My laptops all run MasqMail so that they can always send mail, no matter where I am. This is good, and works very well. However, masqmail is suffering from non-maintenance. So, do I change my MTA, or do I adopt MasqMail? Ideally I'd switch to another MTA, as long as it's simple and will automatically change the delivery method depending on some external data (generally the name of the current network interface). Any suggestions? Or should I start reviewing the bugs and hijack the package? Update: Oliver Kurth, previously absent maintainer of MasqMail, just did a new upstream release and uploaded to Debian. Dilemma over! NP: In Between Dreams, Jack Johnson.

James, while I understand your anger, it would seem as though Hetracil isn't a real product, and is just a (fairly elaborate and subtle) hoax. Resources:

• http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/permalink/hetracil_anti_effeminate_medication/
• http://homomojo.com/life.php?itemid=432
• If that weren't enough, the whois info for hetracil.com points to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the religious figurehead of the Church of the SubGenius. Anyone who doesn't know that organisation's history needs to spend some more time Learning To Love the WikiPedia.

One of the things about the whole money thing and free software is the question of whether it’ll take all the fun and spontaneity out of hax0ring. As it turns out, that doesn’t even work when you try; so instead of doing dak work last weekend, like I’d planned and like the market was indicating, I ended up hacking on britney until about 5am Sunday morning, leaving the dak stuff to be spread over the week, instead. (After the last post, dak might seem cursed, but trust me it’s not. More on that RSN, but not just yet) For those playing along at home, britney is the name of the scripts used to update Debian’s testing distribution; basically it automates some of the hard problems of Debian release management. Naturally, this is a pretty tricky job – there’re over 200,000 packages in Debian unstable (spread across eleven architectures), with fairly complicated sets of interdependencies amongst them. It gets complicated enough, in fact, that the core analysis britney undertakes isn’t just too processor intensive to do in perl or python, it’s too memory intensive to use standard malloc for its data structures. (Cynical and Coding, and the UQ CS228 class of ‘98 will probably have some idea of the fun to come at this point…) The problem is that britney uses an absurd number of linked lists to resolve dependency issues, with each entry in the list being an independent block of a dozen or so bytes; and adding the usual malloc overhead to this can effectively double the memory usage. Worse, britney also likes to reuse memory quite a lot, does a fair bit of backtracking, and generally acts like the prima donna she is. Up until last week, britney’s memory was managed by the use of a parallel bitfield indicating whether memory was free or not: so britney would first allocate a 128kB block using standard malloc, note it’s all free, then every request for 12 or 52 bytes would result in some bits being twiddled; and every free would twiddle the bits back, so they could be reused later. This means two things: one is that the free invocation has to include the size of the memory to be freed as well as the address, and the other is that finding an appropriate sized block of freed memory can be awkward, leading to some degree of fragmentation. This fragmentation seemed to lead to britney having a gradual memory leak, which would mean that if the release managers were doing some complicated transitions gigabytes of memory would end up being used and OOMing; or, since britney runs on ftp-master and it’s probably not a good idea to have the OOM killer start on the machine that ensures the Debian archive’s integrity, the ulimit is reached, and britney aborts unhappily. Unfortunately, though, the use of a “roll your own” malloc means you can’t use the standard memory checkers to see what’s going on, so you’re left with guessing and hoping. And as a consequence the memory leak’s been around for ages, causing fairly regular minor annoyance. This changed last week when Micha Nelissen (neli) got into the act:

<neli> why does it need so much memory ?
<aba> neli: because it needs to check how the changes affect the installability count
<neli> aba: ok…but still does not seem like a big deal
<neli> how large trees are we talking then?
<aj> it has to do a lot of backtracking
<aj> how large is the longest dependency tree in debian?
<neli> backtracking only takes time, not space, right?
<aj> you need a list of things to backtrack over
<aba> neli: it also consumes memory, at least with the current dpkg-implem ntation
<aba> (well, there are ideas how to avoid this memory fragmentation, but that’s something else)
<aj> (it’s not actually memory usage, it’s memory fragmentation)
<neli> hmm, bad memory manager ?
<aj> imperfect, *shrug*

After poking around at getting britney to run locally, and doing some basic analysis on how it was used, neli decided to rewrite the memory manager to use chunk-size pools – so that a separate pool would be used for 4 byte allocations, for 8 byte allocations, for 12 byte allocations, etc. That’s possible due to two factors: one is that the special memory allocation is only needed for data structures which are all made from fairly small sizes, and are a multiple of the word size. It also means that fragmentation can be avoided completely – since you can use the “free” elements to store a free list taking up no extra space. Happily, that change also made the memory allocation much simpler. (It also shows the benefits of a fresh look at code; I’d been thinking of doing something similar for ages, but always been stopped because I couldn’t figure how to make it cope with the various different sized blocks I’d need. As it turned out though, I’d solved that problem ages ago when I wrote a separate allocator to deal with strings, which would’ve required my malloc to cope with a much larger variety of sizes) What it didn’t do was actually solve the memory leak. Which was pretty confusing, since the old memory checker had some tests to ensure that memory wasn’t really being leaked, and if the memory’s not being lost due to a missing free, or being lost to fragmentation, where is it going? At this point, the real benefit of having a simpler malloc implementation came across; because suddenly it was plausible to add some debugging code to allocate a separate pool for every memory allocation, and to report how much memory is being used at any point, per line of code. That gave me output like:

pool 8B/1:751; 1962683 used 1965960 allocated (99.8% of 22 MiB)

So I knew that line 751 (of dpkg.c), was allocating 8B chunks, had used up to 22MiB in the past, and was currently using 99.8% of that. (Actually, I made an off by one error initially, so the “8B” above is actually 12B, as you can see if you divide 22MiB by 1965960) That let me see two “leaks”. One turned out to be fairly easy to diagnose; as an optimisation, when I say “package foo is installable”, I note that “but we used bar to see that, so if we later update/remove bar, note that we’ll have to see if foo is still installable”. So the datastructure for bar ends up with a linked list of all the packages, foo, that relied on it. But I don’t check that list for dupes, so if I note that both bar and baz were required for foo to be installable, then update bar, when I recheck foo, I’ll add it to both bar’s and baz’s lists; which is fine for bar, whose list I cleared when I updated it; but not so fine for baz, because it’s now got two entries for foo. Having already added a check for dupes when trying to see if my guess was right, extending that check to skip the addition was pretty easy. The other leak required a little more investigation. It was in a fairly tight loop which could reasonably be using a fair amount of memory; but by the end of the loop it should all be freed. Adding some more debug code to the allocation functions confirmed the problem:

<aj> pool 8B/11:1231; 1618157 used 1703936 allocated (95.0% of 13 MiB, 9.05% current)
<aj> so it looks like ~9% of those allocations are never freed to me
<aj> 9.05% = used/alloc
<aj> where used is incrememnted on b_m, decremented on b_f
<aj> alloc is incrememneted on b_m, never decremented

The code was meant to either add the allocated block to a larger list that’s being traversed, or to free it immediately – the problem turned out to be that there were some nested ifs, and an internal if was lacking an else that should have freed the block. Fixing that changed the results to:

pool 8B/11:1228; 160 used 131072 allocated (0.1% of 1 MiB, 0.01% current)

Which both dropped the leak – only allocating a maximum of 130,000 nodes instead of almost 2,000,000 – and resulted in almost all the allocations that had ever been made, having been freed once britney had been running for even a fairly short while. As it turned out, though, the cure for the first leak was worse than the disease – checking for duplicates in a linked list turned out to take too long, and the memory wasted in that section wasn’t that big a deal. Using a red-black tree or similar instead would’ve been a solution, but so far doesn’t seem necessary. There haven’t been any OOMs since, happily; and even better, the reduced bloat seems to have made the overall checking a bit faster. Sweet.

Recently, I’ve been going through mozilla-firefox’s list of bugs and took a look to some of them. I got interested in #336411, since I’m regularly hit by this one myself (remember ? I said I got strange crashes with 1.5beta1). It appears that this strange crasher is in fact due to extensions using binary components. ColorZilla was the one killing my firefox. Why does it crash on debian’s firefox and not on upstream’s ? Simple : upstream’s is built with gcc 3.4, debian’s with gcc 4.0. Both C++ ABIs are incompatible. Now the question is : what can we do for that ? A quick fix could be to check before loading the component, if it’s linked to the incompatible libstdc++.so.5, but it’s almost as nasty as the bug itself… I’ve not really investigated possible solutions yet, but if you have some better ideas, you’re welcome. Another bug I got interested in is #211010 and its dupe, #256384. This one was really nasty. One of the kind I hate : bad programming practices. The interesting thing with this bug, though, was that it’s been revealed because of 3 other issues in 2 separate programs. The first issue is that autoconf decides to use echo 'something\c' over echo -n something when both ‘\c’ and -n are understood by echo. The second issue is that when giving some options with spaces to configure (like in --enable-optimize="-pipe -w -O2"), the associated variable gets backslashed spaces (i.e. "-pipe\ -w\ -O2") (thus, being an autoconf feature) The third issue is that the mozilla configure.in script tries to get rid of these backslashed spaces with echo $enableval sed -e 's \\\ g', triggering the nasty dash bug. A simple workaround, as stated in #256384 is to quote $enableval Now, for the dash bug itself. What happens with dash is that whenever you echo a ‘\c’ escape sequence, all subsequent echo commands stop printing after the first argument containing a backslash. For example echo test1 'test2\ttest3' test4 outputs test1 test2<tab>test3. In the case of our echo $enableval, since its value was -pipe\ -w\ -O2, it printed -pipe\ without any space after the backslash, so that it was not removed by the sed call. This value was then substitued in config/autoconf.mk.in to create config/autoconf.mk, where the ending backslash was interpreted as its shell meaning (continue on next line), thus breaking the variable, and build command lines. And for the bad programming practice ? The dash bug is due to a global variable that never got re-initialized, leaving the “terminate echo” (kinda) flag turned on (which is only checked when there is a backslash in the argument, since it is used to stop printing after, guess what… ‘\c’). No wonder why one of the first things you learn in programming classes is : never use global variables. (or at least, be very very very careful about what you do with them)

Name Overload?

First there was Debian Planet then along came the Planet Debian, unfortunate naming collision, but something we could mostly get used to and understand. If you’re not confused yet: well done. You soon will be:

• http://www.planetdebian.com

Guess which site that is? A third completely new name comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Planet”. WTF? Think that was fun? Lets try again. Stick with me: First there was Debian Help - now there’s another new site which is comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Help”:

• http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/

*Ugh* Now I’m personally of the opinion that competition is a good thing, but please people - can we all just get along without confusing our users/visitors? I’ll sidestep the whole trademark issue, in case my site is in trouble too

Some weeks ago the kernel on vore, Debian's sparc porting machine and sparc buildd, was exchanged and didn't run as stable as expected. According to the site admin he was able to fix these problems in the meantime. However, one week ago the machine became unavailable again. This time it's a connectivity problem with the switch port. Unfortunately the security buildd for sparc has no redundancy. Even though auric, the other sparc machine of the Debian project hosted at the same place, visi.net, was configured to run a buildd for the general distribution, it wasn't set up to pick up security as well. It is not know when the connectivity problem of vore will be fixed. However, this morning build logs for security updates were received from a new machine. It looks like somebody spent some time on fixing the issue without vore and alleviate the situation. Hope we'll have a sparc buildd soon again.

On Wednesday I got up way too early in order to go to Heathrow in time for my flight to Osaka. The flight went via Frankfurt and wasn't terribly spectacular. I was a bit disappointed in the flight entertainment system (only shared monitors in the middle of the plane, mostly showing movies I've seen before) but I had Hodges' biography of Alan Turing with me and slept for a while, so it wasn't a bit issue. Arriving Thursday morning, Yabuki-san, who had originally invited me to the Japan Debian Mini-Conf (JDMC), picked me up from the airport. Shortly afterwards I met up with Imai-san, who was so kind to go sightseeing with me in Kyoto. I wanted to go there because I heard that it's quite different to Tokyo, where I stayed for about 10 days for a conference three years ago (incidentally, that trip was in October too, so it was three years ago almost to the day). Kyoto was surprisingly close to Osaka — it was faster to get there than to go from Kansai airport to the city center of Osaka. We first went to Nijo Castle, followed by some temples, including Kiyomizu-dera, one of the most celebrated temples of Japan. We had sushi and noodles for lunch, and in the afternoon we returned to Osaka so I could rest for a few hours before meeting up with the interpreter of the conference. This we did at a restaurant specialized in tofu. The food was surprisingly good given that I'm normally not a big fan of tofu at all. The following morning, I had my keynote speech, talking about release management. I covered various insights learned from my research and then tried to apply some of them to Debian, asking the question whether something like time-based releases would make sense for the project. A big issue is obviously planning, and I think the new release team does a much better job at this than we did in the past, even if many improvements are still possible, such as better coordinated NMUs when major transitions take too long. All of the other talks where in Japanese, so I was either working on my laptop or walking around the city. The first day, Hatta-san and I went to Osaka Castle; Roland Mas, who briefly turned up for the JDMC, joined us as well. The second day I did some shopping before going to the conference where I participated in the key signing session. On Sunday morning I had to leave again... it was a nice trip, even though much too short and influenced by jet lag. I think there could have been more people at the JDMC but on the other hand it's nice to see some efforts to attract new developers in Japan and this conference was certainly a good first step in that direction.

Today, a UPS delivery guy delivered a largish box, containing the Quadra 700 that had been donated to me by Sebastiaan Couwenberg (thanks!). The box was much larger than I expected, however. At first, I was afraid; if it ended up very large, I wouldn't have any space to put it anywhere. Fortunately, on opening the box, I found that it was, in fact, not very large, as the case is the same as that of the IIci (which is the smallest case I have—people who went to DebConf5 may remember what it looked like, since it stood in the hacklab the whole time); instead, the box contained more than I expected. Aside from the Quadra, the box also contained a keyboard, a three-button ADB mouse (I didn't even know those existed in the first place), and a monitor. Whee. I had four macs (of which one has a broken LC040, so is not usable), but only two ADB keyboards (of which only one is in perfect working order), one ADB mouse, and one monitor (which beeps annoyingly if it's been powered on for more than a few minutes). With this, that amount has suddenly doubled, which is very welcome. I'll probably move this monitor to the office, and move the one at the office home some time. Not just yet, though.

So, many people have had many things to say about Gobby, the much-vaunted app with the most phenomenally awful and unfortunate name I've ever seen in a free software app. This tends to be either hype (oh my god, it will enable us to leverage synergies to maximise shareholder value like we've never leveraged synergies before!), or disappointment (is that it?). Mine is neither, really.

I don't find that collaborative editing is hugely groundbreaking; a small IRC channel which everyone uses to document things, then assembled into a text document from there, can do roughly the same job. One thing we've been using it for at Ubuntu Below Zero is taking notes in BoFs. Most people in the BoF log in and the main note taker does the bulk of the work, and either him or the assignee steers conversation.

Normally in BoFs, I either get so involved in it that I forget that I'm supposed to be taking notes and thus don't, or tune out somewhat and forget to take any notes, and have to reconstruct it from vague memories later on. What Gobby is useful for in this case, is keeping the note-taker honest. If the notetaker is writing down anything inaccurate, you can just fix it; if they're forgetting to take notes at all, you can stop talking and throw some Mentos at them.

I think this alone makes it tremendously useful for stuff like note-taking in BoF sessions, and could be useful for minuting conference calls also. Adding the IRCalike interface is useful too as an out-of-band channel to throw URLs around (and to give Seb crap about using azerty) also. So I'm pretty sure I'll keep using it for that.

This is by far the most stressful long period I can remember in my life. I was quite in control of things approximately until around June. Since then, things have been falling over me in a quick and heavy sucession - First of all, being co-organizer at Debconf was quite hard. I had run conferences before, but nothing ever like this - And, I should add, I never had a German boss running the show. [friend="Stockholm"], as a project leader, you really rule... But whoever works with you should be warned: It is not easy.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: It's easier to be the coordinator (remember I was officially the Tyrant for three years at CONSOL? :) ) than to be in the immediately subordinate team.
Back home, I expected the regular post-vacation rush, so having a hard August -trying to make everything on time- was expectable and OK. I don't remember exactly what projects was I in during August/September (I remember some minor stuff, but I think adding it all together was the mistake). There is one thing I did, though: Accepting way too many invitations as a speaker, at least one every two weeks. And, as many of you know, you cannot just travel somewhere and keep working - When I am at a conference, I want to get to talk with the people there, I want to know what are they interested in (why they invited me in the first place), and make friends with them. But this time it was (as it happens every year - Why are most conferences stuck together September-November?) just way too much.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: Be careful on what you accept. It's easy saying "yes" to a conference. It's hard keeping sanity afterwards.
Ok... I have been going places. For example, two weeks ago I was to San Luis Potos . Instead of staying there for two days, I left my office at 7PM, took the metro to the bus station, got the bus at 9PM, arrived at 2AM, went to my hotel, woke up at 7:30AM, had breakfast, coded for ~1hr, went to the conference theater, delivered my talk at 11AM, went for a quick lunch (which became a takeaway order) at 1:15PM, got on my bus at 2PM, arrived back in Mexico City at 7PM, got to a (fucking long) meeting at 8PM, left the meeting at 12AM, and finally got back home at 1AM. Fun, huh?
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 3: Yes, it's fun to travel. It is much more fun to travel when you actually get to know the place!
...And pressure has not given way. As soon as I finish with one project, there is another one demanding my attention right away. October has been more than hectic. I had to cancel two invitations (on which I was to go to two cities each time) I was quite looking forward to, in Peru - I am very sorry, friends at Lima, Moquegua, Tacna and Arequipa... But I won't make it there this year. I am specially frustrated by not being able to make it to Concladeb in Arequipa - I really want to see DebianPeru/DebianArequipa's good work! And I am specially sorry on canceling today my trip to Moquegua, after they had already booked (and paid) for the tickets... It seems the money will not be lost after all, but I was such a pain in the ass for them, it is not fair I am cancelling... But anyway.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 4: Remember to learn from past experiences - It feels incredibly as a deja-vu from last year.
I hope I am not spoiling any surprises: Today, instead of blogging, I am supposed to be setting up the Comas server for Debconf6. Even with all of my worries, yes, I am still determined to be the man behind the show for Debconf. It will be in Oaxtepec, don't worry, and it will be a huge success. So let me finish this post quick, and it will be sooner you can register for it ;-) There are still too many points to work on Comas, though. I am setting up a tweaked version, against my will, but with the commitment to fix it transparently and soon. Oh... Yes, and I still have to coordinate with the locals here, as it's taking forever for us to open the fscking bank account so we can start receiving funds and paying money. Did I mention Debconf would be in Mexico? Ok, I will do my best not to make lateness the norm.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 5: Try not to bore your audience with too many details. Remember you have to work, and somebody might complain you lose too much time blogging!
But before I leave you alone: You might ask why do I mention the addiction in my post title... Well, because I have started treating my main addiction. It is really not easy, and I don't ever want to know what is it like to have a chemical addiction, like people who abuse drugs. If you have seen me face to face, it should be obvious: I have a very strong addiction to food. For one month already, I have been as conscious as I can every time I open my mouth - And, yes, it was not just three times a day. I have made some advances (sorry, I cannot really measure it, as home scales make it only to 120kg). Today is a big day for me: I was admitted in a pilot obesity control follow-up treatment at my University's sports health direction. I am very happy about this, as I do need mentoring and hand-holding. This is a seriously difficult process to follow, and I really hope to carry it thoroughly. Fortunately, my health has been perfect until now - But I cannot abuse myself forever.

There are lots of cases where you can have a positive view of a stock, but still want a bit of investment protection. A fairly typical way of getting some protection against a drop in price is to place a stop-loss order with your broker, so that if a stock hits a certain price that you set, the broker will automatically sell the stock. This limits your loss (known as downside protection), and if the price doesn’t go down, then you keep all the stock, and you get to take full advantage if the price goes up (known as upside participation). Also, it should be free to place a stop-loss order with your broker, unless the price is hit and the stock is sold. So, stop-loss orders have three benefits: downside protection, upside participation, and no up-front cost. Unfortunately, there are a couple downsides (no pun intended) to stop-loss orders. The first is that if a stock is really plummeting (there aren’t any buyers at all), then it may be difficult or impossible for your broker to get the price that you’ve specified. That’s sort of an extreme situation though and only happens about once every thirty years (think October 19, 1987). The other, much more likely, scenario is that the stock goes through a temporary decline (causing your stock to be sold), but then recovers. In that case, you’ve sold for a loss and you miss out on the recovery. So instead of placing a stop-loss order with your broker, you can purchase what’s called a protective put. A “put” is a contract that says the buyer of the put has the right (not an obligation; it’s the buyer’s choice) to sell stock on (or before, in most cases) a predetermined day at a predetermined price to the person who sold (”wrote”) the put. For example, today RHAT closed at $23.22; you can buy an option to sell 100 RHAT shares at $22.50 (the strike price) anytime between today and November 18, 2005 (the option expiration date) for $55 (as reported by Yahoo!). So you get downside protection and full upside participation, for a price. (There’s also a married put, which is the same thing as a protective put, except you buy the stock at the same time as the put; a protective put implies that you already own the stock.) But there is still the annoying up-front cost. If you’re willing to risk missing out on some of the potential upside though, you can offset the costs. A collar is when you buy a protective put and at the same time selling a call option. By selling (writing) a call, you give someone else the right (again, not the obligation) to buy shares on a predetermined date for a predetermined price. For example, say you do buy the protective put above, and at the same time, write a call option for 100 RHAT shares that expires on November 18, 2005 for a strike price of $25. The proceeds from this sale will be $30 (again, minus fees). So for a cost of $25 ($55 to buy the put minus $30 to write the call), you’ve got downside protection, and upside participation up to about 7.7%. All of this assumes that your preference is to keep the stock. But say that your stock has done very well and it’s gotten to be a sizeable part of your portfolio, and you’d like to diversify a bit. That means that you’re serious about selling it, regardless of what you think the price is going to do. (There are lots of good reasons to sell a stock that’s enjoyed nice gains, not the least of which is that nice gains are generally caused by nice growth, and a company can only grow so big.) Selling the stock outright is one technique; another is a variant of dollar-cost averaging, but instead of buying a fixed dollar amount, sell a fixed number of shares. But you can combine either of these with writing call options to potentially achieve even better results. A covered call is when you own a stock and write a call option on it (like a married put, a buy-write is when you buy the stock and write the call at the same time). Instead of selling the stock immediately, you give someone else the option to buy it from you at a predetermined future date. Because the date is in the future, there’s a bit of a premium that buyers will pay (which means more money for you). For example, November 18, 2005 calls for RHAT with a strike price of $22.50 are selling for $120 for 100 shares; that means that if the option is exercised, you make $22.50 from the sale, plus $1.20 per share from the option, for a total of $23.70 as your effective sale price. If the option is not exercised though, then your shares are not sold, but you get to keep the $120, and do the whole thing over again. (Unfortunately for me, Brocade has a company policy prohibiting collars and covered calls. But fortunately for me, I don’t own very much BRCDE stock.)

Don't ask me why, but my video iPod has unexpectedly arrived yesterday instead of sometime next week as I was told. But hey, who am I to complain? Quick notes:

• Sound quality is great, videos look great.
• GNUpod doesn't work yet, it seems the iTunesDB format has changed. I'll investigate.
• I tried putting the whole Wikipedia on the iPod using the Notes feature. It's not that easy unfortunately, as the built in software limits file sizes to 4 KB, and the number of notes to 1000. Maybe iPod Linux software will support this.
• Speaking of iPod Linux — it doesn't work yet. I'll try to come up with patches.

No time for blogging, must play with iPod...

Systems 2005 Another year, another Systems. This year, however, sadly the first time without Jens, so organization was harder than usual. C&L again provided an Open Source area where we had a booth along with GNOME, KDE, the several BSDs, PostgreSQL and some smaller Open Source projects. As we were not able to build up the booth on Sunday already, there was only a pretty bad location left on Monday, facing towards the wall. Roland Stigge provided a huge 1,5 by 1,5 metre Debian swirl banner, which we mounted in the vicinity of the (too small for that) booth. Michael Ablassmeier brought a Shuttle PC and a TFT display so we could show visitors around the Debian desktop and point them towards further information on the internet. Credativ again kindly shipped posters and flyers. We sold the former and distributed the latter to passing visitors. Unfortunately, Credativ did not receive any LinuxTag DVDs this year, and we were unable to obtain some from other people (apparently they are spared for LinuxWorldExpo in Frankfurt next month, though most visitors there should know Debian already I guess), so we only had about 30 DVDs, which were left from the pack I took back from LinuxTag myself. We sold those for 2 EUR, and later distributed some shiny new Breezy CDs the GNOME booth acquired on Thursday and had some Sarge CDs pressed at a nearby CD production booth which we sold for 2 EUR as well. After some initial doubts on whether we would be able to properly man the booth, it turned out that the local Debian community was enough to guarantee presence except for Friday morning. Michael Ablassmeier, Erich Schubert, Simon Richter, Roland Stigge and Rene Engelhard manned the booth besides me. So we were in the fortunate position that we had two people at the booth most of the time while shuffling around personnel, while most other booths were operated by the same one or two people throughout the week. This year, almost all people I asked (I usually offered a flyer and asked "Do you know Debian already?" to all passing visitors, unless they quickly tried to run through our territory) knew about Debian at least somewhat, and surprisingly many people said they had Debian installed and were happy with it. Thanks to the Sarge release and the almost-official amd64 archive (the respective lack of which were by far the most prominent questions last year), we had almost no recurring questions to answer; probably the most frequent question was about Ubuntu and our relationship with it, but those were pretty scarce and I expected much more of that. Likewise, only very few people were unhappy about Debian (far outweighed by the happy bunch), and most of that seemed to be due to specific technical issues rather than any general reservations about the Debian development or community processes. Most of the remaining questions were pretty specific, e.g. people having issues installing Debian on their hardware or trying to do some exotic stuff. To summarize, it was a nice having a booth again and getting in touch with visitors and users. I did not see much else of Systems this year due to being busy with university as well, but I do not think it would have been worth it anyway. Murray Cumming and Joerg Kress (who were managing the GNOME booth) helped me dismantle the booth and carry back the hardware and leftovers on Friday evening and we decided to have dinner together at a nice pub in Munich.

2.6.14-1 was uploaded to unstable already (it's waiting in NEW currently), but it will fail to build at least on alpha, because an include statement in include/asm-alpha/barrier.h is missing. Al Viro sent a patch against 2.6.14-rc5 to the kernel mailinglist two days ago (and Ivan Kokshaysky corrected it), which unfortunately wasn't included into the final release. I added the mentioned patch to 2.6.14-2, but there's no ETA for a new upload yet.

Security Updates

A new version of GNUMP3d is out. This is primarily a security update. Install it now if you use it publically. (Local mirror in case you’re running from source and the gnump3d.org site hasn’t updated yet)

Apt Updates

I’ve updated my personal APT repository. This now uses reprepro to create/update/manage it. The reprepro tool is utterly wonderful. (Although I used the backported Sarge version, rather than the older one). Expect an article on the Debian Administration website shortly. Now I have an “incoming” directory I can upload new package builds to, and have them magically migrate into the relevent section. The other significant change is that now I can host packages with Arch: All, as well as i386. This is useful as I distribute several perl scripts/libraries which were previously unavailable to non-x86 users. Talking of which I still have to finish my review of The Debian System written by Martin Kraft - I’ve been sitting on that for too long. (Summary: Great Book, buy it if you can’t get one donated to review ).

Tonight was my last CLUG meeting for a while, and it was a pretty good one. We didn't have a whole lot of structure to the meeting. Bob gave a couple of short talks. I gave a short talk off the cuff about the wonders of LVM. Hugh showed off some virtual reality goggle things. Alex tried to have a bit of a hackfest on Coda, but I think there was a general lack of Coda fu, so that didn't get very far unfortunately. Steve Walsh has kindly offered to take over as the person behind the shell script that schedules the meetings, and I've moved it from caesar (in the cupboard at home on the end of an ADSL connection) to daedalus in Brisbane, so it will continue to be accessible while I'm relocating. I'm looking forward to checking out SVLUG and BALUG (which seems to have fallen off the Internet (from home) at time of writing, looks like someone needs to read the IETF's BCP #16).

board games Bought myself the European version of "Ticket to ride" in preparation for the winter to come. Also, some Carcassonne updates ("The dragon and the princess" and "The count") since i believe i have all the rest. Maybe i should also get "The city", but it is a standalone game, so i need to read some reports. dspam Dspam is back. We have a coordinated effort to get it out in less than a week. I had a package more or less ready, but since two non-developers are working on it, too, i stepped out and right now i am more an observer than an active packager, while i clean (read janitor) some things from time to time. Also, too much work is keeping me from doing other Debian stuff, including coordination of DC6. music I have recently discovered beatport.com. I have refused to access it before, due to its Flash (yep, chilling effect) interface. It is crack for the following reasons:

• One cannot set bookmarks. I would like to set a flag on some artists, or just have a "duh, this one i have to recheck". Forget about it.
• One cannot open multiple windows/tabs. While I am surfing the interface, i would like to open some labels/artists in another tab for inmediate review. CAN NOT DO.
• Shit, man, one cannot even send a URL to a friend for him to buy a song, since there is no such concept in the interface.
• Also, one cannot go back, since the flash buttons (RW, FF) are b0rk3n.

So, please, beatport, if you are out there and listen to your users, do something about it. However, the music selection they have rocks (even if it is crappy electronic music).

I finally found some time to devote to hacking on the DG834G. Given that it seems the bootloader checksums almost the entire flash on each boot a writeable flash file system doesn't seem to be an easy option. This rules out vanilla OpenWRT unfortunately, which is a shame given the AR7Port. However as I'm familiar with OpenEmbedded (which seems to be non working at present, but is behind OpenZaurus which I run on my C3000) I decided to have a look at getting that going. So now I have an image that boots, creates a ramfs for /, pivotroots the flash round to /media/realroot, creates a bunch of symlinks and should give me a basic filesystem to play with. Except it's not very happy, producing INIT: PANIC: segmentation violation! sleeping for 30 seconds. messages. Booting to just /bin/sh works fine, but various things won't run. I'm currently blaming this on the fact I haven't changed the default Netgear kernel from 2.4.17, so the next course of action is probably to use an OpenWRT based kernel and see how that goes.

This weekend I was in Berlin, at the Berlinux 2005. I have to work until about 17:00 on Fridays so I couldn't attend the first day, instead I arrived at Berlin at about 19:00, just in time for the Social Event :) The Social Event was really nice, well organized with little group tables to sit and chat and very delicious food. Apparently there was also a tuxracer tournament planned but that couldn't be done due to some technical problems (didn't follow that too closely). The evening was very nice anyway I ate a lot and talked to the other attending Debian people. We didn't stay up too long since the exhibition was scheduled to start at 09:00 the next day.
When we got to the Technical University on the next morning the first thing I noticed was a huge transparent hanging over the entrance. Upon closer inspection however it advertised some events for this semester's new students, not Berlinux. Shame. We quickly checked with the Information desk, where we were told to check back with them before giving our talks, since there had been some last minute room changes. Given the quite chaotic organisation in the run-up of this event I must say I wasn't too surprised. (There had been quite a mess regarding the preparation of the talks, many speakers only read on the site when - and that - they were giving their talks, deadlines suddenly popped up and then started wandering ... All in all preparations had been a bit confusing.) Also the planned Berlinux CD had somehow not worked out, so there were no CDs available.
With such good news we went on to the Debian booth to set up the usual stuff. The biggest attraction certainly was Frank Ronneburg's Debian-controlled model railway. Kids had to be forcibly moved on and grown-up men were seen regressing to small children again ;) Unfortunately attendance was rather low anyhow and a lot of the people walking by were regular students on their way to some other events.
At least the talks managed to attract a higher number of people. I can't estimate for shit so I have got no idea how many people attended my talk on user friendly system administration. But I was rather content with the number and so were the other speakers I talked to (The only one who was a bit unfortunate was Alexander 'Tolimar' Schmehl who had to compete with Klaus Knopper giving a talk at the same time.) After the talks were over we killed some more time at the booth, playing with Frank's model railway and Wolfgang Borgert's Nokia 770 (It has Mahjong! Yay!). It should be noted that when we were finally taking down the booth a very brave person walked around with a laptop collecting criticism and suggestions for improvement. There were so many of them that I had to help him out with my Thinkpad's power supply :)

I am not sure how much the Debian project benefited from the whole event since the attendance was so low and we got very few questions. Personally though I quite enjoyed the event. The talk went well (I got a few laughs and good questions afterwards), I met a bunch of new and very interesting people and had a really great Pizza. I hope Berlinux Organisation picks up a few of the suggestions they received. For the moment, my conclusion is that I'd probably give a talk there again, I am however not so sure if I'd go there only to man the Debian booth.

PS: Sadly they didn't have name tags either, so I don't even have something to put on my "trophy board" :(
Hint: Most speaker love souvenirs, give them a piece of paper with their name and your logo on it and they are happy people :)

Steve wrote in his blog:

I’ve seen this argument before “Buy distribution of GNU/Linux and support free software programmers”. The only problem I have with it is that it is incorrect. Buying GNU/Linux distributions helps the vendors who created it, certainly, and may indirectly help pay for some free software in the sense that the vendors might ship free software they wrote (e.g. SuSEs Yast 2]). However plonking down real cash-money for a boxed set of SuSE gives no money to the people who created MySQL, no money to the people who created Firefox, no money to the people who created Emacs, Vim, Bash, and Catan/Pioneers, etc.

I think, in general you’re right. And if you — as you did :-) — take SuSE, it usually works. And you’re probably also right for most people who just know the big, commercial distributions. But what if you take a free distribution like Debian or some of the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD? How much truth is in there then? Especially in the case of OpenBSD your view doesn’t seem work, because if you buy an (official) OpenBSD box, you pay the developers — or at least a few of them — of the operating system core and some mission-critical applications. But what if you take community based distributions like Debian? You distinguished between distributor and authors of free software. In my eyes especially Debian, but also some other community based distributions are both at same time. So IMHO you can put them on the author side of your view. And since many Debian vendors (at least those I saw) donate a part of the profit they make from selling Debian CDs or DVD to the Debian Project. Or they offer additional shopping cart items “Donation to Debian” if you order a Debian item. (Example: LinISO.de) Another question in this context would be, how the FOSS world would look like if there are or were no commercial distributors. It probably would be much smaller because some marketing and some lobbying would be missing. Although that’s the only implication which comes to my mind, I’m sure, there are many more possible views on this subject. But as I said, IMHO you’re right for most cases.