The following is a repost from my old blog, originally written one year ago. As I start to write this, it’s the last minute of my country’s 87th birthday (the Finnish Independence Day). It got me thinking about nation-states and independence and whatnot. And I came to a threefold conclusion: First, there is some value in independence. Getting rid of the status of a Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia was certainly a good step for Finland, in light of the rough road the Russians themselves have since travelled. For the same reason, the two wars Finland fought against the USSR were quite worthwhile. Similarly, if Finland were to be threatened by a neighbour again, armed defense would certainly be justifiable. Second, there is no intrinsic value in independence. If a humanly life (including freedom and local government) can be guaranteed even if there is no Finnish state in itself, I see no reason to hold on to the old-fashioned concept of a nation state. Third, I am in favour, as a long-term goal, of a world government. Of course, a single government becomes a single point of failure in case of a coup, for example, but if the global state is arranged properly, the danger of a successful coup is minimal. On the other hand, a world government is in far better position to institute necessary policies to combat the global problems of poverty, climate change and other such issues than the current system of competing and cooperating nation-states. In the current system, the big issues are easily put aside in name of local opportunism. Finland is by no means immune to that problem. The great crises of the 20th Century were its devastating wars. Fortunately, we have overcome them to a sufficient degree. The great crisis of the 21st Century is not terrorism – though it is a symptom. The great crisis is caused by the limits of growth, and we are already feeling quite concretely the nearness of those limits. If something is not done, our current civilization will crash spectacularly. The human race will probably survive – but do we really want to live through another Dark Age? Long Live the Earth!

I’ve been playing with Tomboy, the note-taking application. Unfortunately, there’s one thing preventing me from using it for anything important: export to plain text. Call me paranoid, but there’s something unnatural about making notes that really matter (such as PhD-related notes) in an application with a file format other than plain text (yes yes, you can read XML with a text exitor, but that’s not what I mean). That said, I wouldn’t be deterred (given that Tomboy is nice) if I could simply export all my notes to plain text. (I’m not bothered about links between notes; if I wanted those, I’d export to HTML.) Simply letting me export note content to a text file would make the difference between “cute” software and a serious research tool. Also on my Tomboy wishlist is a mindmap-like graph interface showing me all my notes and the links between them. Quite frankly, that’d kick ass.

KeySigning

Today I went to meet Paul van Tilbur for coffee hot chocolate and exchange key fingerprints. A nice chat on a nice evening. I was pretty sleepy since I’d been forced to get up and leave the house at 10AM this morning to donate blood samples to the local vampires doctors. Getting home afterwards was a bit challenging as there was a fire river - really a torchlit procession + fireworks. Several of the streets on my route home were closed to traffic, so the busses weren’t running. I walked part way home, stopping of en route to buy some DVDs. Once I did manage to get a bus going in the right direction I stupidly creatively managed to get on the wrong one. It immediately changed direction and left me going away from my house! I guess I was more tired than I’d realised. Anyway I got off the bus, and now I’m going to watch part of one of my new films before having an early night.

So, the delightful Kathy bought me a Marks & Spencer USB Missile Launcher (unfortunately out of stock at present or I'd have linked directly to it. Try searching on eBay / Google to see what I mean.) Problem. WinXP/2k only drivers. That's no fun. Plugged it in to my laptop (as you do). dmesg reports:

input: Tenx Nonstandard Devic as /class/input/input6
input: USB HID v1.10 Device [Tenx Nonstandard Devic] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2
input: Tenx Nonstandard Devic as /class/input/input7
input: USB HID v1.10 Device [Tenx Nonstandard Devic] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2

lsusb says:

Bus 002 Device 004: ID 1130:0202 Tenx Technology, Inc. 
Device Descriptor:
  bLength                18
  bDescriptorType         1
  bcdUSB               1.10
  bDeviceClass            0 (Defined at Interface level)
  bDeviceSubClass         0 
  bDeviceProtocol         0 
  bMaxPacketSize0         8
  idVendor           0x1130 Tenx Technology, Inc.
  idProduct          0x0202 
  bcdDevice            1.00
  iManufacturer           0 
  iProduct                2 
  iSerial                 0 
  bNumConfigurations      1
  Configuration Descriptor:
    bLength                 9
    bDescriptorType         2
    wTotalLength           59
    bNumInterfaces          2
    bConfigurationValue     1
    iConfiguration          0 
    bmAttributes         0x80
    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               1.10
          bCountryCode            0 Not supported
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      43
         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               1
    Interface Descriptor:
      bLength                 9
      bDescriptorType         4
      bInterfaceNumber        1
      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               1.10
          bCountryCode           33 US
          bNumDescriptors         1
          bDescriptorType        34 Report
          wDescriptorLength      23
         Report Descriptors: 
           ** UNAVAILABLE **
      Endpoint Descriptor:
        bLength                 7
        bDescriptorType         5
        bEndpointAddress     0x82  EP 2 IN
        bmAttributes            3
          Transfer Type            Interrupt
          Synch Type               None
          Usage Type               Data
        wMaxPacketSize     0x0008  1x 8 bytes
        bInterval               1

The Windows software appears to consist of TenxHID.dll (24k) and Missile_Launcher.exe (908k). TenxHID only exports DeviceIni, ReadBuffer and WriteBuffer AFAICT. Which implies the higher level stuff is done in the exe to me. I think it's a job for USBSnoop and a Windows box, but that'll have to wait for a few days until I get back to a WinXP box I can use to fiddle. Unless someone else manages to write a driver in the meantime. :)

Today I've been fighting Planet, the well-known blog aggregator tool. After a while I had found out how/why it was scrambling Atom feeds horribly. I'm not sure if actually is a planet bug - maybe it is fine with older python versions. The SGML parser of python2.4 however fails on tags such as <br />, a very common case in blogs and thus in atom feeds. Strage additional > brackets appeared in the output. The reason is, that the SGML parser as of Python2.4 is looking for <tag/foo/ as an equivalent to <tag>foo</tag>, and thus treats <br/><br/> the same as <br>><br<br>> with the inner chars somehow magically escaped... The fix is quite simple: add

sgmllib.shorttag = re.compile('<([a-zA-Z][-.a-zA-Z0-9]*)/(/*)>')

to your feedparser.py file in the obvious place (next to sgmllib.tagfind). This will break support for these true SGML short tags, but I've never heard of a blog feed using them anyway. I told you that I'm not really sure whether this is a planet bug: It might be a bug of pythons sgmllib, too. But maybe Planet should just use a XML parser for XML files, and fallback to an SGML parser (or maybe a robust XML parser) for other files (unfortunately, many blogs - including mine - do not ensure correct XML). And Planet could use some proper XML handling, too, anyway... Right now, the code is so string-array-based, it makes me sick. You might also want some extra magic to re-fold <br/> tags to not confuse older browsers.

I recently came into posession of a collection of (smallish) WMV files containing photo slideshows. Unfortunately, they don't play on my DVD player, and SWMBO's laptop has No Hope of playing anything remotely like a video. So, technology to the rescue. Initially, I was just going to convert the movies into something that the DVD player would actually play, but by the time I had those, I was 95% of the way to doing the job properly, and it would (of course) look far nicer with menus and other Shinyness (instead of just a boring file menu), so I went all the way and made a complete DVD movie disc. The whole process was non-trivial to discover, but ultimately straightforward in practice (once you know the set of command line options to use), so I'm archiving this for posterity. I use Ubuntu Breezy. A lot of the packages I've used are under really heavy development, so slightly older versions may not work. If you're running another distro, finding compatible versions may be tricky (or not). Try the process with whatever you've got; if it works, great; if it doesn't work, try upgrading versions or something. Step 1: Convert Video Files To Something Less Bong Packages used: transcode 1.0.2-0ubuntu2 (trivial backport from Dapper; mail me if you want it, but the one in Breezy will probably work OK), mplayer 1.0-pre7cvs20050716-0.1ubuntu9, mjpegtools 1.6.3+rc2-0.0ubuntu2 As far as DVD players are concerned, WMV is non-existent (clever things). DVD players like some form of MPEG-2 video with AC3 or MP2/3 audio. So, we use transcode to convert the video. For WMV files in particular, only mplayer does the decoding right (the af6 plugin seemed to work, but the resizing didn't turn out too well). So, our command is:

 transcode -x mplayer -i $FILE.wmv -g 640x480 -e 44100,16,2 -o $FILE.tc --export_prof dvd-pal

Items of note:

• -g 640x480 is necessary because transcode currently can't ask mplayer for the size of the video. This will apparently be fixed in the near future, but until then, work out what size your input video is (run mplayer manually and look at it's output) and substitute for 640x480 in the above.
• -e 44100,16,2 exists for a similar reason to the above -- it's the sample rate, bits/sample, and channels of the incoming audio stream. Again, retrieve by running mplayer manually until transcode knows how to ask nicely.
• I've used -o $FILE.tc because what actually comes out of this transcode step is a separated audio/video stream, which needs to be multiplexed into a single stream (see next step). You actually get $FILE.tc.m2v and $FILE.tc.mpa files (the extensions get automatically appended).
• --export_prof dvd-pal sets a bunch of options behind the scenes so that everything gets output as PAL-compliant DVD video. Much easier than the alternatives. dvd-ntsc works nicely too, if you're stuck somewhere without decent chroma control.

As I mentioned, the output from the transcode run is two separate streams -- an audio and a video stream. We want to combine them. This is quite easy:

 mplex -f 9 -o $FILE.vob $FILE.tc.m2v $FILE.tc.mpa

This is a simple "glue them together" command -- the only interesting bit is -f 9, which simply specifies a particular MPEG-2 multiplexing method (full DVD-compatibility, or some such). If things aren't working out for you, try -f 8, which I believe also works. Since you'll probably have a bunch of video files to convert at once, you'll want to automate all of this with a shell script or shell 'for' loop. Step 2: Make a DVD Layout Packages used: qdvdauthor 0.0.10-0.1 This is the bit that I thought would be hard, but is actually amazingly easy (the previous step took me two days to get completely right, this bit took me about an hour). Fire up qdvdauthor, answer any stupid questions it might come up with. When the main screen comes up, click on the 'Add Movie' button on the left hand side, then select the first video you want to add. Repeat as required to add all of the videos you want. (Remember to add the VOB files you created earlier, and not the WMVs you might still have laying around. D'oh!) Clicking on the 'Video' tab on the left hand side should list all of your videos. Check they're all there, and are the correct size. Next, create or find a suitable background picture or video to make your main menu background. I've only tried with an image, but it seems to accept videos if you give them to it. Click on the 'Add Background' button on the main qdvdauthor screen. Pick your image. The image will probably need resizing; just go with the flow and pick the correct image size. Now you need to add those funky little menu items for selecting on. This is the really cool bit. Right-click on the background image you've got, and select 'Add Text'. Drag on the background to create a text box. You'll get a dialog come up, type some text in the bottom box, then click 'OK'. This'll create the text on the background. Drag it around if you need to. Finally, right-click the text and select 'Define as Button'. Another dialog box will appear. Rename the button if you like, then pick which video you want to play from the select box marked 'vmgm'. Click 'OK'. Repeat as necessary. That's all the hard stuff done. You can add a sound clip to play over and over again if you like, but I haven't done that yet, so you're on your own there. Step 3: Make the DVD For this step, I needed to compile toolame from source. Get it from http://toolame.sf.net/. This is super-simple. Basically, just click on the giant icon labelled 'DVD' in the top toolbar. Follow the prompts. Click 'OK' as necessary. When the process is done, check the 'Keep Open' checkbox quickly, and go over the output to ensure nothing completely crapped out. Assuming all is well, you can make your DVD image by running:

 mkisofs -dvd-video -udf -o /tmp/dvdimage.iso $DVD_DIR

Naturally, replacing /tmp/dvdimage.iso and $DVD_DIR with appropriate values. Lastly, cook the ISO to appropriate media with something like:

 cdrecord -dao -eject -v speed=2 dev=1,0,0 /tmp/dvdimage.iso

Assuming all went according to plan, you should have a physical DVD you can stick in your DVD player and watch to your heart's content. Congratulations! You just did all of this in about a 50th of the time it took me.

My father got me a nice IBM ThinkPad from 1996 earlier this year, so the next old laptop he digged up was planned to become a christmas present for my brother. But my father didn’t manage to find out, how old nor how fast that laptop was. And when I found out that it was a Pentium I with 90 MHz, it was clear, that my brother wouldn’t have any use for it, so he got “only” the used 850 MHz AMD Duron midi tower and my parents declared that old Compaq LTE 5100 laptop as a christmas present for me. :-) As my IBM ThinkPad bijou, this Compaq LTE 5100 is from 1996 and has a Pentium I processor. Both also have a 800×600 resolution, a double PCMCIA slot and a floppy drive, which can be replaced by a CD-ROM drive (if I had one). But that are all similarities. Technically the Compaq has 90 MHz instead of the ThinkPad’s 133 MHz, but therefore has 72 MB RAM in comparison to the 48 Megs the ThinkPad has. Also regarding disk space the Compaq outperforms the ThinkPad: 1.6 Gigs of disk space in comparison to the ThinkPad 1.0 GB hard disk. Another difference is the battery: While the ThinkPad can work over 2.5 hours without external power, the Compaq even didn’t manage to completely boot its currently installed Windows 98 (the ThinkPad had a Windows NT installed when I got it) when running on battery. (Will do that test again when I can confirm, that the battery was full before testing. :-) Yet another difference is the keyboard layout: The ThinkPad has an US layout while the Compaq has a Swiss-German layout. But the most obvious difference is the look: The black ThinkPad still looks like having a modern design while the Compaq looks very very outdated in its perfect computer beige and with its quite small display. So retroperspectively, it was a good a idea to name the ThinkPad “bijou” (French for jewel, jewellery, gem, etc.; named after a very neat british two-door limousine built in the UK by Slough on a 2CV base during the ’50s). Because now I have the choice between a lot of not so nice looking (not to say ugly ;-) 2CV derivatives to name the Compaq after. My favourites currently are the Iranian “Baby Brousse”, the Greek “Namco Pony” and the German “Fiberfab Sherpa”, all canvas and flatbed style 2CV based buggies, similar to the original Citroën Méhari but with steel body instead of the Méhari’s controversial plastic body. And one of the not used names, I can use for further ugly Compaq laptops¹. Another question yet to answer is the question of what operating system to install on it. Since the ThinkPad runs fine with Debian 3.0 Woody and I have a lot of other Debian boxes at home (running Woody, Sarge or Sid), I currently think about installing the very fresh NetBSD 3.0 (released on Christmas’ Eve 2005), FreeBSD 6.0 (released early November 2005), DragonFly BSD 1.4 (to be released in December :-) or DeLi Linux 0.7 pre (which was also released in early December 2005 and already uses X11R7). Another idea was to install grml 0.5, but since grml is a live CD distribution, it probably would be hard to install it over network. Same counts for ReactOS (version 0.2.9 was released shortly before Christmas 2005), which doesn’t seem to have a floppy disk plus network install. Since I always planed to upgrade my currently defective Toshiba T6400 i486 laptop ayca (maybe after getting an organ donor on eBay or so) to DeLi Linux 0.7 (and perhaps write a review about it for Linux Magazine or so) and I may get an Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 soon (on which NetBSD 3.0 would be the perfect OS since Linux’ performance still seems to suck on Sparc :-), I currently prefer the FreeBSD or DragonFly idea. If the Ultra doesn’t come, it probably will get NetBSD, since I haven’t a NetBSD box yet. (Haven’t a DragonFly box either, but a FreeBSD 4.x running somewhere. :-) Well, I guess, I’ll take even more old laptops than last year to the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) next May. And since the two 1996 laptops are now 10 years old, they’re even ontopic! Yeah! ;-)

¹: I have two other not yet working Compaq laptops, both from an elder generation than Pentium I. One I got on a Swiss flea market for a few euros and the other was the first laptop of my boss, which he else would have thrown away. Unfortunately both are without power adapter and neither the usual allround laptop power adapters from Conrad, etc. nor the one from the LTE 5100 fits. But since there is eBay, I expect to get such a power adapter once. :-)

My current long-term learning project is Ruby on Rails, the ultra-hyped web application framework from David Heinemeier Hansson and friends. I like it (primarily because I can see a lot of my own abortive ideas from a web app framework for PHP I used to develop), but there is one big thing about it (or, rather, it's surrounding hype) that irritates me. Throughout the Rails literature (webpages, magazine and webzine articles, and the book Agile Web Development With Rails), there is a consistent message -- that, because everything is written in Ruby, you don't have to learn any new programming languages to write Rails applications. This is a wonderful theory -- no large XML config files to define my database schemas, and no castrated and irritating HTML template system to learn. From defining table relationships to printing a select tag, It's All Ruby, All The Time. Sweet, right? Sort of. The problem is that you won't find the language primitive to declare a one-to-many relationship in the Pickaxe (the definitive Ruby language reference book -- like "the Camel" for Perl, "the Bat" for Sendmail, or "the Turkey" for PHP). Defining a separate namespace in Rails for all of these operations is, of course, necessary, since the language didn't already define these operations. But, once you've defined a whole new set of methods to do all of these operations, you can look back on your hard work and see -- what? A new language -- one specifically designed to describe webapps. Don't get me wrong -- domain-specific languages are teh r0x0r. If everyone had to do all of their HTML manipulation by hand, programmers would be even more insane than they are. But, when you're writing your application in Rails, you're not speaking "pure Ruby". Your syntax and basic structure is Ruby, but your methods and attributes are new, different, and All Rails. It may not be a separate programming language in the usual sense, but by the time you've added a whole new pile of classes, methods, and attributes (not to mention whole new ways of structuring your application), how much importance is the use of the @ symbol to signify an instance variable, compared to the whole new set of methods to learn? Natural languages, of course, have similar issues. Most western european languages share a lot of common characteristics -- similar character sets, punctuation sets, and they read left-to-right. So I can look at a page of German or French, and identify most-to-all of the salient features (hey look, an 'a'!), and even grok the meaning of a few of the words (familiar to me, probably, because English misappropriated them from wherever they came from) but I still have no hope whatsoever of understanding the meaning of the passage as a whole. The language syntax looks familiar, but those nouns and verbs don't have any meaning to me. You can't plonk a Rails app in front of even a seasoned Ruby developer and expect them to immediately jump in and start hacking on it like they've been writing it all their life. The language syntax looks familiar, but those methods and attributes don't have any meaning to them. This is nothing peculiar to Rails, of course. If you want someone to hack on your Hibernate or Spring app, you'll get better results if you advertise for a Hibernate or Spring programmer than a Java programmer. But Rails advocates regularly say "it's all just Ruby, so there's nothing new to learn!", and that's Just Wrong, in my opinion. As an aside, if you're looking around for something a bit different, do seriously consider Rails (or just Ruby, if you don't need a webapp framework). It's different from the "usual" suspects (C, C++, and "the Ps" -- PHP, Perl, and Python), and pleasantly so. If you judge your programming languages by the old adage "a programming language that doesn't change the way you think about programming isn't worth learning", Ruby will score well. I know it's helped me think about my programming differently already, especially my Python programming (and thanks to Anthony Baxter for answering all of my esoteric python questions at OSDC a couple of weeks ago).

I have decided, if I ever get tired of working in IT, that I'm going to open a swimwear shop, and call it "Swimmers 'Ere". Thankyou, I'm here all week.

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite. It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already. Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)). VPN I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet. Debian/Ruby It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues. For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

I'm typing this on my laptop, an Apple PowerBook 12", at a customer's site while I'm waiting for my contact to return. I'm configuring a server here; to do so, I'm logged in to one of their system, which has an SSH connection open to the server, and I have a second system which I'm using to test out the configuration. That second system is a laptop running Windows 2000. Unfortunately, the system went into suspend mode because I hadn't plugged it into the power, and now it's locked. And I don't have the password. So I can't test my configuration, and will have to wait until my contact returns so that he can unlock it. Since everything is preferable to waiting, I took out my own laptop and started reading some Usenet posts (they prefer me not to log on my laptop to the network here, but luckily there's leafnode). As I was sitting there, typing away on the laptop, one of the employees of this place walked and saw me typing. Quote: Isn't one computer enough these days?. Heh. Well, no; I explained that I actually do need all three of them. What I didn't tell him, however, is that at home and at the office, three isn't even enough... Perhaps I should rearrange my computers.

Free software mailing lists suck. Especially Apache’s.

• Many of them have a CRAP Web interface or worse:
• Posting limited to subscribers

For weeks I have been struggling with Apache mailing lists (apache-users and spamassassin) and now recently with mutt lists. I know with Apache lists you can use a special syntax:

You can start a subscription for an alternate address,
for example “john@host.domain”, just add a hyphen and your
address (with ‘=’ instead of ‘@’) after the command word:

But when I do it via mutt or a echo test mail users-unsubscribe-hendry=dabase.com@httpd.apache.org . I get no response from the automated mailing list manager. :( So, If I ever get subscribed it’s generally thanks to the mailing list owner. Then after lurking a bit, I try post. That never works as the return paths don’t match the email I am subscribed with. Return paths change all the time depending on which machine I sent it from. It could be anything from:

• hendry@pico.dreamhost.com (from my shell)
• hendry@laptop.dabase.com (from my laptop)
• hendry@soltecsoftware.com.au (from work)

And the first two aren’t working email addresses! If you must filter, can’t you filter on my From OR Reply-To email address FFS: hendry@iki.fi All I suggest is for Apache to start using something usable like Google Groups for user support. Does anyone else feel my frustration?

I’m coding a new CGI application, tentatively entitled BabyOp. It is software to run a babysitting coop; I suppose it is a species of “social software.” The idea is to be able to track hours credits, schedule babysitting times, centralize contact information and other details about babysitting requirements. I considered using something like Zope or Drupal for the application, but I’ve never liked developing exclusively through a web-interface and found myself having to do a fair bit of “actual” coding to get the results I wanted. I realize there is a command-line interface for Zope, but it’s really pretty limited. I had some plans a couple of years ago when I designed my wedding site in Zope to extend it to be more useful, but sadly never got around to it. So I’m back in my comfort zone, perl. I’ve written a fair amount of unmanageable perl code, however, CoopOrder probably being a shining example (it was also my first perl program). I’ve certainly improved since then, and the fact that I’ve received several patches from others for randomplay suggests that my coding style is getting to a half-decent point. I’d really like to get it right this time, though. One thing I’ve learned over the years is always to look for a module to do what you want before setting out to do it yourself, since chances are the module writer is a better coder than you (or at least, than me!). To that end, I’m using CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and DBIx::Abstract, among others. I’m also trying to keep things really granular and avoiding long subroutines. Certainly taking the HTML out of the perl code helps with that. I’m amazed at how often my code now just “works” on the first try, similar to esr’s story about his first look at Python (“Brace yourself: this code only took me about ninety minutes to write—and it worked correctly the first time I ran it.”) I’m trying to figure out if it would be sensible to make this application more fully object oriented. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and having done a lot of database programming, I’ve always been unfortunately pathologically declarative. (My first major package was in Clipper—I was 13 years old). I find it a lot easier to modify a pre-existing object oriented package than to design my own. But then again, does it really make sense to attempt an object-oriented design where there is really only one important “object” — in this case, the babysitting unit?

CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use. The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years. Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago. The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break. I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it. The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.

Well, following my resign at my current workplace for end of this year (only about 2 days of work left) I had some not so nice weeks in the past, but now it’s so near to the end that I’m happy that I did it. Ok, I will be without a job from January on, as the stuff I tried all didn’t work out (or maybe will, but much later than expected, but for now I just don’t count on it), but the last few weeks at work did make it clear that I would have resigned even without hoping for them. The only unfortunate thing is that I don’t get any money from the “job center”, but I never had any good experience with them, so well - nothing much lost. I just dont have money. :) Hrm, maybe I should start a “market”? But looking at AJs there isn’t much money out there. :)

As you read this fascinating but edited-for-brevity irc log from #debian-boot, imagine yourself as a contributor to either the larger Debian project or the Debian-Installer sub-project. At what point do you begin to feel insulted?

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<Chepre> can i talk to the chief of debian please. the whole project could earn some money
<minghua> Chepre: if you are serious, write email to leader@debian.org
<Chepre> thanks minghua. is there a way to get a "official" release created with all up-to-date modules, like for Intel ICH7 sATA-Controller...as long as i pay for it?
<minghua> Chepre: chances are small. the official release is a long process
<minghua> and it doesn't happen often
<minghua> the earliest date you can expect for next release is probably end of 2006
<minghua> so you would have a better chance to hire some people/company who knows debian and provide you an updated kernel
<Chepre> OMG? does debian have not enough coders or don't they have "fun" to keep it up-to-date? e.g. the intel ich7 is already very old
<Chepre> well, can i hire the debian-team?
<minghua> Chepre: well, there is no official "team", but sure, you can hire debian developers
<gravity> Chepre: The stock kernel doesn't support your device? Why not? Is the driver not in the mainline kernel tree?
<Chepre> no
<gravity> Why not?
<Chepre> its just a default Dell PowerEdge 850 with Intel ICH7 and it isn't supported
<gravity> Chepre: Well, did you send an installation report?
<Chepre> gravity: no
<gravity> Chepre: That'd be a good first step to getting your problem fixed for future releases
<minghua> Chepre: ah, then it's supported by stock kernel after all, did you say it only works for kernel > 2.6.12?
<Chepre> minghua: 2.6.8-2 doesnt support it
<minghua> Chepre: okay, so as gravity said, write an installation report so that people know your problem
<Chepre> well, we cant wait month or years for a fix
<gravity> Chepre: You can create a custom installer image with the updated kernel for your work
<Chepre> we have to install many server in the next weeks :(
<munghua> Chepre: then I'm sure if you offer enough money, some d-i people can provide an installer with a newer kernel for you
<Chepre> well, i already got an custom installer but its a bit buggy...i need a whole netinst with the same "quality" like the official releases got
<gravity> sounds you were at the right track at the beginning... though "chief of debian" is probably the wrong person to contact :-P
<gravity> You could send a mail to debian-boot I suppose, offering the work for what you need
<Chepre> well, i also need up-to-date software, not just only the installer :( so the "whole" debian-team has to stop current work and has to start creating a stable version which is newer than the current unstable
<Chepre> minghua: do you think 50k are enough to get a 3.3 as stable?
<minghua> Chepre: by "up-to-date software" you mean all the software, including desktop, web servers, and stuff?
<gravity> Chepre: You may want to check out an alternative source. HP, as I understand it, provides the kind of support you want. Progeny does as well. And Ubuntu has their own full derivative with this sort of thing
<Chepre> minghua: right, as long the software is not a beta :)
<gravity> Chepre: The whole Debian team is not the kind of project that'll do this for you
<Chepre> so the debian-team dont want to earn money?
<Chepre> gravity: i know, open source :) ... but i think the guys making a new "official" release for me whould be very happy getting up to 20.000 us$ for one month of work
<gravity> Chepre: It would violate a lot of principles and the stable release policy to do an official debian release. You could get what you need with a name other than debian though, with some of the companies I listed above
<Chepre> where is the problem? i give you the money and you give me an up-to-date release which is only for my company, not for public
<gravity> I know I'd quit the project if there was an official Debian release for cash
<minghua> and there are like what, 10,000 packages in sarge now?
<gravity> Chepre: That's what those companies are for. Debian doesn't work like that
<gravity> Chepre: If you want to talk to individual debian developers for that, you can do that too
<Chepre> hmm, ok....now i know why the d-i doesn't recognize smp or 64bit systems

---

Now imagine yourself as someone who is trying to install Debian on twenty thousand stock machines for work and it's not working. At what point above did you begin to feel alienated? (Assuming that "Chepre" is not trolling,) Neither side in this exchange is particularly meaning to insult the other, both are doing what is right and obvious from their perspective. Two ships passing in the night, two trains speeding down a track, I don't know. It's a shame we can't deal better with this sort of thing. I would be truely interested to see how other free software projects deal with it differently. The rest of this is my attempt at some analysis and is probably not very useful.. A few mistakes Chepre made:

• When trying to communicate with someone, it's helpful to try to understand their motivations. Maybe these people are not highly motivated by money. Maybe spending 1% of your budget to buy the right someone a computer exhibitng the problem would be more effective.
• If a coder asks if you're filed a formal report of your problem, and you haven't, and you don't understand the underlying problem and rebuff their attempts to get a grip on it, escalating the issue to upper management will not make them your friend.
• Trying to pre-solve your problem by setting requirements like "it can't be a beta" and "it needs to be a 3.3 release" and "it needs to be newer than the current version" will only result in the wrong problem being solved, and smart people will not want to get involved in such a process. If you plan to hire someone to solve a problem it makes more sense to give them a broad vision of the problem to be solved, some example use cases, and let them, not you, solve the problem. That's what you're hiring them for.
• Not doing basic background research. And letting it show.

A few mistakes the channel (irr-)regulars made:

• Not recognising that "it will be done at the end of 2006" is not an answer a user wants to hear, and not pointing out alternatives such as last month's beta release or today's daily build.
• Assuming that when a user asks for a release, they necessarily want what we consider a "stable release". Perhaps they want a release that has some form of support and is free of showstopper bugs; what Debian terms "stable" is not the only release that necessarily has those characteristics, depending on how it will be used. (In other words, holy penguin pee (aka "official") might be more plentiful, and more symbolic, than you think.)
• Not pointing Chepre to the Debian consultants page. (Minor, but it's possibly the best place to have mentioned.)
• Getting offended. And letting it show.

So, I finally got myself a new digital camera — the Canon PowerShot A610. Judging from some, good reviews I read, it looks like the best option for my purposes and for the price I'm willing to pay. It's a 5 megapixel camera, it has a 4x optical zoom, it's pretty fast, can do videos (640x480 at 30 fps) etc. etc. Of course, it only comes with a 16 MB SD-card which is a joke, so I'll need to get something like a 1 GB card soonish. It seems to be pretty well-suited for macro photography (1cm minimum distance), see the samples on the right.
Linux usage: Using this camera with Linux is not as simple as mounting it as an USB mass storage device. Instead, the camera uses the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) for file transfers. Fortunately, the wonderful gphoto2 (apt-get install gphoto2) supports that, so I can easily get all images and videos off the camera with a simple

gphoto2 --get-all-files

(actually, the camera is only "supported" in the current gphoto2 CVS version, the latest stable release, 2.1.6, doesn't really recognize it — but it still works ;-) As I now have a pretty solid digital camera (compared to my last one), and I've also been gifted a good book on digital photography, I hope to be able to improve the quality of the photos in my photoblog quite a lot in the nearer future. In any case, I'll sure have some fun with this new toy...

Well, following my resign at my current workplace for end of this year (only about 2 days of work left) I had some not so nice weeks in the past, but now its so near to the end that I’m happy that I did it. Ok, I will be without a job from January on, as the stuff I tried all didn’t work out (or maybe will, but much later than expected, but for now I just dont count on it), but the last few weeks at work did make it clear that I would have resigned even without hoping for them. The only unfortunate thing is that I dont get any money from the “job center”, but I never had any good experience with them, so well - nothing much lost. I just dont have money. :) Hrm, maybe I should start a “market”? But looking at AJs there isnt much money out there. :)

I didn't want to migrate to 2.6.x kernels, since I really don't like its current development approach, but unfortunately I had to, because my usb cable for mobile phone works only with this branch.
So from now I'm not-so-happy 2.6 user ;)
At least now I can exchange data with phone, so Debian logo is now on the screen.

I bought brand new Siemens C75 phone few days ago. This is how it looks like:

It's really great and of course I wanted to put Debian logo on screen. I had some old serial cable from my previous phone, so that was first I tried. Unfortunately trying to connect to phone causes its power down. Probably some firmware problems.
So I bought USB cable today. This time at least it doesn't want to switch off my phone, but I still can't get it work. Tried siefs, scmxx and both seem to have problems handling this phone.
I forced usbserial module to use explicit vendor and product id. Only then dmesg shows:

usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
usbserial.c: Generic converter detected
usbserial.c: Generic converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4

This seems to be ok at least according to many howtos I found on net. So why does it still not work?