and all the way over to confronting the way most Free Software projects distribute their work. I have previously ranted presented informed and opinionated blog posts on this topic Ruby culture dictates the distribution via Ruby Gems, which are for many reasons not Debian friendly. Besides Gems, most projects have adopted Git for development tracking and are hosted under Github That's why I came up with Githubredir, which basically presents an uscan-friendly listing of tags for a given project. But if you develop in Git, you might want to split a project in its constituent parts for easier organization, without meaning that each subproject should be an independent project by itself, right? After all, that's what Git submodules are for. That's what happened with a great PDF generating library for Ruby, Prawn. Thing is, the three parts of the main project are required for the project to be built. Anyway, that was a great reason to move the package over to the new dpkg 3.0 (quilt) source format. And, yes, it is a straightforward move! If you have not yet done so, take a look at Raphael Hertzog' explanation+FAQ wiki page. It just works, and makes many things way easier. There are still some wrinkles in my packaging, like where I'm getting the orig tarballs from As the submodules are not presently tagged in any way, I was only able to download a snapshot of their respective current master branches. This is suboptimal, I know, but I have talked to the upstream author, and he confirms that for the next major version (which should not be long in coming) the tags will be synchronized, and things will be even cleaner. PS- I love Hpricot. To get the numbers for my QA page, I just had to get three dirty but useful arrays:
  1. require 'hpricot'
  2. require 'open-uri'
  3. url = 'http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=gwolf&comaint=yes'
  4. doc = Hpricot(open(url))
  5. tot = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row  
  6.         (row%'td' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .select   i  i 
  7. team = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row 
  8.          (row%'td' % 'span.uploader' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .
  9.        select   i  i 
  10. mine = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row 
  11.          (row%'td' % 'span:not(.uploader)' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .
  12.        select   i  i

And work from the three very simple lists there i.e. tot.select pkg pkg =~ /lib.*perl/ .size gives me 177.

Biella Coleman: Ninja Mind Tactics

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

Biella Coleman: Ninja Mind Tactics

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

24 November 2009

David Welton: Google Design Annoyance

I'm the last person in the world to have much of anything to say about visual design, but this one is so blatant that even I can't help but notice: Adsense Analytics See the big blue button in the same place? In one case, it is a 'sign up' button, in the other it is an 'enter if you already have an account button'. This is visually confusing for those (and there are a lot of us, I'm sure), who use both products.

Joerg Jaspert: Tssk.

The conclusion of this discussion is that systems like cmucl are no longer possible under this new system.
You are wrong. If there is a good reason, there can be exceptions. As we mentioned. One of those is for new architectures. Another can be for such packages. But not for I am too lazy to do that , only for it is impossible . Whatever it might be in the cmucl case. Anyone else up for a useless discussion via blog posts?

Russell Coker: Car Drivers vs Mechanics and Free Software

In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said If you don t know how to make a surgery, you don t do it. If you don t know how to drive, don t drive. And if you don t know how to use a computer, don t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses. Later he advocates using a taxi. Now I agree about surgery apart from corner cases such as medical emergencies in remote places and large-scale disasters. I also agree that it s good to avoid driving if you aren t very good at it (that would be much better than the current fad of sub-standard drivers buying large 4WD vehicles). But I don t think that people who lack computer skills should avoid using computers. When cars were first invented everyone who owned one was either a mechanic or employed one. Driving a car often involved being well out of range of anyone else who might know how to fix it, so either the car owner or their chauffeur had to be able to fix almost any problem. As the car industry evolved the level of mechanical knowledge required to own and operate a car has steadily decreased. I expect that a significant portion of drivers don t know how to top up the oil or radiator water in their car and probably don t know what is the correct pressure for air in their tires. To a large extent I don t think this is a problem, owning a car involves regularly taking it to be serviced where professionals will (or at least should) check every aspect of the car that is likely to fail. If I used my windscreen-washer less frequently I could probably avoid opening the bonnet of the car between scheduled services! When budgeting for car ownership you just have to include regularly spending a few hundred dollars to pay for an expert to find problems and fix them with of course the occasional large expense for when something big breaks. When the computer industry matures I expect that the same practice will occur. Most people will buy computers and plan to spend small amounts of money regularly to pay people to maintain it. Currently most older people seem to plan to have a young relative take care of their PC for them essentially free mechanic services. The quality of such work will vary of course, and poorly designed OSs that are vulnerable to attack may require more support than can be provided for free. Due to deficiencies in city design it is almost essential to drive a car in most parts of the US and Australia as opposed to countries such as the Netherlands where you can survive quite well without ever driving. When a service is essential it has to be usable by people who have little skill in that area. It would be good if driving wasn t necessary, I would be happy if I never drove a car again. The need to use computers however will continue to increase. So we need to make them more available to users and to support users who can t disinfect computers etc. The only skill requirements for using a computer should be the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse! This requires a new industry in supporting PCs. Geek Squad in the US [2] seems to be the organisation that is most known for this. I expect that there will be multiple companies competing for such work in every region in the near future, just as there are currently many companies competing for the business of servicing cars. We need support for free software from such companies. Maybe existing free software companies such as Red Hat and Canonical can get into this business. One advantage of having such companies supporting software is that they would have a strong commercial incentive to avoid having it break unlike proprietary software vendors who have little incentive to do things right. The next issue is the taxi analogy. Will software as a service with Google subsidising our use of their systems [3] take over any significant part of the market? Of course the car analogy breaks down when it comes to privacy, no-one does anything remotely private in a taxi while lots of secret data is stored on a typical home computer. Google is already doing some impressive security development work which will lead towards low maintenance systems [4] as well as protecting the privacy of the users to the extent that you can trust whoever runs the servers. My parents use their computer for reading email, browsing the web, and some basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet work. The mail is on my IMAP server so all I need is to have some way to store their office documents on a server and they will pretty much have a dataless workstation. Moving their collection of photos and videos of their friends and relatives to a server will be a problem, transferring multiple gigabytes of data on a cheap Australian Internet access plan is a problem.

Lucas Nussbaum: UDS Lucid

I m back from Dallas, where I was invited at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Lucid. I spent a great week there ; the event was extremely well organized (by organizing them every 6 months, you are probably able to gather a lot of experience!). Of course, after all I had heard about people hugging each other all the time in the Ubuntu community, I was a bit worried, especially with the flu spreading! But there are lots of fantastic people around Ubuntu, and it was a very nice opportunity to be able to meet them all. Since it was my first UDS (I was at FOSSCAMP in Prague a few years ago, but didn t stay for UDS back then), I was not really sure of what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised. UDS vs Debconf UDS is very different from Debconf. In Debconf, we do three different kind of things: In UDS, the main focus is on the third point: most of the sessions are about discussing what will be implemented for the next release. All of the relevant developers are in the same room to discuss possible problems, and the outcome of each session is usually a detailed plan, with a list of action items. It s a very nice way to ensure that changes are well thought, and allows making large-scale changes in Ubuntu very easily (you don t spend weeks arguing about them on mailing lists). Of course, it s probably also helped by the fact that there s a company behind Ubuntu, with a set of large teams (kernel, foundations, desktop, etc), which helps transfering trust (not everybody feel like they have to participate in each discussion, even when they affect the whole distribution: the team in charge is trusted by the rest of the project). On the other hand (yeah, let s be negative for a while) it doesn t really help spreading information between Ubuntu developers: it s often a bit difficult to get the global view of what is happening inside Ubuntu, especially since lots of things are discussed on IRC. Collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu During the week, I mainly was interested on collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. There s a strong focus on doing the right thing wrt Debian (and also other upstreams). Then, of course, Ubuntu also has an agenda, which sometimes requires moving very fast on some things, or making compromises between technical purity and pragmatism. But the willingness to have common foundations between Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid will surely benefit both distros. Quality Assurance On the QA front, I am planning to do archive rebuilds for Ubuntu as well (fixing FTBFS is an easy way to start contributing to Ubuntu or Debian, and having those bugs fixed in Lucid would benefit Debian as well, by having patches already prepared). I also had a session with the QA team, where I gave an overview of what we are doing in the Debian QA group, to discuss opportunities for collaboration. The Ubuntu QA team focuses more on testing (with automated or manual testing) and bug triaging than archive quality that part is left to the MOTUs and the release managers. (About MOTUs, I liked how what they do was described as long-tail maintenance, landscape gardening or terraforming. That gives a good idea of what it s about). Ultimate Debian Database On the Ultimate Debian Database front, I did a plenary talk to try to demonstrate how UDD could be useful to Ubuntu as well, and, with Jorge Castro, we examined some metrics of Ubuntu s giving back to Debian. I also talked with the Launchpad team to try to resolve my long standing pretty please provide an export of Ubuntu bugs, so I can easily import them in UDD! issue. Ubuntu and ARM ARM netbooks and smartbooks (mix between netbooks and smartphones) are coming, and Ubuntu is clearly very well positioned to play an important role on that market. There was a whole track about ARM support, with lots of changes that will be done for Lucid. Let s all hope that Ubuntu-powered ARM netbooks win that market, so we don t reproduce the failures of the non-ARM netbooks. Distributed Development James Westby has been working on a set of tools to be able to work on Ubuntu packaging using bzr. The point is not to store the canonical source for Ubuntu packages in bzr (well, at least it s not the plan yet), but to provide a set of branches to make it easier to merge or cherry-pick from Debian. The resulting workflow looks extremely nice, with lots of syntaxic sugar. And even better, he assured me that his code is portable to Git ;)
Using his work, merging Ubuntu-specific changes in a new version of a Debian package basically means pulling from lp:ubuntu/foopkg, merging from lp:debian/sid/foopkg, and you are done!
As a bonus, we (Debian) would get bzr branches with the history of packages (kind of bzr-powered snapshots.debian.org).
James project is not completely ready yet, but should be very soon. It s already basically usable, apparently. Conclusion Ubuntu has clearly gone a very long way since 2004. Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop. With Cloud Computing and now ARM netbooks, Ubuntu has proven to be able to adapt to the current trends and attract a lot of visibility. It is great news for Free Software, but also proposes an interesting challenge to Debian: of course, it s nice that a Debian-based distro is in that position, but will Debian manage to stay relevant, or are we just going to be the technically-pure distro without many users that serves as a package supermarket for Ubuntu?

23 November 2009

Sune Vuorela: Subclassing QMutex considered harmful

If you are using QMutex, you are probably writing threaded applications, and thus want to use helgrind (part of valgrind). helgrind has some support for threading and mutexes in Qt, but not fully. If you try to run a app using a QMutex subclass in helgrind, it fails with

<appname>: hg_intercepts.c:2124: _vgwZU_libQtCoreZdsoZa__ZN6QMutexC2ENS_13RecursionModeE: Assertion 0' failed.
Basically, it is the handler for the _ZN6QMutexC2ENS_13RecursionModeE symbol that is implemented as assert(0);. The demangled symbol is QMutex::QMutex(QMutex::RecursionMode), which looks very much like the constructor for QMutex:
$ objdump -T /usr/lib/libQtCore.so grep _ZN6QMutexC
00068840 g DF .text 0000005b Base _ZN6QMutexC2ENS_13RecursionModeE
000687e0 g DF .text 0000005b Base _ZN6QMutexC1ENS_13RecursionModeE
which both demangles into the same QMutex::QMutex(QMutex::RecursionMode) The important difference is the C1 vs C2 in the mangled symbol name. The C1 symbol is used for creating QMutex objects (complete object constructor), wheras the C2 symbol is used for creating subclasses of QMutex (base object constructor). And the C2 handler in helgrind is as said implemented as assert(0);.
So until helgrind is fixed here, please be careful to not subclass QMutex. (the destructor handler for subclasses is also implemented the same way) QMutex has no virtual base class, so even in case of subclassing, I think the helgrind handlers should be implemented the same way in the base object constructor as in the base complete object constructor. I guess I should file a bug against helgrind. A test app if anyone is curious:
#include <QtCore> class mymutex : public QMutex
public:
mymutex(QMutex::RecursionMode=QMutex::NonRecursive);
;
mymutex::mymutex(QMutex::RecursionMode mode) : QMutex(mode)
int main(int, char**)
mymutex m;
QMutexLocker lock(&m);
return 0;
Update 1: Bug filed.
Update 2: Better understanding of virtual base classes. Thanks Thiago

Russell Coker: Designing Unsafe Cars

The LA Times has an interesting article about problems with Toyota and Lexus cars [1]. Basically there are problems where the cars have uncontrolled acceleration (there seems to be some dispute about whether it is due to engine management or the floor mat catching the accelerator pedal). When that happens the brakes don t work (due to the vacuum power-assistance for brakes going away when the engine is at full power) and a terrible crash seems inevitable. There are suggestions that the driver should shift the car to neutral and discussion about how the Toyota gear selection makes that difficult. Some years ago I was driving an automatic car on a freeway at 100Km/h and the engine stalled (due to a problem with the LPG system). I had become used to never touching the gear lever while driving so the possibility of moving the gear lever one notch to neutral didn t occur to me. With a dead engine in gear the car slowed rapidly which is quite dangerous when surrounded by 100Km/h traffic. Fortunately I was able to swerve into the emergency lane (across one lane of active traffic) before the car slowed much. That was in a relatively controlled environment with a gear shift mechanism that is a lot simpler than that which is common in some of the more expensive cars. According to Wikipedia the maximum speed limit in the US is 80M/h [2]. It seems to me that Toyota is being irresponsible by selling cars that can sustain 120M/h, while the probability of surviving a crash at 80M/h is quite low, it seems likely to be a lot greater than the probability of surviving a crash at 120M/h. Also if a car is out of control at 80M/h then the driver will have a lot more time to work out how to put the engine in neutral or turn it off the lower speed will extend the time available by more than 50% because bends in the road can be better handled at 80M/h. It seems to me that it would be a feature for the car owner to have the car limited to a speed that is not much greater than the speed limit. According to Wikipedia the highest speed limit in Australia is 130Km/h (in NT), but it s 110Km/h in all places where I have driven. If my car had a governor to limit the speed to 115Km/h and a switch to change the limit to 135Km/h in case I ever drive to the NT then it would not affect my driving patterns (I rarely drive on roads with a 100Km/h limit and almost never drive on roads with a 110Km/h limit) but it could reduce the probability of things going horribly wrong. Also one thing to note is that last time I checked car tyres sold in Australia were only required to operate safely at speeds below 190Km/h (118M/h), so a Lexus that went out of control at 120M/h in Australia might risk a tyre blow-out which admittedly would only make things marginally worse. A governor for the reverse gear would also be a good feature. Some time ago a granny got her foot stuck on the accelerator in a car park and caused serious damage to her car and a parked car after passing close by where I was standing. I don t think that there is a real need to do more than 5Km/h in reverse, limiting the speed would give pedestrians a better chance of escaping parking accidents. One serious problem with some of the Toyota and Lexus vehicles is that it apparently takes 3 seconds to turn the engine off in an emergency! I ve been driving for almost 20 years and experienced a number of dangerous situations, all of which were essentially resolved (for better or worse) in significantly less than 3 seconds. A 3 second delay is as good as a 1 hour delay for safety critical systems. Also if the accelerator and brake pedals are pressed at the same time then the brake should take precedence. It seems quite obvious that whenever both pedals are pressed hard then the driver would probably prefer hard braking to hard acceleration. If you look at industrial machinery (robots, lathes, etc) you will always see big red buttons (or whatever color is used for emergency stop in your region) that are clearly marked and obvious to the workers and to bystanders. Escalators have less obvious red buttons but they can still be shut down in an emergency. It seems to me that there are potential benefits to having an emergency shutdown button in a car, maybe in a position that is accessible to the front-seat passenger in case the driver is incapacitated. Such a shutdown button wouldn t do anything extreme such as fully activating the brakes (which would be very bad on a road that has high-speed traffic), but would prevent acceleration (with some sort of hardware control to avoid software problems) and maintain power to the brakes and the steering. One thing that needs to be considered is that people tend not to do the most logical things when in an emergency situation. It needs to be possible to do whatever is necessary to save your life without any great deal of thought. Pushing a big red button is easy, holding down the on button for 3 seconds or even navigating a gear shift to an uncommon setting is a lot more difficult. It seems to me that there is also an issue of driver training. If putting an automatic car into neutral and cruising to a stop was part of the test for new drivers then the results of such car problems might not always be so bad. But I don t expect there to be any serious changes to driver training or car design. People are too accepting of road deaths. Don Marti has expressed a plan to never buy a vehicle with an automatic transmission because of this issue [3]. But the number of new vehicles being sold with a manual transmission is steadily reducing. An automatic transmission allows better performance (F1 cars have used them for ages), better fuel efficiency (you could never make a manual Prius), a more comfortable ride (the Hybrid Lexus keeps winning the Australian Luxury Car of the Year award), and allows less skillful drivers. Unless Don wants to ride a moped or drive an old car then I expect that he will be forced to get an automatic transmission. Then of course he will still be at risk of other people having car problems (the LA Times article mentions a third party being killed after an out of control car hit them). Also I expect that the extra safety features that are implemented in luxury vehicles such as the Lexus would save a few lives, they should save enough to outweigh the number that are lost on the rare occasions when the car goes out of control. Other luxury cars such as the Mercedes S class have great safety features and don t have a history of going wrong in a newsworthy way. A second-hand S Class Mercedes was surprisingly cheap in the UK last time I checked, cheap enough to make it worth considering the importation of one to Australia. But my solution to these problems is to try and minimise my driving. A 1.5 ton Lexus driving out of control at the maximum speed possible in urban streets won t do much damage to a 20 ton tram.

Vincent Sanders: Fitting Everything In

Recently I have been having issues fitting everything I want to do into the time available.

As my kids grow up they always seem to need to be taken someplace or picked up from an activity and that is on top of the daily school run. I recently worked out I spend over eight hours a week, a whole five hundred minutes, taking them to and fro.

Now do not get me wrong, I actually enjoy spending time with my children and we do talk and interact during these occasions but it is hardly a stimulating activity walking to school or being driven to a club.

Add to that my job and its traveling requirements and assuming I want to sleep, eat etc. and all of a sudden I discover I have about forty hours left in a week to share between my family and hobbies.

Anyone with kids knows they are a wonderful time sink :-) and of course the family home often needs something doing. All of a sudden I realize why I feel like I often end up having to trade sleep for my hobbies!

As I get older I find I still have the same number of ideas for projects but the realization that even if I find the time to start something I am unlikely to be able to devote the resources to finishing it. Being one of life's boring people who like to finish a project they start (ok at least make something useful) this means I tend not to start new things too often.

All of this has lead me to become very careful about how I spend my free time and on what. It means my personal involvement in software projects like Debian and the Linux kernel is nowhere near the level I might like. Similarly my music practice (or absolute lack thereof) causes my teacher to get snippy with me.

As you can imagine starting something like a blog when I do not have enough time for what I am already doing is something of a challenge for me and may indeed falter. However I shall give it a chance as I feel a need for public place to share all those small things which I would probably put on my personal website if I had time to work on it ;-)

Holger Levsen: munin 1.4.0 in experimental

Saturday I have uploaded munin 1.4.0~beta-1 to experimental, though it is currently awaiting NEW processing, as it introduces new binary packages. This upload is due to the awesome work of Tom Feiner who joined the munin maintainers team following up on the RFH bug I filed in July 2009. At first, Tom helped out with some bug triaging and worked on some patches. So he then got commit access (to the svn repo which hosts both upstream code as well as the debian packaging), which quite soon he also used to fix issues in upstreams trunk too and finally prepared this release mostly on his own, with me just doing some mentoring work. Overall, I'm totally impressed and happy with his work on the package. Tom, kudos & thanks a lot!

Munin 1.4.0 comes with a lot of new features (the most important ones being SSL and multigraph support) and new plugins, and of course, lots of bugfixes too. If you're curious, read the upstream changelog. Also noteworthy, the number of (Debian) patches has gone down from 64 to 8!

Please report bugs and experiences to munin-users@lists.sourceforge.net unless they are specific to the Debian package, in that case, please use the BTS as usual. The final 1.4.0 release is scheduled for this friday, unless real blockers are dicovered :-) Expect it to hit unstable on friday or saturday too, unless real life or other blockers prevent it :-)

If this post has made you curious and you cannot wait for the package to leave NEW, svn-buildpackage it yourself from the debian experimental branch.

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