Of course, I was in Brussels this week-end, for FOSDEM. I gave a talk about Ultimate Debian Database (slides here) in the Debian devroom. The conclusion was UDD is ready, go play with it! so you know what you should do now! FOSDEM in general was great and huge (see the video from Quim Gil if you still doubt that) as usual. On a more sad note, the worst talk of the week-end was without any possible doubt Frans Pop s release team bashing. Nobody is claiming that the release management of the lenny release cycle was perfect: there s always room for improvement. But given the context and the constraints, I think that they did a very good job. Frans talk boiled down to: The release team doesn t know what they are doing, I would have done much better because I m so qualified. Giving such talks at FOSDEM, in front of an audience with many people not involved in Debian development, is really insulting. To make things worse, he finished the talk late, not leaving any time for questions/discussion, so the audience might be left with the impression that his opinions are representative of the opinions of DDs.

Another Monday, start of the working week and I m thinking about business again. Ian Lynch of The Learning Machine is a smart cookie who I ve collaborated with before. He leads a free-software-based business which is very different from TTLLP s cooperative model and he gave a talk about it to Manchester Free Software. Here are the headlines:-

Building a FOSS Business

• No fees from licenses
• Services allied to FOSS
• Something everyone needs
• Low cost to produce
• Low cost to distribute
• Encourage FOSS take up
• Increase the number of FOSS contributors
• Make money to support FOSS development

Background theory and research

• Clay Christensen and the theory of disruptive innovation
• The innovators dilemma
• Seeing What is Next

Business Growth

• 3 horizons of business growth
• Horizon 1 current profitable business
• Horizon 2 business with clear potential
• Horizon 3 possibilities currently being explored
• Pipeline for growth

Tipping points

• Critical mass
• Viral effects

The ideal product

• Something everyone needs
• Something that costs nothing to make
• Something that costs nothing to distribute
• Something that has increasing value the more that is bought.

The INGOTs

• International Grades Open Technologies
• Market disruption
• Lower barriers to entry
• Target those currently not in the market
• Provide products that are good enough
• Improve and add features over time

Primary Schools - KS3

• No-one targets primary schools
• Very little certification in KS3
• Use specialist schools community plans
• Upsell from primary to secondary
• KS3 add value at with less work for teachers

Developing world

• Enable developing countries into the qualifications market
• Target those making the transition to FOSS
• Ally to netbook/smartphone internet access to lower costs
• Use UK Awarding Body status for credibility.

The above points are under a Creative Commons cc-by-sa license and the original report was at Manchester Free Software. Sometimes FSUK-Manchester produce videos of talks, but I ve not seen this one yet. Watch their page for details. What can Ian s business analysis teach us about free software businesses? What interesting questions does it leave open? Have you had anything to do with the INGOTs? I ve not worked in education for a while, so I d love to hear tales from the chalkface about them.

Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen. Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact. What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will at least for a while to the narrative and the story. I don t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper. But I don t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn. So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?

Geeks are creatures of the screen. Many, I have found, are also great lovers of books. I have peered into the homes and apartment of many and books usually adorn the walls and the tables. The exist in abundance. Though I am more or less paid to read for a living but these days, I don t seem to the time to do extra reading and I often mourn the fact that I spend so much time getting scraps of stories and information from the net as opposed to delving into a great book, over the course of weeks and weeks (and as opposed to reading, often hurriedly but totally intensely, for class).
I do manage to get in some good articles and last night, I pushed through the heaviness of sleepiness to read a pretty interesting article People of the Screen by Christine Rosen. Though a bit too alarmist for my taste, I enjoyed reading it, largely because it was written well and also brought some interesting questions and points to the table about the transition from a print culture to a digital one. One point, that I was not surprised to read, is the most avid of screen users (programmers, the digerati), are also avid readers. But among the less (economically) privileged, who have different educational relationships to books and who also may not have the time to read, reading in the traditional sense, is may soon be a more or less historical fact. What I also enjoyed reading about and contemplating are the different material properties of the screen vs print book and the ways in which these affordances might create a different user/intellectual (almost existential, the author would argue) experience. For example, she argues that the emotional relationship to treeware books are more profound, or that reading a long novel (vs playing a video game) is about submitting your will at least for a while to the narrative and the story. I don t agree with all of her assessments but I certainly agree that there are phenomenological differences between reading words on sheets of paper and the pages of a compact book, and then reading from the blue hue of a screen, often sitting upright, and whose text, at least for me, does not seem quite alive as it is when imprinted on bounded paper. But I don t think this necessarily has anything to do with some inherent properties of the screen. For example, writing on the screen does nothing but enliven text for me. When it comes to writing, I cannot imagine doing it any way but via the screen and the keyboard. I can play around with some words and erase with impunity. I can move around a whole paragraph here and there, split it into two or three and as such it feels dynamic and quite alive. I am sure I have lost, or there is something to lose, by not going straight from brain to pen but I never did all that much serious writing without the keyboard and so perhaps there was nothing to lose, no bodily transitional for me to undergo, and thus nothing to really mourn. So, I suspect many readers of this blog are voracious writers and readers, on screen and off screen. Do you, can you read novels on the screen? If you love the printed book, why? Are you concerned about the loss of this medium? Or is there nothing to really worry about since technologists will eventually create a new digital medium that will surpass, in terms of a good user experience, the printed book?

This year I managed to go to fosdem every day, even at the beer event. Not that I attended many talks: I was quite busy getting the network to work. We got wireless in almost all locations in the end. Setting up and fixing the problems took most of Saturday. On Sunday we added the final 'experimental' room via a wireless bridge link across the square, with the beam over the heads of the people in the queue for Belgian fries.

In the end it all worked and we had only a few configuration and many cable problems. I must say it was more for to 'work' at fosdem then to just be there. May thanks to Jerome Paquay who actually arranged to lend the equipment from our employer (Cisco) and to configure it. Thanks for AY for ... well being AY.

Next year n-mode? serious uplinks?

I ve been working on a redundant wireless network for a client. The network has two sites that have pairs of links (primary and backup) which have dedicated wireless hardware (not 802.11 and some proprietary controller in the device - it s not an interface for a Linux box). When I first started work the devices were configured in a fully bridged mode, so I decided to use Linux Bridging (with brctl) to bridge an Ethernet port connected to the LAN with only one of the two wireless devices. The remote end had a Linux box that would bridge both the wireless devices at it s end (there were four separate end-points as the primary and backup links were entirely independent). This meant of course that packets would go over the active link and then return via the inactive link, but needless data transfer on the unused link didn t cause any problems. The wireless devices claimed to implement bridging but didn t implement STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and they munged every packet to have the MAC address of the wireless device (unlike a Linux bridge which preserves the MAC address). The lack of STP meant that the devices couldn t be connected at both ends. They also only forwarded IP packets so I couldn t use STP implementations in Linux hosts or switches to prevent loops. Below (in the part of this post which shouldn t be in the RSS feed) I have included the script I wrote to manage a failover bridge. It pings the router at the other end when the primary link is in use, if it can t reach it then it removes the Ethernet device that corresponds to the primary link and adds the device related to the secondary link. I had an hourly cron job that would flip it back to the primary link if it was on the secondary. I ended up not using this in production because there were other some routers on the network which couldn t cope with a MAC address changing and needed a reboot after such changes (even waiting 15 minutes didn t result in the new MAC being reliably detected). So I m posting it here for the benefit of anyone who is interested.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict;
use Sys::Syslog;
use POSIX; my $cfg_file = "/etc/bridged.cfg";
my $daemon = 1; openlog("bridged", "pid cons", "local1") or die "openlog"; if($ARGV[0] and $ARGV[0] eq "-d")

$daemon = 0;
open(CFG, "<" . $cfg_file) or die "Can't read \"$cfg_file\".";
my %cfg = ( SLEEP => '30',
PING_INTERVAL => '3',
PING_COUNT => '3',

);
while(<CFG>)

chomp;
if($_ =~ /^#/ or length($_) == 0) next;
my ($name, $val) = split(/ *= */);
$name =~ s/ \t*$//;
$val =~ s/^ \t*//;
$cfg $name = $val;

close(CFG); system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down"); my $route1 = 1; if($daemon == 1)

my $rc = fork();
if($rc > 0)

# parent
exit(0);
if($rc != 0)

error("Can't fork.");
POSIX::setsid();
my $pidfile = "/var/run/bridged.pid";
open(PID, ">" . $pidfile) or error("Can't open $pidfile.");
print PID getpid() . "\n" or error("Can't write to $pidfile.");
close(PID); open(STDIN, "</dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDOUT, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");
open(STDERR, ">/dev/null") or error("Can't open /dev/null.");

syslog("info", "starting up, 60 second delay");
sleep(60);
syslog("info", "now running"); sub ping_host

my $ip = shift;
open(CMD, "ping -i $cfg PING_INTERVAL -c $cfg PING_COUNT $ip sed -n \"/transmitted/s/^.*\\([0-9].*\\).received.*\$/\\1/p\" ");
my $count = <CMD>;
close(CMD);
if($count == 0)

syslog("err", "Host $ip can't be pinged");

return $count;
while(sleep($cfg SLEEP ))

if($route1)

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
if(ping_host($cfg PING1 ) == 0)

system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 50");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is broken, using interface $cfg IF2 ");
$route1 = 0;


else

if(stat("$cfg SIGNAL "))

unlink("$cfg SIGNAL ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF1 up");
system("brctl addif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 ");
system("brctl setpathcost $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF1 25");
system("brctl delif $cfg BRIDGE $cfg IF2 ");
system("ifconfig $cfg IF2 down");
syslog("warning", "Interface $cfg IF1 is considered to be fixed");
sleep(60);
$route1 = 1;

Yesterday I phoned into The Phone Co-op AGM 2009 and heard the reports, most of which you can read in the PDF annual report from the AGM website. There were also various questions from members, which I scribbled down as follows:-

What does ADSL mean?

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. Essentially, what we sell as broadband.

How many day-equivalents of training did part-time employees get on average? (I think this was the question, but I got a bit lost.)

Information not immediately available. ThePhoneCoop will research and reply later. The number of part-time employees is an asterisk footnote in the non-financial performance indicators.

Where are the Phone Co-op s investments?

Most of the share capital is for investment in TPC, but surpluses arise for various reasons and are invested outside. Current locations include 40k in long-term investments, including 10k in the Co-operative Group, 20k in Westmill wind farm, 5k in a hydro power project; 60k is in the ICOF share account, 1.4m in the Co-operative Group, [...I missed some. I was struggling to keep up. Some of this may be wrong anyway...] 486k in Midcounties Cooperative share account, 20k in Chelmsford Star; total of about 2.9m.

Is ICOF deciding recipients of the sustainability fund or The Phone Co-op?

The arrangement with ICOF is now ending for various reasons and now TPC will partner with Black Country Reinvestment Society. Don t want to manage the fund directly because it s not a core task for a phone company.

The increase in turnover is described as mainly to existing customers. Has there been an increase in the number of customers?

The Phone Co-op is recruiting 150-200pcm residential and 30 business customers, but losing a similar number. Have recruited new staff to try to improve this.

Is share account interest being cut in line with banking interest?

Just cut to 3%, but there has been a net inflow of investment. Current interest receipts from TPC cover it due to long-term investments, but they will mature, so the interest rate will be cut gradually to keep it sustainable.

Purchase from other cooperatives is 11% and falling. What is being done to increase it?

[I missed the answer to this.]

What is happening about getting a new office?

The Phone Co-op still has an option on a site in Chipping Norton, but no planning permission. An alternative commercial building which was being discussed with its owner was lost to housing (planning permission granted there!). There is a general lack of suitable sites available and things are happening cautiously in the current climate.

If we re trying to save paper, why did members receive two envelopes in the post for this AGM?

The report was sent from Calverts directly, to save time, postage, staff and report miles

Is the description of non-white in the performance indicators a problem for mixed white+non-white people?

Will look into this.

How many affinity schemes are there?

There are currently 300 and they are being reviewed for the best way to work better with them.

Are acquisitions likely?

Expect the credit crisis to being opportunities. There are benefits from more traffic and so on. TPC has been contacting potential suppliers and intermediaries asking after other providers in difficulties.

What is the deferred income shown in the financial statements?

Pre-billed broadband and similar products.

Is the investment in the Co-operative Group risky?

TCG holds around 4bn in assets under and is one of the longest continuously-traded companies in the UK.

Are ThePhoneCo-op s 0845 numbers advantageous to TPC or the caller?

Still yes for TPC, paying 1p/min at peak; probably not advantageous to caller these days.

There are 15% sales to cooperatives shown. What s the largest cooperative and what % of that is it?

Shown in the annual report. [The numbers in report work out to about 15% of all sales I think. So, nearly all sales to cooperatives are sales to Midcounties?]

All errors and omissions in the above are mine. I heard the allocation approved, then I had to leave before the special meeting and the presentations. If anyone has links to them or coverage, please leave me a comment. Other comments welcome, too.

If you go for an ultrasound or some other imaging procedure, they may give you a CD with the images that requires some overly complicated and under-featured Windows viewer. Chances are these images are in DICOM format, which is like the AVI of the medical world. Your first clue will be that file might report the file as an unoptimised QuickTime movie, e.g. After figuring out the file type wasn't actually anything to do with QuickTime, I tried some of the many different tools and methods to convert this to something viewable. Unfortunatley, the DICOM viewer in GIMP and ImageMagick (probably the same thing?) didn't like the files at all, and neither did a range of other tools. I finally managed to do it with the dcm2pnm tool from the Debian dcmtk package -- just point it at the file and it spits out a PNM which is easily converted by all graphics tools. You can also encapsulate a series of images in a DICOM file, like a little movie. dcm2pnm extracts these easily, but requires the --all-frames options. An ffmpeg recipe to turn these extracted files into a more easily viewable movie is: I certainly can't guarantee this will actually work for you, as DICOM appears to be an extremely complicated format with many possible vendor extensions. But hopefully it's a starting point!

I've been banging my head against this all day and it doesn't make any more sense than it did when I started. I have a need to write some code that can manage job control on a terminal. More specifically, I need to run a single process and stuff it into the background at will, so that it gets suspended when it tries to read from the terminal. So, there's a controller process and a subprocess process.

 controller  ----------> subprocess
               manages

The man-pages and glibc info documentation make this look simple: disable TOSTOP if it's enabled via tcsetattr() so that the subprocess can write to the terminal, then start the subprocess in a new process group (by fork()ing and calling setpgid()). Once it's going, you can put it in the foreground or background by calling tcsetpgrp() to set the terminal's foreground process group to the subprocess (to put it in the foreground), or to the controller process (to put the subprocess in the background). Whenever the subprocess is in the background, it will be sent SIGTTIN if it tries to read from the terminal. I have everything working -- except for the very last sentence of that last paragraph. I can see my processes being put into the right process group, and I can see them going into the foreground and the background. For instance, here the first line is the controller process and the rest of the lines are the process group of the subprocess (this one started a few other processes).

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss+  ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26989 26980 26989
S    ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26989 26989 26989
S    /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26989 26991 26989
S    /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26989 27027 26989
Z    [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26989 27028 26989
S    whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26989 27028 26989

If I try to move the background process into the foreground, it is marked as the foreground process in this session:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
S+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
S+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
S+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
S+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

Note that the background process is not suspended, even though it's busy reading from the tty. If I manually suspend the process group with kill -TTIN -26991, it stops as expected:

STAT CMD                           PID  PGID TPGID  PPID   SID
Ss   ./src/aptitude              26989 26989 26991 26980 26989
T+   ./src/aptitude              26991 26991 26991 26989 26989
T+   /bin/sh -c /usr/sbin/dpkg-p 27027 26991 26991 26991 26989
T+   /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/ 27028 26991 26991 27027 26989
Z+   [dpkg-preconfigu] <defunct> 27034 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   /bin/sh -e /tmp/lynx-cur.co 27039 26991 26991 27028 26989
T+   whiptail --backtitle Packag 27043 26991 26991 27028 26989

So the signal isn't being blocked or ignored. I can also run programs in a normal shell, outside my harness (e.g., links &) and watch them auto-suspend, but the same thing doesn't happen when I start them directly under my controller process. It's not even that they're starting as foreground processes: I start them in the background, and they never see a SIGTTIN. Does anyone have a clue what's going on? Hopefully it's as simple as a flag I have to set somewhere... Oh, and for extra fun, this is all happening inside a VTE terminal widget. That shouldn't make a difference (after all, it's what gnome-terminal uses, and SIGTTIN behaved as expected when I tested it there), but who knows, it might be relevant. [UPDATE] I did a little more testing: I was bringing the subprocess into the foreground whenever the terminal was active, so I couldn't try typing into the terminal while the subprocess was in the background. If I do that, it does get SIGTTIN and it suspends. So it looks like select() doesn't count as a read for the purposes of job control. I doubt there's much I can do to get around that.

A new version of openMSX has been released!

Important new feature is save-states. This gave me the means to finally finish the very first game I bought as a kid: Konami's Nemesis 2 for the MSX computer.

In these times games were usually hard. Nemesis 2 is even harder. The only way to play it without save-states is not dying all 15 levels. Given that Nemesis 2 is a shooter this is VERY hard :)


Each one of those red bullets and grey stones is fatal :)

But save-states wasn't enough. I also enabled "old-people" mode, meaning running the emulator at 75% speed of the original MSX computer.

After more then an hour of hard labour playing using alot of save-states I finally managed to finish the game.

Only 22 years late ;-)

P.S.: I checked with my MSX friends and no-one was able to finish this game without some form of cheating....

This is a giant rant with a small point at the end. So be warned. Earlier this week, I booted up Windows for the first time in a few months. About 2 minutes after it came up, just after I had started up an app, it informed me that it desperately needed to restart because it had applied some updates, and unless I clicked cancel, it would. So I restarted. The Saga Begins Then I opened up the program for my negative scanner. This device has an infrared dust-detection system that is not well supported in SANE. I can insert a 6-frame negative, it will load it in, identify where the 6 frames are, and scan it at 4000 DPI. So anyhow, I opened it up and started scanning. Surprisingly, it was REALLY SLOW. Normally it takes about 3 minutes per frame, and I could tell it wasn t going to do that. It sounded as if the computer couldn t keep up with the scanner. I tried to get Windows to tell me if it was talking to the scanner at USB 2.0 speeds, but this information was nowhere to be found. So I went down under my desk and moved some USB devices to different ports. Got back up from under the desk, and: BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH was there. Reboot. Scanner now works at normal speed. So I started it scanning, then went off to watch the Purdue game with Terah. Came back a little while later, expecting it to be ready for the next negative, only to manage to catch it in the nick of time before it helpfully rebooted my machine again due to yes more updates. So I saved, rebooted, and finally scanning worked after that. Also I disabled automatic installation of updates. A Turn For The Worse A few days later, I was getting expecting a new camcorder, and I was planning to use Windows for video editing. Originally, my hard disk had Windows, a Windows emergency recovery partition, and Linux on it. When I upgraded my motherboard and added a SATA HDD, I moved almost all of Linux to it. So there was now a lot of free space on that original drive, and the recovery partition is useless with the new motherboard anyhow. So I figure: delete that recovery partition, and expand the NTFS partition to take up the whole of the disk. Easy enough, right? So I do this, and much to my annoyance, Windows now refused to boot. It would just hang. No boot menu, no splash screen. Just hang. Linux saw and could access the NTFS partition just fine. So I went hunting for my XP install CD. Finally found it. Boot off the thing. It spends 5 minutes loading drivers for all sorts of things I don t have off the CD, then promptly crashes, saying inaccessible boot device. A hunch or two later and I m twiddling bits in the BIOS to try to get it to see my SATA DVD burner properly. No luck. I finally download the drivers for my chipset from Gigabyte, have to use Wine to extract them, then scrounge up a working floppy to put them on. Reboot. Blue screen again but a different one. Twiddle some more bits in the BIOS. Reboot. Success! Recovery console is mine! I run chkdsk, and fixboot, which everybody in the forums says will fix this. Neither made any difference at all, but the recovery console could see the NTFS partition just fine. Grumble. More googling, and I try testdisk for Linux. It twiddled some bits on the NTFS boot sector and my partition table. Reboot. And UGH. Now Linux won t even boot and Grub won t start. Download Debian live CD. Boot from it. Inspect disk with fdisk. Turns out testdisk just renumbered my partitions. Restore the previous numbering: Windows on partition 2, Linux /boot on partition 5. Save, reboot. Grub is back. Linux boots. Try Windows. And . Still hangs, but this time only after saying that HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt. Reboot into Linux. HAL.DLL is right there where it should be, and at the size it should be. Ponder this for a bit. I then tried looking at boot.ini. On a lark, I wondered if deleting the recovery partition meant that boot.ini no longer considers Windows to be partition 2, even though that s what the partition table says. Change it to partition 1, save. Reboot. SUCCESS IS MINE! WINDOWS BOOTS! Only 4 hours after expanding its partition. I told some friends about this trouble booting. What on earth did you do, John? I expanded the NTFS partition. And the response: Ahh. That ll do it. Expanding a partition is something we do routinely on Linux. Even on running production servers. Even WHILE THEY RE RUNNING. And I never have a problem like this. And even if I did, I wouldn t have to use some tool written FOR A DIFFERENT OS to fix it. Argh. The Problems Multiply A few days later, I got a new Canon Vixia HG20 camcorder. It shoots in AVCHD format 1920 1280@60i, h.264, which is a standard format for hard disk or SD card HD camcorders. I needed some basic video editing software that would let me do simple edits and burn a BDMV or AVCHD disc onto DVD+R formats that Blu-ray players can play, yet are cheap to make. After poking around, I decided to download the free trial of Ulead/Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. The free trial supposedly was the full version of the program, though it quite obviously wasn t after installing it. So I bought the full version and was greeted by about an 800MB download instead of the 120MB full version free trial download. Now here s the thing about VideoStudio Pro X2. IT S CRAP. It has crashed on me at least two dozen times, usually when I click the Play button. Its interface is really clunky. There s no way to mark a start and an end point, and say just delete everything between there, regardless of what clips they re in. The AVCHD disc creator wants to re-encode the entire project, even though it s ALREADY IN AVCHD. Though you can work around that by exporting the entire project to an AVCHD *FILE* which is smart enough not to re-encode it then making a disc from that. The project properties likes to say I m editing 720 480 even when I m editing 1920 1080, and doesn t even have a box for 1920 1080. Though after some Googling, it turns out that the project properties settings are irrelevant anyway. Yay for good design? So after all this crashing, I went out and did some more Googling. I found this lovely quote:

In short, every application I and our Labs tester tried iMovie, Pinnacle Studio, Ulead Video Studio, Sony Vegas and Avid Liquid at best could open but barely play some clips, and more often simply hung or crashed.

So what we have here is a whole culture of mediocrity. Everybody advertises that they work with AVCHD, yet nobody actually WORKS with AVCHD. And this is the format that the industry is rapidly moving to for HD HDV s days are quite numbered.

The maddog did one reconnaissance. He did it in his midnight-blue Thunderbird.

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

So I know, I know. There are a lot of annoying memes circulating on the net/facebook/[pick your spot] and well, sometimes the best thing to do is stop the damn thing by ignoring its existence. But I have to say, I have completely, totally and absolutely have loved reading the 25 things notes on facebook. It just provides a window into the extraordinary character that emerges from the collection of mundane events/likes/pleasures that make up people s lives. Reading them took me back to elementary school when and where I was an avid slam-booker. I have very fond of collecting and reading the tidbits of thoughts and information people left behind in my notebook. What also struck me about these recent 25 thingie notes is how odd or not as interesting, I think, it would be to have them recited to you over coffee or at dinner. Now I could be wrong here but I think the list-like quality would just not fly in a conversational context. A few facts with more embellishment would work but a whole string of thoughts would just sound flat and out of place. A reminder that format does matter for engendering certain types of knowledge. So here is my list.. 1. I looked like a boy for the first three years of my life (but a cute one, I think).
2. I love dogs so much that I often think that if I had a criminal streak, I would be a dog nabber.
3. I would routinely bring home dogs from the street when I was a kid. Many of them ended up dead after being hit by cars (they liked to return to the street and this only happened to 2 of them).
4. My favorite concert was Jimmy Cliff in a parking lot. There was lots of rain and lots of weed.
5. I like have a penchant for tall men. My mom claims it was because I lacked a strong father figure in my early childhood years. Who knows if that is the case.
6. I knew the instant that I took an anthropology class I wanted to be an anthropologist. I guess I made it happen (and it was one of the few moments of clarity in life).
7. I started the first environmental club in my high school and my car was called the recycle-mobile because there were always cans in the back seat.
8. I love the ocean; swimming, snorkeling, diving, sailing, and just watching it, though the cold ocean is not always by cup of tea.
9. I had terrible insomnia for a year and slept for a good chunk of it on a couch. I like the snuggle feeling I got from sleeping against a back.
10. I am very indecisive person. It is annoying as i tend to worry a lot about whether I made the right decision.
11. I was a shy kid and barely talked until meeting my best friend in kindergarten, Yael
12. I also failed the psychological test to get into school but my mom managed to get me in anyway.
13. I often wonder if I would have been a nun if I had lived prior to 1900s to escape various domestic obligations. I think it might have been fun to be a nun.. Fun to be a nun also has a nice ring to it.

14. I am currently struggling with an Etsy addiction and the UPS delivery guy asked if delivering packages would be a daily occurrence.. I just find all the stuff amazing and it brings me back to my artist days when I used to paint and spend a heck of a lot of time in the darkroom.
15. I have recurrent issues with nausea and have been hospitalized for it a few times. It is gut wrenching and really uncomfortable when it happens.
16. When I left NYC in 1997 I thought i would never come back. I am here now and quite happy.
17. I was obsessed with Ultimate Frisbee for many man years. I played more than I studied and finally gave up as it was ruining (or perhaps ruined?) my neck. I still miss it.
18. I LOVE tostones and would eat them everyday if they were not, you know, so bad for you.
19. I have been using IRC for 7 years and consider some of my best friends to come from there.
20. Some folks have asked how I became interested in politics and I am pretty sure it was Doonesbury.
21. When I was like 4 we went to some fair and I swore that I almost got flung off some rickety ride but this could be totally wrong. It was really frightening.
22. The coldest night of my life was spent in Los Nevados, Venezuela and the scariest car ride I ever took was leaving Los Nevados in a jeep and something that resembled a road.
23. A few sucker fish once tried to stick on me while I was doing a decompression stop after a dive. My dive buddy smacked the fish, which had devil faces, with the regulator, saving me from what would have been a really sort of sucky situation.
24. I am trying to learn how to surf and am really sorry that I did not do so when a teenager since I don t exactly have the time to really learn.
25. Since I am not sure how to end, I will do so with a

Bruce Schneier is very sceptical about the new hard drive encryption standards released by a group composed of virtually all major storage vendors. He points out that the established software solutions have worked just fine, while this new standards adds complexity (and probably flaws, too) at the hardware level. I'm not so sure myself in which direction the balance goes:

• Encryption (without the key management, which I do not suppose the standard covers) is not that complex to get right and it can easily take advantage of hardware acceleration. (Yes, I don't quote numbers here. Schneier claims he hasn't had problems with encryption speed, but doesn't have numbers either ...)
• It should be a lot easier to subvert a software component than it is to subvert a hardware component.
• It is a lot harder to correct errors in hardware / firmware than in software and get users to apply the updates.
• In many cases the key management is the weak point, not the encryption itself. And key management is hard to get right regardless of where the encryption sits.
• I'm sure the abysmal track record of encrypted drives affects only the cheap USB drives and not the type of hardware we're talking about here. But, can I really be sure? (Serious) software solutions come from companies where security is the main business, whereas the hardware encryption will be implemented by storage companies which so far haven't had to care much about these issues.
• Finally: This standard should replace a number of proprietary solutions since some vendors already do offer encrypted drives anyway. Assuming the standard is sane, this should certainly be a Good Thing in any case.

In August I got a very nice HP 2510p notebook which is now my main system for development. This took a while for two reasons. First of all the system did not resume 100% reliably. This has now been solved, although the final patches needed for that will only be in 2.6.29, but that's no problem as I run upstream kernels anyway (I do quite a bit of kernel testing). Kudos have to go to Rafael J. Wysocki who has been doing a huge amount of work to improve the suspend/resume code in the kernel. Second of all I wanted a docking station so I could continue to use my 19" monitor, with the laptop's LCD as second display. I bought the docking station in December. The challenge then was to automatically (de)activate the external display when the notebook is (un)docked. Unfortunately there are no ACPI events, but the hp-wmi module (written by Mattew Garrett) sends docking events to the input subsystem. I wrote a small program to catch these events and a script that uses xrandr to switch displays. There were two issues with that setup. The first docking event was getting lost, but I managed to fix that. And the X server would crash when starting some applications (einstein and virtualbox) after undocking, but there's a patch for that too now. The notebook is now really well supported and stable.

• suspend/resume works completely reliably
• the docking station works nicely and so does the dual display setup
• wireless works nicely
• the SD card reader works (was used to develop support for MMC/SD cards in Debian Installer)
• the accelerometer works (so I can play Tux Racer and Neverball by tilting the notebook) using the lis3lv02d module, and Pavel Machek recently even added freefall detection, including example code to park the hard disk (targeted for 2.6.30)
• the fingerprint reader works, though I'm not sure I actually want to use that for logging on to the system

The system is currently running Debian/lenny with a KDE desktop and a 2.6.29-rc3 kernel. Working with upstream developers to get this far has really been worthwhile, and fun.

I'm supporting a class of high school students who are new to programming, and will be learning some python. Most of these students are comfortable with computers, but not hacker types, and few if any of them have written code before. I'm looking for an editor or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that won't be too scary for them, and will help them get used to the novel idea of writing code without simultaneously having to get used to the novel idea of an unfamiliar user interface. So i can't expect them to pick up my beloved emacs, for example. But on the other end of the spectrum, i'd hate for them to try to write python in an word processor (i've seen people do it!). Here's what i think i'm looking for:

• comfortable graphical interface -- these students have not used the command line before, and while they'll be introduced to the python shell, they should be able to write code and browse for files, etc. in the "normal" (sigh) way. This means, for instance, that tk-based interfaces are less good because they don't integrate with the common GTK-based UI.
• syntax highlighting -- the students will need to figure out what's a variable, what's a function name, what's an operator, what's a reserved word, etc. Visual indications like font-lock-mode from emacs would be really useful.
• whitespace management -- since python has syntactic whitespace, it would be great if there were convenient/intuitive ways for students to adjust the whitespace in their programs. Of course, it's hard to say what's going to be intuitive for other people. I like tab-cycling whitespace myself; are there other approaches i should be proposing?

Do you have suggestions for tools that work well for the above needs? Favorites? Are there features other than the "top three" i listed above that you think i should pay attention to? FWIW, they'll be working in a labful of machines running Ubuntu Hardy for the most part, but i'm willing to port and deploy programs (particularly ones that feel like a perfect fit) if they're not available in hardy.Tags: ide, python, recommendations, student

It has become a hidden tradition for me to watch Superbowl every year, despite disappointment in the game and coverage quality in the years before. It started as before: pre-game show, pre-pre-game show, coin toss show and kick-off show It is clear that the show is planned by and for advertisers and not for the viewers. That is a shame and a disgrace - the viewer must be the master of the TV programming and NOT the advertisers. In soccer the program starts, you see the captains exchange a handshake, you see the referee throw a coin and 10-15 seconds later the game is going full steam. Why do you need 3 ad breaks and 2 songs before the game is beyond me - get to the game! The camera work and NBC commentary is MUCH better than last year - stable shots with good close-ups and explanations that actually make sense even to people that are not American football experts. Oh and they actually use units - saying they won x out of y games this season and not they are x in y this season , mostly at least. The game had more fun than usual in the beginning, but the legal things slow it up again - it is weird that a guy got over the line but was called beck because of the knee touching and then a penalty for a false start ? Too much rules and regulations. Soon you ll have a team of lawyers on the sidelines and lawyer drafts will be more important than player drafts. And then again holding and chopping - isn t that what the blockers are supposed to do? Is that some kind of sissy sport? Maybe not. 100 yard interception return run I am speechless. Now that was a great, great play. That episode alone made watchig this thing worth it. Not the best sport thing I ve seen, but the best American football moment for sure. I like the basis of the game, it is a good game, but there is way too much fluff on it. That game needs to be cut down - less rules, less breaks, less interruption, less advertisements, less time to think and relax for the players. 10 seconds of play and 5 minutes of players chatting is not a sport, even curling has more action. The whole Superbowl should be over in 1 hour real time. If the TV transmission starts at 17:00, it should be done before 18:00. There is no content there to justify anything longer than that. Why is there a limited number of challenges? Do the referees make only a limited number of mistakes per game? No. Illogical. And when I though it was done and sealed, Arizona does a great drive and get a great touchdown. One more drive like that and the game could go either way. Now that is a good game. But again penalties spoil the whole game Fitsgerald gets a touchdown, another great play to turn the game around, but only because of the holding penalty giving Arizona safety score. Not deserving in my opinion. And the Steelers drive back AMAZING game! Now this is actually close to the best sports game that I have ever seen. I sure was not expecting that. And Arizona tries to drive back again. I was sleepy when I started to watch this, no sleep now. That was a great game. Despite all the commercialization, it is still a great game and it is very watchable if you download it from the Internet or watch it with TiVo and can skip the adds and the slow parts.

A new release of Backup Manager has been published. This release closes a bunch of bugs reported in Debian and in the official Bugzilla. The release notes are available here. Here is the announcement made on the user mailing list. I ve also uploaded a new Debian package to sid, in order to provide 0.7.8 for the unstable distribution of Debian. Reports are welcome (but bug-related ones are prefered, if possible in the official Bugzilla rather than in the Debian BTS).