On a recent trip up the Oregon coast, a friendly doorman at our hotel in Portland was inquiring about our trip. When we mentioned we passed through Bandon, OR, he quipped that Bandon was the place furthest from a city of one million people in the USA. I guess a normal person would just think "oh, that's interesting" and move on, but it has been plaguing me ever since. Firstly, I had to find what cities in the USA had more than 1 million people. Luckily Wolfram Alpha gives the answer:

• Chicago,Illinois
• Dallas,Texas
• Houston,Texas
• Los Angeles,California
• New York, New York
• Philadelphia,Pennsylvania
• Phoenix,Arizona
• San Antonio,Texas
• San Diego,California

(I certainly wouldn't have guessed that list!) From there my plan was to find the bounding box of the continental USA; luckily Wikipedia has the raw data for that. Combined with the latitude and longitude of the cities above, I had the raw data. I couldn't figure out any way better than a simple brute-force of testing every degree and minute of latitude and longitude within the bounding box and calculating the distance to the closest large city; the theory being that from one particular point you would have to travel further than any other to reach a city of 1 million people. Luckily, that is short work for a modern processor, and hopefully the result would be a point somewhere around Bandon. I'd already become acquainted with the great circle and measuring distances when I did Tinymap, so a quick python program evolved. However, it turns out that the program picks the far south-east corner of the bounding box. Thanks to the shape of the USA, that is way out over the ocean somewhere. I can't figure out a way to get an outline of the USA to test if a given point is inside the border or not, but all is not lost. I modified the program to output the the distance to the closest large city along with the location to a log file, and then imported it into gnuplot to make a heat-map. The hardest part was finding an equirectangular outline of the USA to place the heat-map over, rather than a much more common Mercator projection; Wikimedia to the rescue! I actually surprised myself at how well the two lined up when, after a little work with Gimp, I overlayed them (big) From this, I can see that Bandon, about a third of the way up the Oregon coast, is a pretty good candidate. However, probably not the best; I get the feeling the real point that is the furthest from any city of 1 million people is actually somewhere in the central-middle of Montana. However, we can also fiddle the program slightly to disprove the point about Bandon. The numbers show the closest large city to Bandon is LA, at ~1141km. Taking another point we suspect to be more remote; the closest large city to Portland (where we met the doorman) is also LA at ~1329km. So to reach the closest large city you have to travel further from Portland than Bandon, so Bandon is not the furthest place in the USA from a city of one million people. Myth busted!

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

To count means that you/it/whatever counts matters. If one counts the number of females in many tech/media conference, the number of women is dreadfully low, giving off the meaning and feeling they don t always count, even if they are very well received. There is a new project spearheaded by the efforts of Annina R st that will help us count women at conferences. The project is cleverly called Be Counted and it allows you to input information about gender representation in conferences. Here is a little more about the project and I urge you to check it out and contribute:

The project aims to collect a stream of user-contributed data on gender diversity in technology environments in the form of Gender Ratio Reports (GRRs). The longterm aim of the project is to not just collect but also provide tools for retrieving and visualizing the data in order to encourage others to collectively analyze the patterns behind the numbers.

Kumar brought in some daal roti. Amin announced that he was a gujju and a Patel. Alpesh glanced at him derisively, for he was the only other Indian. Harish told a story about the fishmonger, and Ankit launched into a tirade about his mother's chapati. That may have been all that happened, .

Past wednesday, a new Saturn electronics store opened it's doors right next to the railway station of Brugge (Bruges). To celebrate this, they had several real bargain deals, among which an Asus Eee PC 900 to be had for 129 EUR.

Thing is, the advert wasn't really clear which Eee 900 type it was, and it was contradictory even: the netbook was said to be equipped with the Atom N270, and at the same time the CPU clock speed supposedly was 900 MHz. The latter being the speed of the earlier models that had a Celeron Mobile CPU.
So I called the store and asked for some explanation. The person on the other end of the line, a guy named Kevin, confirmed that it had indeed the Atom N270, yet at the same time ran at 900 MHz and not the usual 1600 MHz. Errrr ?

Well, this is a bargain deal, so that's why it's running at a slower speed. Sure, I know the N270 normally runs at 1600 MHz, only this netbook doesn't.
Yeah right.

I was offered to have one netbook be put aside for me, because they were supposedly running nearly out of stock.
Since you simply cannot find any netbook over here for under nearly twice it's price, I still considered it a good deal. Even if would be the old Celeron model.

I was slightly tempted to ask if it would be possible to have one with Linux rather than the Windows XP version they offered, but as the answer was clear from the outset I refrained to do so.

So after work I drove to the shop, picked it up, and returned home. As thursday evening is swimming evening, I only had time to briefly power it into the bios when I returned home. There I saw confirmed what I suspected, it was a Celeron Eee 900 and not a revision with the Atom.
Saturn really should learn to educate their support staff better.

Still, I'm not unhappy that I bought the netbook it should provide sufficient speed for most things I have in mind to use it for.
Now all I have to do is put a modern OS on it.

[Notice] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting any of the recurring topics I talk about in my blog, feel free to skip it. This is one of the topics I don't like to share as impersonally as a blog post goes But I know I will not be able to meet most of the people I care about that this will reach in person And even if I did, it is not something easy to say. I have failed several times to communicate this to my closest friends. And if you are among the group of people I am thinking of, this will most probably not surprise you, given there is precedent. But in the end, it didn't work out. Nadezhda and I have lived together for practically 14 years. We had a for month long timeout in 2008. And, a couple of weeks ago, decided that we should make the separation definitive while we are in good terms and have hopes to continue having a good relationship. Anyway Life continues. It will take a bit for things to fall in their place. I know that many of you (again, the group of people I am writing this for) know and care for Nadezhda as well as me. We will Try to do things right as much as possible, and keep the many good things that are still there after all. And while life comes back to track, please excuse me for the many oversights I have done and will probably continue doing during the following weeks. (yes, comments closed. As I said ~18 months ago, Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination)

Here's a code fragment to track outgoing links with Google Analytics. As usual, use it at your own risk. I can not give you support for Google products, for obvious reasons.To use it, you <me>need at least understand where to put it (call it in a try-catch in onLoad) and how to adjust the variable name of your page tracker (I'm not using the default).

function trackLinks() 
  var as=document.getElementsByTagName("a");
  var ig=["mydomain.tld","google-analytics.com"];
  for(var i=0; i<as.length; i++)  
    var ignore=false;
    var oc=as[i].getAttribute("onclick");
    if(oc!=null) 
      oc=String(oc);
      if(oc.indexOf('urchinTracker')>=0
        oc.indexOf('_trackPageview')>=0
        oc.indexOf('javascript:')>=0)
        continue;
     
    if(as[i].href.indexOf("mailto:")<0) 
      for(var j=0;j<ig.length;j++) 
        if (as[i].href.indexOf(ig[j])>=0)
          ignore=true;
       
     
    if(!ignore) 
      as[i].onclick = function() 
        var o=this.href.replace(/:\/*/,"/");
        pt._trackPageview('/out/'+o)+";"
        + ((oc!=null)?oc+";":"");
       ;
     
   
 

This code tries to attach an onload handler to any outgoing link, ignoring internal links or links that use JavaScript. If such a link is clicked, it generates a virtual page access with an "/out/" URL that can be analyzed in Google Analytics.A side benefit (apart from knowing which links are interesting to your visitors) is that you should get more accurate "time on page" statistics for your pages.

Lil is white trash. She does not live in a double-wide and make hot dog casserole, and in foreign lands she could easily pass, but she is white trash nonetheless. Lyle is white trash. He does not buy potted meat or have a car up on blocks in his yard, but he is white trash nonetheless. One day Lil and Lyle met, and something drew them together. Perhaps it was a disturbance in the philotic web, or maybe a magical Jungian archetype of a dirty rag as a gas cap that resonated in their minds, but whatever it was, they decided to keep in touch online and get to know each other better, with clear non-platonic overtones. Lyle had a penchant for underdressed girls with a modest amount of tattooes and piercings and a full-on bent for drunken promiscuity. While Lil did not fit this stereotype well, she played up her sexual indiscriminateness and made up a few fetishes to impress him. Lil needed a boy who would not judge her for all her faults and long history of poor decision-making. So Lyle pretended not to judge. One-third deceit, one-third misinterpretation of Internet ambiguities, and one-third imagination led them to develop unrealistic perceptions of each other. Since they also had unrealistic perceptions of themselves, were fairly narcissistic, and were almost totally caught up in their own private melodramas, it took a while for the veil to come down. Come down it did, like an avalanche of Kraft Dinner boxes falling off a Canadian supermarket shelf. Then they were angry. Then they were sad. Then they brushed on fresh new coats of self-delusion and heated up some chicken nuggets.

When you just read the following sentence: "usage of a software, that can only be used together with the Internet Explorer". You already know the consequence that several hundreds Wienux boxes are gone.
Heavily disgusted by the waste of community money. The online local newspaper has a comment that seems quite to the point to me: "If as sysadmin you introduce Linux you'll be accounted for eventual failures, while with softies people just accept the shortcomings and won't blame you."
German source: Wiener Inkompetenz in IT Managment. P.S.: Wienux got setup by inexerienced people having no prior exposure to Open Source. The project setup included a calculated failure from the start.

Linux 2.6.32 was released overnight. This has been a fairly busy release for ASoC, with changes including:

• Redone power sequencing code, giving shorter power sequences which
  should reduce the effect of any artifacts that exist.
• Reporting of power management decisions via debugfs, enabling much
  easier diagnosis of path setup problems.
• Beginning of work to factor out the register access and caching code
  from the individual CODEC drivers into a shared file. This needs to
  be rolled out over more CODEC drivers.
• New CODEC drivers for AD1836, AK4642, MAX9877, WM8523, WM8776, WM8961, WM8974 and WM8993
• New CPU support for multi-channel Blackfin SPORT, DaVinci McASP, i.MX2x SSI, and OMAP 1510 McBSP.

Finally, after more than a year of preparation, and six months of very very hard work, DebConf8 has come and gone. Even if I'm not yet completely recovered from all that stress, I'm good enough to feel really happy about how things turned out. DebConf8 was a great success. We had great talks, many opportunities for developing interesting ideas, a lot of social interaction, an awesome video team that allowed more than 200 people from all around the world to be part of the conference even if they weren't in Argentina, and in general almost everyone had a very good time. It was really nice to have so many people from Debian over here, and it was specially nice to see them working and enjoying themselves so much. This was all possible thanks to our sponsors, thanks to the many hours spent during the previous months both by the DebConf orga-team (the usual suspects) and specially by the local team, which includes Tincho, Dami n, Romanella, Maxy, Sebas, Zero, Mendieta, Dererk, Melisa, Angasule, Lisandro, Nueces, and also thanks to the all help of the volunteers that came to work with us during DebCamp and DebConf, which include Tom s, Tinchito, M nica, Lucas, Germ n, Diego, Fefu, Nicol s, Mart n, Marcos, Hern n, Alejandro, Mat as, Rodrigo, Alberto and Joaqu n, and finally, DebConf wouldn't have been the great event it was without all the people that managed to travel thousands of kilometers to get here. To all of them, thanks, for making DebConf8 such a great conference Now, at last, DebConf8 is over (although there is some stuff that we still need to do before we can really forget all about it), and life goes on. Today, I did my first NMU after a long time. I'm particularly glad to have time for fixing bugs again, but I won't lie, I'm also extremely satisfied with how DebConf8 turned out. See you in Extremadura!

Well that all happened rather quickly. This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling. It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like: The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too. A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm. I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd. Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago. So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires. Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

resurrecting CamlJava (testers welcome) CamlJava is a great project by almighty Xavier that bridges the OCaml and Java worlds via the respective C interfaces (Caml/C interface for OCaml and JNI for Java). Unfortunately, the last stable release was a bit out of date and seemed not to work with recent JDK (both in terms of buildability and of runtime correctness, i.e., segfaults). With the tremendous help of Gr goire Henry, I've managed to prepare a set of patches that enables to build (and use without segfaults ...) CamlJava with recent JVM: in particular it seems now to work with both Sun's JVM and OpenJDK. A Debian package has been prepared; while it gets processed by archive manager, you can get an equivalent unofficial package from my APT repo:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/
    deb-src http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/

Any form of testing is very welcome. In case you want to try O'Jacare on top of CamlJava however, you need to wait a bit more: Gr goire is working on it, but in the process he banged his head against bugs in both CamlP4 and CamlP5 (the only two available porting paths from the last stable release of O'Jacare)

You get a rigorous analysis of the science behind boiling eggs. I want one of those thermal circulators for Christmas.

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

The following is written in German and probably only interesting for people living near D sseldorf. I decided to post this to Planet Debian as it might interest some of you :)

Als (ordentlicher) Student kommt man ab und zu in den Genuss, eine Arbeit schreiben zu d rfen, von der Andere (sprich: nicht nur ich durch die gute Note *g*) profitieren k nnen.
So auch geschehen mit meiner Bacherlor-Arbeit. Und obwohl mein Vortrag erst am n chsten Montag (07.12.2009, 10:00, wahrscheinlich in Raum 25.12.02.33) ist, gibt es morgen auf dem diesj hrigen Dies Academicus der HHU D sseldorf bereits einen kleinen Vorgeschmack.

Dem geneigten Leser wird aufgefallen sein, dass der Link nicht auf die Webseite meiner Universit t zeigt, und auch nicht auf die Webseite unserer AStA, sondern auf Wikipedia.
Nein, ich bin noch nicht so ber hmt um f r die Wikipedia relevant zu sein. Es gibt schlicht und einfach nichts dazu auf den Seiten. Nicht mal im Kalender der AStA stehts drin...
Woran das liegt? Keine Ahnung, ich vermute ja, dass die Herren und Damen (puh, safe, sonst kommt noch der Gleichstellungsbeauftragte zu mir...) lieber mit Streiken, Maulen und sonstigem Quatsch besch ftigt sind, anstatt irgendwie mal die Bildung zu f rdern. Egal, hier ist nicht der Platz um zu St nkern (Twitter/Identi.ca ich komme! [Danke Asel f r die Idee]), ich wollte euch n mlich einladen!

Keine Einladung ohne Einladungstext, *such* *kram*, ach hier hab ichs: Programm zum Dies Academicus 2009. Leider wei ich nicht wie aktuell die Version ist, liegt irgendwo in den Tiefen der Seite der Fachschaft Modernes Japan und ich bin da als

Spam-Erkennung: Intelligent Greylisting
Ort: H rsaal 3C
Zeit: 13 bis 14 Uhr

auf Seite 8 vermerkt. Aber ihr wolltet ja einen Text haben. Den hab ich eigentlich auch eingereicht. Und nun ganz exklusiv und nur f r meine lieben Leser (und weil niemand auf die Idee kam den ins Programm aufzunehmen):

Intelligent Greylisting

Gute Spamfilter sind entweder ressourcenhungrig, weil sie die ganze E-Mail analysieren m ssen, oder fehleranfaellig, weil sie Entscheidungen zu voreilig treffen und dadurch legitime E-Mails verlieren. Wir stellen euch eine neue Methode vor, wie man Spam effektiv filtern kann, ohne viele Ressourcen zu verbrauchen und ohne legitime E-Mails zu verlieren.

So! Ihr kommt morgen alle um 13 Uhr in den H rsaal 3C (Geb ude 23.irgendwas, PhilFak) und genie t meine Anwesenheit!

Es gr t das Grummeltier.

I ve been investigating the Ext4 filesystem [1]. The main factor that is driving me to Ext4 at the moment is fsck times. I have some systems running Ext3 on large filesystems which I need to extend. In most cases Ext3 filesystems have large numbers of Inodes free because the relationship between the number of Inodes and the filesystem size is set when it is created, enlarging the filesystem increases the number of Inodes and apart from backup/format/restore there is no way of changing this. Some of the filesystems I manage can t be converted because the backup/restore time would involve an unreasonable amount of downtime. Page 11 of the OLS paper by Avantika Mathur et al [2] has a graph of the relationship between the number of Inodes and fsck time. Ext4 also has a number of other features to improve performance, including changes to journaling and block allocation. Now my most important systems are all virtualised. I am using Debian/Lenny and RHEL5 for the Dom0s. Red Hat might back-port Ext4 to the RHEL5 kernel, but there will probably never be a supported kernel for Debian/Lenny with Ext4 and Xen Dom0 support (there may never be a kernel for any Debian release with such support). So this means that in a few months time I will be running some DomUs which have filesystems that can t be mounted in the Dom0. This isn t a problem when everything works well. But when things go wrong it s really convenient to be able to amount a filesystem in the Dom0 to fix things, this option will disappear for some of my systems, so if virtual machine A has a problem then I will have to mount it s filesystems with virtual machine B to fix it. Of course this is a strong incentive to use multiple block devices for the virtual machine so that a small root filesystem can be run with Ext3 and the rest can be Ext4. At the moment only Debian/Unstable and Fedora have support for Ext4 so this isn t a real issue. But Debian/Squeeze will release with Ext4 support and I expect that RHEL6 will also have it. When those releases happen I will be upgrading my virtual machines and will have these support issues. It s a pity that Red Hat never supported XFS, I could have solved some of these problems years ago if XFS was available. Now for non-virtual machines one factor to consider is that the legacy version of GRUB doesn t support Ext4, I discovered this after I used tune2fs to convert all filesystems on my EeePC to Ext4. I think I could have undone that tune2fs option but instead decided to upgrade to the new version of GRUB and copy the kernel and initramfs to a USB device in case it didn t boot. It turns out that the new version of GRUB seems to work well for booting from Ext4. One thing that is not explicitly mentioned in the howto is that the fsck pass needed to convert to Ext4 will not be done automatically by most distributions. So when I converted my EeePC I had to use sulogin to manually fsck the filesystems. This isn t a problem with a laptop, but could be a problem with a co-located server system. For the long term BTRFS may be a better option, I plan to test it on /home on my EeePC. But I will give Ext4 some more testing first. In any case the Ext3 filesystems on big servers are not going to go away in a hurry.

• [1] http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Howto
• [2] http://ols.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/mathur-Reprint.pdf

Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I can write a review. The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a picture a day type of thing. So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the iGala being sold pretty much exclusively by ThinkGeek. The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it appealing. So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we headed to Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's the highlights. WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA) Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the frame would not associate with my Linksys WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2, and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure. I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped. The automatic updates are brain-dead Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds. So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented the HEAD request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic a day. Taking these frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles. I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly sufficient. Transitions are unavoidable It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one. Automatic on/off time I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's "off". Photo check frequency is configurable Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day (that we change it). Built in photos are a bit too sticky There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to have at least two photos in your online source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix. The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works... Touch screen UI was adequate Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections. Fairly responsive support The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation" period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I was raising with them. It's written in Lua?! I have no familiarity with Lua, other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to be a Blackfin based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware. Easy to update Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back. The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have. Conclusion I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the price, I expected a more polished product, though. I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their Linksys WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.