Let's start with a caution: this is a work-in-progress and is aimed at Squeeze (for the tools) and Squeeze+1 for the actual TDebs. Nothing about TDebs will happen within Debian any time soon. DebConf9 could be an important step in the work - as long as we've released Lenny by then.
Various steps and decisions have been discussed and tested during the meeting, to the point where we now have an early draft specification for tdebs.
See also details of the ftpmaster meeting and progress on i18n and tdebs.
The draft spec includes links to the current resources, including links to git repositories for the changes being tested for dpkg and debhelper.
These changes will supersede the existing experimental scripts in the emdebian-tdeb package.
The spec will continue to be updated during the rest of this meeting and I'll continue working on the dpkg and debhelper support.
(A trivial patch for CDBS support is already done, dependent on the debhelper support.)
Next on my ToDo list is Emdebian Grip - including a few tweaks to em_installtdeb.

I've always installed the smartmontools package on my servers because I figured it'd maybe give me some early warning about an impending disk failure. Getting proper SMART access was one of the motivating factors in moving my home-brew SAN from IDE-to-USB disks to native SATA. Since then, I've had two drives fail on me. One of the original four that I bought, and the replacement one that Seagate shipped to me. (Incidentally, I love how your only recourse to a replacement drive failing with Seagate is they'll ship you another (reconditioned) replacement drive. I can see the shipping expenses racking up very quickly). I decided to do the expedited return when the second drive failed, just because it meant I didn't have to be without a disk in my RAID-10 for a week while I waited for them to receive my drive and turn around and ship me a replacement drive, and it also meant I didn't have to mess around with packaging it myself. (Incidentally, I wonder what happens in Seagate's reconditioning process? Will someone else get my failed drive (i.e. the same serial number) after they replace the platters or whatever it was that failed? Would it be interesting to set up a website where people could register the serial numbers of drives they returned to Seagate, and how they died, and at how many power-on hours? How many times does a drive get "reborn"?) Whilst I was waiting for the replacement drive to arrive, I messed around with the failed one (I removed it from the RAID array), fiddling with the SMART self-tests that smartctl can initiate for you. The faulty drive failed the long self-test at the same LBA every time I ran it. It was around this time that I realised that the default configuration that comes with the Debian smartmontools package isn't all that useful with SATA disks. It ships with

DEVICESCAN -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

which, as it turns out, doesn't detect SATA drives properly. I got

Nov 24 22:00:13 minotaur smartd[2990]: Device /dev/sda: ATA disk detected behind SAT layer 
Nov 24 22:00:13 minotaur smartd[2990]:   Try adding '-d sat' to the device line in the smartd.conf file. 
Nov 24 22:00:13 minotaur smartd[2990]:   For example: '/dev/sda -a -d sat' 

logged. It seems to me that if the software can detect this situation, it should be able to just try the "-d sat" behaviour automatically. So it seems that this whole time, I haven't been getting any SMART monitoring of my SATA drives. hddtemp has been happily logging the temperatures for me though. So I took the advice in the comments of /etc/smartd.conf and removed the DEVICESCAN entry in favour of explicitly naming the disks I wanted to monitor. I also discovered that I can have smartd kick off scheduled short and long self-tests on whatever schedule floats my boat. So now I've got something like this:

/dev/sda -d sat \
         -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner \
         -s (L/../.././01 S/../.././(00 12))

This runs a long self-test at 1am every day, and a short one at midnight and midday. Hopefully this will help predict the next drive a bit earlier. I'm now debating whether to set up an active Nagios monitor for SMART, or to see if I can write a passive one that runs as part of the smartd-runner infrastructure that the smartmontools package provides (and is pretty neat). I guess it's already setup to email me, so it doesn't really matter whether it's Nagios emailing me, or smartd itself.

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character. Furthermore, the novels have gone out of print, and are only available from amazon.com as used books. Unfortunately, I travel a lot. So much so, that one of the few times that I have time to read is when I’m traveling. And I really dislike having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around; they take up far too much weight and space in my carry-on luggage. Unfortunately, these out-of-print novels were published by a Neanderthal Publishing company who hasn’t made any of the books available in ebook format, DRM’ed or no. Grumpy, I searched on Internet, and found all three novels were easily available for free download — in a pirated form, of course. Should I download them and convert them into a form which would allow me to read them on my Sony eReader? Well, according to Russell Davis, former chair (and now president of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) of the SFWA’s Copyright Committee, “electronic infringement is theft”. From a legal perspective, I suppose that is true. And given that as an Open Source programmer, I depend on Copyright Law to assure that my wishes as an author are upheld, it would be hypocritical for me assume that I should be able to ignore Copyright Law just because it is inconvenient. And yet… from a moral perspective, who has really lost anything? The argument made by Russell Davis is that infringement is bad because it is “harming authors and author estates”. Jerry Pournelle has indignantly proclaimed that e-piracy goes against a “specific (and very stern) Biblical injunction against stealing from widows and orphans”. Of course, in this case, the author is still alive (and is female, although I suppose stealing from widowers would be just as bad). Also, given that the author has publically stated she doesn’t plan to write any more books involving this character (since some of her more psychotic readers sent her death threats as a result of reading said books), the publisher is highly unlikely to re-release said novels — and if I buy used dead-tree versions of said novels, the author doesn’t receive any additional royalties. So, then, where is the moral bright line?

• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, and lug it around, inconveniencing me, causing more CO2 emissions by shipping the book to me, and in the airplane because of its added weight, as the only way I can comply with copyright law? Furthermore, should I do this to set an example to all of the younger generations that are treating copyright law much more casually, much as essentially all drivers casually ignore the law’s dictats to not drive faster than the speed limit? (Many have argued that the current state of affairs with respect to music and etexts and copyright law is bad because it encourages people to not respect the rule of law — I guess, as the argument goes, if people don’t respect the copyright law, what’s next? Torturing prisoners in Guantanomo in violation of the law? Oh, wait… too late…)
• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, slice the binding off, and then run pages through a scanner and an OCR program, then spend hours reformatting it into an .LRF file so I can read it on the Sony eReader? Would that be considered fair use?
• What if I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, but to save the time and effort of scanning the pages and correcting the OCR errors, download the pirated e-text, and convert it into an .LRF file and enjoy it on my Sony eReader?
• What if I don’t purchase the dead-tree copy of the book, download the pirated e-text, and send a money order (so it can’t be traced) for roughly the same amount of money as the cost of the used dead-tree version of the book to the author, with a letter explaining why she was receiving this check?
• What if I just download the pirated e-text, justifying my actions that no one is actually getting hurt my downloading the text and reading it; after all, since it is long out of print and not available from any booksellers as a new book, the author isn’t going to be getting any more royalties anyway.

Somewhere along this continuum, we’ve crossed over from the light-side to the dark-side. Setting aside the observation that the Neanderthal attitudes and business practices of the publisher involved has made it impossible for me to legitimiately follow the law, enjoy the novels, and direct money to the author via royalty payments — what do you think is the morally correct course of action? And why? And if you don’t mind saying so publically, roughly what generation are you from (i.e., Baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, etc.)? I’m curious how attitudes are changing based on age, and whether folks who are currently in college might differ from those who can remember a time when the Internet didn’t exist… Update: I’ve posted a follow-up to this post here.

Russell I know this is odd but I have an email message for you (from someone else who can’t seem to successfully get it to you). If you would like it, drop me a line and I will pass it along. (I have no idea why they wrote me but..)

The very worst of the United States is summed up in this tragic story.

Yay, long time since the last ftpmaster blog post. Time to write a new one. It’s not that I haven’t done anything since my last post, it just wasn’t only ftpmaster related. Right now I’m somewhere in Extremadura, Spain, at the Ftpmaster / I18N / QA Meeting. This meeting is near to the location of DebConf9, so yesterday we visited that venue. Still have to upload the pictures I took. It’s pretty nice, but I fear we might have a problem with wheelchairs. While the venue is very well prepared for wheelchair users, like having ramps or electric elevator platforms for every little staircase, I see one big problem in the size of the elevator going from the ground floor up to the first level. We don’t have exact measurements currently, just our rough guess from looking at it, but this is something we definitely have to look in. Something similar applies to the sleeping place. They do have a room for disabled people, but we couldn’t look into it when we where there, as it was in use (And it is pretty unpolite to just move into an occupied room). So we need to get an exact floor plan and hopefully also pictures for it later on. Luckily, the sleeping place is a much smaller issue, if it doesn’t fit we could think about placing disabled people in a Hotel. More ftpmaster related we had a lot of discussions about one of our main agenda points for this meeting, tdebs. The more we discuss it, the more we all hate it. Its a topic that touches nearly everything in Debian and will redefine quite a lot of places/actions/behaviours, so it needs a lot of thought. Which is what we start here. We wont be able to get anything substantly implemented here, but I think we can get to a common understanding of a specification and a Todo. After all the schedule currently has “lenny + 2” for this, its not a light weight step. But thats not all, would be boring if we would have only one topic. Us ftpteam also intends to/does work on other issues, like a redesign of dak and the database below it. And today we issued a statement about the AGPL. Not ftpmaster related, but also a nice work done here in Extremadura, is the setup for mirrors of packages.debian.org. This enables us to mirror the part of packages.debian.org to other .debian.org hosts thats responsible for the web view, and as such allows us to have redundancy in case of errors, load balancing and all those nice things. Comments: 2

Today I phoned Optus to disconnect my Internet service. Some time ago I got an Internode [1] SOHO connection. This gave me a much faster upload speed (typically 100KB/s) compared with Optus having a maximum of 25KB/s. Also Internode has better value for large data transfer (where “large” in Australia means 25GB per month) and I get a static IP address. I also get unfiltered Internet access, Optus blocks outbound connections to port 25 which forced me to ssh to another server to test my clients’ mail servers. But the real reason for leaving Optus is based on events two years ago. When I first signed up with Optus four years ago my contract said “unlimited uploads“. What they really meant was “upload as much as you want but if you transfer more than 8KB/s for any period of time you get disconnected“. They claimed that running a default configuration of BitTorrent was a DOS (Denial of Service) attack (the only part of their terms of service that even remotely permitted them to disconnect me). So I was quite unhappy when they cut me off for this. What really offended me was the second time they cut my connection. I had been running BitTorrent on Friday and Saturday, and they cut my connection off on Wednesday. Once it was determined that the issue was uploads we had a bit of a debate about when my BitTorrent session was terminated, it was my clear memory of using killall to end BitTorrent during a commercial break of a TV show on the Saturday night vs the Optus idiot claiming they had a record of me doing big uploads on the Sunday. But I let the help desk person think that they had won that debate in order to focus on the big issue, why large uploads on a Saturday (or a Sunday) should result in a loss of service on Wednesday (three or four days later). They said “it was to teach you a lesson“! The lesson I learned is that it is best to avoid doing business with Optus. I didn’t immediately cancel my contract, if you have both phone and Internet service through Optus they do offer a reasonable deal (there are a variety of discounts that are offered if you have multiple services through them). When discussing this matter in the past it had been suggested to me that I try appealing to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman etc. However I didn’t do this because I was in fact breaking the Optus acceptable usage policy for most of the time that I was a customer. When I signed up their AUP prohibited me from running a server and from memory I think it had a specific example of a shell server as something that should not be done, it now prohibits running any automated application that uses the Internet when a human is not present (which presumably includes servers). I’m pretty sure that my SE Linux Play Machine [2] met the criteria. While I’m reviewing Optus service I need to mention their mail server, here is the summary of the Optus anti-spam measures in protecting my email address etbe@optushome.com.au in September (other months were much the same):
131 emails have been sent to your Inbox.
52 of these emails were identified as spam and moved to the Spam Folder.
39% of your email has been identified as spam. The email address in question only received legitimate mail from Optus. This meant that I received between two and four valid messages a month, the rest were all spam. So of the 79 messages delivered to me, at least 75 were spam, and Optus blocked less than half the spam. But to be fair, given that the Optus mail servers are listed on some of the DNSBLs it seems reasonable for them to be lax in anti-spam measures. I wonder whether it would be reasonable for an ISP of Optus scale to run the SpamAssassin milter on mail received by their outbound relays to reject the most gross spam from customer machines. But Optus are good at some things. The download speed was always very good (I could receive data at 1MB/s if the remote server could send that fast). Also their procedures for account cancellation are quite good. The guy who took my call offered to transfer me to the complaints department when I mentioned how I was “taught a lesson”, he also offered me a significant discount if I was to continue using the service. In retrospect I should have had that conversation six months ago and had some cheap service from Optus before getting rid of them. Getting the account terminated happened in a couple of hours. It was so quick that I hadn’t got around to transferring my Play Machine to my Internode account before it happened, so I had a few hours of down-time.

• [1] http://www.internode.on.net/


• [2] http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html

Of course everybody in our crowd noticed the huge "Wifi zone powered by Debian" sticker with a Deban swirl at the restaurant door where we had dinner :-) And the Debian wallpaper among the other images on the screensaver on the restaurants computer was probably also noticed by many. What really freaked me out though (in a very positive sense) was that the owner/someone (? I have no idea, I talked with him, but not about restaurant ownership...) wrote the billing programm himself. When shown the features it looked to me like a good one, with a simple and nice looking interface and appearantly feature complete to manage the restaurant (including creditcard interface etc.). The cashier computer was running Debian and the app is written in gambas2, which is a BASIC interpreter with build-in database abstraction layers and supporting gtk and QT. And he plans to release this as free software. Yay. Yay Yay Yay!

Me looks forward to this to happen and also to get the .svg of the sticker

It's interesting to be here in Casar de Caceres for the joined i18n+QA+FTPmasters Extremadura meeting. Today, I've been sitting all day long in the biblioteca, which is used as hacklab, and just watched all great people around playing around with the concept of "tdebs". That weird beast can be described in two words as a concept of deb packages that would be able to distribute translation data in a more independent way then "regular" deb packages. Don't smash me as the concept is currently being twisted around in all directions by the nice folks here, to bring it to a great concept well suited for "side" material of our packages. To get an idea, you can read the original concept that popped up during the 2006 i18n Extremadura meeting, but got transformed drastically by ideas exchanged at Debconf 8 All this is made possible because the concept is now a very important issue for Emdebian and is strongly pushed by Neil Williams, whose nickname shall now be "MisterT", by general agreement of the folks here. What's really interesting right now is to see live discussions happening all the way round and see the concept slowly emerging from this. Something we could probably never do in regular mailing lists discussions or on IRC. We should really grant tons of rewards to the Extremadura region, and particularly out tireless C sar who again organised that meeting. It's still hard to say what will emerge from this and we willprobably need some more such live meetings to have real implementations of these tdeb beasts, but this is really how I like to see free software development going on. And now people begin to think about coding stuff and prepare patches, which is a good sign, in general.

The other day I was looking at the statistics collected from my web server logs, and saw that easily more than 80% of people who find my website are looking for my Latin vocab learning tools. They’re pretty basic, but I found them to be somewhat helpful when I was learning Latin. I’m seriously considering expanding it a bit, adding conjugation/declension drills, making it a little prettier, etc. Anyway, tonight, I got a nice email from a woman who uses the vocab tools, and noticed that there was a problem with fourth principal part of the Latin verb ‘cado’, and it sent me on a somewhat fruitless search for what the right word is. (A quick primer for those not familiar with Latin verbs: most verbs have four principal parts, which can be used for conjugation. The fourth principal part is the perfect passive participle, e.g. “to have been heard”.) So then, what is the perfect passive participle of ‘cado’, which means “to fall”? Before I get into that, consider for a moment what the translation to English would be. “To fall” is usually used as an intransitive verb (the transitive form is mostly obsolete), so “to have been fallen” doesn’t really sound natural. But the translation can be approximated to something like “to have been dropped” or “to have been struck down”. But what is the actual word that is used? On this there appears to be some disagreement. Wheelock’s Latin says that it’s ‘casurum‘, as does Wiktionary. However, Tyro’s Dictionary says that it’s ‘casum‘, as does All Verbs. Meanwhile, Whitaker’s Words says that ‘casurum‘ is “very rare”, from “later” Latin, and used in the Vulgate Bible, and says it should actually be ‘casusus‘. I still don’t know which one is correct, and suspect that all three are correct depending on the text that’s used. I can somewhat see how ‘casum‘ might have been correct at some point, but changed as it overlaps with the noun ‘casus‘, which is the noun “fall”, as in “that was a nasty fall”. Or vice versa. I tried to go searching through prose to see which was most commonly used, but most of what I found was from the Vulgate Bible and used ‘casurum‘. So, I’m still not sure which is actually the “best” word. I’ve changed the site so that it uses ‘casurum‘ to be consistent with Wheelock’s. So, does anyone definitively know, which is actually best, and what the etymology is?

meta-hacking I've had a lot of fun over the past few years detecting and fixing XSS attacks - a few months ago compromising several thousand user-accounts belonging to a particular niche social networking site and then more recently experimenting with XSS issues upon a popular software developer's advocate blog. One thing I've been wondering about recently is meta-XSS attacks. Consider the LKML (linux kernel mailing list). This list receives lots of long patches, submitted by email, which are copied verbatum to various sites. For example if I mailed an interesting patch to LKML chances are it would get posted to:

• LWN
• KernelTrap
• ...

(Obviously the challenge here is to make a patch sufficiently interesting that it received more than usual coverage.) Do each of those sites HTML-encode patches? In general they do, certainly the ones I looked at had code like this:

#include <linux.h>
...
...

But I'm certain that not all sites do so. I'm also pretty sure there are interesting avenues to explore here, and the general idea of indirectly attacking a specific target is ripe for exploration. Anyway I'm probably not the person to go playing in the field these days; I don't have the time. But it is certainly interesting to think about. ObFilm: Dirty Harry

Space and place has long been important to hackers. Whether it was/is the university lab, the workplace, the hacker con, or the particularly high-tech city, hackers congregate and meet face to face, often and everyday. One semi-new development has been the explosion and proliferation of hacker labs and spaces, such as Noisebridge located in the Mission district of San Francisco Foulab in Montreal. I recently got back from San Francisco and was able to spend a few nights at Noisebridge and was jaw droppingly impressed. The space is, well, spacious and nice (and located right by the Bart, a real +++++), but more important is that it is a thriving collective with all sorts of geeky participants and they have just souped up the space with all sorts of equipment, from the usual suspects (lots of computers) to lots of electronic gear such as oscilloscopes. What I also was impressed by was not only the blizzard of events but the open and accessible nature of the organization, which seemed to sit in some contrast to NYC’s hacker collective, NYC Resistor. Like so many organizations in this metropolis, they apparently are lacking in space to grow and the word on the streets (which I cannot confirm or deny as I have had very little contact with them but have heard this repeatedly) is that the organization has had a tough time letting in new members. Some folks are understanding of this given their space limitation, others have been less kind, and have referred to the group as a clique. There are already a few other initiatives under way to find a larger space so as to accommodate a more open, participatory atmosphere for a hacker space but I imagine that over time the culture and developments of NYC Resistor will also change as new spaces develops and do hope that this creates the conditions for more access rather than less (and again, I know next to nothing of the situation though I suspect space plays a real limiting role as it does with nearly everything else in NYC). And thankfully Rose White, a NYC-based sociology graduate student at CUNY, is paying close attention to the rise and development of these hacker spaces. She is well underway doing her dissertation dissertation on these hack spaces and I really look forward to her work.

So, I've just got a portable machine. I've configured it to be a pretty minimal installation of Debian Lenny, but one thing that makes me unhappy is mail handling. By default it came with several exim4- packages. Now in general Exim4 rocks. But it is a deamon running all the time, and overhead I could live without. I looked around to find a mail transport agent that would be more suited to the machine and was suprised to find nothing suitable. Basically I figure the machine will never generate "real" emails. Instead it will only receive mails from cron, etc. The machine will never have a real fixed IP, and so relaying mail externally is a waste of time. The mail should just go somewhere predictable and local. There are a couple of lightweight agents which will forward to another system, but nothing seems to exist which will queue mail locally only. So I've hacked a simple script which will do the job. Given the spool director /var/spool/skxmail the following command:

skxmail root < /etc/passwd

Produces this:

/var/spool/skxmail/
 -- root
     -- cur
     -- new
         -- 1227702470.P8218M243303Q22.vain.my.flat
     -- tmp
4 directories, 1 file

That seems to be sufficient for my needs. (I support the flag which says "read the receipient from the body). Of course to do this properly I'd be setgid(mailgroup). Instead I assume that local means everybody can see it and /var/spool/skxmail is mode 777. Ooops. Still happy to share if it sounds interesting. ObFilm: Dogma

Following from unexpected results, I can't make up my mind why Gtk+ supports rotated labels.
Try it, load Glade3, create any normal Gtk window and add or select a standard GtkLabel, add some text. In the properties of the label, there is a spin button for Angle:. Why is that? Which applications have need for this? I can't think of any examples that I've seen in Debian. Does anybody use rotated labels?
I could possibly understand rotations in increments of 90 degrees but this supports rotation at an precision of two decimal places! I mean, why support a rotation of 89.27 degrees?
Even if this was a version of a progress bar, why is it supported for every GtkLabel anywhere?
Weird.
P.S. Off to Extremadura tomorrow, hopefully I'll have a chance to get a better hackergochi too.

Yesterday I exchanged my “old” Thinkpad T60 with a shiny new T500. This time I ordered a Thinkpad with integrated Intel graphics since it’s supposed to be way better supported than the graphic chips from ATI or NVIDIA under Linux. And of course it is supposed to be much more silent. I don’t regret this decision so far, the new T500 is barely hearable even under heavy load. Debian I installed Debian unstable (aka. frozen for waaayy to long) without a problem. Sound worked out of the box, graphics worked somewhat. The kernel automatically loaded the correct modules but I had to tell Xorg that I want the “intel” driver instead of Vesa. Unfortunately Xorg’s intel driver in unstable is already too old to allow me to use an external monitor via the docking station’s DVI port, so I had to to upgrade to Xorg from experimental, which is not very cool since this is the machine I depend on at work. Wifi also doesn’t work, since the the driver and firmware available in unstable are outdated. Suspend to RAM works sometimes, but most of the time the laptop refuses to wake up properly so I have to shut it down. I’ve not yet tested if bluetooth and Wimax works. So currently the T500 is usable under unstable but without external monitor and without Wifi. If you are brave enough to use packages from experimental, you get your external monitor to work but still don’t have Wifi. Suspend to RAM does not work reliably. The T500 should probably work fine with Lenny but of course without external Monitor and Wifi support. Vista After I’ve installed Debian and moved my /home from the old laptop to my new baby, I noticed that silly “Windows Vista” sticker on my laptop. Of course I tried to remove that thing, which I regretted painfully. After I’ve successfully removed the sticker — which was surprisingly hard — some glue remained on the surface of the laptop. No problem I thought, nothing some nail polish remover can’t handle. Unfortunately it only smeared the glue but did not resolve it as I had expected. So I’ve tried perfume, water, soap, rubber, tape and solvent for several hours, but was not able to remove the glue at all. All I achieved was to smear the compact but thick chunk of glue to a very thin but much more distributed layer of this nasty glue on my laptop. Now it looks like a 5×5cm square of dirt on top of my laptop — not sure if removing the Vista sticker was worth it.

I have just encountered a bug in Gnome that is much more visible when the hard drive is slow or overloaded and responds slowly. This gave me an idea - how about a simple transparent FUSE filesystem that does nothing else than delay, slow down and possibly reorder filesystem requests? Such a filesystem would be very useful for debugging. We developers tend to have high-performance systems and that hides many bugs, but if we could have a slower system on-demand, it will give us the ability to debug our applications better. Even better would be a virtual machine where one could arbitrarily slow down any specific aspects of the system - slower CPU, slower hard drive, slower RAM, slower network, … I know that engineers of network hardware have special devices that emulate long distance and noise - you take two wireless network cards and plug cables into their antennae sockets and then plug those cables into the device. The device then makes a connection between those cables, but with emulation of a variable distance, variable antennae and variable environmental noise, so the wireless cards can be tested for distance and noise resistance right in the lab. We could do the same in software for HDD, CPU, RAM and networking - imagine having two Xen instances and putting an emulated network between them with 10 hops, 1 second latency, 20% average packet drop traffic shaping and limited top bandwidth of 100 kbit/s. Now that is a real test platform for any kinds of applications that have anything to do with networking (or HDD, CPU or RAM). Anyone up to making that? Could someone of you use a system like that?

While a few developers have the chance to be paid for their job on Debian, most of us are doing it on our spare time, for fun. Yes, we are making the best operating system out there, for fun. Yet a large number of developers are taking this project way too seriously. To say it in other words, they have a carrot up the ass. I happen to prefer the French expression though, since it conveys better the rigidity of their attitude: they have a broomstick up the ass. Recently, when I launched the idea of the Bug Sprint, someone wrote to me to propose, instead of rewarding people with cookies, to send them money. This is the best example of broomstick behavior: taking the fun out of people by bringing back rampantly the very idea that almost split the project in two the last time it was introduced. The very same person, when faced with a sarcastic email sent to an announcement mailing list, immediately rushed in to send a ban request to list masters (a totally useless one, since I don t have the habit to make the same joke twice). That person happens to be the project leader. So it seems the only thing the DPL has to do, at a time when we d rather need people to fix RC bugs, is to protect the project from seditious members who don t share their love for broomsticks. When someone makes a bad-taste joke, you are not forced to laugh. But you are not forced to impose your rigid and moralist views either. And on top of that, throwing random accusations of sexism without any kind of justification does not improve the mood. This is even very close to defamation, but since I don t have a broomstick in the ass myself, I prefer to just laugh at them with the help of some fellow developers. I will go on shocking these people. And they won t like it more than in the past. Every time one of them climbs on her high horse to take a pathetic and patronizing stance while totally missing the point, it will bring a bit of fun. Bonus #1: as for the promised statistics, we are, at the time of writing, at 493 599 unique IPs who clicked on the trap. Quite a good investment for someone who d want to make money from smelly geeks. Bonus #2: here is a sexist picture.

Sebastian K gler dissects my dissection, except in fact he appears to be responding to a pile of stuff I didn't write.

First of all, Matthew assumes that the setting "powersave" will actually use the powersave cpufreq governor - citation needed.

the "conservative" governor, which indeed is an "ondemand" governor, meaning it gives you the extra needed CPU power when you ask for it - more slowly than ondemand does, resulting in extra power draw. Never run conservative unless your P-state latency is so high that ondemand won't work.

Powerdevil doesn't offer such option, so Matthew will be happy about this item - I didn't say it did. However, it is a common myth that thermal management is part of the job a power management policy should play. CPU frequency changing is a mechanism that can be driven by two policies - power management and thermal management. The fact that they share a mechanism does not mean that these policies should be conflated. Really. I wasn't just talking about Powerdevil here.

"3d takes more energy than 2d" is something I didn't actually say. I brought this up because various people have advocated disabling compiz to save power and because Powerdevil appears to have a "Disable Kwin compositing" button.

Lesson learned: Don't have an immediate emotional response to perceived criticism and fail to actually read what you're responding to. I would have commented on Sebastian's entry directly, but he forbids comments, so fuck that.

I saw a posting about PowerDevil, the new KDE power management interface. It's somewhat disheartening - for the most part, it falls into the same traditional errors made in power management (ie, letting you change cpufreq settings, using "presentation" as a power management setting rather than getting applications to actually do the right thing). But my point isn't to bitch about PowerDevil. My concern is more about why we're still failing to get the message across about certain power management myths. Implementing power management incorrectly leads to wasted power, dead polar bears and wet carpets. It's important that we get this right.

• To a first approximation, the Powersave governor will only save you power if you're playing 3D games. The performance governor will basically never give you extra performance. Don't use them. Use ondemand instead. Do not make it easy for your users to choose them. They will get it wrong, because it is difficult to explain why this result is true.
  
• Thermal management is not the job of a power manager. Using power management to implement thermal management will result in your computer taking up more power overall, reducing battery life. Implement things in the right places.
  
• When people say "Presentation mode", what they mean is "Disable screensaver and automatic suspend to RAM". This is not a power management policy. It is an application behaviour policy. The sensible behaviour is for applications to request that these things be disabled when they switch to full-screen presentation mode. The foolish behaviour is to request that your users select "Presentation mode" in their desktop and then start their presentation in their application and then finish their application and then remember to disable "Presentation mode".
  
• It takes no more energy to scan out a framebuffer drawn with the 3D engine than with the 2D engine. If you're spending a significant proportion of the time on the GPU when in your desktop environment, you're already doing something wrong.

One of the problems is probably that most desktop programmers don't know how hardware behaves. How can we change that?

Gintautas Miliauskas blogs about a computer program that can generate something which reportedly really sounds like composer-written music; apparently it has passed a 'turing test' where people listened to music generated by this thing, and music written by a human composer. I'm afraid, however, I'll have to disappoint him a bit, really. If we ignore the effect that music can have on the emotional state of a living being for a moment, then it's a plain and simple fact that music is pure math:

• 'An octave' is the musician's term for 'a doubling in frequency'. As many people know, a center A on a piano is tuned at 440Hz; it follows that an A one octave higher is tuned at 880Hz, and that the one which is one octave lower will be 220Hz.
• 'Chords' are based around that, too. A regular C chord, for example, contains the C, E, and G notes; and usually, a C at one octave above the first C is included, too. The frequency of a G is exactly halfway between the two C notes, and the E is about halfway between those. Most chords are built in such a manner; the sound waves of those notes will build an interference pattern that is perceived as a chord.
• A melody usually starts with the base note of the key in which the piece is written, and almost always (except during a short time in the early baroque) ends with that same base note. Note that the 'base' note is not the same thing as the "bass" note (although the base is often used in the bass).

There are many other things in music that can be expressed as mathematical rules; learning to how to compose music involves learning those rules, which is a long and tedious process. Now I'm not saying that following those rules will necessarily lead you to an interesting piece of music; the fact that it's possible to create something ugly while still using chords etc. But since so much of it already is math, I can imagine it not being extremely hard to figure out what the other rules are (the ones a composer figures out by imself as opposed to being taught them), transferring them into a computer program, and using that to generate music. That's not to say that such a thing is easy to do, and I'm sure it's still an impressive feat to create a computer program which can create "nice" sounding music; but I don't think this would qualify as 'artificial intelligence'. At least not any more than Deep Blue