Would you like to hack on open source for a living? Interested in cutting edge desktop/mobile technologies? We’re hiring! If you’d like to just chat about this or anything else relating to Codethink, I’m reachable on IRC (GIMPnet and Freenode with nick robtaylor) and on XMPP and plain old email at rob.taylor@codethink.co.uk.

Some people troll free software lists with remarks like:

Linux will never be able to displace MacOS/Windows since the latter are much more pretty/user-friendly. You will lose.

Such people assume that hackers write free software because they "hate Microsoft" or "hate capitalism" or have some other pet hates. However, it should be obvious that such a large creative effort cannot be sustained if it is based on such negative emotions.¹ There are a number of positive reasons why one works on free software. The software that I like to work on is software² that I use or want to use. This has some consequences which are worth underlining:

• Contrary to the views expressed in some articles about free software, the theme of usability (by me!) is uppermost in my mind whenever I approach any task pertaining to software.
• Since the software I work on should be usable long after I have forgotten the ideas behind its implementation, the user interface should be one that confirms to "standard" expections. This means that it should be possible to use the software without reading the code.
• When I look at the code after a long time (for example to extend it in some way) I should be able to read and understand it, which requires clean code with adequate documentation.

Giving others the "four freedoms" results in wider critical examination of these aspects. Bugs must be acknowledged and fixed --- or elevated to features! Moreover, there are parts of the task that are "obvious" to me but I would have to ask others for advice on other parts. So I gain a lot by being part of a larger community. There are other reasons to write free software. For example, someone may pay you to do it. However, this is just deferring the same question to your employer. In most cases, your employer already has a use in mind for the software. The employer has the same concerns as I outlined above except that the job of writing the code is being out-sourced. The usability, portability and long-term maintainability are probably even bigger concerns for your employer. "Last but not the least" (as we always wrote in our school-day essays) free software is fun! You share ideas with people from across the globe and to show them your own clever little tricks. Good code and good themes resonate with people who may not even speak the same language as you do. What could be nicer than that!

Dear Adrian, I can only but complain about the "Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle" that you mention in your last post. All that is said there about OSS is pure FUD and only reflects a deep ignorance of the current project. It is a pitty to spread misinformations that deprecate the work of others without even trying to understand it. Here is what is said about OSS in this document:

The Open Sound System is a low-level PCM API supported by a variety of Unixes including Linux. It started out as the standard Linux audio system and is supported on current Linux kernels in the API version 3 as OSS3. OSS3 is considered obsolete and has been fully replaced by ALSA. A successor to OSS3 called OSS4 is available but plays virtually no role on Linux and is not supported in standard kernels or by any of the relevant distributions. The OSS API is very low-level, based around direct kernel interfacing using ioctl()s. It it is hence awkward to use and can practically not be virtualized for usage on non-kernel audio systems like sound servers (such as PulseAudio) or user-space sound drivers (such as Bluetooth or FireWire audio). OSS3's timing model cannot properly be mapped to software sound servers at all, and is also problematic on non-PCI hardware such as USB audio. Also, OSS does not do sample type conversion, remapping or resampling if necessary. This means that clients that properly want to support OSS need to include a complete set of converters/remappers/resamplers for the case when the hardware does not natively support the requested sampling parameters. With modern sound cards it is very common to support only S32LE samples at 48KHz and nothing else. If an OSS client assumes it can always play back S16LE samples at 44.1KHz it will thus fail. OSS3 is portable to other Unix-like systems, various differences however apply. OSS also doesn't support surround sound and other functionality of modern sounds systems properly. OSS should be considered obsolete and not be used in new applications. ALSA and PulseAudio have limited LD_PRELOAD-based compatibility with OSS.

And here is what one of the devs from OSS answered to this [1]:

It's pretty inaccurate FUD (From the URL address - it's Pulseaudio's author, right? I'd have expected him to know better). He's basically judging OSS per the old OSS/Free drivers, which is like 5 years ago, and even that he does wrong. First, *all* current implementations/emulations of OSSv3 do sample conversion. It's not even a property defined by the API but by the underlying drivers. Second, even OSSv3 supported surround, USB cards, etc. Third, arguing that "it cannot be virtualized" is disproven by the amount of emulations and alternative implementations existing out there and working in practice. (The main difficulty is mmap() API, which is very rarely used anyway, and even that can be done with, say, oss2pulse). Fourth, complaining about OSS API being awkward, is... well, awkward when you compare it to ALSA API, if you could compare it, since most ALSA API isn't documented. It's kinda funny he advocates using ALSA API (not in the quoted part above, but last time I read his blog he suggested it). Actual ALSA devs advocate against it, but using a sound library with multiple backends [2].

If you read some documentation, you can understand that OSS has been the target of some kernel developpers that didn't like it to be reused in a commercial product, back in the 90s. Hence, ALSA was launched, and OSS was progressively discarded, while constantly being the target of FUD like this. OSS has then lived for almost 10 years in the dark side of the force, but eventually did the way back in July 2007. Ironically, now most of the developpement in the linux kernel is driven by commercial interests. Most of the original complains about OSS are now fixed, including all the FUD written in this guide. In particular, software mixing is now supported. Being also part of a project that writes code to handle sound input and output, I can only but complain about the mess in the area of sound APIs in linux. However, OSS should really be reconsidered. In particular, its API is designed in order to abstract as much as possible access to the sound card, so that application writers have as less as possible to do with sound conversion and the like Those who have tried to use ALSA may for instance compare that to the "set rate near" call in its API: this call will set the rate to what the hardware support and let you handle the conversion... For each application... Also, OSS API is available across all unices, except OSX, and there is even a BeOS port going on. Finally, OSS API is POSIX oriented, reading and writing on the sound card, being a matter of calling few ioctls and then reading from the device file. In the future, OSS developpement will most probably be done as a community project, and I believe it is now time to stop spreading false ideas about the project, and give it as much attention as the other projects. For the debian users who want to try OSS4, a package is available in the packaging team's svn repository. It has been sitting in NEW for some time, I hope it gets accepted at some point.

For those who use emacs with Ruby on Rails, and perhaps even use rhtml-minor-mode, I have published an update: http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/files/rhtml-minor-mode.el It now handles .html.erb extensions for layouts/ files and layouts/application.html.erb files (or .rhtml). Something that would still be nice to see is some hacking to better integrate partials, which currently don't really know exactly where they fit in their parent document. That would take some work though, as you'd have to scan for use of the partial in question and perhaps do some other parsing of ruby code. If you're clever though, you could probably get the most common cases by looking for something like :partial => ......

Write your own launcher I am at OpenExpo and while chatting about KDE 4.1 with the nice people at the KDE booth, I realised that some of the Debtags Technology could be used to make a really good application launcher. After a bit of prototyping, I present you the Application Launcher Startup Kit:

git clone http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2008-09/launcher

There are two python scripts in it: index that indexes your existing .desktop files in a Xapian database, and query that contains a function to query the index, and when run with the query keywords as parameters, it shows the results. You give it a list of terms (and possibly of currently selected categories), and it gives you:

• Spell checking suggestions
• Tag cloud generation
• Completion support
• Search results

It's more than fast enough to do all of this in real time, as the user types. For example, on my system:

$ ./query imag
Found: 55 /usr/share/applications/gqview.desktop
Found: 51 /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop
Found: 48 /usr/share/applications/gpicview.desktop
Found: 46 /usr/share/applications/camorama.desktop
Found: 44 /usr/share/applications/inkscape.desktop
Found: 42 /usr/share/applications/geeqie.desktop
Completion: image
Completion: imagemagick
Completion: images
Tagcloud: 2DGraphics 0.661410884419
Tagcloud: Application 0.489939013302
Tagcloud: Core 0.331070153265
Tagcloud: GTK 0.158799073563
Tagcloud: Graphics 1.0
Tagcloud: Photography 0.426417355406
Tagcloud: RasterGraphics 0.661410884419
Tagcloud: Utility -0.3383614892
Tagcloud: VectorGraphics 0.213729717371
Tagcloud: Video 0.364913248472
Tagcloud: Viewer 0.806009703748
Spellchecked: image
$ ./query word proc
Found: 100 /usr/share/applications/ooo-writer.desktop
Found: 69 /usr/share/applications/efax-gtk.desktop
Completion: word processor
Completion: word processors
Tagcloud: GTK -0.255400677833
Tagcloud: Office 1.0
Spellchecked: 
Spellchecked: doc

Now, it's just a matter of putting a GUI on top of it. I am not going to do it: that is up to you.

Yesterday, another of our mailboxes got joe-jobbed, just like last week. Again, it was one of our Exim servers (yes, one got done along with a qmail last week). Again, it was an address that should never appear as the SMTP sender. Again, I put something like

        deny
          message = 553 That address is not used for outgoing email so should never get errors - please telephone us if in error
          senders = :
          recipients = !/etc/exim4/permitted-envelopes

into /etc/exim4/local-rcpt.acl, added CHECK_RCPT_LOCAL_ACL_FILE = /etc/exim4/local-rcpt.acl to /etc/exim4/conf.d/main/02_local_options, put all permitted envelope addresses into /etc/exim4/permitted-envelopes, then ran update-exim4.conf and /etc/init.d/exim4 reload and the flood stopped. So far, it seems to be working like it should. Is there a drawback I haven’t spotted yet, apart from the obvious problem of needing to list all outgoing envelope addresses?

Russell writes about the iphone. I think he's missing a few things.

The open nature of the PC wasn't inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard[1] x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.

Now, let's look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That's really not going to be what determines market success.

Competitive cheapness? When you have a multivendor OS like Android or Windows Mobile, you might expect there to be more opportunity to compete to undercut each other, offering equivalent platforms for less cost. But that's missing something. In the same way that the home computer market has basically consolidated towards PCs, the phone market has already consolidated. Your smartphone has an ARM in, probably along with an off the shelf GSM chip and some 3D core (generally something from Imagination, though in Android's case Qualcomm seem to have come up with their own core - I haven't been able to find out if it's derived from something else). There's no realistic way to make a phone with equivalent hardware functionality and quality to the iphone and sell it for significantly less money. And if you figure out how to, Apple get to take advantage of the same price reductions in their next generation hardware. And, being Apple, they'll probably find some compelling wonderful design feature that costs them nothing extra but makes you want it more anyway. So hardware competition probably isn't going to be what determines market success.

Which leaves two things - advertising and applications. Apple are good at marketing. This is unfortunate, because I'd really rather live in a world where everyone running MacOS was running Linux instead, but we seem to suck in comparison. The good news is that Microsoft also seem to, so maybe we'll have our act together some time between now and Apple crushing us to death. So, assuming current trends continue, Apple's marketing probably isn't going to kill the iphone. Which leaves one thing: applications.

The obvious argument against the iphone's success is that, as a closed software distribution platform, it's less attractive to developers. I don't think that's true. If we look at the console market, the gp2x was hardly a PSP killer. Or a DS killer. You could possibly argue it was a Gizmondo killer, but only if you ignore the Finnish mafia. Being an open platform doesn't immediately result in you killing closed platforms. You need developers, and you need applications. Otherwise nobody's going to buy your hardware, even if it costs $10 less than an iphone and has a few extra bits of plastic. What attracts developers? An attractive development environment and a revenue stream. Android has one real thing going for it here - it's not tied to Objective C, and so there's probably a larger number of potential developers. But let's be realistic. If you're a competent developer, you can move from C++ or Java to Objective C without too much effort. And if you're an incompetent developer, you're not going to be deciding the future of a platform.

Apple have made it easy for people to write applications that share the iphone's delightful[2] UI. There's almost active encouragement to write beautiful programs that integrate well. Sure, the platform limitations bite you in weird ways (like the no background running thing), but Apple have come up with hacks to smooth most of those over. The iphone is a wonderful device to develop for. Sufficiently delightful that there was a huge developer base even before Apple had released the SDK. What does that tell you? Developers actively want to write for the iphone. In fact, they wanted to even before there was a real revenue model. Mindshare means a lot.

What are we going to see in response from Android? To begin with, uglier applications. I'm sure that'll get better over time, but right now the Android UI just isn't as well put together[3]. It's functional, even attractive. But it's not beautiful. And lowering the bar to developer involvement means the potential for more My First Phone Application. Windows Mobile and Symbian have huge numbers of applications. They're mostly dreadful lashups of functionality you'd never want and a UI that's ugly enough to make you want to stab out your eyes, coupled with a nag screen asking for a $10 donation to carry on using it assuming it hasn't crashed before it got that far. To be fair, a lot of iphone stuff isn't much better. But proportionately? Right now the Apple stuff has it. I never want to see another listing of Symbian freeware.

At the moment, Apple wins at providing compelling applications. They may be a gatekeeper between the developer and the user, but right now that's not causing too many problems. Well. It wasn't. The recent fuss about Apple dropping applications because of perceived competition with their own software is an issue. If a developer is going to spend a significant amount of time and money on an application, they want a reasonable reassurance that they're going to be able to ship it. And, right now, Apple's not giving that. It remains to be seen whether this has long term consequences, but there's some danger of Apple alienating their developer base. If those developers move to another platform, and if they create compelling software, Apple might stand some real competition. At the moment? Apple has the hardware, the OS and the applications. They have the potential to take over broad swathes of the market. But they also have the opportunity to throw it away. And that's what's going to decide the success of the iphone - a closed platform is not inherently a problem, but it gives the vendor the option of removing one of their key advantages. If Apple get through this with their developer popularity intact, I don't see the open/closed distinction as having any real-world importance at all.

The relevance to Linux? We're not going to succeed by being philosophically better. We have to be better in the real world as well. Ignoring that in favour of our social benefits doesn't result in us winning.

[1] It's slightly more legacy free than a "genuine" PC - there's no i8042, and things like the gate A20 hack aren't implemented. But it'll boot DOS (given enough effort), so hell, it's a PC

[2] And yes, I genuinely do think that the iphone's UI is better than anything else on the market. There's no reason someone else, including us, couldn't have got there first. But we didn't, and now everyone gets to play catch up. Shit happens

[3] I have no idea where Apple gets its UI engineers from, but someone needs to find the source and start waving huge piles of money to pick them up first.

I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it’s closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch review is interesting - while the built-in keyboard is a nice feature the main thing that stands out is the open platform [2]. TechCrunch says “From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply“. What I want is a phone that I control, and although most people don’t understand the issues enough to say the same, I think that they will agree in practice. In the 80’s the Macintosh offered significant benefits over PCs, but utterly lost in the marketplace because it was closed (less available software and less freedom). Due to being used in Macs and similar machines the Motorolla 68000 CPU family also died out, and while it’s being used in games consoles and some other niche markets the PPC CPU family (the next CPU used by Apple) also has an uncertain future. The IBM PC architecture evolved along with it’s CPU from a 16bit system to a 64bit system and took over the market because it does what users want it to do. I predict that the iPhone will be just as successful as the Macintosh OS and for the same reasons. The Macintosh OS still has a good share of some markets (it has traditionally been well accepted for graphic design and has always provided good hardware and software support for such use), and is by far the most successful closed computer system, but it has a small part of the market. I predict that the iPhone will maintain only a small share of the market. There will be some very low-end phones that have the extremely closed design that currently dominates the market, and the bulk of the market will end up going with Android or some other open phone platform that allows users to choose how their phone works. One issue that I think will drive user demand for control over their own phones is the safety issues related to child use of phones (I’ve written about this previously [3]). Currently phone companies don’t care about such things - the safety of customers does not affect their profits. But programmable phones allows the potential for improvements to be made without involving the phone company - while with iPhone you have Apple as the roadblock. Now having a small share of the mobile phone market could be very profitable, just as the small share of the personal computer market is quite profitable for Apple. But it does mean that I can generally ignore them as they aren’t very relevant in the industry.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/16/mobile-ssh-client/


• [2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/23/touching-the-android-its-no-iphone-but-its-close/


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/safety/mobile-phone-safety/

Share This

Ten Easy Ways to Attract Women to Your Free Software Project? I am a little to sick with a cold now to say anything substantive. I agree in spirit with a lot of what the author says though I still think that part of the problem emerges way before the free software project. I still want to know, in other words, why girls/women are not hacking away at a younger age, which puts them at a disadvantage when and if they decided to join a project. Also, though the author as an important caveat in one of his footnotes:

[10] Throughout this article I make a lot of generalizations about how men and women behave. Obviously men and women are not monolithic groups, and there s a lot of variation, so this is just short hand. There are some important differences that apply in the real world, though, whether because of nature or nurture. Indeed, in writing this article, I have taken the assumption that many of the issues are really just manifestations of lifestyle differences, and it s largely because of lifestyle issues that I feel I can identify with many of the problems that women face when dealing with hacker culture in general and free software in particular.

I am still more than a little bothered by the essentialized portrayal of females/males and the concomicant technlogical determinism as well. Thoughts?

Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe. This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We can not directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred. Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may speedily transfer your commision for this transaction. After I receive that information I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds. Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson **** The source of this? A former U of C graduate anthropology classmate. This actually may be the original source, or like all really good spam, somewhat (seemingly at least) sourceless.

Last weekend at the Software Freedom Day party, I was a little surprised to find myself among hundreds of attendees and supporters. Even if NYC is not known, like Silicon Valley is, for its vibrant tech scene, this event reminded me that we definitely have a thriving community of programmers and advocates but we have lacked a central “place” to check for computer-related events in the area. At least until now. James Vasile, a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center will now be publishing an event feed. Please send him an email if there is any event you want advertised (contact details on his page), you can subscribe here, and here is a calendar.

Now that bug #500000 has been reported, let’s have a look at all our other bugs, using UDD. Number of archived bugs:

select count(*) from archived_bugs;
 count
--------
 402826

Number of unarchived bugs marked done:

select count(*) from bugs where status = 'done';
 count
-------
  8267

Status of unarchived bugs (”pending” doesn’t mean “tagged pending” here):

select status, count(*) from bugs group by status;
    status       count
---------------+-------
 pending         53587
 pending-fixed    1195
 forwarded        6778
 done             8267
 fixed             167

The sum isn’t even close to 500000. That’s because quite a lot of bugs disappeared:

select id from bugs union select id from archived_bugs order by id limit 10;
 id
-----
 563
 660
 710
 725
 740
 773
 775
 783
 817
 819

Now, let’s look at our open bugs.
Oldest open bugs:

select id, package, title, arrival from bugs where status != 'done' order by id limit 10;
  id       package                                         title                                            arrival
------+----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------
  825   trn              trn warning messages corrupt thread selector display                         1995-04-22 18:33:01
 1555   dselect          dselect per-screen-half focus request                                        1995-10-06 15:48:04
 2297   xterm            xterm: xterm sometimes gets mouse-paste and RETURN keypress in wrong order   1996-02-07 21:33:01
 2298   trn              trn bug with shell escaping                                                  1996-02-07 21:48:01
 3175   xonix            xonix colors bad for colorblind                                              1996-05-31 23:18:04
 3180   linuxdoc-tools   linuxdoc-sgml semantics and formatting problems                              1996-06-02 05:18:03
 3251   acct             accounting file corruption                                                   1996-06-12 17:44:10
 3773   xless            xless default window too thin and won't go away when asked nicely            1996-07-14 00:03:09
 4073   make             make pattern rules delete intermediate files                                 1996-08-08 20:18:01
 4448   dselect          [PERF] dselect performance gripe (disk method doing dpkg -iGROEB)            1996-09-09 03:33:05

Breakdown by severity:

select severity, count(*) from bugs where status != 'done' group by severity;
 severity    count
-----------+-------
 normal      27680
 important    7606
 minor        6921
 wishlist    18898
 critical       29
 grave         209
 serious       384

Top 10 submitters for open bugs:

select submitter, count(*) from bugs where status != 'done' group by submitter order by count desc limit 10;
submitter                        count
----------------------------------------------------+-------
 Dan Jacobson                     1455
 martin f krafft                    667
 Raphael Geissert                    422
 Joey Hess                            392
 Marc Haber                368
 Julien Danjou                         342
 Josh Triplett                    331
 Vincent Lefevre                    296
 jidanni@jidanni.org                                    260
 Justin Pryzby      245

Top bugs reporters ever:

select submitter, count(*) from (select * from bugs union select * from archived_bugs) as all_bugs
group by submitter order by count desc limit 10;
                  submitter                     count
----------------------------------------------+-------
 Martin Michlmayr                4279
 Dan Jacobson               3652
 Daniel Schepler     3045
 Joey Hess                     2836
 Lucas Nussbaum        2701
 Andreas Jochens                   2605
 Matthias Klose            2442
 Christian Perrier           2302
 James Troup                   2198
 Matt Zimmerman                  2027

You want more data? Connect to UDD (from master.d.o or alioth.d.o, more info here), run your own queries, and post them with the results in the comments!

The Big Fail

Just read this Techcrunch post about the Android/Google/HTC/T-Mobile phone and loved the last paragraph:

But remember, in the end this is not really about Android versus the iPhone. It s about Web phones versus the brick in your pocket. Simply matching the iPhone on many of these features especially Web browsing and email is going to be enough to help redefine the mobile market. The table stakes have just been raised. From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply. I welcome our new cool future phones

As I wrote in blog item 29 there are many ways to break your debian/rules file. As I grew of seeing those and many more, I decided to write a lintian test for this. Getting that finished will still need several days, as the general Makefile syntax is quite intresting in detail, and lintian is written in perl thus so have to be tests. It's quite intresting that the different cases when variables are resolved and when not seem to quite firmly force an specific way to parse it. (And relearning perl when I so successfully unlearned all parts of that language in the past make it not much faster). Anyway, the reason I'm blogging is to give you already the results of one particular test a preliminary version gave when running over the lintian lab: It's checking for targets with -stamp in them that are phony, as that makes no sense. It will either cause configure or make run multiple times via build, wasting buildd cycles or even make the build more unstable, or just indicates needlessly complex Makefiles (having an install target that invokes an install-stamp target that does not actually produce a stamp file just makes the Makefile longer without doing anything at all but confusing readers). You can find the preliminary results for that test at http://people.debian.org/~brlink/debian-rules-phony-stamp-file.log. I looked at some randomly choosen results and did not find a false positive. As that list was produced by the last runable version which did not yet look at variables, I guess the list will only increase.

Ok, my apologies, the Latin is incorrect, but the idea is this: I have run into an important limitation of Google's domain registration system. Buyer beware. Lately, I have been using Google Apps to register domains. At $10 a year for new domains, which come with all the nifty Google applications, email and so on, it's a really good deal. However, there appears to be a potentially crucial problem: you can't sell or transfer the domains, as far as I can tell. I would love to hear that I am wrong on this, but the person helping me through Google's support channel first told me to "enter the new credit card details in the Google Checkout account associated with the domain". Uh, sorry, but I want to transfer the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel. After another round of email, I got this:

To assign a different Google Account to the subscription you'll need to modify your billing information by following the steps listed below:

• Enable automatic renewals for your account.
• When you receive email notification of the impending charge, visit the link to the 'Ordering page.' - Authorize a new purchase for your domain registration renewal. This will replace the old subscription and charge your new billing information on the subscription expiration date. Automatic renewals will also be enabled going forward.

If you don't have automatic renewals enabled, your email notification won't include an 'Ordering page' link to change the Google Checkout account and purchase or renew Google Apps. You must first enable auto-renew to be sent this link.

I don't want to have to wait for the email notification, though! The domain won't be automatically renewed until sometime next spring. Hopefully this is either an oversight on my part or something Google will fix soonish, as buying a domain name that you can't sell or otherwise give to someone else is of very limited use for some things. No, I haven't gone into business as a domain name speculator/squatter, the domain in question is InnsbruckExpats.com, a site I registered for a friend a bit more than a year ago.

A little while ago, I discovered Emacs has D-Bus support now. I wanted to play around with it, and I discovered Alban's collaborative editing page. It seems like Emacs's D-Bus documentation is somewhat lacking, though CVS has some more docs. Alban's work seems to need a well-known name, something Emacs can't yet do, so I'll probably add a method to text-remote-control where any app can register and say "Hi, I support your interface" as I think this makes more sense. I don't have any code that does anything useful yet, but once text-remote-control is fixed, I don't think that's very hard.

I went to this event a few weeks ago. The immediate outcome is the call for expressions of interest in RISE-SW’s projects. The deadline is next Monday (29th September) at 12 noon, so get emailing if you’re interested in them. After that, shortlisted EoIs will get two weeks to write a full bid. I’ve asked for a non-Microsoft copy to be posted. Microsoft is a social problem, not a social enterprise. The consultation event was a pretty straightforward introduction and discussion in small groups, followed by feedback to the whole group, with lunch to finish. The host was Gareth Hart of Perfect Moment (yet another non-SE hired by RISE instead of SE providers?). First, the introduction covered the CapacityBuilders Social Enterprise Programme, the context of the programme and RISE’s suggested themes for support: accessibility of SE support, better opportunity for the Voluntary and Community Sectors to be more enterprising, improving SE quality standards and organisations, making SE infrastructure sustainable, and developing more peer-to-peer SE support and mentoring. In the discussion that followed, I think the standards and sustainability themes were largely kicked into touch as unachievable with the available budget, while we felt peer-to-peer support was better as part of the more general accessibility and opportunities themes. My personal pet points were that if the Social Enterprise Mark is funded, it should benefit small SEs rather than RISE, and that if another database or directory is funded, it should be Open in licence and maintenance, like ODP and unlike previous directories which have wasted government money. I’ll be interested to see how that’s reflected in the Call for Expressions when I get to reading it this week.

zakame++;

There should be a picture of me above, following the Me(me), but its late. And I have to get up early tomorrow to catch the bus to Manila for next day's Cebu flight (work calls.) I look forward to another roller-coaster year. This year had been a ride through new stuff mostly at work, picking up CentOS and Ruby along the way, although remaining faithful to my Perl roots. And quite recently, it has come back full circle with a renewed interest in Debian again. However, I've been also coming back at exploring Plan 9 from Bell Labs and Inferno, rekindling my lost interest in distributed systems and showing me just how bad Unix and friends have become (current meme: tell me why any xterms, mine or yours, has a baud rate, as told by stty.) Still, I can't forget my roots; yesterday's "save" was a subtle reminder that I should come back to Debian again. I'll do what I can, and maybe learn something or two in the process ;) I guess that's how $DEITY works; always moving in indeterministic ways. Ok, off to sleep...

Since I was watching Don Armstrong’s talk about Debbugs’ SOAP interface I wanted to use devscripts' bts to get a list of boinc’s top five bug reporter. Finally, this is possible with devscripts (>= 2.10.36):

bts status file:-  bts select source:boinc archive:both  \
    egrep "^originator"   cut -f2-   sort   uniq -ci   sort -n \
    tail -n5
 2 Riccardo Stagni <unriccio@email.it>
 3 Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>
 6 Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>
 6 Thibaut VARENE <varenet@debian.org>
10 Sandro Tosi <matrixhasu@gmail.com>

Sweet - Thanks Debbugs and Devscripts maintainers!
And congratulations Sandro (or thank you - whatever you find appropriate)!