... is far from trivial: you are not on the senders side, and not every protocol (in fact very few) allow rate limiting. Not to speak of limiting the total of multiple connections. Basically you'll have to accept that the sender is sending the data at it's own pace. However, the TCP part of "TCP/IP" is designed in a way that it does a fairly good job at detecting bottlenecks. The basic principle is this: when a packet is received at the destination, a confirmation will be sent back. By adjusting the rate of packets going out to match the rate of incoming "received" message (and to minimize the number of lost packets that need to be resent), TCP/IP connection can adopt to the slowest link in the chain. This is how incoming traffic shaping works: incoming packets are held back (or even dropped; however holding back packets might also lead to dropped packets somewhere up the stream), which in turn will limit the speed "ACKs" go out, and thus (hopefully) the speed data is pushed down to us. It's not perfectly reliable, and by design won't work well with short-lived connections and non-TCP-traffic. But it can still come in handy. We have a shared internet connection with 2 mBit. That usually is fine, but our router isn't very smart. When I'm using up all bandwidth for a longer timeframe (say, apt-get upgrade with new openoffice and tetex), the other users will suffer from a serious performance impact. One of them is often playing games online, and eventually gets kicked out of a game server because of his bad roundtrip times. By limiting my incoming traffic rate, I can hopefully keep the connection useful enough for him. In my tests, it worked pretty good at keeping my bandwidth useage down. The remaining unused bandwidth should allow his game data to pass through without larger extra delays. Here's the short script I'm using:

tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI handle ffff: ingress
tc filter replace dev ethWIFI parent ffff: protocol ip prio 50 \
  u32 match ip src 0.0.0.0/0 police rate 1500kbit \
  burst 10k drop flowid :1
tc qdisc replace dev ethWIFI root tbf \
  rate 1500kbit latency 25ms burst 10k

Don't forget to adopt it to your needs, you probably havn't renamed your interface to ethWIFI and might want a different valye than 1500kbit.

A few days ago Applemania took over Warp HQ and several workmates purchased MacBooks. The MacBooks came with this nice remote thing and I grew jealous. In my way back home I thought that it shouldn’t be very hard to get a kind of remote control working using bluetooth and my Nokia mobile. I had never coded for my mobile so I wasn’t sure about how difficult would it be. In the end it was quite easy to write a simple program that just sent every key press to my laptop via bluetooth, and it only took 113 lines of Java code. Then I spent several hours coding the “receiver” part, in the end I created a little Python app which could load different plugins and created several of these modules:

• System: it basically provides “lock” and “halt”
• amarok: play, stop, next song, raise/lower volume
• mouse control: it allows you to move the pointer with the mobile and do clicks, it’s quite handy for presentations
• video: I’ve a dir with videos and the module shows you a list of the available videos, shows previews of them and allows you to select one to play in fullscreen

There are loooots of things to improve but it works for me , I’ve uploaded the source code (tarball) in case you find it useful.

I've reverted an old backup of my drupal's database so I should be able to blog again.

After two weeks of being operational, Stuff To Do has been a big success at work, because it lets people keep track of what they're doing with a minimum of hassle. Truth be told, I've never been that wild about "productivity" software, but I'm pretty happy with the system I've created. I really have attempted to make something that stays out of your way as much as possible. That has involved making some choices - for instance, instead of buttons to start or stop time tracking for a given task, Stuff To Do [aside: it would be much faster to write 'STD', but I think that might not be such a good idea in terms of marketing] uses some javascript to see if you've moused over (or blurred, or typed, or done anything, basically) to the window where it lives in the last 15 minutes. This will certainly reduce the accuracy a little bit, and if you get 'in the zone' and don't hit the browser for a while, it won't count your time, but all things considered, this is better than having to hit a stupid button every time you do anything, because you will invariably forget to hit the button, and leave it going overnight, and then have to go back and manually edit everything, and.... yuck. I also have some ideas about how to further improve the javascript in order to make it even easier to track whether you're active or not (with your consent, of course!). In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

• You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
• The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

• Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
• "Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

In the process, I also happened upon Active Merchant, which is some cool code by the fine folks at jadedpixel.com, which was quite handy for integrating Paypal. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I found a few things that I wanted to do just slightly differently, and sent in a patch.

A group of us have been doing the Every Pub In Cambridge challenge for the last year and a bit. There are various lists of the pubs in the City of Cambridge around the Net in various places, and we based ours on the one at www.cambridgepubs.co.uk. Most Thursdays, Phil, Pod, Jon and I picked 3 or 4 pubs from their handy tube-style map and went and visited. The rules are simple:

• All pubs must be visited during the period of the challenge. Earlier visits don't count, but people may catch up later on pubs they may have missed due to being unable to make a week.
• An alcoholic drink must be drunk in each pub (normally beer, but doesn't have to be)

Today, we visited the last 4 pubs and finished after 14 months. We would have finished in under a year, but the football World Cup and Pod's travel-heavy new job slightly dented our schedule. In all, we visited 108 pubs and couldn't make it to 11 due to them being closed. The point of the exercise? We already knew of several good pubs in Cambridge, but expected there to be plenty of others. Plus, it was something fun to do on Thursday nights and a good excuse to drink more beer... :-) In the end, we each found some good new places to go, and some that we'd never go back to by choice. Our choices for best pub vary, but our respective best 5s basically agree. My own are the Live and Let Live, the Kingston Arms, the County Arms, the Castle Inn and the Free Press. Alongside those, there are plenty more I'd be happy to visit again. After more discussion, our other opinions were unanimous: the worst was the Duke of Argyle (nasty!), and without a doubt the most entertaining was the Cross Keys (with an amazingly funny barman). At some point we may get around to writing up reviews and posting them somewhere, but not right now... *grin*

A post by Scott James Remnant describes how to hide command-line options from PS output. It's handy to know that but that post made one significant implication that I strongly disagree with. It said about command-line parameters "perhaps they contain sensitive information". If the parameters contain sensitive information then merely hiding them after the fact is not what you want to do as it exposes a race condition!

One option is for the process to receive it's sensitive data via a pipe (either piped from another process or from a named pipe that has restrictive permissions). Another option is to use SE Linux to control which processes may see the command-line options for the program in question.

In any case removing the data shortly after hostile parties have had a chance to see it is not the solution.

Apart from that it's a great post by Scott.

So, like everybody else in the world, I was intrigued by the announcement of the iPhone. But like most Open Source folks, I was unhappy with the OS and the general closed format of the dang thing. What options are there for people who believe in Freedom but still want a cool phone? I currently own a Treo 650, which is fine, and which runs the venerable Palm OS. However, the once-thriving Palm Open Source community has pretty much dried up, leaving me without much in the way of interesting apps for my phone device. Thanks to Mike Linksvayer's notes on the subject, I got a link to the OpenMoKo project -- an effort to make a standard, Linux-based phone OS that uses ipkg for application installation and update. The first phone supporting the platform will be the FIC Neo1973, which looks pretty awesome and fairly similar to the iPhone (see this review from Linux Devices for some photos). OpenMoKo isn't the only game in town. TrollTech has a Linux-based Greenphone running their funky Qtopia platform, although it apparently doesn't work with their Qtopia Open Source version. And Nokia has this weird Maemo platform, but it only seems to run on their Internet tablet thingies. Mike gave a good link to an article about Open phones on PC Magazine. But I'm going to be looking out for availability of the OpenMoKo-enabled phone. I guess I'll have to switch phone providers -- Telus, my provider, only has CDMA service, and the FIC phone uses GSM. So, I dunno. But it'd be cool to have a mobile device that was fun and interesting and that I could believe in and want to hack on. tags: openmoko iphone greenphone maemo

What Chris refuses to blog about So, talking to Chris last night at the yulblog First Wednesday, I found out he wants to quit blogging. "I don't really have anything I care about enough to blog," he said. "The only thing that's piqued my interest lately was the execution of Saddam Hussein. I just don't want to blog about the iPhone." I told him I thought it'd be a good idea to make a blog just listing the things he refuses to blog about. He wouldn't commit to the idea, so I guess now I've taken over that job. In other words: Chris won't blog about the iPhone. tags: iphone blogging chris

Hardware evils

I've had quite the unfortunate week, hardware-wise, here. Nothing on my end is broken, but [lj user=ceilingsarecool]'s computer is screwed but good. It all started near the beginning of this week when I started to look into her machine. It had been loud for a while, and was being unreliable in regards to applications. Running memtest86+ on it via a handy System Rescue CD I always keep around discovered a couple of stuck bits on the memory that otherwise had been perfectly fine. However, I have had sticks die before, so I called Crucial and am having the memory replaced. (thank you Lifetime warranty). While I was taking the Memory out I noticed the couse of the loudness. Apparently there was ailing fan on the south bridge, which explained her issues with USB-connected devices. No problem - I'll just order a replacement motherboard. The old FIC AD11 was getting pretty bad anyway.

The new motherboard (a PCCHIPS M810LMR) arrived yesterday, so I went through the lengthy process of removing the old motherboard and moving the CPU from one to another. Just one problem: the new motherboard didn't start up. After checking that I had everything connected right, I thought the board was DOA. This would be my first DOA ever, but as usual the place I bought from has a DOA replacement policy so I thought I just wasted 2 hours and a bunch of time replacing. Unfortunately, this isn't even the end of this sad tale of brokenness. When I put the CPU back in the old motherboard, it didn't start either. So now I'm left with two motherboards for a processor that doesn't work, I assume. I don't really have another one that I can test it out on, and I can't test the motherboards with another CPU because I don't have one.

Luckily, I have some old towers sitting here that were about to be dragged out to the dumpster. I rescued them. They're ancient, even more than the machine that was in use was. I had to burn a Maxtor MaxBlast4 CD just to get them past the 65GB barrier, and of course I need to do a "repair" install of Windows because all the hardware changed since I installed it.

Lesson of this tale: Almost-broken computers are a delicate ecosystem. Just buy a new computer - you'll have to do that in the longrun anyway. Currently I'm looking at replacing the mainboard and CPU with this combo from newegg. It's got mixed reviews, but is reasonably priced, and if DOA I am sure that newegg will replace it. I'm debating between doing this and just saving up to get a decent new motherboard and CPU (generally around $150-$250, $300 easily with new memory) later in the year. I feel pretty bad because every computer that I've given ceilingsarecool to use has had issues like this. She tells me that she doesn't really care that much, and she does have a laptop which works well when the desktop has issues like this, but it's still like a poison apple.

Windows XP Setup

It doesn't seem to matter what you are installing Windows XP on. It can be 500MHz or 1.2GHz or 3.0GHz, the first time estimate that you get for finishing the install is 39 minutes. When XP was first released, I never ever had a computer that would finish that fast - it consistently took an hour or more from that state, and then I jumped to fast computers that come under the mark most of the time (although not by much). At least the estimate is monotonic, not going up to an hour. I can at least assess the progress a little more. Installing a couple times in the last few weeks has got me wondering about the origin of that estimate, and if it was going to be so inaccurate as to just guess and be constant at the beginning of the install, why include a time estimate at all?

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.

• I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
• For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
• Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
• On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
• In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!

Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.

Maj, Amita June and I took a ride up to San Francisco to see our friends Jack and Tricia in China Basin. Jack started wikiHow, and we've become friends over the last year or so as we're both learning about growing big wikis bigger. We had good lunch from Specialties and talked about their recent trip to Oahu. Then we raced back to Mountain View in time to have dinner at Chevys with my brother Andy, sister-in-law Pam, their two daughters, my parents and Pam's mother Midge. A big party, but we managed to get along, even with 3 girls under 4 years old around. Maj had a cranberry margarita bigger than her head, and Amita June ate her complimentary ice-cream cone all by herself. tags: jack herrick tricia herrick wikihow specialties oahu

I support advertising on Wikipedia Mike Linksvayer has a great follow-up on my discussion in Journal/11 Niv se CCXV about advertising in Wikipedia. He notes quite astutely that a $100M/year budget, based on Web advertising, would put the Wikimedia Foundation ahead of almost any other non-profit organization in the world. $100M is a mind-boggling sum of money to leave uncollected. Think that number's gotta be off by a couple of digits? Mike points out that "In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M." Could Wikipedia get something on the same order of magnitude? Almost certainly. Among other things, he suggests that contributors to the current Wikimedia fundraising drive add a simple comment to their donations: "I support advertising on Wikipedia." Great idea! tags: wikipedia advertising mike linksvayer

l33t So, I got a notice from Aeroplan, Air Canada's frequent-flier-miles program, that with all the travel I'd done in 2006, I'd almost be eligible for their Elite benefits level. I'd done 24,341 miles of travel last year -- mostly with trips to California, Portland and Copenhagen -- and the elite threshold was 25K. Today I was reviewing my 2006 flying record and realized that I wasn't credited for one leg of one flight to the West Coast, so I called up and got the miles. Starting in March, I'm gonna be in the the l33t crowd at Aeroplan. Rad! tags: aeroplan air canada l33t

What a great day it was in the Bay Area today -- just beautiful. It's Rose Bowl weather, of course -- Nature blesses California on the day of the Rose Bowl, just so people in the rest of the USA say, "Damn those Californians and their great weather!" Still, there's something so rejuvenating every year around the 10th-11th of Niv se. I wonder what it is? Oh, and: no, we don't have the Rose Bowl in northern California. It's just one of the few times of year that San Franciscans are happy to share the state with their southern neighbors. tags: niv se rose bowl california weather

Fruitcake So, there's a comedy tradition around the holidays that marks the crappiest possible gift you can get for Christmas as a fruitcake. This is stupid; fruitcake is delicious. Candied fruit + nuts + cake + rum = hooray for fruitcake. My parents got a couple of fruitcakes for Christmas, and they tasted great. I've been noshing on them a bit at a time all week. Great stuff! Rumtastic. Anyone who says otherwise is full of malarkey. In conclusion, fruitcake is delicious and Carthage must be destroyed. tags: fruitcake christmas delicious carthage malarkey

New Year's Eve Maj, Amita June and I had a hard New Year's Eve. Our friends Earl and Sue have an NYE party in Walnut Creek every year, and a lot of our friends from Pigdog Journal are there every year. We had planned to have a room at the nearby Embassy Suites, and have friends over before the party to see Amita June (who needs to be asleep by New York midnight, i.e. 9PM PST). But Maj is feeling really sick -- flu-y and nauseous -- and we had to cancel this pre-event. Bad feelings about this; we've missed seeing this group of friends a few times since the baby was born, and some of them have never met her. Eventually, we all managed to go to Earl and Sue's party together, then left early so Amita could get to sleep. A pretty good solution all around. I got to see a lot of old friends, including Sam and Shannon who just announced that she's blogging for two now. (Congrats!) Tjames was there with his ladyfriend Robyn, which was really nice. They made out a lot, which makes me pretty happy. We saw Dan, Johnny, Randy, Dave, and of course Earl and Sue themselves. A really good party. tags: nye earl sue sick maj amitajune sam shannon pigdog

All is quiet I had a pretty mild shom-pan-yah hangover this morning, so we were fully able to go see friends Zach and Wendy in El Cerrito for brunch. We hit delicious Picante off of Gilman Street, which is a massive Mexican restaurant, near the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto and showing some of the foodie-ism of the weird East Bay scene. I had a really good plate of chilaquiles, and Maj had some huevos rancheros and made a pretty good dent in them -- the first food she's really eaten in a few days. Amita June got a great quesadilla with queso fresco that tasted really good. Then, everyone was ready for a nap, so we said goodbye and cut the visit short by heading back to Los Altos Hills. tags: zach wendy picante berkeley chilaquiles

Ads on Wikipedia So, there's been quite a dust-up on Wikimedia Foundation lists about their recent fund-raising drive. The WMF is having its annual fundraising drive (and, if you can, please help with a donation), and the Virgin Group's charity organization, Virgin Unite, set up a matching fund a few days ago so that all donations to the WMF were effectively doubled. All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice -- seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site -- was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising -- or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it. I'm not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I'm in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia's huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia's is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That's money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world. It's irresponsible to abuse that opportunity. Brion Vibber's defense of the logo on the Wikimedia Foundation's mailing list is really interesting and instructive. tags: wikipedia wikimedia ads virgin unite

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area

Merry Christmas to everyone today!

Today, and for the next few days, I'm going to write about some of my Christmas memories from earlier years. Then I'll finish up with some photos from this year.

This post is about Christmas at home growing up.

One of the first signs of Christmas happened when my dad put up the lights on the outside of our house.



My brothers and I had (and still do) stockings that got one piece of candy per day during December, then got stuffed full when we opened our presents. The tree went up over the Thanksgiving weekend, and it was always a lot of fun to help with that.



On Christmas Eve, we'd always go to the program at church. It was the kids' Christmas play. Church would be packed. On the way out, everyone got a gift sack with fruit (apples or oranges), some peanuts, and maybe some candy. Then we'd go home. Mom or dad would read the Christmas story from the Bible, and after a prayer, it was time to open presents. In addition to the regular presents, dad would always give us a large paper gift sack. It would usually have a 12-pack of pop and some sort of nut (peanuts, pastachios, or maybe peanut brittle).

Sometimes we'd all stand still long enough for a photo.



We'd usually stay up late into the night Christmas Eve and sleep in on Christmas day.

A few days ago I installed Debian/Etch on my Thinkpad. One of the reasons for converting from Fedora to Debian is that I need to run Xen and Fedora doesn't support non-PAE machines with Xen. Ironically it's hardware supplied to me by Red Hat (Thinkpad T41p) that is lacks PAE support and forces me to switch to Debian. I thought about just buying a new dual-core 64bit laptop, but that seems a bit extravagant as my current machine works well for everything else.

Feeling adventurous I decided to use the graphical mode of the installer. I found it a little confusing, at each stage you can double-click on an item or click on the continue button to cause the action to be performed. The partitioning section was a little unclear too, but given that it has more features than any other partitioning system I've seen I wasn't too worried (options of creating a degraded RAID array and for inserting a LUKS encryption layer at any level are really nice). The option to take a screen-shot at any time was also a handy feature (I haven't yet inspected the PNG files to see what they look like).

Another nice feature was the way that the GUI restarts after a crash. While it was annoying that the GUI started crashing on me (and would have prevented a less experienced user from completing the install) the fact that it didn't entirely abort meant that I could work around the problem.

I have not yet filed any bug reports against the installer because I have not done a repeatable install (there is a limit to how much testing I will do on my most important machine). In the next few days I plan to do a few tests of the graphical installer on test hardware for the operations that are important to me and file appropriate bug reports. I encourage others to do the same, the graphical mode of the installer and the new encryption and RAID features are significant improvements to Debian and we want them to work well.

I have realised that it won't be possible to get SE Linux as good as I desire before the Etch release, even if the release is delayed again. I'm not sure how many fixes can go in after the release (I hope that we could move to a model similar to RHEL - but doubt that it will happen). So I now plan to maintain my own repository of Etch SE Linux packages and for other packages which need changes to make them work in the best possible manner with SE Linux. I will append something like ".se1" to the version of the packages in question, this means that they will be replaced if a security update is released for the official package. Apart from the SE Linux policy packages (for which any security updates will surely involve me) the changes I am going to make will not be major and will be of less importance than a security update.

I will also add other modified and new packages to my repository that increase the general security of Etch. Apart from SE Linux all the changes I intend to host will be minimal cost issues (IE they won't break things or increase the difficulty of sys-admin tasks), and the SE Linux related changes will not break anything on non-SE systems. So someone who wants general security improvements without using SE Linux might still find my repository useful.

Here is a graph showing the number of proposals sent in for XTech 2007 over the last two weeks. The actual deadline date is the highest bar. The Monday after, when everybody realised they'd missed the deadline, is the second highest bar. Of course, it's an open secret that tech conferences regularly extend their deadlines to account for such things. I am probably stricter than most programme chairs in this respect.
This year we got over 200 proposals. That means over three proposals to each slot, so choosing's going to be tough.This graph is one of the bits of helpful eye candy ExpectNation gives me. As the conference organization proceeds I'll publish some other interesting details about the inner workings of XTech.Meanwhile, I'm overwhelmed as usual with the quality of conference submissions, and will enjoy the task of reading each one this week. 

That would solve so many problems. LaTeX is still unbeaten in terms of print quality. It's really powerful. Since I've been using it, if started to really despise Writer and Impress. latex-beamer slides look just so much better than any PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen. However, it's far from easy to use. The syntax is a pain, and I don't think it's a feature that you can actuall program in this language. Similar things hold for BibTeX - there are so many things to do wrong there that will go a long way unnoticed. I've recently helped a friend to fix some BibTeX files. It was a pain, there was so much wrong in there... for example URLs. People noticed that they can't just always copy URLs in there, because some characters are special to LaTeX. But instead of using the \url macro, which would also have solved linewrap problem, they started doing the most obscure things (and of course they did not read the FAQ we wrote for them or asked how to do it right), for example adding whitespace to enforce line wraps, replace _ and & with whitespace etc., wrap uppercase chars in - an awful mess. The same thing with the author values. They just wrote "First author, second author" without considering that this might be interpreted according to the common "Last Name, First Name" scheme: e.g. "van Damme, Jean-Claude". (The correct syntax is "First Author and Second Author and Author, Third" - use "and" for separating even when you have more than two authors.) XML is better here. It's rules of escaping are generic and application-independant, and thus you'll have much more tools that know how to do it right, and you only have to learn it once, not for each application. The structuring also comes in handy:

  <authors>
    <author firstname="Foo" lastname="Bar" />
    <author firstname="Gnarf" lastname="Quux" />
  </authors>

is a bit more to write, but it avoids parsing errors. And with good utilies it's not particularly hard to write. Now don't point me to XML-FO. I know about formatting objects, the paper I submitted to the eXtreme Markup Languages conferences was done with FO. It's just that they don't come anywhere close to LaTeX in terms of print quality, the only OpenSource implementation I'm aware of didn't make much progress (but they seem to have released a rewrite in the meantime) and was lacking important features, and MathML has a horrible syntax mess (apart from Apache FOP not having MathML support). XSLT also has an annoying syntax. Too verbose and totally unreadable once you do things that are a bit more complex than the simplest examples. I wish we had something that gives a similar print quality to LaTeX, that uses some XML format (or something similar structured and easy to parse, like Xcerpt data terms, but thats basically equivalent to XML, just a bit more compact; Lisp S-expressions and OEM are other examples) that allows the easy creation of third party utilities and does away with all the black magic involved... Yeah, IMHO it's really time for a rewrite of LaTeX with a modern language design. And a large, unified standard library; plain LaTeX sucks, you can barely use it without extras such as url, hyperref, latex-beamer. [Update: yes, I'm aware of bibtexML, but it's just as bad, you still need hacks such as "the C language" or using "and" to separate multiple authors. I'm also aware of docbook and docbook to latex converters; that definitely is a workaround, but doesn't solve the real problems] (Comments in my blog are intentionally disabled. So if you want to voice your general dislike of anything with XML, abuse your own blog!)

Hi Yesterday I did a new install of my notebook because I had LUKS and for a reason my laptop began to hang totally (with all installed kernels) after several seconds. This was also my first installation with compiz, I really like it even if it’s just eyecandy - it’s cool. _BUT_, then I installed the sun-java-* packages and also the netbeans package which is waiting in the NEW-queue, I can start it, but there’s no content inside the window? So i tested some other java programs and there exactly the same. Finally I found out that when you run compiz all java applications don’t have a content inside of the javax.swing.JFrame objects. Iceweasel seems also not to work (I’m still searching why), because when invoking on the console I don’t get any line of output - just no reaction. But I can blog - thanks to “drivel” which is also a very nice program in my opinion. Yeah, enough talking bad now - in general I’m very happy and it’s a very good system (compared to other days with unstable ), I think etch will become a really good distribution when I look at my notebook, it’s very simple to use, enough eyecandy, most hardware works out of the box. Special thanks for this to the GNOME-Team who did a really god job in the last months! Wish you a nice Sunday and have fun at work tomorrow (I have holidays )

Aaron Leventhal of IBM has more details on the relationship between iAccessible2 and the UNIX/Linux accessibility API (ATK/AT-SPI) as well as the motivations behind iAccessible2’s evolutionary approach:

[A]n evolutionary path was needed for applications which already had MSAA (IAccessible) support… [and] an API was needed that did not require separate accessibility implementations for each platform. […] The IAccessible2 interface itself collects important ATK features from other areas, as well some completely new methods and features… For the most part, features were added either to bring Windows capabilities up to the level of ATK/AT-SPI, or in order to support the features of ARIA (previously known of DHTML accessibility). […] [W]hat we’re doing is expanding MSAA while matching ATK/AT-SPI to a very helpful degree. […] [B]ecause IAccessible2 is backwards-compatible with MSAA, the current support of Windows screen readers and other assistive technologies can continue to work on applications that add IAccessible2 support. However, the newer IAccessible2 capabilities will also be exposed, and thus newer assistive technologies will be able to take advantage of them.

Peter Korn of Sun weighs in as well. (Via Andy Updegrove.)