remember Mutt's mail in Org-mode and jump back to them As already anticipated, I've been implementing my own Getting Things Done work flow. This post documents one of its main bricks: the integration between Mutt and Org-mode. As a geek, my main incoming stream of TODO items and information in general is email. As emails hit my INBOX, I either deal with them immediately (reply, archive, delete) or I need to store them elsewhere, possibly adding extra information such as a deadline, a personal note, the associated next action, the context in which it is actionable, etc. This need of adding extra information is what defeats the usage of my mail client (Mutt) as a list manager (in the GTD sense), and that's where I plugged Org-mode in. My main goals are:

1. create Org-mode notes from Mutt, referencing the current email, and possibly inlining some of its metadata (e.g. subject, sender)
2. quickly retrieve referenced emails from Org-mode notes; ideally that should happen in my usual email environment (i.e. Mutt), so that I can process the retrieved mail as usual (e.g. to inform the sender that I did something about it)

In fact, both would be straightforward to achieve if I were using some Emacs-based mail client such as Gnus, but I resist the Emacs operating system syndrome, and therefore I insist in using my beloved Mutt. Let's see how the two parts of the interaction between Mutt and Org-mode work. (1) Mutt Org-mode (there ...) The interaction from Mutt to Org-mode happens via org-protocol. Using it external applications can feed content to Org-mode note templates, which are then interactively edited (via emacsclient), and finally filed away. The Mutt glue macro from my ~/.muttrc is as follow:

macro index \eR " ~/bin/remember-mail\n"

The remember-mail script is trivial: it parses the fed mail from STDIN (using a couple of legacy Perl modules) and then invokes org-protocol. The relevant configuration from my ~/.emacs is reported below; the comments explain the various parts:

;; standard org <-> remember stuff, RTFM
(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-default-notes-file "~/org/gtd.org")
(setq org-remember-templates  ;; mail-specific note template, identified by "m"
      '(("Mail" ?m "* %?\n\n  Source: %u, %c\n  %i" nil)))
;; ensure that emacsclient will show just the note to be edited when invoked
;; from Mutt, and that it will shut down emacsclient once finished;
;; fallback to legacy behavior when not invoked via org-protocol.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
(setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
(defadvice org-remember-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember finalization"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-remember-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember abort"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-protocol-remember (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
  (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))

The result is that when you hit ESC-R in Mutt, emacsclient will be fired up in place presenting a note template that already contains relevant mail information (date, subject, from) and lets you add extra information before going away. Additionally, the email message-id will be hidden in the note as a mutt: hyperlink with anchor text "mail". (2) Org-mode Mutt (... and back again) Going back means that clicking on a "mail" hyperlink within an Org-mode note should bring up a Mutt instance showing the original message, in its context (e.g. its own mailbox). Achieving that consists of 2 separate steps:

1. looking up a specific message by Message-ID
2. firing up Mutt on the looked up message

For the first part I use maildir-utils (AKA mu): a Xapian-based mail indexing tool, which nicely integrates with Mutt; check out my previous blog post on the subject for a sample setup. Using mu, Message-ID lookups are as simple as:

zack@usha:~$ mu find -f p m:E1NbJad-0007x9-B7@ries.debian.org
/home/zack/Maildir/Debian.project/cur/1264883664_0.9472.usha,U=6320,FMD5=2284e927bb93d8a2ec434f5614dc04ba:2,S

Note: I'm relying upon maildir-utils version 0.6 or greater, for all presented scripts. For the second part I use the mutt-open script which fires upon a Mutt instance on the maildir containing a specific message, and then "hits" the appropriate keys to open the message and shutdown the sidebar (if desired). It is a nicely reusable script, which I've being using elsewhere too. The needed glue on the emacs side is just a function to invoke mutt-open in a brand new terminal, and its declaration as the handler for mutt: URLs.

(defun open-mail-in-mutt (message)
  "Open a mail message in Mutt, using an external terminal.
Message can be specified either by a path pointing inside a
Maildir, or by Message-ID."
  (interactive "MPath or Message-ID: ")
  (shell-command
   (format "gnome-terminal -e \"%s %s\""
       (substitute-in-file-name "$HOME/bin/mutt-open") message)))
;; add support for "mutt:ID" links
(org-add-link-type "mutt" 'open-mail-in-mutt)

Voil ! Download Summary of scripts and configuration snippets discussed above:

• remember-mail - store in Org-mode a note back-referencing an email
• mutt-open - open Mutt on an email having a specific Message-ID
• Emacs configuration
• Mutt configuration

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

I had previously sought alternative, innovative search engines, but none of the proposed options made me particularly happy. About a year ago, I came across DuckDuckGo, and today, I ve been using DDG as my primary search provider for exactly 10 months. The reasons why I switched included

• my dislike of the Google information monopoly and the potential that a single, corporate entity with financial interests, gets to censor the information I see. I am sceptical of their Do-no-evil promise because there s nothing binding about it, and if it gets in the way of money-making, I am sure it ll be discarded at a whim if it even still exists.
• the awareness that my usage augments their database (although I am probably too far away from mainstream to provide useful data), which translates into more funds available to them to further strengthen their market position.
• my belief that the days of index-based searches are over, given how 95% (or more) of user-generated content is bogus. Google undoubtedly optimises the results with obscure, secret algorithms, but that s just not enough for me.
• Of course the name DuckDuckGo was perhaps the strongest reason to switch. :)

I am aware that DuckDuckGo is index-based itself, using the Yahoo API, which, in turns means that DuckDuckGo may already be using Bing data. Sounds a bit like out of the frying pan into the fire, unfortunately. I am still investigating better search solutions, sticking with DuckDuckGo meanwhile. Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo doesn t quite cut the mustard at all times, forcing me to go to Google instead. For this reason I am glad to find that the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has not been discontinued, but simply renamed to OptimizeGoogle. This extension allows me to anonymise my identity towards Google, remove click tracking (which Google doesn t want you to know about and hence hide with JavaScript), hide ads, and customise a slew of other aspects of the giant s search engine. It alleviates some of the aforementioned concerns, but not all. Maybe it s time to rethink the way I use the web and lower my search needs. If you are using Firefox, try it out! If you re still using Internet Exploder, you should not, and instead upgrade to Firefox. Users of other browsers might find similar functionality for their application, or might want to switch as well. NP: Tunng: Comments from the Inner Chorus

So far the networking of virtual machines has usually been managed by configuring a Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) in the host, i.e. the good old implementation of 802.1D in the Linux Kernel:

A Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB) is a capability within a physical end station that supports local bridging between multiple virtual end stations and (optionally) the external bridging environment.

While this works well and in some cases is the best solution, in other setups performances or policy needs dictate that the traffic between virtual machines is forwarded to an external bridge (the Ethernet switch connected to the host) and back without having in the host a real bridge learning MAC addresses from its ports and implementing the STP. Enters the VEPA:

A Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) is a capability within a physical end station that collaborates with an adjacent, external bridge to provide bridging support between multiple virtual end stations and external networks. The VEPA collaborates by forwarding all station-originated frames to the adjacent bridge for frame processing and frame relay (including "hairpin" forwarding) and by steering and replicating frames received from the VEPA uplink to the appropriate destinations.

Support for VEPAs has been added to Linux 2.6.33 with a simple change to the macvlan driver. The next step will be to use the macvtap driver (available in 2.6.34), which exposes a tap character device usable by kvm-qemu and "connected" to a macvlan-like interface.

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

I've been trying to remember to post the pictures I like online for the past few months. So this is a reminder to myself. This image below didn't turn out quite how I wanted it to:

• I was hoping for a nicer sihouet upon the lady's face.
• The tree-branch on the left irritates me.

But that said I keep on coming back to look at it. I like the lighting, and I love the way that the brick wall on the right hand side angles towards the building on the horizon. Enjoy. Or not. A similarly "not perfect" image is this outdoor shot. I have only one irritation with this shot - and that is that the trees are clipped at the top. Meh, such is life. (I have two styles of photography; semi-random where I snap what is in front of me, and staged where I try to construct a particular picture - the two images above? One of each.) ObFilm: Bound

I got involved with open-source software before I learnt about software development in a university course. Naturally, when my profs tried to teach the waterfall model to me, I couldn t take them too seriously back then. After all, requirements specification design implementation verification maintenance is not really in line with the principle to release early, release often. Furthermore, since water cannot flow uphill, the waterfall model fails to represent development cycles, as they naturally appear, even in behemoth, ancient software nightmares. And yet, when embarking on a new project, I do tend to find myself first thinking about the big picture, instead of churning out the code. I am certainly not the best coder out there, and it might well be that I could benefit from learning to break down problems to get an earlier start on the implementation of components. However, I maintain that avoiding the waterfalls and engaging directly in extreme programming, agile software development, or pair-based approaches right away is not the answer. Rather, the best approach should probably involve a certain level of conceptualisation before code is produced. I am a big fan of test-driven development, and I like the scrum method for the very reason that it involves talking and challenging ideas (although I wouldn t follow the method down to the book). I like to think about trickles in the mountains where water droplets joyfully jump around. * * * When Glyn Moody spoke in his LCA2010 keynote about challenges we (as in society) face, and how open-source seems to have many answers, he dropped the following gem, which spoke right to my heart:

Twitter is the release early, release often principle applied to thinking.

By this simile, journal articles are produced according to the waterfall model. This may well be why they are usually outdated at the time of publication. Microblogging (like Twitter), on the other hand, is primarily used to publish stuff before it s ready, and which would never be published otherwise. With journals on one end, and microblogging on the other, I think the epiphany is found in between as with software development: web logs web applications that allow for easy publishing by anyone (which is a different problem not to be discussed here). Since articles on those platforms usually have at least a title and a body, they require just a little bit more thought than 140 characters of contracted brain farts, spilled into the world faster than it takes one to stand up, stretch, and sit down again. * * * Microblogging seems to be in line with where we re heading: more information, more self-promotion, more access to more people, and all that with lower barriers of entry. It s hard to argue against a trend, but I think we ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. The one specific instance of content is no longer relevant, and there is no more time in the day to read elaborate treatments of subject matters. Instead, what seems to prevail is a constant flow. This flow threatens to replace actual thinking and discourse, both of which require reflection and time a scarce resource used up by ever new, fast-flowing media. It seems to me that those who immersed in this flow are unable to get out, as if sucked in by a maelstrom. I ve seen people enter serious withdrawal within hours of not knowing what s going on in the world. One could miss out on something. If you re following people on one of those microblogging platforms, I challenge you to spend the weekend offline and when the urge hits, ask yourself what you are actually missing. I mean what you are really missing, and by that I mean anything other than the cozy buzz and hum of entertainment washed upon you, preventing you from having to think about what you could be (actively) doing instead. I hope it s not a lot. For else, I fear that this means that future generations will be stuck with this communication culture, just like water droplets can t ever play in the mountain trickle again. NP: Sola Rosa: Get It Together

A picture is worth a thousand words: A slightly longer story follows, resuming from the previous episode, where Gtk seemed to be working. Making sure Gtk actually works Since the udebs are quite fat already, I decided to put the contents of the gtk2.0-examples package into a new revision of the new libgtk-x11-udeb package. gtk-demo was running fine (if one forgets that this demo application is really easier to deal with if one uses a window manager), although image handling was broken. Julien and I spent quite some time double-checking that the libpixbufloader-png.so plugin was present; that both previous DirectFB-based udeb and new x11-based udeb were very similar; that configuration was generated properly; we went so far as to include strace in the netboot image, and to check the configuration file was open() d, but the plugin was never to be even looked for. All this resulting in a Unrecognized file format message every time. Josselin, our Messiah, enlightened us: although Gtk was previously using some configuration files to determine which pixbufloader plugin to use, it still continues to access those files but relies on a MIME database in the end. Installing the host s /usr/share/mime/mime.cache database did the trick (we have a proper fix pending), and all of a sudden, we got image support (which is needed for the logo_installer.png displayed on top of every screen, as well as for some icons during the installation, like the final one). Tweaking d-i itself Julien took care of rootskel-gtk. It was mostly about:

• Dropping some DirectFB start-up scripts.
• Dropping a related configuration file.
• Adding a start-up script doing trivial things:

  Xorg -retro -noreset &
  export DISPLAY=:0
  

Another easy step was cdebconf. Mostly: search and destroy on the few bits using DirectFB. An interesting issue we had was that even though a proper cursor theme was installed and made the default, we only had a black cross as X pointer. That s where we learnt it s needed to manually set a cursor for the root window, which can be done this way:

GdkCursor *cursor = gdk_cursor_new(GDK_LEFT_PTR);
gdk_window_set_cursor(gdk_get_default_root_window(), cursor);
gdk_cursor_unref(cursor);

Tweaking gtk2-engines was trivial, just a matter of building against the x11 flavour of Gtk instead of the directfb one. Some substitutions in debian/control and debian/rules, and that was done. Julien also took care of tweaking console-setup so that keyboard-configuration s and console-setup-udeb s postinst scripts call setxkbmap when $DISPLAY is set. Meaning we were able to replace kbd-chooser with console-setup-udeb, leading to a correct setting within X right after having selected the layout! Reverting d-i s r61645 (which disabled Gtk-based d-i images) was trivial (although while looking back, it was probably unnecessary), and after having messed around with the packages lists (there s a lot of local udebs at this point), especially to add some fonts, we managed to get an image which seems to work fine (at least in my VirtualBox environment). I tried Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French installations, and all of them seem to work fine (installed systems were bootable after an installation in the selected language) while issues were limited to some rendering or translation glitches, which didn t seem critical at all. Next steps Since there were some iterations, and since the trial-and-error approach was chosen, the first goal is to generate clean patches against all modified packages, and make sure a single walk through all packages in a clean chroot is sufficient to generate a working d-i image again. Once that done, which should probably considered (at least, I hope!) quite a good base already, the idea is to look into the various udebs to see whether there are some parts that could be disabled (maybe introducing a trimmed-down flavour especially for the udeb in some non-flavoured-yet libraries), so as to reduce the size of the resulting image. In the meanwhile, one can fetch the current hand-built netboot image by browsing http://people.debian.org/~kibi/di-x11/. It s only available for amd64, and weights 23MB. There s a sha256sum as well as a detached GPG signature in the same directory.

There s been a lot written about the Amazon vs. Macmillan dust-up. I ve seen a lot of posts by people that work for publishers saying that there are costs to making a book, and that $9.99 just won t cut it for an ebook. They say that publishers invest in typesetting, editing, selection, art, and various stages of quality control. All of that is true. Too bad they aren t doing it with ebooks. I ve had some books published, and while the process varies from publisher to publisher, the editing process usually involves technical editors (people that check my facts), copy editors (people that help the writing and grammar), cover designers, and QC staff. Often I will see PDFs or printed pages at the final stage, and at that point can catch things like bad table formatting or lines split at inopportune places. My point here is that there s a lot of editing going on, and there are many pairs of eyeballs looking at the printed page before it goes to the presses. In the year or so since I ve owned my Kindle, I can absolutely guarantee you that this process is not happening with ebooks. Most of the time, it is quite obvious that nobody has even looked at the finished product. Some intern has whipped up a quick conversion from whatever typesetting software they use, give it a quick glance, and call it good. One of my own books, Real World Haskell, is available in Kindle form. O Reilly took better than average care of that process, but even so, I certainly didn t approve screenshots before it went out like I did for paper (not that I d have had time after the paper project was done anyway.) From memory, some of the flaws I m aware of:

• Huston Smith s Why Religion Matters included some illustrations, but they were scanned at such a low resolution that the text was completely unreadable, even at maximum zoom.
• All electronic editions of Lord of the Rings, not just the Kindle version, suffered some serious issues including missing words and deleting 19 characters after each instance of a particular letter.
• Shmoop converted Project Gutenberg versions of The Iliad and Odyssey, but converted each line of Gutenberg text to a Kindle paragraph, wrecking word wrapping.
• Countless examples of hyphenated words in the middle of lines (probably from someone forcing a hyphenation point in a print edition), paragraphs that should have been block-indented but weren t, etc.

In some of these cases, it is quite obvious that a human didn t even bother to look at the result. Harper Collins got a huge black eye after their LOTR fiasco, and still took quite a long time to fix it. Now, if the publishers were actually going to put as much care into the quality of their ebooks as they do into the quality of their paper books, then sure, I d pay almost the cost of a paperback. But very few of them are doing that. It is quite obvious to me usually by the end of the first chapter of a book whether anybody even looked at the result of their conversion. Bottom line: If they re going to sell me an inferior product, don t expect me to pay near full price. If they can get their act together on quality, only then would they have room to start arguing for higher prices. If all you re going to do with the ebook is run the paper version through some buggy filter, you haven t incurred much additional cost, and it is plainly visible to all. Note: I would like to say that Lonely Planet and O Reilly have done good jobs with the tools available, and while their results aren t perfect, they have done a good job working with rendering their sometimes very complex print layouts for a Kindle.

Last night was the third one spent on playing around with X in a d-i environment. Making sure X actually works So far, running X was nice already, but is it really possible to run some applications inside? Bad news is that many trivial applications (xeyes, xclock, ) pull more dependencies than previously packaged. Finally, xev was chosen, and it indeed works fine (provided one makes sure it gets the focus). X was crashing when the (only last) client was exiting, and that wasn t normal. Thankfully the bug was reproducible outside d-i and Julien sent a patch a few minutes later. In the meanwhile, using -noreset did the trick to keep X running. Another way to run X applications there, is to point the host environment to the guest environment using DISPLAY=$GUEST:0 xterm. With VirtualBox, I followed those steps:

• Forward the host s 6000/tcp to the guest s 6000/tcp.
• Answer the language-related questions in debconf so that network configuration happens, which is needed for the next steps to work (just getting localhost set up is probably sufficient, but let s be lazy and let the installer take care of it for now).
• Run X in the guest, disabling access control, with:

  X -retro -noreset -ac
  

• Start xterm from the host with:

  DISPLAY=localhost:0 xterm
  

Moving forward: cairo, pango, gtk The next step was to rework some udebs. Legend:

• Red box: udeb we no longer want to depend on.
• Blue boxes: udebs to be tweaked first.
• Green boxes: udebs to be tweaked afterwards.
• Ellipse: udeb provided by the one pointed to (magenta edge).

Current situation, keeping only the relationships between udebs of interest: I took care of gtk+2.0 while Julien hacked pango1.0 and cairo. Some more libraries were needed, but being X libraries, tweaking the packaging was as trivial as for the first X libraries, and it only took a couple of minutes: libxcomposite, libxdamage, and libxinerama. Once those added to localudebs/ and to pkg-lists/local, and once the image rebuilt, I prepared a tiny Hello world -style application:

• Grab the source code from the GTK+ 2.0 Tutorial.
• Built it against the x11 flavour:

  gcc -o hello $(pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0) hello.c -lgtk-x11-2.0
  

• Grab it from within d-i, and make it executable.
• Start X as previously explained, then:

  DISPLAY=:0 ./hello
  

Pango wasn t quite happy at first (message wrapped):

(hello:1991): Pango-WARNING **: failed to choose a font, expect
              ugly output. engine-type='PangoRenderFc', script='latin'

Indeed, since no fonts were included, there was a tiny issue. No big deal, adding ttf-dejavu-udeb did the trick. I wanted to play around with a non-Latin language, so I asked for an example (thanks, Theppitak!), and once ttf-thai-tlwg-udeb added as well, one gets: Of course, there are many more features to test, but that sounds like we re going in the right direction (and this is not a joke about RTL). Next step Have a look at the green boxes, which may require to have a closer look at g-i s integration within d-i (it might be needed to see how it s supposed to be started, that might help testing the tweaked packages).

Yesterday, I arrived in Bruxelles, coming from the Issy/Paris FusionForge meeting which will be described more later by Roland on Pl net Forge. Please tell Ohlol if you use it, for more visibility. My employer will also provide hosting for FOSS projects, but we'll need to formalise the hosting conditions first, plus Evolvis currently runs FusionForge 4.5 (aka "Debian GForge") but we're in the process of upgrading to a 4.8-plus-backports-and-patches, then 5.0 soon. There is a new inter-forge mailing list as well, see the info page. People from Coclico and the various *forges may want to subscribe there (forge developers, not so much users (hosters) or end-users (hosted project developers/users) though). At FOSDEM, Benny and I (and maybe gecko2) will be running the MirBSD booth, so no Debian staffing for me, sorry. But I will be there. Also please do ask me about mksh the MirBSD Korn Shell etc. There are flyers in German (not updated), English and French too! (One of the *forge guys did install mksh(1) after reading it, in fact.) Don't you people dare miss the two talks: from Benny about how to package with autotools and libtool correctly and from XTaran explaining Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Benny's also famous for his talk about Painless Perl Ports with cpan2port; XTaran's famous for a whole bunch of other things. I still have some catching up (wlog entries, keysigning, webpages, etc.) to do, please bear with me. I don't really have a proper work environment with me. There's a chance I will not be attending the Beer Event in the Delirium Tremens caf (last year's still remembered). Benny will certainly be there, though. Could someone please order nice weather? I still need to eat some lunch and find a supermarket to shop for the weekend!

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

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According to an article in theWashington Post, Weekly Edition, 9 by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, companies that employ more women in upper level management are more profitable than those that rely heavily on male talent to run their businesses.

This exciting (but not surprising) news is not limited to the United States, but is true throughout the world.

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As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files):

• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.1 and Debian release 1.9.0.1-1: 85 files changed, 1163 insertions(+), 644 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.0.16 and Debian release 1.9.0.16-1: 86 files changed, 1177 insertions(+), 634 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and Debian release 1.9.1-1: 70 files changed, 770 insertions(+), 363 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.6 and Debian release 1.9.1.6-1: 76 files changed, 796 insertions(+), 380 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1.5 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 165 files changed, 3094 insertions(+), 1387 deletions(-)
• Changes between upstream 1.9.1 and upstream 1.9.1.6: 1263 files changed, 64322 insertions(+), 67376 deletions(-) (though more than half of that relates to upstream bump of sqlite3 and the vorbis stack)

A few observations on the above data:

• There are less changes between upstream and Debian than between two consecutive upstream versions.
• Debian changes only account for changes to the xulrunner package, i.e. it excludes changes to Iceweasel itself, or to nspr or nss, but these are far less important in number.
• The number of changes applied decreases when switching to a new upstream branch. This is mostly due to patches getting applied upstream.
• Debian patches on a given branch are pretty stable. In other words, most of the work is done on the first release of the branch.

The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=458631
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519468
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525047

Many others were sent:

• Test suite issues (2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543441
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543438
• make clean/distclean issues (10 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 15 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541767
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541768
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541769
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541770
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=541774
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543464
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543469
• Other issues (8 files changed, 112 insertions(+), 49 deletions(-)):
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535990
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538933
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542468
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542789
  • https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542999

A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=538929
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=542749

A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)):

• Disable python-xpcom tests for now.
• Disable javaxpcom tests at build time when DEB_NO_JAR is unset.
• Synchronize config/rules.mk and js/src/config/rules.mk for check-sync-dirs.py (we used to localize the changes required in each config/rules.mk, but as we now run <core>make check they need to be synchronized)</core>
• Workaround for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455238
  

Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)):

• Remove enable-system-lcms check, which somehow resisted merges with upstream
• Properly clean xulrunner/installer/*.system.conf

Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331779 (this one was applied on Fennec)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442196
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444918
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=481350
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491617
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=491646
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501241
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502369
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510040
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=514151

Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331776 (the part that remains in Debian needs to be sent in a new bug as this one is closed)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=349985
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356011
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428765
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434190 (we actually don t have a patch for this one, but a workaround is in bz#486681 below)
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435683
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440908
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444440
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444477
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486681
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501300
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506224
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530534

Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)):

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445128
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501434
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=528687

Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)):

• xulrunner-config: Give more appropriate cflags and libs
• Install applications in /usr/local/lib instead of /usr/lib
• Unhide release notes link in about: but only if app.releaseNotesURL is defined
• In about:, Don t put an about:blank link when there is no vendorURL defined
• Don t use static strings when setting environment variables
• Exec instead of uselessly forking in xulrunner launcher script
• Disable optimization on alpha for the url-classifier component (this will probably wait for the test suite failures on various architectures to be fixed)
• Build js shell and xpcshell against system libreadline
• Don t export js_SetTraceableNativeFailed, which is only used internally
• Increase stability and performance on mips and mipsel

And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below):

• Feature changes:
  • Disable APNG support when system libpng doesn t support it (6 files changed, 71 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) ; mostly #ifdef ing parts of the code related to animation)
  • Use application.ini from where the xulrunner-stub lies (1 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) ; This one may be dropped and replaced by something totally different, possibly upstreamed)
  • Don t register plugins if the MOZILLA_DISABLE_PLUGINS environment variable is set (1 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; very useful to isolate plugin-related crashes ; I don t think it s worth upstreaming considering the upcoming plugin-in-separate-process work)
  • Remove (un )registering system (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 43 deletions(-) ; xulrunner versions that are installed by a package manager don t need to be registered, since the package does it already ; a variant that conditionally removes it may be upstreamable)
• Preferences changes:
  • Set javascript.options.showInConsole (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Set DPI to system settings (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
• Cosmetic changes:
  • Install loading_16_grey.gif in classic.jar, and add an override for loading16.png (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; Since we don t support APNG, we replace the most used one by its (ugly) GIF equivalent)
  • Add links for about:bugs and about:README.Debian in about: (3 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; I d like to make that something living in debian/extra-stuff)
• Integration changes:
  • Add another preferences directory for applications: defaults/syspref (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Add an rpath to libpyloader.so and _xpcom.so (2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) ; allows python xpcom to work out of the box)
  • Forward-port nsIBadCertListener from 1.8 (4 files changed, 266 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) ; This is necessary for at least galeon and kazehakase, because the new interface is useless for embedding applications)
• Build-related changes:
  • Allow to override the PYTHON_SO variable (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Put the crmf library before the NSS libraries (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Allow to build java jar files in 2 pass (2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))
  • Avoid libxpcom being excluded from linked libraries by -Wl, as-needed (1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-))
  • Ignore system libjpeg, libpng and zlib version checking (1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-))
  • Force to not use -fshort-wchar (1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Add soversion to libmozjs (2 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) ; useful for couchdb, libjavascript-perl and others)
  • Don t build example component (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-))
  • Don t install system profile (1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-))

Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

We finished off moving everything from the old place last weekend. Our new home number can be determined by adding 59115 to the old one (or calling the old one in the next 60 days). The great unpacking is continuing. We're reluctant to unpack much in the kitchen because it's all going to have to come back out again in a couple of weeks. The cats have settled in well. Lily is still spending most of her time under the bed, but she comes out to explore from time to time. We had a bunch of fun with various bits of cable. I had some CAT-6 cabling installed throughout, and also some new RG-6 cabling was installed at the same time. The contractor ran a new line into our place and also a line to the patch panel he installed for the phone. When Comcast came out to activate our cable TV service, the poor guy had all sorts of problems, until I realised there was an air gap between the line coming into the condo and the cables outside. Then the next problem was my contractor had run the new line out to the wrong location. The bunch of cables where he ran the line to was some old out of commission stuff. The Comcast guy was really great. We located where the current cable came in (via the attic) and he spliced that into the new internal cabling, and the net outcome was close to what was supposed to have happened in the first place. The funniest thing was the Comcast cable guy left in such a rush because he ran over time on the job, that he left the cable cabinet wide open, including the box with all of the building's cable connections. If I new how to crimp RG-6, and was feeling lucky, I could remove the filter that's restricting the channels we receive. The next fun was getting the phone line sorted out. Again, my contractor had run a new CAT-6 line to the patch panel for the purposes of giving me a few jacks in the one place, so I could plug in my DSL modem, and a line into my Asterisk box. The only problem was he wasn't sure which pair was the phone line (and the phone wasn't active at the time) so there was an air gap between the end of the CAT-6 and the phone line. AT&T came out and sorted that out. I suspect the AT&T guy also left in a hurry, because he left a tone generator jumpered into the phone line. Once the phone was working we had to wait a couple of days for the DSL service to get moved to the new number. It turns out that I got new static IP addresses with the move, so it wasn't just a case of plugging everything back in and it working, unfortunately. But that's all behind us now. We're fully here, online again, and settling in. I think this weekend we'll bang in some picture hooks and hang up our paintings, and try to unpack a few more boxes.

I was interested to see Adnan Hodzic discuss life without evolution in the GNOME environment recently. I too use GNOME as my desktop environment (I sometimes toy with various tiling window managers before getting annoyed at something or other). My solution to the GNOME problem is to purge the gnome-desktop-environment package and instead my own local package gnome-desktop-minimal. This package is a meta-package which includes a smaller selection of GNOME packages, notably ignoring several that the gnome-core package would pull in such as eog - why install that when I prefer qiv or feh? If I believed we could agree on precisely which packages to include I would submit a bug to the gnome team "Please provide gnome-desktop-minimal" or similar. Still I suspect individual biases/preferences will make such a suggestion contentious at best and impossible to satisfy at worst. ObTitle: L on

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

The South Australian government wanted to force bloggers to disclose their name and post-code when commenting on an election [1]. According to Adelaide Now this included posts on Twitter and Facebook [2]. As expected there was a strong public reaction to this and Michael Atkinson (state Attorney General) stated that the law was not going to be enforced and that it would be retrospectively repealed after the election [3]. Which might have been the end of the issue, but he also said All MPs and all parties voted for Electoral law. Hope Libs, Greens, Family First, Independents etc will join us to support repeal which seems to be a clear claim that the Greens supported that legislation. The Greens are pretty good about freedom of speech issues so I immediately enquired as to what was going on. The following is from a Greens media brief issued yesterday by the office of Mark Parnell MLC (the Greens MLC in SA) which was issued before the new law was retracted: Attorney General Michael Atkinson must urgently clarify the scope of new electoral laws covering public comment on the internet, in the wake of concerns that the impact will be much wider than expected.

With only weeks to go before the election kicks off, there is an urgent need for the Attorney General to explain exactly what his laws are
intended to capture, said Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

When this was debated in Parliament last year, we were told that the law change would only affect electronic versions of a journal . Now there is
concern that the laws could extend further, restricting public commentary on media sites like AdelaideNow and ABC Online, he said.

When the Bill was debated in the Lower House, Michael Atkinson originally wanted to include ALL material on the web. However, the Government
backed down on this by the time it got to the Upper House, with Minister Holloway saying:
The intention is to limit the coverage of section 116 as it applies to the internet to electronic versions of a journal rather than any electronic publication on the internet.

A journal was narrowly defined as a newspaper, magazine or other periodical . Now I don t have a great objection to a law that demands that journalists identify themselves when commenting on an election, and I think that most people would not care about that. It seems that Michael Atkinson is repeatedly changing his claims to try and match popular sentiment. He has got form for this sort of thing, his past achievements include censoring the censorship debate about an R18+ rating for computer games [4].

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/02/precision-vs-accuracy-in-identifying-people/
• [2] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/in-depth/labor-gags-internet-debate/story-fn2sdwup-1225825708827
• [3] http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/victory-atkinson-loosens-gag/story-e6frea6u-1225826104175
• [4] http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/archives//010915.html