Back in September last year I blogged on #debian-tech, a new IRC channel for discussing Debian, but with a charter and some ops with a mandate to enforce it. At the time I wrote:

It’ll probably be quite a bit different from #debian-devel on either OFTC or FreeNode; hopefully that’ll turn out to be in a good way. We’ve got (I think) a pretty good variety of ops, who have (I think) some pretty good ideas on encouraging good productive activities on Debian. We’ll see what happens!

Since then, we’ve had a couple of significant discussions on it, reflected on the wiki page; the multiarch discussion was interesting and spontaneous, and the release and archive qualification discussions were both potentially highly contentious discussions that seemed to end up being conducted really well, and have both had some pretty significant results. That’s pretty pleasing – this time last year, there wasn’t anywhere I’d’ve been comfortable having those sorts of discussions in public, now there’s somewhere that’s been demonstrated to work fairly well. A more surprising outcome is that we’ve never actually banned anyone from the channel. To some extent, this is to be expected since people who don’t like the concept just won’t join in the first place, and to the extent that’s true, it’s a good thing. And at least Wouter, who’d also objected in the past, was willing to join briefly for one of the discussions important to him and get along fine. Unfortunately that’s not the only reason for the total lack of bans. The other aspect is that people have turned out to be far more ready to ban themselves than the ops have been. To anonymise an example from November last year: Read the rest ...

I haven’t been blogging lately. I do have a running list of ideas and topics, but my blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. When I was a law student, it was easy for this to be a ‘law student blog,’ but now that I’m practicing I haven’t figured out how to find a balance between the personal and professional (and, perhaps on a third axis, the technical). Also, since I had a daughter, my time has been pretty scarce and I’m not sure that blogging is the best use of it. I’ll probably pick up in frequency before too long, but in case anyone is wondering, I’m still here. In the meantime, my Webloyalty is a Scam entry continues to get more traffic than anything else on this blog—close to 31,000 hits at the time of this writing, and nearly 1,000 writebacks (plus nearly as many personal emails to me on the topic). See also this follow-up post. One guy has even started a blog dedicated solely to criticizing Reservation Rewards—but now the link seems to broken. When I write these consumer protection entries, I inevitably get comments from low-level company insiders defending their practices (see, e.g., U-Haul Responds). These writebacks are often a much better condemnation than I could ever come with. For example, the following was apparently written by a “WLI Call Center Rep.” The POST request came from the same area of Connecticut as where Webloyalty is located, and it seems pretty genuine:

I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram. Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty. So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.

Last week, linux-2.6 2.6.15-7 was uploaded to unstable. CONFIG_ALPHA_LEGACY_START_ADDRESS was disabled for the -alpha-generic and -alpha-smp flavours, and a new flavour called -alpha-legacy was introduced, which has CONFIG_ALPHA_LEGACY_START_ADDRESS enabled. This was decided a while ago already, but unfortunately I forgot about it, until Steve Langasek brought it to my mind again. Another important point is the support of the prctl() syscall, which was added to the alpha kernel-images through a patch from Steve. The prctl package in Debian supports only ia64 and hppa currently, so this needs to be fixed... wishlist bugreport filed.

I've been writing SELinux policy these days. Again. This time for the Reference Policy. I didn't get any feedback back yet for my policy, which is quite disappointing. Still the number of violations on my systems has gone down a lot, so I might actually be able to run strict some time soon. Which would be a major step. Unfortunately, I still have a couple of things to sort out with the utilities. And every now and then there is a new violation - monthly cronjobs for example are not that easy to observe without playing around. ;-) The Debian/Ubuntu packaging group is growing, and that means it's bigger than the "pretty much nonexistant" it was just a short time ago. Recent policy files I've written (which of course still contain bugs): dpkg, apt, tor, amavis, clamav.

This past couple of weeks saw a lot of Debian and Ubuntu work from me in (hopefully) equal measure. For Debian, I whipped up new versions of robotour, xshisen, libmemcache, and gtklp; robotour finally installs in /usr/games as it should be; xshisen acks NMUs and finally has a sane source package (well, a little bit tipsy still, but at least it’s now fixes the NMU source b0rkage;) libmemcache’s -dev now installs its headers to the right location; and gtklp bumps to a new upstream, with touch-fu replacing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE for seamless build. Thanks a lot to my wonderful sponsors Margarita Manterola, Sylvain Le Gall, and Andreas Metzler for the uploads! On the other hand, opendchub has migrated to testing, and its initscript failed (not to mention missing a manpage) I’ve fixed the latter, but I still have to figure out how to fix the former; I’ll probably have to consult the reference and add an unprivileged opendchub system user and configure the daemon to use that, or fix the source and allow flexible redefinition of opendchub’s working/configuration directories (currently hardcoded to $HOME/.opendchub). Either way, I have to touch the source and make patches; and I would appreciate it very much if my dearest readers can help out On the lighter (or heavier, depending on your POV) side, I noticed that Steve McIntyre posted an RFH for cvs, and I’ve decided to help out a bit. Seeing the source, I was pleasantly surprised as the age (and design) of this package, and it would be a blast for me to study this (and fix bugs, prepare patches, and release new versions while at it. It would also prepare me better for NM as well. As for my Ubuntu work, I’ve upgraded my Breezy Badger desktop to Dapper Drake last Monday (just in time for Flight 4,) and I’m quite amazed at the new features of this release. Like many folks I just loved xchat-gnome’s notification feature (especially when you’re moving in between workspaces very often) and was very much pleased with the speed of Gnome 2.13.91 (so much so that I’ve departed from my normal Ion3 desktop without regretting it. But of course, since Dapper Drake is the latest development branch, there were some snags that I got to encounter. One particular bug was with masqmail, because the 0.2.21-1ubuntu1 version created a /var/run/masqmail directory, but since /var/run is mounted as a tmpfs in Dapper, masqmail will complain the next time it restarts. Another (probably cosmetic) bug(?) was with tuxpaint, since it placed a couple of launchers in the Gnome Applications menu, one on Education and the other on Graphics. I’ve yet to see if tuxpaint’s is a genuine bug or just a design decision, but I’ve fixed masqmail’s, and 0.2.21-1ubuntu2 should be on Dapper now, thanks to Daniel Holbach. So far I’m loving the new Ubuntu release, and with FeatureFreeze finally here that means I’ll have to drag my desktop box again to the local internet cafe to do yet another aptitude dist-upgrade. Gaah, I need a laptop!

Well, my DSL provider killed my connection for 10 days, and then I had some vacation ... Long time no see. Though, I've played with my dotfiles recently, and I set up some really nice things, picked from the web. Screen and zsh cooperation The one I find the best is the tight collaboration between screen and zsh to have nice labelled windows in the screen status line. You have to do this like that :

   # in your .zshrc, add the following code to you preexec :
   preexec ()  
       if [[ "$TERM" == "screen" ]]; then
           local CMD=$ 1[(wr)^(*=* sudo -*)] 
           echo -ne "\ek$CMD\e\\"
       fi
    

   # and this code in order to reset the title when zsh gets the hand back
   if [[ "$TERM" == "screen" ]]; then
       PROMPT="$ PROMPT % ^[kzsh^[\\% "
   fi

Then, you can have in your .screenrc some dark margic like :

   bind s select zsh

which make Ctrl-A s find your first available shell (really nice). Make Shift+PgUp/PgDown work in screen well, this is complete dark magic, but it works :

   # tell screen that you term can scroll
   termcapinfo xterm ti@:te@
   # bind Shift+PgUp/PgDn
   bindkey -m "^[[5;2~" stuff ^b
   bindkey -m "^[[6;2~" stuff ^f

And another great setting is altscreen :

   # Support alternate screens so that, for example, when you
   # quit out of vi, the display is redrawn as it was before vi
   # redrew the full screen.
   altscreen on

Though, now, Shift-Tab doesn't work anymore in screen, and since in vimrc I have things like :

   "   Tab Key magic ...
   vmap <tab> >gv
   vmap <bs> <gv

   function! CleverTab()
       if strpart( getline('.'), col('.')-2, 1 ) =~ '^\s*$'
           return "\<Tab>"
       else
           return "\<C-P>"
       endif
   endfunction
   inoremap <Tab> <C-R>=CleverTab()<CR>
   inoremap <S-Tab> <Tab>

   "  

it's quite important that Shift+Tab works ... zsh does not eat non "\n" terminated lines I don't like the option

   setopt no_prompt_cr

that tells zsh no to print a "\r" before each prompt : I have a rprompt, and if a command (e.g. echo -n "f*****g command") is performed just before a shell prompt display, then my rprompt is wrapped, it's ugly. but printing a "\r" each time eats the line if no "\n" was present, which happens sometime, and makes you think the command you launched failed. I found that jewel on the zsh-users MailList :

   precmd()  
       local escape colno lineno
       IFS='[;' read -s -d R escape\?$'\e[6n' lineno colno
       (( colno > 1 )) && echo ''
    

Basically, it checks before writing the prompt if the current column position is 0, and if not, it prints an "\n". I guess it may exists some races if you have a background job, but for alldays use, it's perfect.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work. The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website. But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minionsnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list. Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on. The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release. I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :) Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatal in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.

I bought a Belkin F6H500ukUNV from eBuyer (quickfind code 77131). At under £25 including P&P it seemed like a good deal and I've been meaning to get round to having a UPS to allow clean shutdown of my local machine during power problems. Belkin ship Linux and FreeBSD programs to talk to the UPS (though only over the serial interface - it has USB too). It doesn't like xterm it seems; prints Error opening terminal: xterm.. Seems fine with a terminal type of linux. It also puts all its files (config, help, binaries) in /etc/belkin. And it's binary only so I can't fix any of this brokenness. However, the lovely Network UPS Tools exists. Except Belkin have a number of UPS types, all incompatible with each other. After figuring out that I really, really needed to use the Belkin provided cable and not just a generic serial extender cable (grrrr. Why? If it's got a 9 pin D labelled RS232 why not make it a sensible port?) I got the Belkin software working and straced it to see what it did. A bit of looking at the nut source found several drivers that appeared to use the commands Belkin were sending (Q1, I & F). I tried powermust first, with the following /etc/nut/ups.conf:

[belkin]
	driver = powermust
	port = /dev/ttyM2

(I have a 4 port serial card, so /dev/ttyM2 is just a normal serial port, really.) And tada. It works. I can now get output like:

[noodles@pot ~]$ upsc belkin@localhost
battery.charge: 100.0
battery.voltage: 13.8
battery.voltage.nominal: 12.0
driver.name: powermust
driver.parameter.port: /dev/ttyM2
driver.version: 2.0.3
driver.version.internal: 1.1
input.voltage: 227.0
input.voltage.fault: 227.0
input.voltage.maximum: 234.0
input.voltage.minimum: 221.0
output.frequency: 50.0
output.voltage: 227.0
output.voltage.target.battery: 230.0
ups.delay.shutdown: 2
ups.delay.start: 3
ups.load: 0.0
ups.mfr: Mustek
ups.model: PowerMust
ups.serial: unknown
ups.status: OL

I don't know about doing shutdown yet, but ups.status correctly goes to OB (on battery) if I pull the power, which is probably the most important thing. :) At some point I'd like to move over to the USB interface; I have better things to do with my serial ports. Belkin don't appear to have done the sane USB HID power thing; instead it's some odd hid device that doesn't even have a Belkin manufacturer ID:

Bus 003 Device 015: ID 0001:0000 Fry's Electronics 
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.00
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x0001 Fry's Electronics
  idProduct          0x0000 
  bcdDevice            1.00
  iManufacturer           1 MEC
  iProduct                2 MEC0002
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           34
    bNumInterfaces          1
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
      (Bus Powered)
    MaxPower              100mA
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        0
      bAlternateSetting       0
      bNumEndpoints           1
      bInterfaceClass         3 Human Interface Devices
      bInterfaceSubClass      0 No Subclass
      bInterfaceProtocol      0 None
      iInterface              0 
        HID Device Descriptor:
          bLength                 9
          bDescriptorType        33
          bcdHID               1.00
          bCountryCode            0 Not supported
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength     624
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x81  EP 1 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval              10
Device Status:     0x0000
  (Bus Powered)

The NUT energizerups driver appears to talk USB and use the Q1/F commands, so I think I'll try that later. Or it's back to usbsnoop and a Windows box I guess.

A couple weeks ago I was going to lunch and met up with one of my friends who I hadn't seen in a while. I had to wait for her to finish her TAing job, in the same lab that I once taught in. I was surprised at my reaction - I wanted to jump right into the room and start helping out. I restrained myself, but it gave me a good reminder of what my actual goal is in grad school. I want to be a professor - I wasn't sure when I started here at the U of M, but after two or three teaching sessions I was certain I was going to teach. It probably helped that it was a class which I have a good amount of experience teaching, being one of the classes I helped with for 3 semesters. Lately I've been trying to remember why I am going through with it all in order to get the Ph.D, and seeing that class was a good reminder. It makes me think that I might want to request a Teaching Assistant job every year or so just to keep me on the right track towards something. Unfortunately, I think if I want to finish in a reasonable amount of time, I will need to focus 100 percent on the thesis before long.

Thanks to the fifty persons that signed the petition regarding abrotman coming to DebConf6! Unfortunately, the guys at Petiton Online temporarily disabled the petition due to anonymous postage, which I had already certified and didn’t get a reply (the bastards).In spite of abrotman’s undecision, here is, for everybody’s joy, a picture of him at a wedding party:

Yay!

It seems that I have become quite a gadget-whore lately. I'm spending all my money buying one gadget after the other, no end in sight... Anyways, I finally got one of those fabulous Motorola A780, a Linux-based smartphone. Getting one turned out to be way more complicated (and expensive!) than what I thought it would be. In the beginning, all sounded quite good: my cell phone contract with o2 is two years old soon, so I can get a new (cheap) cell phone. Stupidly enough, o2 doesn't offer the A780 in their shops and there seems to be no way to order one either (they do offer other Motorola phones, though). After asking the same questions in different o2 shops multiple times (and almost giving up), I accidentally saw the A780 in the local Saturn (a German electronics store). And indeed, they sell the phone, and they can even prolong my contract with o2 (there's a dedicated o2 employee working in the Saturn store), so that I can profit in the form of a cheaper phone. Or at least that's the theory... In practive, however, I have a student-contract (saves me some bucks) which has the stupid "feature" that it can only be prolonged in o2 shops. Guess what, the Saturn guys cannot give me the A780 as they can't prolong my contract, and the o2 shop simply doesn't have the A780 at all. Argh! After grumbling, asking around, googling, and even more grumbling, I finally decided to do the following: I got a new "dummy" o2 contract in the Saturn (yes, I'll have to pay that for 2 years) which enables me to get the A780 and to get it cheaper. I'll keep using my old contract and my old SIM card for simplicity and leave the new one untouched. If you take into account the money I'll spend on the new contract it doesn't save me too much money, but at least it's distributed across two years... I'll terminate my (new) o2 contract tomorrow, to make sure I don't forget about it (I don't want to have it any longer than the 2 years I'm forced to live with)... Stupid, stupid world we live in. Nobody should be required to perform such "hacks" in order to get the phone he/she wants... Enough ranting now, here's some juicy details about the phone:

• ARM CPU (at 400 MHz, I think)
• 48 MB RAM, 48 MB on-chip flash memory, 256 MB Transflash card
• 240x320 touchscreen
• 1280x1024 built-in digital camera (can record videos, too!)
• USB (device, host, OTG)
• Bluetooth
• GPS (+ it comes with CDs with maps of Europe)
• Plays MP3s and videos
• Can send SMS, MMS, emails, and has an IM client
• and lots more great stuff...

For details on the hardware see this wiki page. The only thing which I'm missing is WLAN, but once USB host support works (the hardware does support it), you can easily use a WLAN USB dongle... I'm pretty sure I'll be having lots of fun with this thing, and I'll quite probably be contributing to the OpenEZX project, which was started by Harald Welte (of gpl-violations.org fame) and tries to create the first 100% Free Software GSM-phone using the Motorola A780 and similar phones. Judging from these blog posts by Harald, running your own 2.6 kernel on the phone is not too unrealistic anymore, and telnetting into the phone (via USBnet) seems to work fine already... Expect more spammingblog posts about the A780 in future...

On Heise’s security site HeiSec, Microsoft is advertising (in German) with a Flash animation of a rolling, black horse approaching the reader. Then suddenly a red gate closes and a text apprears:

Trojans must stay out.

If we translate this back to ancient greek history, it would say:

Microsofties must stay out

since Trojans were the inhabitants of Troy (German: Troja) and in the horse were the Greek aggressors. So I strongly agree. ;-) I really hate it, if people just reverse the meaning of something by abbreviating it (here by turning the adjective into a noun). And then not noticing it. The term Trojan Horse in computing is just one (unfortunately) often seen example… But no wonder that Microsoft doesn’t care about such things. They care about so less (e.g. stable software, secure operating systems, users, administrators, trust, etc.) except keeping their monopoly, making money and making even more money.

XSLT is an outright ugly language. Thats why I often just hate it. In some (rare) cases it's very elegant, but most often incredibly clumsy. I've been redoing my homepage completely, and I'm using XSLT to render my data XML files to the XHTML output. That works quite well so far, but I hit more and more special cases. First I wanted to add a language chooser. This required finding out which lanuages my document supports (read: blocks with that language attribute exist) and check for uniqueness. Some things where rather easy to solve (with some experience in XSLT), so where extremely ugly. First of all, I want my template file to be a valid XHTML file, I don't want to have any layout parts in XSLT. Then I have a separate sitemap, needed for generating the menu. So I have to process three documents at the same time in XSLT. Ouch. But doable, using variables. Basically I have three modes - in one mode, the template is mostly copied over, unless I've specified some special rule, e.g. to insert the page title, meta information or content. A second mode uses the current chunk of the template document as template for the contents a couple of times to iterate over data chunks from the data source file (read: put text blocks from my source files into the output template format). The third mode does the same for the sitemap. Unfortunately, it started to get even messier... Big problem number one: Make a list of the available languages for the current page. Make this information reuseable throughout the page transformation. Part one: make a list of available languages by finding unique (!) @lang attributes. (usual approach: grab all nodes with @lang attributes, check if they have the same node id like the first occurence with this @lang value for uniquness, then output. Ugly as hell, but string magic sucks as much.) Big issue number two: Assume we now have a variable with en in there, access these nodes to transform them. Unfortunately, the generated nodes are "result nodes", and you cannot iterate over them with for-each. Luckily the exslt node-set extension to solve this. But now came the third big issue along... this is where I give up. I want my pages to have a nice modification date... my data pages are stored in subversion... Subversion has keywords expansion like CVS, which I can use nicely to automatically update the last modification date of the file. Unfortunately, the date will look like this: $Date: 2006-02-15 21:29:10 +0100 (Mi, 15 Feb 2006) $ Whereas in a web page meta information it's recommended to use ISO8601. Now if I only had regular expressions and proper date handling functions... I guess I'll stop writing ugly, hackish XSLT code and chose pretty Python code instead. Maybe use TAL or KID for XMLish templating...

Yesterday evening, around 17:00 UTC I finished building another DVD image after beeing up for almost 33hours. This time it is for the Cebit edition of the german Linux Magazin and Debian (we will have a booth there, see our Events page for more info, together with Credativ). If you are there you can grab the image there, or alternatively at the booth of Linux New Media/Linux Magazin. I built the image together with Alex (Tolimar), who did a great job keeping me focused on it, compiling stuff, helping with documentation, package selection and many other different things that needed to be done. We had our first big run with this image from (I think) Wednesday til Thursday, not taking any sleep in the night, to get it finished in time. Unfortunately we got the message that it needed some more changes, so we had the weekend to sort through it, and started again on Friday evening. Alex left on Sunday afternoon, where the image was basically nearly finished. Due to some little hickups it then needed until Monday 18:00 to really be final and sent out, which made me stay awake from Sunday, 09:30 til around Monday, 18:00 (local time). As usual (like the last 3 images I built for events in Germany) this is a multi-architecture image, again with i386, amd64 and powerpc included, ready to boot into our nice debian-installer for sarge. The kernel was updated to 2.6.12 for i386 and amd64, to support a few more newer machines. We also included a preseeding magic, so you can install a complete Debian Desktop only by deciding how to partition your harddisc and entering the username / password you want to use. You end up with a nice little Gnome-System, having a custom background, some links on the Desktop and bookmarks in Firefox and a disabled root account (use sudo :) ). This nearly automatic installation is available for german and for spanish, as we will bring some of these DVDs to the DebianDay in Mexico. For the spanish part Marga did a great job with the translation of all the various included Readme files to spanish in a normally much to short timeframe (we asked somewhere on Saturday IIRC), many thanks to her for that work. But it would be boring to have only those bits on this DVD, so we decided to include a few backports from backports.org too. There is a newer X, a newer OpenOffice, spamassassin and others included for at least i386. And still - we have included more. We included a recent build of openwrt and also the small edition of grml on this DVD. All in all users have around 45 - 50 different ways to boot from this DVD, which is a nice and big selection. Right now its hard to think of a collection that makes it “better/bigger/whatever” than that. Im sure there will be something with which we can outperform this, but right now its hard to imagine. Of course an etch d-i could be a point, maybe together with a Debian Livesystem (real Debian, not just “based on with random additions”), maybe many more preseeding configurations and not only one, we will see. If you have suggestions please mail me. If you want it: Yes, you can freely download the image, if you cant grab it on DVD while Cebit is running / from a LinuxMagazin, but this download will only be available after Cebit finished plus a few days more. Its never good to have a DVD for a magazine freely available before that magazine is public. :)