Its getting close to valentines day again so I thought some of you geeks out there would appreciate a post I made last november about a hack that was inspired by an XKCD comic. Anyhow here is a link to the original post titled Roses are #ff0000 , hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

initramfs-tools design principle is to ship a generic initramfs. The design explicitly allows lots of customization through hook and boot scripts. A previous post focused on the history of initramfs-tools. Several contributors enhanced initramfs-tools since the Debian Etch release so the non exclusive new feature list:

• The initramfs contains all drivers/ ata,block,ide,mmc,scsi modules instead of a stupid hard coded list. This gives bonus points for getting more future proof.
• Configurable small initramfs: The MODULES=dep mode walks /sys/ for the needed drivers of the specific box. This was the most wanted feature and is the new default for some Debian-Installer embedded architectures. The code seems in between well tested even if some corner cases might still emerge. The smaller initramfs is needed for specific bootloaders and helps on slow target boxes.
  For a even smaller initramfs you can kick busybox if you don't have an lvm2 root or don't need it's debugging tools.
• Quicker initramfs build: The update-initramfs command uses dpkg trigger and thus not every postinst update-initramfs(8) call leads to a new initramfs build. Also the build time got improved.
• Improved panic message (yes users need to be handhold at this point :).
• Potential debug log is visible after call to init(8) inside /dev/.initramfs/.
• update-initramfs got hardened against failure on update or ro partitons.
• The klibc utilities got worked on: chroot, fstype, ipconfig, mount, nfsmount sync.
• Fixed various bugs in NFS and networking setup due to incorrect option parsing.
• Allow to blacklist modules on boot by cmdline bootarg blacklist=modulename.
• Allow non root usage of mkinitramfs.

As bonus to some cleanup and docs update we have also seen a Ubuntu sync and are not too diverged.

New day, new luck... and next try... ;-)

Today I received two emails with even newer BIOS updates for my problem. The second, latest version 1.80p did actually fix the problem of not booting with 4 GB of RAM. I haven't tried the first, previous version 1.80k yet, so I can't tell if that worked as well.

Anyway, despite the fact that the machine now recognizes 4 GB dual-ranked memory, Linux uses 3.1 GB of it - at least when not using Xen... But first without Xen, standard Debian 2.6.26-1-686 kernel:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 18:29:31 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: 0000000100000000 - 0000000140000000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] WARNING: BIOS bug: CPU MTRRs don't cover all of memory, losing 2048MB of RAM.
[ 0.000000] ------------[ cut here ]------------
[ 0.000000] WARNING: at arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mtrr/main.c:706 mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183()
[ 0.000000] Modules linked in:
[ 0.000000] Pid: 0, comm: swapper Not tainted 2.6.26-1-686 #1
[ 0.000000] [] warn_on_slowpath+0x40/0x66
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_lock_irqsave+0x16/0x2f
[ 0.000000] [] _spin_unlock_irqrestore+0xd/0x10
[ 0.000000] [] release_console_sem+0x173/0x18c
[ 0.000000] [] vprintk+0x2d2/0x2de
[ 0.000000] [] generic_get_mtrr+0x2e/0x11e
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_trim_uncached_memory+0x123/0x183
[ 0.000000] [] mtrr_bp_init+0x20c/0x214
[ 0.000000] [] setup_arch+0x254/0x6bb
[ 0.000000] [] printk+0x14/0x18
[ 0.000000] [] start_kernel+0x62/0x2d7
[ 0.000000] =======================
[ 0.000000] ---[ end trace 4eaa2a86a8e2da22 ]---
[ 0.000000] update e820 for mtrr
[ 0.000000] modified physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000000e4000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 0000000000100000 - 00000000bff30000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff30000 - 00000000bff40000 (ACPI data)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bff40000 - 00000000bfff0000 (ACPI NVS)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000bfff0000 - 00000000c0000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] modified: 00000000fffc0000 - 0000000140000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] 2175MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 896MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 786224) 0 entries of 256 used

Now, when I try to boot Xen hypervisor & kernel, Linux recognizes 4 GB of memory:

[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset
[ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.26-1-xen-686 (Debian 2.6.26-13) (waldi@debian.org) (gcc version 4.1.3 20080704 (prerelease) (Debian 4.1.2-24)) #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 22:52:47 UTC 2009
[ 0.000000] Reserving virtual address space above 0xf5800000
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] Xen: 0000000000000000 - 00000000f5730000 (usable)
[ 0.000000] 3199MB HIGHMEM available.
[ 0.000000] 728MB LOWMEM available.
[ 0.000000] Entering add_active_range(0, 0, 1005360) 0 entries of 256 used
[ 0.000000] Zone PFN ranges:
[ 0.000000] DMA 0 -> 4096
[ 0.000000] Normal 4096 -> 186368
[ 0.000000] HighMem 186368 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] Movable zone start PFN for each node
[ 0.000000] early_node_map[1] active PFN ranges
[ 0.000000] 0: 0 -> 1005360
[ 0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 1005360
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 32 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
[ 0.000000] DMA zone: 4064 pages, LIFO batch:0
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 1424 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] Normal zone: 180848 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 6399 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] HighMem zone: 812593 pages, LIFO batch:31
[ 0.000000] Movable zone: 0 pages used for memmap
[ 0.000000] DMI 2.3 present.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDP 000F9BC0, 0014 (r0 ACPIAM)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: RSDT BFF30000, 0030 (r1 A M I OEMRSDT 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACP BFF30200, 0081 (r2 A M I OEMFACP 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: DSDT BFF30360, 3417 (r1 P4V88 P4V88001 1 INTL 2002026)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: FACS BFF40000, 0040
[ 0.000000] ACPI: APIC BFF30300, 0052 (r1 A M I OEMAPIC 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: OEMB BFF40040, 003F (r1 A M I OEMBIOS 6000816 MSFT 97)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] enabled)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x02] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0])
[ 0.000000] IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 2, version 3, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23
[ 0.000000] ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl)
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ0 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ2 used by override.
[ 0.000000] ACPI: IRQ9 used by override.
[ 0.000000] Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information
[ 0.000000] Allocating PCI resources starting at c4000000 (gap: c0000000:3ffc0000)
[ 0.000000] PERCPU: Allocating 28552 bytes of per cpu data
[ 0.000000] NR_CPUS: 32, nr_cpu_ids: 2
[ 0.000000] Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on. Total pages: 997505
[ 0.000000] Kernel command line: root=/dev/md2 console=tty0
[ 0.000000] Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done.
[ 0.000000] Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done.
[ 0.000000] Initializing CPU#0
[ 0.000000] PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 16384 bytes)
[ 0.000000] Xen reported: 2792.268 MHz processor.
[ 0.004000] Console: colour VGA+ 80x25
[ 0.004000] console [tty0] enabled
[ 0.004000] console [hvc-1] enabled
[ 0.004000] Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)
[ 0.004000] Software IO TLB enabled:
[ 0.004000] Aperture: 64 megabytes
[ 0.004000] Kernel range: c3bce000 - c7bce000
[ 0.004000] Address size: 27 bits
[ 0.004000] PCI-DMA: Using software bounce buffering for IO (SWIOTLB)
[ 0.004000] Memory: 3888208k/4021440k available (1843k kernel code, 124136k reserved, 742k data, 196k init, 3275968k highmem)

Sadly, the machine gets so slow that it needs >20 mins (1100 secs) to boot. Most likely something is broken with PAE on this machine so it get's awfully slow.
I'm curious what the Asrock support will say about this!? ;)

Side note: I'm really satisfied with the good response from Asrock Support. Asrock might not be the company with the best mainboards available, but its support seems very good to me: very responsive and care taking!

I don't remember where I saw this first - probably in the Debian Installer code. Anyway, given an n-tuple it can be somewhat unwieldy to unpack it: The trick being presented is to generate the boilerplate code and then eval it: Here's a more concrete example, with apologies to Python:

So for those of you, not going to FOSDEM, there should be streaming. :-)

For the sake of full disclosure: this is the first time streaming is officially planned at the FOSDEM Debian dev room, but so far maybe the worst prepared. So this announcement is probably a bit too brave...

But I thought I send it anyway. I'm quite very confident it will happen, despite my desorganisation atm (and the little time to set up and test on saturday). And as it would be very sad, if there were streaming, but no viewers due to lack of announcement of the streams, I decided to write this here.

The URL of the streams should be announced/linked on http://video.debconf.org but will definitly be also announced on our wiki page where we keep track of the volunteer shifts (for those watching at home, those times are UTC+1). Please enter your name in the schedule there, if you want to help us, we have 60 shifts to fill. (15 talks, 4 positions for each: 2 camera operators, video mixer, audio mixer.)

Watch this space :-) (Though a proper announcement shall also be send to the project mailinglist.)

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

I wonder if there are any non squash-heavy workflows that this goes well with.

I confess! I hate Wordpress (~130k SLOC). Though I love ikiwiki (~18k SLOC) powering my new blog over at dabase.com. Please subscribe to my RSS feed about mobiles, Debian, Web and related rants. I m also contributing to the W3C Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group Blog. If you care about bringing the open standards Web to mobile devices (the World), perhaps you too can help improve the Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers?. To that special someone who figures out how to dump a Wordpress installation s comments, permalinks and all into a git backend with Ikiwiki. I ll treat you to dinner in London.

Dear Lazyweb,

today I bought 2 GB addtional RAM for my Asrock P4V88 mainboard to max it out with 4 GB RAM. So, 2 GB RAM were already installed. I'm well aware that I can't use all of the 4 GB due to PCI address space allocation.
Asrock states on their webpage:

Memory:
- Dual Channel DDR memory technology
- Supports DDR400/333/266 non-ECC, un-buffered memory
- DIMM slots: 4
- Max. capacity of system memory: 4GB*

*Due to the chipset limitation, the actual memory size may be less than 4GB for the reservation for system usage under Windows XP.

So, everything should be fine with adding 2 more Gigs to the already existing 2 GB of RAM, right?

Well, sadly it isn't. When adding the additional DIMMs I get a black, blank screen after powering the machine on. It seems to hang in POST. The HDD-LED ist lit all the time, but despite waiting for about 5 minutes nothing happens anymore. Just a blank and black screen.
Alas, the machine runs fairly well with 3 GB RAM, but then it's not Dual Ranked anymore.

I've already upgraded the BIOS to version 1.80 but no improvement. Anything else I can try? TIA!

It took again one week and here comes new Gammu testing version. Again number of changes is quite impressive, to name the most important - new DBI backend for SMSD, which allows to easily support wide range of databases, SMSD now exports some information in shared memory segment, what allows monitoring of its state, python-gammu bindings now support some basic SMSD operations, libusb-1.0 based driver for Nokia cables (especially DKU-2) and last but not least, Gammu finally has fake phone driver, which can be used for testing and writing applications and performs all operations in selected directory on filesystem. Full list of changes:

• Fixed privileges dropping in SMSD.
• SMSD inject now properly uses PhoneID.
• Improve SMSD documentation.
• Translations improvements.
• Add ID for Nokia 7373.
• Do not try to use filesystem OBEX if IrMC access was forced.
• Fix possible crash in LMB decoder.
• Avoid string length overflow in Nokia phonebook encoder.
• Introduced backward compatibility of gammu.StateMachine.SetConfig.
• Experimental dku-2 userspace driver using libusb-1.0 (fbususb).
• python-gammu can now inject messages into SMSD (gammu.SMSD object).
• SMSD stores summary counts of sent/received messages in database.
• Added gammu-smsd-monitor program to monitor state of SMSD.
• python-gammu can now monitor SMSD state.
• Do not try to use OBEX 1.0 it's too old (bug #807).
• Better parse ATI replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Better parse CSQ replies from Samsung (bug #806).
• Add small delays to SMS sending/saving (bug #794).
• SMSD monitor can now run for configured number of loops.
• Added DBI backend for SMSD, so we now support wide range of databases.
• SMSD does not delete SMS from phone when it's saving has failed.
• Added SQL structure for sqlite, which can be used through DBI.
• python-gammu can run and stop SMSD.
• Initial implementation of dummy phone driver for testing.
• Allow to configure path to config from command line.
• SMSD monitor allows output in CSV.

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon.

I know the "git tips" meme is over, but I found this in git-fetch(1) and, as I find it extremely useful, I'm posting it. Just add these lines to your ~/.gitconfig:

[url "git+ssh://git.debian.org/git/"]
insteadOf = alioth:

Then, if you need something from collab-maint, just use git clone alioth:collab-maint/repo.git , easy! P.S.: I did not include my username in the URL because I have it set up in ~/.ssh/config. EDIT: the above line needs a "=", not a ":" after "insteadOf". Thanks to those commenting!

---

Earth Hour 2009 - Sign up for Earth Hour!

Welcome back for the last part of the reviews. You may want to look at the previous parts : part 1 and part 2. Jigdo-ivory, a JavaScript Jigdo client Presentation Debian CDs and DVDs take up a huge mount of space on download servers. Using jigdo to download those images can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and space needed on the central servers. Unfortunately, jigdo currently needs special client software to be downloaded/installed first. Adding support directly into a browser-based application could potentially make a very big difference for first-time users here. Jigdo was created in 2001. It allowed to create ISOs from .debs grabbed from regular mirrors. It eliminated the need to duplicate the entire contents of the package repository into ISO files for each release, or even more importantly, for weekly snapshots of testing/unstable/whatever. You may find the complete proposal from the student here. The original idea originated from the Debian-CD people, who wanted to explore ideas about creating a light web client. The project was mentored by Steve McIntyre, who developed a new version of the Jigdo tools, jigit, which is much more efficient. Student Dustin Rayner was a 5th year senior undergraduate student at the Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. I studied Computer Engineering for 3 years as a Computer Engineering student before deciding to pursue a Mathematics and Computer Science degree. Result This project was unsuccessful due to numerous issues. First, because of an inadequate technical preparation of the original proposal. The Debian-CD people were too optimistic with the possibilities of Javascript. In the end, the copying and checksumming part of the Jigdo process were implemented but the checksumming (with a Javascript implementation of md5) was so slow that it was unusable (think 50kb/s on a regular laptop at full CPU charge). The student did the right thing to investigate Java and ActiveX but it was too late unfortunately and he ultimately lacked the experience and knowledge in the relevant technologies. If the proposal is tried again, the student would be requested to have much more experience with Java (and possibly ActiveX). Those would be much more efficient for the task, as they are the most used technologies among on-line anti-virus scanners, which have a workload somewhat similar to Jigdo. I could not find further public involvement of Dustin Rayner within Debian. Aptitude-gtk, usability and GTK+ GUI for the Aptitude package manager Presentation A GTK+ GUI for Aptitude that will work alongside improved current ncurses and command-line interfaces. This will offer an alternative to Synaptic with an interface design geared toward usability and advanced functionality. Debian currently supports multiple non-command-line package managers, the most used being Synaptic and Aptitude. Synaptic uses a GTK+ interface but offers no command-line mode. Aptitude offers a command-line mode but no X interface, although it offers a ncurses interface.
Comparing the interfaces of Synaptic and Aptitude reveal many design differences. Although Synaptic may be more accessible to beginners, Aptitude offers many interface behaviors and functions that are useful to the regular to advanced users : fully hyperlinked tabbed navigation between packages and versions of packages, mostly modeless interface, interactive dependency conflict resolver The proposal was introduced by the student in coordination with Daniel Burrows, the mentor and developer of Aptitude. Student Obey Arthur Liu was a 22 year old french student of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Grenoble Institute of Technology - ENSIMAG, in France. Did I mention that he s also yours truly ? If you want to know more, you might be interested in my previous post. Result This project was successful. The interface was mostly done and functional by the end of the summer. Daniel merged the code into the main post-lenny branch. Development is still ongoing and packages are released into Experimental. For further information, just read the rest of my blog. I could find some further public involvements of Obey Arthur Liu within Debian. Doh! Lintian for fuller automated setups Presentation lintian, the Debian package checker, at the moment presents possible problems in three categories: errors, warnings and informational messages. This leads to several problems, most importantly that the severity and certainty of a check can t be expressed separately. In the course of this project, the student should design and implement in lintian an improvement of the current situation, for example by using a two-letter code (one for certainty, one for severity). This project would make lintian errors much more fine-grained and help in maintaining pertinent quantitative analysis of package quality. The project was mentored by Marc Brockschmidt. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the Lintian team. Student UPDATED: Jord Polo Bard s has done a lot of work with translation in Catalan, his native tongue. He can usually be found on #debian-catalan. He also maintains a few packages as a DM. Result This project was successful. The classification was entirely done. Jord also helped with the new lintian.debian.org website. The Lintian team was very satisfied with the revamped errors list and new website. They have an immediate impact on packages quality reporting. Jord is still active within Debian, helping package a few games. Debexpo, a generic web-based package repository Presentation mentors.debian.net is currently a very specialized web-based repository that allows everybody to contribute software packages to Debian without the need to be a Debian Developer (or Debian Maintainer). It has successfully helped simplifying the sponsoring process in the last years. However it needs to be refactored and in the process should be turned into a generic piece of software that can be used for other Debian source/binary package repositories, too. Mentors is a very good initiative to recruit new packages maintainers (and needs your help!) and the software underlying it could be reused for many different purposes (think PPA). The project was mentored by Christoph Haas. The project proposal was commonly introduced by the mentors team. Student Jonny Lamb was a Computer Science student in the United Kingdom. He was already quite involved within Debian, maintaining a lot of significant packages. Result This project was successful. The whole proposal was perfectly executed. Jonny now continues to develop debexpo, with the mailing-lists and commit logs showing interesting activity. Of course, help for debexpo is appreciated to get it into full shape. Jonny has since become a Debian Developer (here is his AM report). Congratulations to him. It s nice to end on a nice note isn t it ? Now that we re done with the individual reports, I m going to write down my recommendations report. Hopefully it will help with next year s Summer of Code.

Keeping track with packaging software which is under heavy development can be time-consuming. I noticed this while packaging Conkeror, because there was quite a demand for up-to-date packages, especially from upstream themself. So recently on the IRC channel #conkeror the idea of automatically built Debian packages came up. After a few hours of experimenting and a few days of steadily optimizing, I can proudly present daily built snapshot packages of Conkeror for currently Lenny and Sid, ready to be included in your sources.list:

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main

The binary package conkeror-spawn-process-helper is currently only built for the i386 architecture, but other architectures may follow. The packages probably work also on any other Debian based distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) which includes XULRunner version 1.9. Surely they are not of the usual Debian quality, but they should do it for staying up-to-date with the Conkeror development just by using your favourite APT frontend. The script which generates those packages is also available in the Conkeror git repository at repo.or.cz. The APTable archive is generated with reprepro. Packages and the repository are signed with the passphrase-less GnuPG key 373B76B4 which is used only for the Conkeror nightly builds. (If anyone knows a better solution for automatic builds than a passphrase-less key, please tell me. :-) P.S.: I really like the new keybindings << , >> and G . :-)

I recently ate a bag of potato chips made by FoodShouldTasteGood, Inc.. Their motto (as printed on that bag under their name) was, "It's our name. It's our brand. It's our motto." Now, either the antecedents for those three it's are different -- which seems implausible -- or their motto is lying in its final sentence. It's all very complicated. Seth Schoen reminded me of a somewhat similar issue with the United States' national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. The final stanza includes the line, "And this be our motto 'In God is our trust.'" This is not and has never been the U.S. motto. In fact, the U.S. had no motto at all until 1956 when "In God We Trust" -- which is very similar, but not quite the same -- became official. It seems that nobody is quite sure where "In God We Trust" came from but there is some speculation that it originated in the anthem itself. Presumably, it became the motto because lawmakers thought it sounded good in the song and not because the U.S. government failed while trying to "correct" the embarrassing incorrect line in its anthem.

Content analysis details:   (5.9 points, 3.8 required)                          
                                                                                
 pts rule name              description                                         
---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------  
 1.0 NO_REAL_NAME           From: does not include a real name                  
 1.0 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message                      
 0.0 BAYES_50               BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%        
                            [score: 0.4956]                                     
 1.4 HTML_10_20             BODY: Message is 10% to 20% HTML                    
 1.5 MIME_HTML_ONLY         BODY: Message only has text/html MIME parts         
 1.1 HTML_MIME_NO_HTML_TAG  HTML-only message, but there is no HTML tag         

That's the registration verification email from the National Do Not Call Registry.

...goes to: Seagate and/or heise.de (translation here).

Stewart has made some predictions for the future of computing [1]. He predicts that within 2 years the majority of consumer machines will be laptops and have SSD (not rotational media). I predict that by the end of next year more than half of all new consumer machines that are being sold will be laptops (defined as being portable machines with the display and keyboard forming part of a single unit), and that more than half of such machines will have SSD as the primary storage (IE used for booting and for most common file access). I predict that by the end of 2010 the majority of all computers shipped (in all form factors including games consoles and servers) will have SSD as their primary storage. I predict that in late 2010 rotational media will start to go away for most tasks, but for at least the next year the model will be SSD for small/light/fast operations and rotational media for large capacity. I m not disagreeing with Stewart, just being more precise. Also while Val made some good points about the reliability of SSD [2] I don t think that this will be an obstacle in the low-end of the market. There is no little evidence of computers failing in the consumer market due to being unreliable - it seems that Microsoft has conditioned people to expect unreliability. I predict that Sun will not release ZFS under the GPL in time for anyone to care. The release of OpenSolaris was way behind schedule and I don t expect anything different this time around. Stewart predicts that in five years Linux will have significantly more desktop market share than Apple. I agree and also predict that Apple will convert to the Linux kernel. I predict that Apple will become the first Linux distributor to make any significant hardware sales for the mainstream computer market (Linux bundled with hardware has already done well for mobile phones, routers, Tivo, and similar devices where the user doesn t know what OS is running). I predict the death of Windows mobile. I predict that in five years the mobile phone/PDA market will be dominated by Android with a variety of other Linux based phones. I predict that some time after five years the iPhone will go away. Chris Samuel has made some predictions too [3]. He predicts that within two years The distinction between laptops, netbooks and mobile phones will get even more blurred with consumers demanding mobiles with more power and lighter and lighter laptops/netbooks . I believe that the difference between laptops, netbooks, and mobile phones is primarily one of IO (size of keyboard, sockets for peripherals, and size of screen). For desktop use the only application I use which requires more RAM or CPU power than my EeePC 701 can provide is Firefox. A combination of more efficient javascript interpretation and better coding practices by web designers would solve that problem. A significant portion of the mass of a laptop is dedicated to suppporting IO ports and maintaining the structural integrity of the device. A common feature in science fiction is lapotops that can be rolled up, stretched to size, etc (the Thinkpad Butterfly keyboard was an attempt at a first step towards this which failed due to issues of mechanical strength). As some Netbook class systems already have 3G networking built in it seems a logical extension to have telephony functions built in to a laptop. I predict that laptops with full telephony support will go on sale in 2010. One promising feature in regard to laptop IO is the new Display Port [4] video port. It will only be an incremental improvement to the space taken for IO capacity, but I am not expecting anything revolutionary in the near future. I predict that HDMI will be a failure in the market and DVI will never gain critical market share, it will be VGA and Display Port on most systems by 2012. Predicting that technological developments won t happen is always risky, but I predict that the mechanical issues which separate the heavier laptops and desktop-replacements from netbooks (in terms of making a large display and keyboard that won t break frequently) won t be solved within five years. In the same note, I don t expect anyone to try building a mobile phone which can have a full-size screen and keyboard connected to it (although it would be possible to do so). So I expect that the phone/PDA, Netbook, and laptop distinction will remain for at least the next 5 years. One thing that would make sense is to have a small device (PDA or mobile phone) store data that is security relevant and connect it to full-size machines for serious work. So for example you could use a desktop machine for Internet banking (maybe in an Internet cafe) and have your mobile phone ask you to confirm the transaction and then authenticate you to the bank server. I predict a larger role for PDAs and mobile phones as computers as soon as people start to take security seriously. I won t try and guess when that might be, but I predict that it won t be for at least five years. I predict that increasing oil prices will significantly make a significant impact on the price of computers before the end of 2010. Not that I expect the prices to suddenly jump upwards, it s more likely that prices will steadily increase while at the same time new technology to reduce production expenses in other areas is introduced. I also predict that increasing oil prices will increase the desire to maintain systems for longer periods of time without maintenance. For example my Thinkpad T41p has had a few significant part replacements (a couple of motherboards, half the case, and a few keyboard replacements). This is OK while plastic costs almost nothing and the manufacturing expenses are also very low. But in future I expect that people will want laptops that can run for years without needing part replacments and which have a service life of 10 years or more. This requirement for strength will counteract the demand for laptops that are as light as netbooks.

• [1] http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/11/09/technology-predictions/


• [2] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [3] http://www.csamuel.org/2008/11/09/technology-predictions


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displayport

I received quite some feedback on my dlhack() post. Most of it negative. For clarity: no, I do not consider such practices to be the best of ideas. I called it a 'hack' for a reason I fully expect this mechanism to be replaced by the time I eventually release the code. It was just fun to do it this way, that's all. Having said that, There's one comment from a xine developer that deserves a followup:

I'm sure I have seen a few different software that can simulate keypresses from the keyboard through the user event interface of the kernel with a joystick, and thus you should just need to wire it down with the original xine-ui. Or use gxine and the gxine_client program to control it.

While this will work, there are several problems with this approach:

• The kernel can't know which application currently has the focus. With this approach, you may be sending joystick-generated keypress events to your IM client because it popped up while you were watching a DVD, and you hit the table (causing the joystick to move) while trying to click it away.
• A keyboard and a joystick are fundamentally different devices. While a keyboard can only tell the difference between 'the button is depressed' or 'the button is not depressed', a joystick has a much wider range; the Linux API will give you a signed 16-bit integer for the position of the stick. This can be useful to skip forward or backward in a much more detailed manner than the traditional 'chapter, 5 seconds, 30 seconds' approach; or one could use it to set the volume to a particular level (activate 'set volume', push the stick somewhere between fully-forward and the idle position for a volume level over 50%, or somewhere between fully-backward and idle for a volume level under 50%, then push a button to confirm). This kind of UI comes naturally with joysticks, but is impossible to implement through a keyboard-emulated UI.
• Some of the functionality I have in mind will require some visual feedback (e.g., the volume setter described above). I could do a separate window, of course, but that has its own set of problems; e.g., you need to ensure that it is on top of the video window; it will also be opaque, which is not as nice as transparent overlays on the xine window itself.

While all of the above is not a problem if I write a xine plugin, and indeed I might eventually convert the code to a one, the problem with that is that I don't know the xine plugin API yet; and writing a standalone application makes for easier prototyping. For the time being, at least. Oh, and in case you wonder why I don't just buy a LIRC-capable device and use a regular remote control: I have my gamepad. I do not have such a LIRC-capable device. My budget is not unlimited. 'Nuf said.

So, on the one hand, I am not surprised about this news about a study which found that high fructose corn syrup, which is of questionable health value, is laced, with a significant amount with mercury. On the other hand, I am surprised that this is not splattered all over the front pages of all the major newspapers. This is serious stuff. Mercury is extremely poisonous and is known to cause all sort of health problems from immune system dysfunction to massive neurological damage. Might more of our foods be laced with heavy metals, aside from fish, HFCS. It is very likely. More on this, but later. update: Since the article I linked to did not mention the amount of mercury found, here is the original publication (and as a small aside, why newspapers don t link to these documents is beyond belief). Page 9 of the PDF is particularly telling because it reveals how it was difficult for researchers to obtain more samples so that they could enlarge the sample size .