Things have been rather hectic lately, so I haven't found much time to blog. Here's why:
DBE62
The Gigabit Ethernet version of
our thin client took more time to produce than I expected, for a number of reasons mostly related to a few improvements we decided to squeeze into the design at the last minute.
However, today, we finally reached a point where
LinuxBIOS runs as well as it did on our previous DBE61 model and where we no longer need any
DOS tool to flash the
MAC address into the VIA velocity Gigabit chip we selected. Hurray!
Production will only commence in one month, but I'm already excited by the new model's potential, both as a thin client and as an embedded platform.
Another good thing is that, thanks to
Ubuntu developer Scott Balneaves, we managed to get all the necessary tools to support thin clients based on LinuxBIOS into
LTSP, so our Etherboot model works out of the box on Ubuntu, since Gutsy. Hurray!
There is one remaining issue related to recent changes in X.org core functionalities that make the AMD driver we need unstable but, again, various
AMD,
Debian and Ubuntu developers are looking into fixing this, so we should soon have spotless Geode support into Debian and Ubuntu again.
T rkiye
I visited Turkey twice over the last few months, because I'm putting together a pilot project to better promote the Estonian high-tech sector abroad, in collaboration with the Estonian government.
I have to say that the more I visit Turkey, the more I like the place and the more understand why these people see themselves as Europeans because, you know what? They are: practically every significant civilization and religion that is at the core of European culture had major events taking place in in Anatolia or Thrace and, also, a devastatingly huge percentage of the consumer goods sold in Europe are designed and manufactured in Turkey.
Learning the rudiments of Turkish has also proven to be a lot of fun. While I'm nowhere near as fluent in Turkish as in Finnish or even in Estonian, the learning curve isn't as steep as I initially expected: Altaic and Ugric languages share a surprising amount of grammatical concepts, while Turkish itself borrowed a lot of vocabulary from French, because the founder of modern Turkey, Atat rk, was very fond of the language. I'll venture that proximity with nearby Middle-Eastern countries that were formerly under French influence has something to do with it too.
Identity crisis
To me, the most challenging part of these business missions abroad is to represent a whole economic sector from a country of which I'm not a citizen or even a resident. Case in point:
Being invited to dinner by a Turkish investor, I noticed the waiter asking my host where his foreign guest might be from. A few minutes later, as the waiter put down a gigantic pita bread with the word "Estonia" spelled in roasted sesame seeds, my host asked, reading my business card:
- Actually, your name doesn't sound Estonian. France?
- Qu bec.
- And your mobile number ... 358 ... is that Finland?
- Yup. I've been living there for the past 10 years.
- Ah! So you don't live in Tallinn?
- Nope. Helsinki.
Looking at the waiter and pointing at the gigantic pita, he continues:
- Actually, make that Canada ... no, Finland ... Ah, sorry, never mind. Just keep it as Estonia.
Honestly, trying to keep a straight face while saying "We" about a country of which I'm not a citizen and where I don't even reside becomes unbearable. At some point, some European bureaucrats will have to admit that I need a new citizenship, to reduce the confusion and to let me find myself a proper national identity again; the sooner, the better.
Besides, the absurdity of the situation keeps on jumping at everyone's face: during the second mission to Turkey, I kept on bumping into Finnish diplomats who took personal offense at me for living in their country and yet representing the interests of a competing, neighboring country. If you ask me, I cannot entirely blame them for it.
However, as far as I'm concerned, I've done my homeworks: I've been here 10 years, I speak the language and I don't have a criminal record. Given this, you'd think that acquiring citizenship would be a mere formality, but the Ulkomaalaisvirasto doesn't see it that way.
If you ask me, this country's very first Minister of Immigration, Mrs.Astrid Thors, ought to unilaterally grant citizenship to anyone who's lived here for at least 5 years, just for the asking, regardless of what circumstances brought them here or of what absurd decisions the Ulkomaalaisvirasto might have previously made on their residence permit status. Doing this would go a
long way towards undoing the mess of her predecessors at the Ministry of Interior and it would speak volumes about how much Finnish society has evolved from the days when any foreigner was a commie they had to push over the Eastern border.
A conversation at lunch today inspired me to work on a quick estimate of the amount of power wasted on animation and Flash-laden MySpace profiles. My conservative estimate is somewhere in the region of 320 kiloWatts, which is much less than I'd have expected. This is probably skewed by me carrying out the test on a laptop - I'd guess that it'll be worse on desktops, but I need to do some more testing to be sure (ideally involving a Watts-up and a serial connection so it can be done without a ridiculous amount of pain). By changing a couple of assumptions it's quite easy to get it up into the megaWatt range, but we're still talking "That's quite a pile of money" rather than "That's a sizable proportion of the US electricity output". 
So it's been a few days since I swapped in the Zonbu 
Many languages are spoken in more than one country, and many countries have more than one language. When you forget this you do stuff like language selection menus that use flags to represent languages. This is problematic for several reasons, starting with having to ask yourself what flag you are going to use to represent English, and how to deal with the angry letters you’ll receive when you use the national flag to represent a regional language. So, using flags to represent languages is definitely discouraged.
This said, have a look at this small piece of the 
The funny thing is that the flag you see next to Galician is the flag of Greenland. And Galician is not spoken at all in Greenland! So, what happened? Why did they use so wrong a flag?
The problem is that the ISO 639-1 code for the Galician language is gl , which is the same as the ISO 3166-1 code for Greenland. So, when choosing the flag for Galician they confused the language code with the country code and selected the flag for gl : that is, for Greenland.
(I’m surprised that they used the Ukrainian flag ( ua ) for the Ukrainian language ( uk ), and not the Union Flag. Perhaps that would have been too obvious an error :) – although I have been told by email that the ISO 3166-1 code for the UK is GB , not UK )
So, my takeaway message is: don’t use flags to represent languages and if you do, make sure you use a flag of a place where the language is actually spoken!
Addendum: I have just seen that Basque is accompanied by the flag of the European Union! That’s because the language’s code is eu . Ah, and there are three variants of the Chinese language (Hong-Kong, Simplified and Traditional), all with the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Someone is bound to receive angry email – Taiwan is a political hot potato. I have sent email to the maintainer of the page.
Tricky question, isn't it?
Indeed, according to the ISO 639-3 standard which finally became an official ISO standard in 2007, there are 7696 different languages, including extinct, ancient, historic, and constructed languages.
Of course, this may become a very debated discussion about what constitues a "language". Let's give the guidelines used by SIL International, who was designated by ISO as the official maintenance agency for ISo-639:
There is no one definition of "language" that is agreed upon by all and appropriate for all purposes. As a result, there can be disagreement, even among speakers or linguistic experts, as to whether two varieties represent dialects of a single language or two distinct languages. For this part of ISO 639, judgments regarding when two varieties are considered to be the same or different languages are based on a number of factors, including linguistic similarity, intelligibility, a common literature, the views of speakers concerning the relationship between language and identity, and other factors. The following basic criteria are followed:
Many 
The problem with this error message, is that it doesn’t give you any clue to the root cause of the error. This of course makes it harder for me to fix the problem and get on with using the program.
I’ve opened the file with vi, and it generally seemed OK with the all the major starting/ending XML tags. So I opened it with Firefox, to see if it parses the XML, and only then I could see the real problem:
One year ago, I 
Recently I bought a new desktop PC and rotated my existing machines around, leaving me with one spare. Last night I donated that PC to a local friend, (co-incidentally the same woman who had been out cat-sitter when I went to stay at Megan's parents for Christmas).
I said "Its got Debian on it, that funny operating system that you used when you were looking after our kitten, remember?".
She said "Linux ssems to be getting popular these days I might as well try it out".
But seriously she used it. It had GNOME, it had firefox, she seemed happy. It isn't rocket science these days to point a technicalish user at a Debian Desktop and expect them to know what to do with it. The only minor complication was the lack of flash/java since it was etch/amd64 - but thats probably a plus with the amount of flash adverts!
In other news I made a new release of 
First, and most important: while researching a functional bug for a
client, I found a rather important security problem in GForge. All
versions (starting from 3.1) are vulnerable to an SQL injection
problem due to missing input sanitisation. Debian packages have
already been fixed and released, and the patches have been committed
to the upstream Subversion repository, so non-Debian users are
encouraged to grab the patches from there. For instance, the patches
for the 4.5.* branch can be obtained from the 
