I d like to extend a warm welcome to our selected students for the 2010 Debian Google Summer of Code! They should pop up on Debian Planet soon and you re welcome to come talk to them on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org Aptitude Qt by Piotr Galiszewski, mentored by Sune Vuorela Qt GUI for aptitude. Currently, KDE users need to use Aptitude via the console interface, or install the newly developed GTK frontend, which does not fit well into KDE desktop. Making Qt frontend to Aptitude would solve this problem and bring an advanced and fully Debian-compliant graphical package manager to KDE. Content-aware Config Files Upgrading by Krzysztof Tyszecki, mentored by Dominique Dumont When a package deliver configuration files, the problem of merging user data with new configuration instructions will arise during package upgrades on users systems. Sometimes merging can be done with 3 way merge, but this process does not insure that the resulting file is correct or even legal. This project intends to create standards, tools an heuristics to make the scary config file conflict resolution debconf prompt a thing of the past. Debbugs Bug Reporting and Manipulation API by David Wendt Jr., mentored by Bastian Venthur Currently debbugs supports a SOAP interface for querying Debian s Bug Tracking System. Unfortunately this operation is read-only. This project would create an API for debbugs which supports sending and manipulating bug reports, without having to resort to email. This project does not intend to replace email as mean to manipulate the BTS but rather to enhance the BTS to allow other means of bug creation and manipulation. Debian High Performance Computing on Clouds by Dominique Belhachemi, mentored by Steffen Moeller The project paves a way to combine the demands in high performance computing with the dynamics of compute clouds with Debian. Combining the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure with the TORQUE resource manager and preparing the components for dynamically added and removed instances provides the user with a attractive high performance computing environment. Such a system allows users to share resources with large compute centers with minimal changes in their workflow and scripts. Debian-Installer on Neo FreeRunner and Handheld Devices by Thibaut Girka, mentored by Gaudenz Steinlin This project aims to improve the installation experience of Debian on handheld devices by replacing ad-hoc install scripts by a full-blown and adapted Debian-Installer. The Neo FreeRunner is used as it is the most convenient and open device from a development standpoint, but other devices will also be explored. Hurd port and de-Linux-ization of Debian-Installer by J r mie Koenig, mentored by Samuel Thibault The primary means of distributing the Hurd is through Debian GNU/Hurd. However, the installation CDs presently use an ancient, non-native installer. The goal of this project is to port the missing parts of Debian-Installer to Hurd. To achieve this, all problematic Linux-specific code in Debian-Installer will be replaced by less or non-kernel dependent code, paving the way for better support of other non-Linux ports of Debian. Multi-Arch support in APT by David Kalnischkies, mentored by Michael Vogt Hardware like 64bit processors are perfectly able to execute 32bit opcode but until now this potentiality is disregard as the infrastructure tools like dpkg and APT are not able to install and/or solve dependencies across multiple architectures. The project therefore focuses on enabling APT to work out good solutions in a MultiArch aware environments without the need of hacky and partly working biarch packages currently in use. Package Repository Analysis and Migration Automation by Ricardo O Donell, mentored by Neil Williams Emdebian uses a filter to select packages from the main Debian repositories that are considered useful to embedded devices, excluding the majority of packages. The results of processing the filter are automated but maintaining the filter list is manual. This project seeks to automate certain elements of the filtering process to cope with specific conditions. This project will also generalize to more elaborate and intelligent algorithms to improve the transitions of the main Debian archives. Smart Upload Server for FTP Master by Petr Jasek, mentored by Joerg Jaspert Making packages upload smarter, more interactive and painless for uploaders by switching from anonymous FTP and Cron jobs to a robust protocol and modern package checking and processing daemon. This daemon would test early and report early, saving developers time. More details coming soon on http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc Congratulations everyone and have a fruitful summer!

Last weekend, I went to the Grenslandhallen in Hasselt, to see Belgium compete against Estonia in a Fed Cup tie of the World Group playoffs. The winner of this tie would gain a seat in the top-tier World Group next year, which opens the possibility of winning this competition. The Belgian team was the strongest possible one, with all four best Belgian female tennis players Yanina Wickmayer, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and Kirsten Flipkens. On paper, the team should not have had any problems beating the Estonian team. Unfortunately, Justine fractured her pinky finger during practice on wednesday; and while it did not make it impossible for her to play, it did reduce her fitness somewhat, which meant that on Saturday, Kim and Yanina had to defend the Belgian colors. They did and won, but then Kim injured some muscle in her foot, which made it hard for her to walk on Sunday, let alone play. With only Justine, Yanina, and Kirsten available, coach Appelmans chose to put Justine on the field. Though she made a valiant effort, she unfortunately did not manage to beat an unleashed Kaia Kanepi, who it must be said played a terrific match. As such, it fell on Yanina to bring home the tie in the fourth singles rubber against Maret Ani. Being a bit nervous in the start of the first set, she made some unnecessary errors; but after a few games, she came through and started to play much better. Unfortunately, by that time the score was already at 5-1. Yanina won her first service game of the match to bring it to 5-2, but it wasn't enough, and Ani won the first set somewhat easily. She couldn't put anything on the table against a storming Wickmayer, however, and after two more sets, the outcome of the match and, by extension, the tie was clear: a win for Belgium. I can't help but note that Wickmayer has been a great player for the Belgian fed cup team these past few years, however. Since her first Fed Cup participation in 2007, she holds what is, given her ranking at the time, a rather impressive 9-4 win-loss record in Fed Cup. If it wasn't for Wickmayer, the Belgian team would not be where it is now. It was Wickmayer who won her three matches against Canada, one as part of a doubles team, to prevent demotion from world group II to the Europe/Africa zone back in 2009, with a 3-2 score. It was Wickmayer who won the crucial third rubber against higher-ranked Radwanska in February to beat Poland, with the latter even holding the home field advantage. And it's now been Wickmayer who won two of the three rubbers against Estonia that were needed to win the tie. So Congrats, Yanina!

Having my primary working Computer, a Lenovo Thinkpad, going into repair at the end of December I finally got up to ordering on of those TouchBook ARM based netbooks I was looking at for some time. After some processing time it finally got shipped in April and arrived here last Monday, time to write up my first impressions. Some words about the Hardware. The TouchBook ships with a so called "Beagle Board" featuring a OMAP3 Processor, ARM Cortex A8 running at 600MHz, 512MiB of RAM and a 8GiB SD Card for storage. It has a 8.9" touch screen and comes with USB and Bluetooth Sticks for wireless connectivity. The Display part contains all the needed Hardware and is detachable from the bottom that is just a keyboard sitting on the secondary Battery. You can open the Top to get at 4 intern USBs (3 USB-A and one Mini-USB) where 2 of these spots are occupied already for wireless networking and Bluetooth. First experience The TouchBook comes with an US Power Adaptor only so when I got the device I was running for some tiny Adaptor to get the plug into a normal EU Power Outlet (it's incredibly hard to get one for this Direction while it's easy to get some travelling stuff to plug EU Hardware into various different Outlets!). When I finally booted it the first thing you'll notice is the touch interface for the bootloader. That's quite a difference to all-text-based old grub! The shipped SD Card offers 3 Operating Systems, one custom Linux that might well be interesting to the average User, a Ubuntu Karmic that really OK for a Debianoid Hacker- both running a XFCE Desktop - and a Android that is really slow and doesn't seem to be good at anything. Needless to say I sticked with the Ubuntu for now. What to not expect Well this is a 600MHz CPU with half a Gig of RAM running of a SD Card. So don't expect it to be good at anything that can profit from today's High-End Hardware. The good Points First of all, I have to admit that the touch screen is a neat interface, way superior to the Touchpad Area you'll normally find on a Notebook - at least if you use the stylus. It's quite different from the inside-the-keyboard trackball the thinkpads have of course. The Website claims 10h of Battery life and while I've emptied the battery much faster under certain workloads (e.g. Playing cards) it does hold that promise with emacs fired up in org-mode, IRCing on a server over SSH and the mandatory wireless working. Same for a always-on on campus day which just works. Again putting the screen on the keyboard the wrong way 'round will give you a touchscreen tablet with the keyboard out of your way, an ideal configuration for playing. And I have to admit playing games like gtkballs or aisle riot real fun. So much fun actually I'm currently thinking on whether it would be feasible to get openpandora working on it. What I'm really missing There are two Properties that are really lacking from the device which would make it (in my personal opinion at least) a whole lot better: A simple Ethernet controller I could use to go online when sitting in the server room doing some maintenance without taking my WRT with me and some slot to store the stylus when not using it where it's easy to get out (currently I'm having it in my wallet). Then there's something (maybe a Kernel Bug): The Wireless is unable to find any new Access Point after disconnecting from some and walking out of reach from that. Force-unloading the kernel module and waiting 30 minutes worked for me multiple times but that's purely inacceptable. Finally there are some minor glitches. The shiny red cover just gets dirty every time you touch the thing and the Keyboard is really small (what a surprise on a 9" device) and has some of the special Keys (like the Home key) located at unusual spots (Page-Up/Down only available through the FN modifier). Shift and End at the right side are also labeled opposite from their actual function (at least on Ubuntu). The last ugliness is the top part battery only charging when the device is running, which means you"ll have the TouchBook running all night to get the battery charged and the Battery Monitor not working at all (at least in the current version of the operating systems). Where to go now I've not yet come around to really play with the operating system (apart from installing wicd, urxvt-unicode and awesome getting the most needed of my working environment). As I'm a Debian Developer I'll definitely need a Debian running on it (although I was told it'll be slow with software compiled for armv4te) and, as it needs to be running all night anyway, I'll try out gentoo pending another SD Card for experiments. Secondly there's currently no useable conforming Common Lisp Implementation in Debian for armel as far as I can tell. As arm was already working it shouldn't be that hard, let's see if I can change that but feel free to join me! Final Notes I was thinking of some mobile-ish note-taking device and remote ssh terminal for University which the device clearly can do even for 10h away from any power plug while being some non-standard non-x86 device to toy on (It's actually my second armel next to the sheeva plug mounted on my window board. As a final Remark: This blogpost was written on the TouchBook hacking some markdown into emacs while traveling by train to Erlangen where I study on Sunday Night after having read some chapters of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother on my E-Slick E-Book reader and finished later in my Room. Maybe I'll find some time to write a review for this device as well one day!

Sam Harris gave an interesting TED talk about whether there are scientific answers to moral questions [1]. One of his insightful points was that when dealing with facts certain opinions should be excluded it would be good if journalists who report on issues of science could understand this. Another insight was that religious people most strongly agree with him regarding the issue of whether there are factual answers to moral questions but they think that God just handed the answers to their ancesters rather than making it an issue that requires consideration. He cites the issue of gay marriage as being a distraction from moral issues such as genocide and poverty. He asks how have we convinced ourself that every culture has a point of view worth considering? . He asks how the ignorance of the Taliban on the topic of physics is any less obvious than on the topic of human well-being. Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk titled Why Are We Happy? [2]. One interesting fact he cites is that people who become paraplegic are no less happy in the long term than people who win the lottery. He points out that a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable and uses this fact to explain the promotion of natural happiness over synthetic happiness in our society. Dan Barber gave an amusing and informative TED talk How I Fell in Love with a Fish [3]. He speaks about ecological fish farming and how the fish are more tasty as well as the farm being good for the environment. The farm in question is in the south-west of Spain, hopefully there will be more similar farms in other parts of the world soon. Gary Lauder gave an interesting brief TED talk about road signs [4]. His main point was to advocate a road sign saying take turns , but there are already signs in the US at freeway on-ramps saying that 1 or 2 cars may enter every time the light turns green which is a similar concept. The innovative thing he did was to estimate the amount of time and petrol wasted by stop signs, add that over a year based on the average income and then estimate that an annuity covering that ongoing expense would cost more than $2,000,000. This makes two stop signs at an intersection have an expense of $1,000,000 each. He suggests that rather than installing stop signs it would be cheaper to buy the adjacent land, chop down all trees, and then sell it again. Alan Siegel gave an insightful TED talk about simplifying legal documents [5]. He gives an example of an IRS document which was analysed with a Heat Map to show which parts confused the readers the IRS adopted a new document that his group designed which made it easier for taxpayers. He advocates legislation to make legal documents easier to understand for customers of financial services. Tim Berners Lee gave an interesting TED talk about Open Data, he illustrated it with some fantastic videos showing how mashups have been used with government data [6] and how the Open Street Map project developed over time. Martin F. Krafft gave an interesting Debconf talk about Tool Adoption Behavior in the Debian project [7]. One thing that I found particularly interesting was his description of the Delphi Method that he used to assemble a panel of experts and gather a consensus of opinion. The post-processing on this talk was very good, in some sections Martin s presentation notes are shown on screen with the video of him in the corner. As an aside, I think we really do need camera-phones. The Big Money has an interesting article comparing the Mafia Bust Out with the practices of US banks [8]. Mark Roth gave an exciting TED talk about using Hydrogen Sulphide to trigger suspended animation [9]. They are now doing human trials for suspending people who have serious injuries to reduce tissue damage during the process of surgery. Pawan Sinha gave an interesting TED talk about how brains learn to see [10]. He started by talking about curing blindness in people who have been blind since birth. But he then ended by showing some research into the correlation between visual processing and Autism, he showed that an Autistic child had significantly different visual patterns when playing Pong to an NT child. Adora Svitak gave an insightful TED talk about what adults can learn from kids [11]. She made some particularly interesting points about the education system requiring that adults respect children more and expect them to do better than their parents which is essential for all progress in society. The NY Times has an interesting article on animal homosexuality [12]. In terms of research it focusses on lesbian relationships between albatrosses. But a large part of the article is devoted to the politics of scientific research into animal sexuality. BrowserShots.org shows you what your web site looks like in different web browsers [13]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article titles Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship about the Apple DRM [14]. He describes the way the Apple Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) doesn t stop copyright violation but does reduce competition in the computer industry. He is not going to sell his work on the Apple store (for the iPad or iPhone etc) and suggests that customers should choose a more open platform. It s unfortunate that he didn t suggest a better platform.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_lauder_s_new_traffic_sign_take_turns.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_siegel_let_s_simplify_legal_jargon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_data_went_worldwide.html
• [7] https://penta.debconf.org/dc9_schedule/events/381.en.html
• [8] http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/money-trail/2010/03/19/bust-out?page=full
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_roth_suspended_animation.html
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/pawan_sinha_on_how_brains_learn_to_see.html
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html
• [13] http://browsershots.org/
• [14] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/456751-Can_You_Survive_a_Benevolent_Dictatorship_.php

Since writing my post about whether the National Broadband Network can ever break even [1] I ve had a number of people try to convince me of it s merit. He is my summary and rebuttal of some of the arguments for the NBN: The FUD Claims are made that Australia may fall behind the rest of the world, children may be disadvantaged in their education, or many other bad things may unless a faster net access is provided to everyone. That is FUD. If we are going to spend $43,000,000,000 then we should have some evidence that it will do some good. One thing to note is that rural areas will not get anything near the 100Mb/s speeds that FTTH will deliver to people in the cities. So if faster net access is actually essential then it would probably make sense to start by delivering ADSL2+ speeds to rural areas something that is not planned to be part of the NBN. Some people claim that having slow net access (ADSL2+) is going to preclude unknown future uses of the Internet. However the NBN is only going to be 100MB/s so any such claim is essentially that unknown things will happen in the future to make 24Mb/s too slow, but those unknown things won t make 100Mb/s too slow . I started using computer networks when a 1200/75 modem was considered fast. Over about the last 25 years typical net access speeds have increased from 1200b/s to about 12Mb/s, that s a factor of 10,000 speed improvement! Now the people who believe that we only need to multiply the current speed by a factor of 4 to address all future needs could be correct, but it seems unlikely and doesn t seem like a good idea for a $43,000,000,000 bet. If they were talking about 1Gb/s net access then things would be different in this regard. Technological Development Some people compare the NBN to the Apollo Program and suggest that the scientific research involved in implementing a FTTH network might result in useful developments in other areas. The Wikipedia page about Fiber to the premises by country indicates that Hong Kong had 1Gb/s available in 2006. It seems that a service which is rolled out 4 years later and 10 times slower than in Hong Kong is not going to involve a huge amount of research. Certainly nothing like the Apollo Program. It would allow multiple HDTV channels to be viewed at the same time According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2001 the average Australian household had 2.6 people (3.0 in NT) [2]. The incidence of every member of a household wanting to watch a different live TV channel at the same time is probably quite low, it seems that young people nowadays spend as much time watching Youtube as they do watching TV. Based on the Wikipedia bit-rate page it seems that an ADSL2+ link could stream two HDTV channels. I could use fiber speeds today There are some people who claim that they need faster speeds for their data transfers right now. The problem is that the latency of data transfer is a bottleneck in transfer rates. In some quick tests between servers that have reasonably fast connections to the Internet I was only able to get one international transfer in excess of ADSL2+ speed (24Mb/s or 3MB/s). I was able to transfer data between London and Germany at a speed of 11MB/s which was possibly limited by the 100baseT Ethernet connection in the data center in Germany. Now if the people who pay for that German server were to pay more then they would get a higher speed. So anyone who downloads anything from my web site in it s current configuration would get a significant performance boost by using an NBN connection if they live in Europe! But if they live in Australia then they will probably get a fraction of that speed (a quick test indicates that my ADSL2+ connection gives me about 500KB/s from my web server. I need to have at least three transfers going at the same time to get more than 600KB/s when downloading files from other countries, and it s rare to have a single download run at a speed higher than 100KB/s. It would be handy if I could download at higher speeds from my ISP s mirror (which seems to be the only way someone in Australia can even use full ADSL2+ speeds). But it s certainly not worth the $5,000 per household installation cost of the NBN to get that. I m sure that there are some people who really do have usage patterns that could take advantage of fiber net access, one possibility would be downloading large files from a local source such as a major web site that uses a CDN. It seems likely to me that the majority of people who fit this category are using major porn services. Fiber would be good for Video-Conferencing To be better than ADSL for video-conferencing a NBN connection would need a faster upload speed. Internode is already selling NBN connections for the trial areas [3]. The cheapest fiber plans that they offer are at the 50/2 speed, that s 50Mb/s download and 2Mb/s upload in theory ADSL2+ should have a higher upload speed. In my tests the best result I ve got from sending files over my ADSL2+ link to another country is about 110KB/s (880Kb/s). The fact that the theoretical speed of a fiber connection is better than the measured speed of an ADSL2+ connection in this regard doesn t mean much, let s not assume that a fiber connection will get it s theoretical maximum speed. Not that you necessarily need higher speeds for video-conferencing, Youtube is one of many services that uses a lot less bandwidth than the upload speed of an ADSL2+ connection. Also video-calls which are supported on most 3G mobile phones use even less bandwidth again. I want an NBN connection to run a server at home The fastest connection for uploading that Internode offers to home users is the Home High plan at 100/8 speed, that is maybe a bit more than twice as fast for uploading as ADSL2+. They also offer a SOHO plan that supports 16Mb/s upload speed (at extra expense) and suggest that customers who want higher speeds contact their business sales department. But they include both sending and receiving data in the bandwidth quota for the fiber connections. Transmitting data at 16Mb/s isn t that great for a server. The cheapest virtual server plan on offer from Linode [4] includes 200GB of data transfer per month and has significantly higher transmission speeds. You could get a Linode virtual server plus an Internode ADSL2+ connection for about the same price as an Internode fiber connection to the home. There are two down-sides to virtual servers, one is that they are limited in the amount of RAM that they have (I can easily afford to buy 8G of RAM for a home system but renting an 8G virtual server is going to be expensive) and the other is that the storage is limited. Shared storage on virtual servers can be slow and is limited in size. If you need to run a server with a few terabytes of data storage (which is cheap on commodity SATA disks but expensive on server-grade disks) and you don t need to transfer much of it then a home server on the NBN might do well. Otherwise it s probably not going to work well for server use. The NBN will avoid people leaving their PC on to do downloads and save electricity To save electricity you would have to have a significant incidence of situations where a download can complete fast enough over the NBN to allow the user to turn their PC off before going to bed but be slow enough over ADSL to require that it be left on overnight. That would probably only apply to downloads from a CDN or from a local ISP mirror. From the Internode mirror I can download a test file at a speed of 850KB/s (I guess this means that my ADSL connection is not delivering full speed I suspect poor quality wiring in my home and would try to fix it if the current speed was too slow). In 5 minutes spend brushing my teeth I could download 250M of data, in the same time if I had a 100/4 connection on the NBN I might be able to download almost 3G of data. So in the unlikely event that I wanted to download a CD or DVD image and turn off my PC immediately before going to bed then the NBN would be a good thing. But then of course I would want to burn the CD or DVD image to disc and that would take long enough that I would leave it on overnight My ADSL connection gives really low speeds or I m out of range for ADSL Some people who live only a short distance from an exchange are unable to get ADSL2+. Some people live a long way from exchanges and are outside ADSL range. The ideal solution to these problems is not to provide fiber access to the majority of the population, it is to provide ADSL to everyone who is near an exchange and maybe provide fiber access to some people who are a long way from exchanges. I find it rather ironic that some people in the country are essentially saying because net access in the country is so slow we need fiber in the cities . The NBN is not going to give fiber to rural areas, satellite is one of the options that will be used. Really High Speeds I have been informed that to get the distances needed for the NBN they have to use Single Mode Fiber, this permits scaling up to higher speeds at some later time by changing the hardware at the end points. So we could end up with a Hong Kong speed network at some future time with the same fibers. This is a good thing. But I don t think that we need to get fiber installed right now so that we can use 100Mb, we could wait until there is enough need to get the faster transmission rates from the start. At the moment it s just a waste of money.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/17/can-the-nbn-ever-break-even/
• [2] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyTopic/52BF7AD1530122AACA256C75007E400F?OpenDocument
• [3] http://www.internode.on.net/residential/broadband/fibre_to_the_home/plans/

Nearly a year ago people starting worrying about the complexity of SHA-1 being reduced and the potential availability of viable attacks against things such as PGP keys that used SHA-1. Many people (myself included) generated a new key, or updated preferences on keys that were otherwise strong enough. There were worries about what this might mean for Debian. We were getting ahead of ourselves a bit though. Firstly there haven't been any public viable attacks that I'm aware of (though of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to migrate away), but secondly there's a much easier method of attack. PGP v3 keys. To quote RFC4880:

V3 keys are deprecated. They contain three weaknesses. First, it is relatively easy to construct a V3 key that has the same Key ID as any other key because the Key ID is simply the low 64 bits of the public modulus. Secondly, because the fingerprint of a V3 key hashes the key material, but not its length, there is an increased opportunity for fingerprint collisions. Third, there are weaknesses in the MD5 hash algorithm that make developers prefer other algorithms. See below for a fuller discussion of Key IDs and fingerprints.

At the time of writing Debian has 21 remaining v3 keys. This is a significant improvement over a year ago, when we had 200, but it's still 21 more than I'd like. I've been chasing people since last May (starting with those who had v3 + v4 keys, all of whom now only have a v4 key) and we're down to the stragglers. So it's time to name and shame, in the hope of kicking them into action. The following keys are what's left (doesn't match the currently active keyring because we've had a few replacements since the last promote):

0x0D2156BD3D97C149 Michael Stone <mstone>
0x225FD911CD269B31 Carlos Barros <cbf>
0x31E73F14E298966D James R. Van Zandt <jrv>
0x366CD3FEEBC11B01 Chris Waters <xtifr>
0x37A73FE355E8BC4D Frederic Lepied <lepied>
0x3E973117DCC528E9 Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo>
0x5C7A46637953F711 Rich Sahlender <rsahlen>
0x5D6560F85F30F005 Craig Brozefsky <craig>
0x6B0E322836129171 Jim Westveer <jwest>
0x723724B4A5B6DD31 Christian Meder <meder>
0x7629B22ED71DAABD Adrian Bridgett <bridgett>
0x8FFC405EFD5A67CD Adam Di Carlo <aph>
0xB0D269DE17F3D4D1 Matthew Vernon <matthew>
0xBC151FC8D2A913A1 Peter S Galbraith <psg>
0xC1A0A171C2DCD3B1 Jim Mintha <jmintha>
0xC3168EBA23F5ADDB Ian Jackson <iwj>
0xCE951B1160D74C7D Patrick Cole <ltd>
0xE82A8B0D57137FE5 Paul Seelig <pseelig>
0xF20E242CE77AC835 Brian White <bcwhite>
0xFBAA570C3087194D Alan Bain <afrb2>
0xFFD1B4AC7C19FD19 David Engel <david>

Of these keys only 2 voted in the recent DPL election. 8 have failed to make any response to my mails (3 since last August). Only 9 have uploaded a package since August 2008. And 10 were already known to the MIA database. Some of them have stated they'll sort out a new key, but not yet done so.

If you are one of these people, please either get a new key sorted and signed and reply to the mails I've sent you, or reply and say you no longer wish to be involved in Debian. And if you know any of these people, encourage them to get a new key sorted and offer to sign it for them.

Something that regularly happens when I get to see other peoples shell scripts is me thinking Why do they not use the powers of bash? . Sometimes it s fine to not use bash specific features, like when you are limited by the Operating System you have to run on (don t you try some commercial Unix systems. Or this WIndows crap. Brrr). Sometimes you want it for some perceived performance win, sometimes a full bash doesn t fit the target system (think embedded devices). Thats all fine, don t come up with those, I know them. What I mean is - people are using things that bind you to bash and your hashbang also makes your script use bash. But people still jump out to a different command just for some variable modification which are easily doable in bash too. A few examples follow, always imagine them in a script starting with the header of

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -u

---

Example Get rid of newlines (actually, any replacement you can think of):

var1="something with
space and
linefeeds"
var1=$ var1//
/_ 
echo $var1

This is a simple but powerful demonstration of the Pattern substitution bash can do for you. Read its manpage, it can do much more than what I list here, but the above simply replaces all occurences of a linefeed with an _. Make the double // a single one and it is just the first that is replaced.

---

Example Removing a prefix (or suffix) from a string:

VAR1=$ VAR1##sync:archive: 

This removes the text sync:archive: from the beginning of the VAR1 variable. Replace the ## with %% and its gone from the end. The topic to look for in the manpage of bash is Remove matching prefix pattern (or suffix, of course).

---

There are many more possibilities, you might want to look through the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, it contains some helpful information. Or read the bash manpage. Or (shameless self-ad) look at the latest ftpsync script, the one and only official (mirroradm) supported mirror synchronization for the ftp.*.debian.org mirrors.

Alexander Lehmann, creator of the great videos "Du bist Terrorist" (You're a Terrorist) and "Rette deine Freiheit" (Save your Freedom), has created another fine piece of video art:



http://cleanternet.org

It's about the new plan by EU commissionar Cecilia Malmstr m of censoring the Internet in the name of the fight against child porn. In Germany we had this discussion in the last year and although a law has been brought into action, all political parties don't want that law anymore. Putting up STOP signs in front of webpages is the wrong way to fight child porn.

I found myself with a problem: trying to linearly edit a movie clip with a non-linear editor isn't very simple, nor is it meant to be. Case at hand: I have about 1 hour and 40 minutes of film material that was recorded with dvswitch, and which is 90% fine; but given what we wish to do with it, we really wish to remove the errors from the recording things like failed transitions, rogue camera movements, and so on. This is why we recorded the individual video streams on tape too, so that we could indeed do some retouching afterwards. Cinelerra, however, is not really made for that. If you want to create a transition, you need to have two segments of clips that are stuck together on the timeline, and the transition is then applied to the border between the two. You can create multiple video tracks, but you cannot cut from one track to another; you really have to add a clip to the timeline. Doing that has obvious issues if you have multiple video streams that were recorded on the same time and that can be time-synced on multiple tracks. You would prefer to just select one track or the other on a certain point in time, but cinelerra just doesn't do that. So the workflow that I found is the following: Add all video streams to the time line, each on a separate track. Make sure the to-be-touched-up stream is on top; when multiple tracks are in use, and the are not faded to 50% or so, cinelerra will only show the top stream in the final rendition. Synchronize the streams: first, create a rough alignment by moving them with the mouse. Then, press arrow-down until you can see the streams on a frame-by-frame basis. Now for each of your camera streams, do the following:

1. In the 'main' stream, search a section that was filmed by the camera which we are trying to align.
2. Hit 'l' to create a label
3. Search for the exact same frame in the camera stream. It may help to disable playback for the 'main' stream temporarily to visually verify that the frame is the same in the compositor window.
4. Move the cursor to that frame, and create another label.
5. If the streams are indeed desynced, then one of the tracks will lead, and the other will follow. If the leading track is the 'main' track, arm the main track and any tracks that you have already synced before, and make sure to remember the audio tracks. If, on the other hand, this is the camera track, then only arm that camera track. At any rate, make sure to disarm the track(s) that are following.
6. Use the control and arrow keys to select the first label. Use control, shift, and the arrow keys to select the section up to the second label.
7. At the bottom right of the program window, you can see three entry boxes with time indexes. The first is the time index to your first label; the third the time index to your second label; an in between those, the second is the length of the interval from the first label to the second label. Set the contents of the first box to all-zeroes, to move the selection to the beginning of the time line; then press tab (to move to the second entry box) and enter (to confirm that you wish to create a selection of that length at the beginning of the timeline).
8. Press Shift-Space to insert silence at the location of the selection. This will move the armed tracks to the right, and not touch the not armed tracks.
9. If you did everything right, the two tracks should now be aligned. Move the cursor to the second label, and verify that this is true by disabling 'play' for the main track and any tracks in between the main track and the track you're syncing. The frame in the compositor window should not change if you re-enable the main track. If it does, use 'z' for undo, remove your labels and try again.

Once your video tracks are aligned, you need one final video track that comes all the way on top. This is an empty, 'override' track. Anything you put in this track will override the main track. This way, you do not have to cut from the main track to another camera; instead, you just copy from a camera track and paste on the override track. It is, of course, possible to paste onto the main track, but that has the disadvantage that you cannot easily undo such edits after a 'save' operation. Using a separate 'override' track does allow that. To copy from one track to another track without moving in time, use the following method:

1. Select the region where you wish to select another camera.
2. Arm the camera track that you wish to copy from, and make sure not to arm any other track.
3. Hit 'c' to copy the clip at that point.
4. Disarm the camera track, and arm the 'override' track
5. Without moving or removing the selection, hit 'v' to paste onto the override track.

All this may be basic knowledge for people who are more flexed in nonlinear editors than me; but I couldn't find this procedure on the Internet, so I thought I'd put it out there so that the next person who tries this doesn't have to try for days on end to come up with this, as I had to do.

One of the features of Windows 7 is that hitting windows+p will pop up a little dialog that allows you to configure your active display outputs. This is an improvement over previous versions of Windows, which would generally instead have a variety of random vendor-specific tools that would function differently, look ugly and make you cry. So, hurrah to Windows for moving into the 21st century.

Most laptops have a display switch key. This is sent in a variety of ways, generally either via the keyboard controller, via WMI or via ACPI. In Linux we take all of these events and turn them into KEY_SWITCHVIDEOMODE, making it easy to implement standardised behaviour.

This is, obviously, far too straight forward.

Microsoft, rather than introducing an input mechanism that allows all of these events to hook into the windows+p infrastructure, provide the following recommendation:

As documented in this Launchpad bug, vendors are starting to do this. It's been seen in HP and Dell machines, at least, and it's presumably going to become more widespread.

So, if your display switch button now just makes the letter "P" appear, say thanks to Microsoft. There's a range of ways we can fix this, although none of them are straightforward and those of you who currently use left-Windows-p as a keyboard shortcut are going to be sad. I would say that I feel your pain, but my current plan is to spend the immediate future getting drunk enough that I stop caring.

(The good news is that the same set of recommendations says that you can no longer put a Windows sticker on a monitor unless it has a valid and accurate EDID. The bad news is that that implies that you've previously been able to put a Windows sticker on a monitor without it having a valid and accurate EDID)

If you re convinced that cloud is a useless buzzword, being used to describe everything under the sun, old and new, then well, you re right that is, except for the useless part. It s true that this word is being (ab)used in many different products, services and technologies, which do not seem to relate to each other in any concrete way. Cloud in the abstract is being defined in many different ways, based on different fundamental characteristics of cloud technology . Nonetheless, there is something genuinely important going on here, and this is my view of what it s about. The hype Countless business which only had web sites or web applications in 2008 now call them cloud services . They aren t delivering any new benefits to their users, and they haven t redesigned their infrastructure. What do they mean by this? Cloud is defined, some say, by where your data is kept, and cloud means storing your data on remote servers instead of internal ones. Millions of Gmail and Flickr users have been in the cloud without even knowing it, and so has everyone who reads their mail over IMAP, or uses voicemail. In short, cloud is just data that is somewhere else. Last September, I watched a presentation on Cloud computing where Symantec pitched their anti-virus product as having something like three different cloud computing technologies. These, it turned out, all involved downloading files over the Internet. In this view, cloud is essentially about the network, derived from our habit of using a drawing of a cloud in our network diagrams for so many years. Wikipedia currently shares this view, as its Cloud computing article opens with Cloud computing is Internet-based computing . No Internet, no cloud. Maybe cloud is just SaaS, and any service provided on a pay-per-use basis over the Internet is a cloud service. It would seem that cloud is about paying for things, especially on a utility basis. The cloud is computing by the hour; it s something you buy. Others maintain that cloud is just virtualization, so if you re using KVM or VMWare, you ve got a cloud already. In this view, cloud is about operating systems, and whether they re running on real or virtual hardware. Cloud means deploying applications as virtual appliances, and creating new servers entirely in software. If your servers only have one OS on them, then they re not cloud-ready. If this vagueness and contradiction irritates you, then you re not alone. It bugs me, and a lot of other people who are getting on with developing, using and providing technology and services. Cloud is not just a new name for these familiar technologies. In fact, it isn t a technology at all. I don t think it even makes sense to categorize technologies as cloud and non-cloud , though some may be more cloudy than others. Nonetheless, there is some meaning and validity in each of these interpretations of cloud. So what is it? A different perspective Cloud is a transition, a trend, a paradigm shift. It isn t something which exists or not: it is happening, and we won t understand its essential nature until it s over. Simon Wardley explains this, in presentation format, much better than I could in this blog post, so if you haven t already, I suggest that you take 14 minutes of your time and go and watch him do his thing. This change doesn t have a clear beginning or an end. Early on, it was a disconnected set of ideas without any identity. We re now somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, with enough insight to give it a name, and sufficient momentum to guess at what happens next. In the end, it will be absorbed into the way things are . What s going on? So, what is actually changing? The key trends I see are:

1. People and organizations are becoming more comfortable relying on resources which do not exist in any particular place. Rather than storing precious metals under our beds, we entrust our finances to banks, which store our data and provide us with services which let us use our money . In computing terms, we re no longer enamored with keeping all of our programs and our data on our hard drive: as it turns out, it s not very safe there after all, and in some ways we can actually exercise more control over programs and data out there than in here . We can no longer hoard our gold, or drive off would-be thieves with a pistol, but that wasn t a productive way to spend our energies anyway. While we can t put our hands on our money, we can know exactly what s happening with it from minute to minute, and use it in a variety of ways at a moment s notice.
2. IT products are ceding ground to services. In many cases, we no longer need to build software, or even buy it: we can simply use it. As computing needs become better understood, and can be met by commodity products, it becomes more feasible to develop services to meet them on-demand. This is why we see a spike in acronyms ending in aaS . Simon explains the progression in detail in his talk, linked above.
3. Hardware, software and data are being reorganized according to new models, in order to provide these services effectively. Architectural patterns, such as hardware/OS/framework/application are giving way to new ones, like hardware/OS/IaaS/OS/PaaS/SaaS/Internet/web browser/OS/hardware . These are still evolving, and the lines between them are blurry. It s a bit early to say what the dominant patterns will be, but system, network, data and application architecture are all being transformed. No single technology or architecture defines cloud, but virtualization (at the infrastructure level) and the web (at the application level) both seem to resonate strongly with cloudy design patterns.

These trends are reinforcing and accelerating each other, driving information technologies and businesses in a common direction. That, in a nutshell, is what cloud is all about. So what? This transformation is disruptive in many different ways, but the angles which most interest me at the moment are:

• Operating systems Cloud seems to indicate further commoditization of operating systems. We will have more operating systems than ever before (thanks to virtualization and IaaS), but we probably won t think about them as much (as in software appliances). I think that the cloud world will want operating systems which are free, standard and highly customizable, which is potentially a great opportunity for Ubuntu and other open systems.
• Software freedom As Eben Moglen and others have pointed out, this trend has significant consequences for the free software movement. As the shape of software changes, our principles of freedom must evolve as well. What does it mean to have the freedom to run a program in the cloud? To copy it? To change it? What other protections might people need in order to exercise these freedoms in the future?
• DevOps I see a strong resonance between cloud which is blurring the lines between hardware and software, infrastructure and applications, network and computer and DevOps, which is bringing together the people who currently work in these different categories. Cloud means that we can no longer afford to treat these elements separately, and must work together to find better approaches to developing and deploying software, knocking down barriers and mapping new territory. Fortunately, cloud also means developing powerful new tools which will power this revolution.
• Clients A majority of cloud related activity seems to be focused on what happens to back-end servers, but what about the computers we actually touch, on our desks, and in our pockets? How will they change? Will we end up reverting to a highly centralized computing model, where clients are strictly limited to front-end user interface processing (e.g. a web browser)? Will clients join the cloud and be providers of computing resources, not only consumers? What new types of devices will we need in order to make the most of cloud?

I d like to explore some of these topics in future posts.

Once again, I was invited by several different groups to be present at FLISOL, a quite interesting phenomenon: FLISOL (Latin-american Free Software Installation Festival) is s very large-scale, very loosely coordinated thing put together for five years already in over 200 cities in basically every Latin American country. Go to the FLISOL page, it is quite interesting to try to understand it! Now, I don't like FLISOL. I managed to avoid it in 2005 and 2006; in 2007, I was present at a FLISOL, although I didn't know beforehand it was the reason for the conference I was invited to. In 2008 and 2009 I took part for reasons I should not go into right now. This year, again, I will not be part of any of its activities (regardless of rumors to the contrary I was invited to be present at a panel on ACTA, but I have not followed the topic enough to be aware of anything besides the very basic aspects, I have no authority to speak about it; I told the organizers I would like to be there as part of the audience, but not present the topic. And I am quite work-stressed, so I doubt I'll make it). Why am I against FLISOL? FLISOL itself, as I said, is a positive and interesting phenomenon, and I have enjoyed the conference cycles which often happen together with it. What I am against is installfests In my opinion, in the stage we are at today, instead of promoting Free Software, an install-fest just works against it. Free Software Linux-based distributions at least is widely known already, as a concept, even though most people dare not come anywhere close to it. Few people outside our already consolidated groups recognize programs such as the Mozilla and OpenOffice suites as being also Free Software, and valuable, quality alternatives for their everyday needs in the environments they currently use. If we need to show how to install and understand the GNU/Linux ecosystem to people who have not got close, it is not IMHO to end users. Installing a GNU/Linux system is easy enough for anybody interested in doing it, or at least, for him to request a one-on-one help session, handholding and understanding the basic ideas. We need, in any case, for the computer corner shop technicians to be somewhat acquinted, at least with the basics, at least with one popular distribution (and with the fact that there are many, and that they are different). People who have not had the curiosity and courage to try to install Linux by themselves do not need to be evangelized (a verb that should be out of our vocabularies by now, as that phase in our movement should be over by now) End users have simple needs: Things should work, and be as surprise-free as possible. They don't want to depend on a specific time-starved person (or even on a small group of people, all of which have a sanctity delirium/aura). When they go to technical support, they expect the problem to be solved Not even understanding what was wrong. End users are willing to pay a small fee to anybody to help them solve their problems. The key word is anybody. If we (myself, or me and my 10 friends who were there at the gathering, or any sufficiently defined small group) are the only support point for the OS, it is no good. Online support forums are not good either, in my experience, as the end user will prefer just lugging the computer to the nearest technician and get it fixed. Even if fixed means just installing one more readily-available package (not to mention, of course, when an update breaks something). I have witnessed, after an install fest, people walk very happy with their new system as a new toy. After a week or two, they cannot install the latest virus^Wscreen saver, or a legitimate program they need for their work. As it does not work, they take the computer to the technician... Who will end up formatting his system and installing something more usual. On the other hand, some people prefer installing a dual-boot system That guarantees the user will feel he is carrying some kind of moral superiority on his computer, and will often remember he has something Not Evil. This will often happen, of course, at boot time When they see GRUB at boot time, and rush to select Windows before That Strange Thing starts up. Anyway... Go ahead, install Free Software, enjoy the day. The conference cycles are usually interesting, and are the best part of it all I'm not saying you should stop doing it. But I'd urge you to take the focus away from the mass-installs, which become often just lost work (even detrimental to furthering Free Software). Try to see things as a non-technically-interested user would. Try to design ways to get corner shop technicians interested. Maybe that can be useful in the long run.

Bdale has just opened up the Garbee and Garbee web store to sell Altus Metrum electronics including TeleMetrum and TeleDongle. The TeleMetrum boards aren t quite ready to ship, so they re marked as out of stock for another couple of days. That s because we ve decided to switch GPS antennas to improve GPS reception and we won t have enough of those until Friday to start shipping boards. The TM boards themselves are working great and we ve flown them several times. We ve already sold a couple of TeleDongle boards for use without TeleMetrum. These boards contain the CC1111 transceiver chip along with an 8-pin connector that can be used for USB, SPI or serial communication. This adds long-range wireless digital communication to almost any project. Steve Conklin has posted his plans for these boards. We sell TeleDongle as either bare boards or packaged in a pretty blue box with a USB cable attached. All of the hardware designs are licensed under the TAPR open hardware license and software under the GPL. All of the tools used to design the hardware and build the software are also free software (already packaged for Debian, of course) so you can take these designs and do whatever you want with them.

I'm pleased to announce that the new Garbee and Garbee web store offering products designed by the Altus Metrum community is now open for business! Rocketry folks, please note that I refuse to sell anything that isn't in stock, so if you want TeleMetrum boards you'll have to wait a few more days. Keith and I just weren't happy with the GPS receiver performance using the patch antennas we selected for version 1.0, and I'm changing to a slightly better (and more expensive) antenna that we expect will make everyone happier. Parts are due by Friday, and so with any luck you should be able to buy TeleMetrum boards and starter kits early next week. In the meantime, we have TeleDongle boards and other accessories in stock now and ready to ship. Last week, Steve Conklin became our first customer by showing so much enthusiasm for TeleDongle over snacks at a conference we all attended for work that we pointed him to the web store under construction and he has already posted an enthusiastic blog entry about his plans! More as it happens!

Hi everyone! I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC:

/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

Hi everyone! I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC:

/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

A few People on IRC have ask me to elaborate on my email reading setup. ( As far as hosting I use Google Apps for your domain, but I wont be getting into the details of that. )

First this will work for anyone that uses IMAP to currently fetch their mail, no matter the provider even though I'll be hi-lighting Gmail because thats what I use. This also works well for GMail and/or IMAP Backup of your email.

In short the setup is as follows:
IMAP Server --> offlineimap --> Local Maildir --> Evolution Reading Local Maildir

Soo lets get to the meat of this, first install offlineimap sudo apt-get install offlineimap then lets configure it, below is my config file, most everything should be straight forward (the formating below seems wrong on planet click the post link to copy/paste):
[general] accounts = brandonholtsclaw maxsyncaccounts=1 ui = Noninteractive.Basic metadata=~/.offlineimap [Account brandonholtsclaw] localrepository = gmailLocal remoterepository = gmailRemote [Repository gmailLocal] type = Maildir localfolders = /home/bholtsclaw/.maildir/brandonholtsclaw/ sep = / [Repository gmailRemote] type = Gmail remoteuser = me@brandonholtsclaw.com remotepass=XXXX realdelete = no # This translates folder names such that everything (including your Inbox) # appears in the same folder (named root). #nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub('\[G.*ail\] ^\.INBOX\.*', '.', re.sub('^', './', foldername)) nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub('^(\[G.*ail\] INBOX)', '.', foldername) # This excludes some folders from being synced. You will almost # certainly want to exclude 'All Mail', 'Trash', and 'Starred', at # least. Note that offlineimap does NOT honor subscription details. folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Gmail]/All Mail', '[Gmail]/Trash','[Gmail]/Spam','[Gmail]/Starred']
Save that file as ~/.offlineimaprc and then create the directory ~/.maildir/

Make sure to chmod 0600 ~/.offlineimaprc so because it stores your email password and you dont want anyone else reading that. Other than that you are now all set, just Setup a new email account in Evolution and tell it to use Maildir , point it at your ~/.maildir directory and your golden.

If anyone else uses a setup similar to this and noticed something glaring I missed please drop me a comment, and I'll update the post ( plus I might learn something new ).

Cheers!
P.S. Dont forget to add a crontab to run offlineimap once in a while ( every ~10 minutes ) to check for new mail and sync your local changes back to the IMAP server.

The last few weeks i have had the pleasure of reading a thought-provoking collection of essays by Cory Doctorow, on topics touching copyright, virtual worlds, the future of man when the conscience mind can be duplicated into a computer and many more. The book titled "Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future" is available with few restrictions on the web, for example from his own site. I read the epub-version from feedbooks using fbreader and my N810. I strongly recommend this book.

Hello, Planet Mozilla! I'm Matt Brubeck, the newest member of the Mobile Firefox (Fennec) front-end team. I'm working remotely in Seattle, but you can find me in #mobile during the North American day, or follow me on Buzz/Twitter/etc. To help myself learn Fennec and XUL, I wrote a simple extension called Read Later. Like Marco Arment's Instapaper service it stores a list of web pages so you can return to them later. Unlike Instapaper, my extension does not save pages to a remote server. Instead, it uses your mobile device's storage, so you can view saved pages offline. I use code from Arc90's Readability bookmarklet to extract the main content from the page, save it, and present it in a simple mobile-friendly layout. One thing the extension can't do (which Instapaper and other services can) is synchronize saved pages between computers. This would be a great feature for a Mobile Firefox add-on, but writing my own sync service is a bit more work than I want to put into this little side project. A future version may use Weave to sync saved pages, as long as the size of the data is not a problem. If you are using a recent Fennec 1.1 build, try out Read Later and let me know what you think. And if you're a developer, you can look at the source code to see how a simple Fennec extension works.

The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to TEDxVolcano [1], this is a small conference that features people who are stranded by the Eyjafjallaj kull volcano in Iceland. As usual TED is an inspiration to us all, so there is obvious potential for other conferences to be organised in similar situations there s no reason why a free software conference can t be organised in Europe right now! What You Need to run a Conference If a conference will have limited attendance (EG due to a volcano preventing anyone from flying to the area) then filming everything is very important. I ve seen adverts for digital cameras that support Full HD resolution (1920*1080) for as little as $AU400. $AU600 will get you a digital camcorder that does Full HD which will offer some benefits for recording long movies (such as the ability to store the video on an external hard drive). If I was stuck in a foreign hotel with not much to do then I would be prepared to buy a digital camera or camcorder for the purpose of running such a conference (my current digital camera is 5.1MP and only has 3* optical zoom, it s a nice camera but I could do with something better. A tripod can cost up to $100, but I recently bought myself a 15cm tall tripod for $10 that would do at a pinch. Once you have high quality video you can easily upload it to something like Blip.TV. Of course you get a better result if you do some post-production work to merge images of the slides for the lecture into the video, but that is a lot of work and probably requires a camera that outputs uncompressed video for best results. The next issue is getting a venue. Different hotels cater for different parts of the market, some cater to tourists, some to business travel, some to conferences. If you want a venue at short notice you may be able to get a good deal if you find a hotel that is adversely affected, for example I m sure that there are some quite empty conference hotels in Europe right now but the tourist hotels are probably reasonably busy (why not do some tourism if you are stuck). I expect that hotels really don t want to have empty conference rooms and are prepared to offer good deals for bookings at short notice. Of course you would want to try to ensure that hotel rooms aren t too expensive in that hotel as some delegates will want to stay in the hotel which hosts the conference. The minimal staffing for a micro conference is probably two people, one for taking payment, directing people, etc, and the other to film the lectures and moderate panel discussions. Rumor has it that attending without paying is a problem at conferences, for conferences that are planned in advance corporations will try and send multiple employees on the one ticket and have them share a name-tag one issue with this is that there is a fixed quantity of food supplied and if extra people appear then everyone who paid gets less, another is that people who pay really hate to see freeloaders. The best reference I ve found for people not paying at conferences is Jon Oxer s description of how Leslie Cachia of Letac Drafting Services brazenly stole a book from him [2]. Name-tags are needed for any meeting with more than about 15 people. I m not sure how to get proper name-tags (ones that pin on to clothing and have printed names maybe the bigger hotels can add this to the conference package). But a roll of sticky labels from an office supply store is pretty cheap. Costs in Wellington Along with a few other people I considered running a small security conference immediately before or after LCA 2010, that ended up not happening but I will consider doing it in future. When considering that the general plan was to get a hotel to provide a meeting room for 10-30 people (we had no real idea of the demand). When investigating the possibilities for running a conference in Wellington I discovered that the hotel fees for a conference room can either be based on paying a fixed fee for the room plus additional expenses for each item or you can pay a fixed rate per person. It seemed that there was the potential to save a small amount of money by paying the fixed fees and avoiding some payments for things like tea/coffee service. But the amount that could be saved would be small and it would incur extra effort in managing it saving $5 per person is a good thing if you have 600 delegates, but if you have 30 then it s probably a waste of time. So it seemed best to go for one of the packages, you tell the hotel what time you want the lunch and snack breaks and how you want the tables arranged and they just do everything. The cost for this seemed to be in the range of $nz35 to $nz55 per delegate per day. There is some flexibility in room arrangement, so a room that seats 12 people in the board-room layout (tables in a rectangle facing the center) would fit 25 in the classroom layout (tables all facing the front) or 50 in the theater layout (chairs facing the front with no tables). So the hotel could accommodate changes in the size at relatively short notice (whatever their notice period for buying the food). The cost for a catered conference dinner seemed to be about $nz45 per diner. In many cases it would be possible to get a meal that is either cheaper, better, or both by going somewhere else, but that wastes time and effort. So that gave an overall conference cost of about $nz135 for a two day conference with a dinner at the end of the first day. Given that the cheapest budget rate from Wotif.com for a 3 star hotel in Wellington is currently $nz85 per night it seems that $nz135 for a two day conference including dinner is pretty cheap as the minimum accommodation cost would be $nz170. Also note that the hotels which I considered for hosting the conference had rates for their hotel rooms that were significantly greater than $nz85 per night. The hotels all offer other services such as catered cocktail parties , these would be good things for any company that wants to sponsor the conference. Different cities can have vastly different prices for hotels. But I expect that the way conference rooms are booked and managed is similar world-wide and the ratio of conference costs to hotel booking fees to also be similar. Most of the hotels that cater to conferences seem to be owned by multi-national corporations. It would probably make sense to charge delegates an extra $10 or $15 above the cost of running the conference to cover unexpected expenses. Of course it s difficult to balance wanting to charge a low rate to attract more people with wanting to avoid the risk of a financial loss. Conclusion The hard part is getting speakers. If you can get speakers and panel participants who can fill the time slots and have interesting things to say then all the other parts of organising a micro conference should be relatively easy. When the cost is less than $150 per delegate then a syndicate of a few people can easily agree to split the loss if the number of delegates turns out to be smaller than expected, a potential loss of $2000 shared among a few people shouldn t be a huge problem. Also if the conference is booked at short notice (EG because of a volcano) then the hotel shouldn t require any deposit for anything other than the food which is specially ordered (IE not the tea, coffee, etc) that limits the potential loss to something well under $100 per delegate who doesn t attend. Anyone who has enough dedication to a topic to consider running a conference should be prepared to risk a small financial loss. But based on my past observations of the generosity of conference delegates I m sure that if at the conference closing the organiser said unfortunately this conference cost more than the money you paid me, could you please put something in this hat on the way out then the response would be quite positive. Note that I am strictly considering non-profit conferences. If you want to make money by running a conference then most things are different.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2010/04/tedxvolcano_exp.php
• [2] http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/224