While I don’t really have a strong opinion on the suggestions in Ganneff’s announcement in d-d-a, as I haven’t had time to think deeply about the consequences that they would have, but which I foresee to be very important (they could have strong implications in the Debian Project), and making use of my freedom of speech, I must say that I agree with Joey and Julien. I don’t like how the whole proposal has been done, and I also fear the accumulation of power that slowly seems to be going along in Debian. I believe that spread power usually is much better and healthier than the opposite, and if it’s true that decisions are being increasingly taken in cabals, we’re going in the wrong direction. About Julien’s post on people being too coward to say what they think, a long time ago I posted about NM process saying that “If you want to finish university, you should take care about getting on with the teachers. The result are submissive citizens that won t face authority even if they know they re right, in order to avoid problems“, and “What should be taken care about is that the NM process don t filter side (lateral) thinking, creativeness, confrontation with authority or the will to make a better world. I wouldn t like an NM process that promoted the same submissive values that the educational system does“. I hope this is all a misunderstanding and things aren’t changing for worse. In any case I’m not afraid of sharing my thoughts on the matter.

Following the recent announce about an intent to extend debian membership to various levels of contribution, I would like to add my two cents.. Some bloggers mentioned how they disagree on the notion of various level of rights, claiming that it was yet another class inequality. Some other bloggers mentioned their support to the proposal, and other felt that the announcement was badly done. I, for myself, don't have an objection to the idea that they should be various level of rights. I do like the notion of anarchism, but I have some doubts it can extend to a wide group of persons. Besides, I personally don't want to have rights on everything, since I don't want to be responsible for them. As for real life, I believe the less broken system to rule a big group of people is democracy. And, as such, I don't have objection to a system establishing different levels of rights, provided it is transparent and responsible to the majority of members. In particular, voting right and vote outcomes should rule everything. According to the debian constitution, it is already the rule that most major decisions in the project can only be taken by votes. That's a good thing for actions and resolutions concerning the project. Now, concerning members, the proposition would establish new rule to accept and give rights to new coming users. Fine. But, I wouldn't think it is fair until the same process apply also to core teams, and until the basis of the project are the voters, which would choose or dismiss members of those teams. Inequality class, just like democracy, can be seen as a necessary evil. But inequality is balanced, to me, when there is a democratic process of electing and dismissing people. Then, we can hope that there won't be any sort of aristocracy.

Here are some tricks that you can use to ensure that your announcement to debian-devel-announce has maximal negative utility. hide who's talking Make sure that your announcement does not start off by making clear who's speaking. The announcement will have a From line with your name on it, and that's good enough. Everyone knows who you are, what groups you're a member of, and can guess what group you're speaking for ... or whether you're just speaking for yourself. Throughout the annoucement, be use to use terms like "We plan", "let us describe", "we are considering", "This is where our proposal comes in.", etc. Maybe in a footnote include a clue such as a mention of "the NM-Committee", but be sure to not sign the announcement with the name of any group or team or set of people, so that the reader is left guessing about who this "we" is all the way to the end and beyond. (And hey, "cabal" is a fun word.) weasel words Scatter throughout the announcement some vaguely worded digs at things you disagree with. The key here is to make clear what you really mean, while providing enough plausible deniability that you can deny having said it later. So you might say ...

Some time ago a few Developers thus went and pushed forward the "Debian Maintainer" status.

... Thus implying that this was a few malcontents who should be ignored. Sure, the whole project voted for this, and so you should be sure to allude to that vote somewhere else. Maybe in a different paragraph entirely, you could refer to "Debian Maintainers (DM) [GR-DM]". (It would be excessive to have that footnote refer to a bogus url like http://vote.debian.org/something.) the big lie Make sure that your announcement starts off all bright and cheery on the surface, with just a hint of deadly steel jaws underneath. Something like:

If you are an existing Debian Developer or Debian Maintainer, don't be afraid, we are not going to take anything away from you.

Natter on for many, many pages of trivilities, good ideas, bad ideas, half-baked ideas, conflicting acronyms, and useless footnotes. Then spring the trap:

In future this will be a list maintained by the NM-committee. At the time of migrating from the old to the new way, Ftpmaster will convert the existing DM-Upload-Allowed fields into that list, so there should be no interruption in your ability to upload.

And ability to upload is all that matters. Who cares about the regression back to the tyranny of unix permissions? Who cares that DDs won't be able to decide when they trust a DM to upload their package, or that DMs won't be able to sign up quickly and easily, or that DMs will have to petition a disinterested committe to change anything? Nothing will have changed, nothing will be taken away, nothing to see here, move along: The big lie.

I've just started a new job, so I decided to take a few days holiday in between and work on something that's been on my todo list for way too long now -- making the debian-installer work on the D-Link DNS-323. After a couple of days of work, I've just finished off the install of Debian on my DNS-323, which I initiated by loading a firmware image into the web interface of the stock firmware, and then SSHing into the machine at the appropriate moment. What this means is that anyone with a DNS-323 can install Debian on it. I think that's worthy of a small, quiet "woo hoo!"... Looking back now, it seems to have been a fairly simple and straightforward operation, but I can remember that it didn't look so simple when I started a week ago. So, in the interests of perhaps short-cutting someone else's adventure into the world of d-i hacking, I'm writing everything up while it's fresh in my mind (the benefits of being on holidays -- plenty of time to write long blog posts). Alternately, if anyone has a random device they'd like to see d-i on but doesn't have the inclination to do it themselves, feel free to send me one and I'll do it for you. Before I begin, I've got a few "shout outs" (I think that's what the cool kids are calling it these days) to people who've helped me along the way. First off, Martin Michlmayr has answered innumerable dumb questions from me, and I think wrote most of the parts of d-i that I've extended -- it's fair to say that I'd have had no hope of doing this without him. Thanks also to the people in #debian-boot and #debian-arm for answering questions and putting up with my frequent bouts of self-congratulation whenever I passed the most miniscule milestone. Finally, everyone who has put work into d-i has my thanks, too -- it's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better (both to use and also to hack on) than any other installer I've ever met. So, without further ado, off we go... Work out how to get a console Unless you are a guru of unbelievable skill, you will undoubtedly not do everything quite perfectly the first time, and you'll want to see the kernel/init boot messages, and maybe in some cases try some investigation and diagnostic work. For that, you're going to have to have some sort of console access. If the device doesn't have a full screen/keyboard thing going on, the chances are you'll almost certainly end up with a serial console. A few devices have a network management thingo that will give you a console, usually over VNC or some sort of horrid Java applet, but I've only ever encountered that in rackmount servers, which have a keyboard/video interface anyway... In theory, I suppose, the kernel could provide a network console, but I've never heard of such a thing being attempted, and Google is not helping me out. I might add that to the todo list as a future hacking project... On the DNS-323, it was a serial console that was needed. Like a lot of the embedded devices I've seen, it didn't quite talk RS-232, so I needed an adapter (I got a TTL-232R-3V3 USB-to-3.3v-serial adapter from a local electronics supply place, which worked perfectly with Linux as soon as I plugged it in). I needed to solder a few wires to a connecter inside, and connect that up to the USB doohickey, but it all came good in the end. The chances are someone's done a similar job for your device of choice, so a search for things like "devicename serial console" will almost certainly pay off. Work out how to load and boot a kernel/initrd Your development work will involve booting weird kernels and initial ramdisks to make everything work; you need some way of stuffing those into the device and booting from them. Everything has a boot loader of one sort or another; working out what you've got and how to make it sing and dance is the ultimate quest here. How this is done will vary greatly from device to device; the WRT-54GL, for example, waits for a tftp connection for a couple of seconds on startup, which you can use to send a new firmware; many other devices have a boot loader that you have to explicitly control (via the console), but it will make a tftp connection out to another machine if you ask it to. Some devices you just need to load the data in via serial cable (at 115200bps it's bearable; at the 9600bps I've heard some devices work at, it would be tres painful). The DNS-323 runs uBoot as the boot loader, which will do a tftp request by default. However, D-link, or Marvell, or someone in the decision-making chain for this thing decided to knobble it and removed most of the useful commands, so sending the thing via serial port is the only option. Since writing to flash takes a pile of extra time, I found (eventually) that you can just load the data into RAM somewhere and boot from there, without needing to write it to flash (also handy to avoid wasting precious write cycles), since you can tell uBoot to boot a kernel located anywhere in the address space. Obviously you need to reload the kernel/initrd on every boot if you don't write it to flash, so if you've got a "stable" kernel or initrd that you think you'll be using for a while (when you're testing the other item) you should flash it then. One note on uBoot, that took me far too long to work out -- you can't just stuff a kernel fresh off the Makefile in and assume it'll work -- uBoot needs a special header prepended that tells it all about what you're loading (architecture, file type, compression method, etc). You "wrap" a file in this uBoot header with the "mkimage" command (in the uboot-mkimage package in Debian). Incidentally, if you need to remove the uBoot bits from a file, just strip the first 64 bytes off -- that's all the uBoot header is, so something like this will do nicely:

 dd if=file.uboot of=file bs=64 skip=1

A final uBoot warning: it's fairly important to specify a "load address" for the files; if you get them wrong, your kernel and initrd may or may not boot (I never quite got the hang of why some wrong values worked and some didn't). If your device uses uBoot, and you have the ability to extract the uBoot-enabled kernel and initrd from a vendor-provided firmware image, you can use mkimage -l to inspect what all the values need to be for your own kernels and initrds. Just stick with them. Does Debian support your hardware? Obviously, if you want to run Debian on something, Debian has to support that hardware. The easiest way to test this out is to try an install. For this, you'll need to retrieve an appropriate kernel and initrd pair for the installer. Some arches, like i386 and amd64, only have one kernel and initrd for the installer, so you just have to choose if you're going to netboot, or do a full CD install, or whatever. Other arches, though, like arm, have subtly different images for different machines. There are two reasons they vary: firstly, they often need to split into subarches, where they all share a general CPU architecture but there are enough differences in the hardware that they're not all supportable by the same kernel. At a more fine-grained level some different machines of the same sub-architecture need differently formatted firmware images to boot. On ARM, in particular, it's pretty common to need to prepend a "device ID" to the kernel image so that the kernel knows what sort of machine it's booting on, which means that every machine typically needs it's own kernel image, regardless of any other issues with firmware formats. Choosing the sub-architecture should be relatively straightforward, if you know much about the machine you're targetting. Picking a machine type can be a bit harder, but again, if you know what your boot loader needs, it shouldn't be too hard to find a kernel/initrd from the existing machines in your subarch that you can mangle to fit. Load up your kernel/initrd into the device, boot it, and see how far it gets. You might get lucky, and the kernel inits, your hard drives are detected, your NIC is initialised, and you're off and running without further ado. Or you might not be so lucky. The worst case is that the kernel doesn't even get as far as loading the initrd -- it might not print anything at all, or the kernel might hang part way through the boot. This is likely to require a fair amount of debugging fun, as initial boot failures get a bit tricky. A better situation is where the kernel boots OK, and d-i starts, but something in the install process falls over. This can either be a kernel/driver problem, or a d-i problem. Either way, since d-i has started, you're likely to be able to get a shell and do some debugging. In order to make d-i work, you need to have somewhere to install to (disks, usually) and a source of packages to install from (CD/DVD if you're on a suitably large device, or the network otherwise). These are the two key ingredients you need; most everything else is stuff that ranges between "nice to have" and "critical" for operational purposes, but which has absolutely zero impact on your ability to do the install, so we'll ignore it for now. For the DNS-323, I had a few kernel problems (which I'd been warned about by Martin before I started) -- the NIC wasn't initialised with it's MAC address, which meant it was running around my Ethernet screaming "I am 00:00:00:00:00:00! Ph33r m3!", and the SATA controller just didn't seem to exist at all. These were kinda critical to doing an install, so it was time to get hacking to make those work. There were also a couple of parts of d-i that needed tweaking -- the preseeding code didn't support the device, and I needed to package a tool to build a "complete" uploadable firmware image and teach d-i how to use it. Apart from that, though, things were looking pretty good. Make the Debian kernel support your hardware Once you've worked out what hardware you need to make work, you need to dig into the kernel and fix it. Sometimes, if you're really lucky, a kernel version newer than the one currently in Debian has better support for something, and you can backport the fix / feature improvement. Other times, there's something similar already in the kernel for a different device and you can crib off that (I did this extensively for my little fixes). Then there's the "ask an expert" school, where you find someone who knows what they're on about and pick their brain (I did a bit of that, too). Finally, there's plain old "research and development", for which there are piles of documentation already out there. My changes for the DNS-323 came to 121 added lines and 16 deleted lines, most of which was cribbed-and-tweaked from other parts of the kernel. I might have written 10-20 lines of code "from scratch". It's not always scary-hard. Cross-compiling your own kernel One thing that I think needs mentioning in the kernel hacking department is cross-compiling a modified kernel for testing purposes. Chances are your main workstation has a lot more grunt (and build tools) than whatever you're trying to get Debian onto, so cross-compilation is the way to go. You need to first grab a copy of the source you want to build (from apt-get source linux-image-blahdiblah, or a release tarball, or Linus' git repo, it doesn't really matter) and a cross-compilation toolchain. For my cross-compilation toolchain, I just added this to my sources.list:

 deb http://www.emdebian.org/debian/ unstable main

then I ran apt-get update, and installed these packages:

	binutils-arm-linux-gnueabi gcc-4.1-arm-linux-gnueabi
	gcc-4.3-arm-linux-gnueabi-base libc6-dev-armel-cross

Kudos to the emdebian team for making that such an utterly painless exercise, by the way -- the days of needing to faff round with gcc sources to get a cross-compilation toolchain are apparently over. Once you've got a source tree and a cross-compiler available, you can run any of the usual kernel make commands (like make zImage or make oldconfig), as long as you've got a couple of make variables defined. In my case, I used:

 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-

ARCH tells the kernel what architecture to build for (useful in all make commands because not all arches have the same config options in make menuconfig, for example) and CROSS_COMPILE tells the build system what to prefix the calls to gcc, ld and such with (if you installed the same cross-compiler packages as I did, you'll find it installs files like /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc, so you can ls /usr/bin/*gcc to find out what you'll need for the CROSS_COMPILE setting). Hack d-i to make things work In addition to tweaking the kernel, it's quite possible that the internals of d-i might need some tuning. It's possible that d-i might need to be "taught" to recognise the hardware in your device, or you'll need to extend some aspect of the installation process to complete the installation. In order to hack d-i, you need to know a bit about how it works and how it is structured, so let's run through that first. The entireity of d-i is based around udebs, which are packages of the same format as "real" debs, but which have been built differently (against a small libc, for instance) and have had everything that isn't absolutely necessary (docs, non-essential scripts, extra functionality, etc) stripped out of them to create the smallest possible packages. There are a variety of different udebs -- most are derived from otherwise normal, law-abiding citizens of the archive, like busybox (basic unix utilities like cp and ls), the shell that's used in the installer, parted, various libraries, and so on. Others are "special", and have no big brother in the archive. These are mostly "task" udebs, that define what actually happens in the installer. When they're "installed", they have special fields in the package metadata that define where in the install sequence they go, and they end up on the menu you see if your installation goes a bit pear-shaped. The tricky thing about udebs is that, as small as they are, there's too many of them to be able to have them all available when the system first boots, so even the "setup" of the installation gets done in several stages. First, the kernel and initrd boot. The initrd contains just enough stuff to get access to the rest of the udebs, and nothing else. Even this early stage is built from udebs -- there's lists of what goes into the initrd for various architectures and flavours of installer under installer/build/pkg-list in the d-i SVN. If you need an extra udeb in your initrd, that's the place to specify it. Once the initrd has gotten access to a source of packages (off a CD, over the network, telepathy, whatever) it can drag the rest of the packages it needs from there. Space is still an issue at this point, though -- there's no diskspace yet to put anything onto, so everything needs to fit into a ramdisk. Don't go loading anything you don't need. The packages loaded at this stage are what defines most of the steps that will be done for the rest of the install, so once all those extra udebs are loaded, the remainder of the install kicks off and does it's thing. Different architectures and install methods have different requirements, too, which complicates matters. For example, when you're installing on a regular PC with screen/keyboard, you can guide the install using that. However, if you've got no screen, how can you control the install? There's serial consoles, but requiring everyone to void the warranty (more) on their little embedded doodad by installing a serial console cable to install Debian isn't so hot. So, lacking a terminal, how do you control the install? Well, on install flavours for devices that might be in this situation, you can SSH into the installer and complete it that way. That feature is, like everything else, provided in a udeb -- called network-console, as it happens. But what IP address do you connect to, and what network settings does the device use? Again, without a console you can't configure your network, and not everyone has a DHCP server (and even fewer people have a DHCP server that will hand out an address that they'll know in advance, or be able to find out). So, there's a udeb (called oldsys-preseed) that does it's best to configure your network based on the settings already in the nvram for your device. In short, there's a lot of tricky, well-thought-out shit going on inside d-i, and you might have to deal with a little bit of it. The nice thing is that by now I expect most of the really hard problems have been solved, so with a bit of luck you'll only ever have to do minor tweaking. In general, all of the packages that are "d-i specific" live in packages in the d-i SVN. If you need to modify a udeb, you need to rebuild it and put it in installer/build/localudebs/ (creating it first if need be) and every time you change it, you need to delete installer/build/apt.udeb/cache/. To give a concrete example (from the ever-present DNS-323), I had to modify oldsys-preseed so that it would get the details from the nvram that the stock firmware uses to configure itself. This, in turn, required that the minix-modules udeb be included in the initrd, because the DNS-323's nvram is actually a small minix partition stored in flash. Painfully, this required some more hacking, because the armel d-i kernel wasn't configured to generate minix-modules. That might need some explanation... Since building the kernel is a fairly massive undertaking, CPU-wise, instead of building all the udebs from scratch there's a package called kernel-wedge to split a real linux-image package into lots of little udebs. There's a separate source package for each architecture, linux-kernel-di-$ARCH-2.6, that contains the configuration data for kernel-wedge to specify what udebs need to be built, and what goes into each of them. A small tweak to the armel package and voila! I had a minix-modules udeb to include in the initrd. With the config stuff I'd done in the d-i build itself and my changes to oldsys-preseed, we were done with d-i. Tell d-i how to build your bootable artifacts If your device needs a "different" install image from other similar devices, you need to write some makefile rules to build those files. Look under the installer/build/config/$ARCH/ directory to see the various rules files available. I had to package a new tool to create uploadable firmware images for the DNS-323, along with adding a rule to use that tool to build images. None of it was particularly difficult. Polish the diamond Getting d-i working is only part of the battle; it's quite likely that there will be other hardware in the machine that needs to be supported. This could involve kernel-level stuff to interface to the hardware, or userland tools to manage the hardware. There's several bits in the DNS-323 that still need work; I can't control the LEDs on the front panel, nor the fan, and I can't use the on-board temperature sensors yet. But, I do have Debian running on the thing, which is what I was shooting for. Examples If you're interested in exactly what I did, there are a number of bugs in the BTS that contain the patches I made:

• #502821: oldsys-preseed changes to take existing network config from NVRAM;
• #502936: build a minix modules package for the armel d-i kernel;
• #503040: d-i core changes to build firmware images for the DNS-323;
• #503172: kernel patches to support the SATA controller and NIC better.

One month with Emacs and counting - Part 1 Straight to the point: since mid September I've been using Emacs, trying to evaluate whether I was willing to switch from Vim to it. Yup, that's true, me (user of Vim since the day I've started using GNU/Linux 10 years ago, (not so) active maintainer in Debian of vim and related packages, author of some popular Vim extensions and of vim-addon-manager) it's considering switching to Emacs. What is worse is that I've de facto already switched. May jamessan forgive me. OK, that was the hardest part to write, now ... This choice will have an impact on me: partly because I'm quite sure several fellow DDs will start making fun of this story , and partly because as many geeks I've always had strong opinions on the editor war. Switching side ain't easy. Hence, I've decided to write a small (2-3) series of blog posts on the issue, to future memory. The post you are reading is about why, since a few months ago, I wasn't willing to give Emacs a try, and how I've changed my mind. Why I wasn't willing to give Emacs a try, but then changed my mind I love knowing tools which can improve my workflow, no matter the task. Editors happen to be at the intersection of many tasks, hence knowing well his own editor and feeling satisfied about it is quite important. This is even more so for free software hackers which, for a reason or another, happen to use the very same editor for a lot of different tasks; in my case: programming, conf file hacking (i.e., playing the sysadm role), mail writing, and everything in between. I've started using vi on Solaris around 1998, then switched to Vim starting from version 4.0, and then followed all its releases up to 7.0. I consider my "Vim karma" to be quite hight and I've delivered several talks about using Vim for LUGs and other free software-related events. Still, I've always been hit bit several minor nuisances and glitches of Vim which couldn't be fixed by simple configuration tuning or add-on implementations (more on this in a future post). In the quest for the perfect workflow, those glitches have made me try several times other editors hoping for more satisfying work environments. Of course Emacs was one of them, which I've tried repeatedly during the years; the last time was circa 2006. For one reason or another, after a few days of experiments, I've always decided to give up with it. Why? Various reasons, listed below, together with an explanation of what (I think) has changed since then.

1. Poor Unicode/multibyte support. Support for whatever Unicode encoding was close to null. It was not available in the legacy editor, and you had to use something called MULE, to be specifically enabled. That was so 60's, and rather hard to use. Now (apparently starting from Emacs 22.1, June 2007) finally you have built-in Unicode support and the needed two variables for setting the input encoding and the file encoding, which is basically all you need. Looks easy once you have it ...
2. Lack of "modern" UI toolkit support. Yes, I do live in a console and invoke my editor from it, but nevertheless for long coding sessions I do also love having a nice GTK+ window containing my editor using settings which smoothly integrated with the graphical settings of my desktop environment. Maybe I'm getting old, maybe GNOME has changed my perceptions, but why the heck I had to tolerate different monospace fonts in my gnome-terminal wrt my GUI editor I never understood. Firing up Emacs was like getting back in time of 15 years, and if a geek having a maximized terminal on most of its workspaces had this feeling, then something was really wrong. This has changed: starting again from Emacs 22.1, the editor has frown support for that "bleeding edge" technology called GTK+. Finally you can use Pango font faces and avoid the time travel feeling when switching from a terminal to your GUI.
3. "Dead upstream" syndrome. As we all know by experience, choosing a free software product is not only a matter of evaluating bugs and features, there are other environmental factors. A notable example is how active upstream is. A few of us will use a product affected by the "dead upstream" syndrome. That's exactly what I was feeling about Emacs. The first argument I can offer to back that feeling is again the Emacs release history (noted that "small" hole between 2001 and 2007? Rest In Peace release early, release often ...). The second argument is the bug tracking system: there was none, bug discussions happened only on the development mailing list and the bug tracker was a text file on CVS! (Yes, Vim doesn't have a proper BTS either, but I was looking for reasons to switch from it and hence looking for something better in several respects.) That has changed completely, as I discovered only at this year DebConf thanks to gismo. 2007 has enjoyed 1 Emacs release and 2008 already two. They do have a BTS now and guess what? is dear old debbugs. According to my first experiences as Emacs bug reported the maintainers are very reactive and also friendly in dealing with bug reporters. Finally, also keeping up with snapshot releases in Debian is entirely trivial, thanks to Romain's repository.
4. Poor performances & memory consumption. This goes in the direction of probably the most popular joke used by Vim zealots in the editor war: Emacs is a nice operating system, but lacks a good editor, or something such. In the past I had the impression that starting Emacs was really slow and that generally the memory footprint was too high to be acceptable. You know what: starting a full-blown gvim with a good deals of add-ons (and I used quite a lot of them, that's why vim-addon-manager was born) is not that faster. And on the contrary, firing up an emacsclient is way faster than starting up a new gvim instance. Regarding memory consumption Emacs is still "gaining" the battle. Still, one has to keep in mind the different workflow: with Vim you are encouraged to enter and exit the editor (not without drawbacks, as I'll discuss in a future post), while with Emacs you always use the same one. It turns out that via emacsclient the resulting feeling is the same as having multiple editors (as you can fire them up as separate windows or in separate consoles), still sharing all user memory. A final comment on memory consumption while looking at my top sorted by decreasing RSS memory: the top process is xulrunner (from the browser) with 356Mb, then Xorg (159M), pidgin (128Mb !!!!), trackerd, gnome-terminal, gnome-panel, ..., Emacs shows up with 51 Mb at the 7th position. Yes, it is not the thinnest editor in the world, but on average machine it doesn't really matter at all.

In the next post: how to switch from Vim to Emacs, without loosing your mental sanity. (Whether I did succeed wrt sanity is up to the reader to judge.)

Joerg Jaspert has posted a proposal to add some new types of contributor status to the Debian project. I like it. Clint Adams on the other hand is not a fan Here's why I think it is a good idea. For some time, I have been involved in trying to get people involved in Debian particulary, but not exclusively, Indians. One thing I have heard over and over again is that getting involved is too overwhelming. Obviously there are some people who are motivated enough to deal with all the hurdles but there are others who could contribute something but lack the time or inclination to go through the whole New Maintainer process. Some kind of lesser privileged status with would enable them to participate with less responsibilities. And, it must be acknowledged, with less rights, but this type of person would not care about being able to vote or login to project servers. It can be argued that they can already do this via alioth or sponsorship but this proposal formally acknowledges that they are part of the Debian team. Being on the inside may in time give wallflowers the impetus to get more involved and eventually seek full developer status. We already have this in part with the Debian Maintainer appellation which seems to be working well, this proposal just extends the idea a little bit. One thing which was not made clear was if the proposal is a fait accompli or if there will be a GR about it. I think there ought to be one to give skeptics a chance to really prod and poke this thing or we will end up with another morass of recrimination and backbiting like what happened with dunc-tank.

So you put off buying a high-def TV for years, because you weren’t sure they had gotten all the standards right. You recently gave in, thinking that the coming shut-off of analog broadcast TV in February meant that they had to have their technology figured out by now. Of course, you were wrong:

CableCARD devices have generally supported only one-way access to cable systems, but their long, winding journey toward full two-way communications is finally coming to an end. Panasonic has announced that it is at last shipping new HDTVs enabled with tru2way technology to the two US markets where they can actually be used.

So what’s the main thing you’re supposed to get with tru2way?

This means that you can walk out of a retail store with a tru2way-enabled HDTV, plug it in at home, and have immediate access to basic features like an on-screen guide and on-demand content.

In other words, we are just now starting to see HDTVs that can just plug into the cable jack and work, without an add-on cable box and all the limitations that implies, right? Well, not really.

All tru2way-compatible devices will have a CableCARD slot built into them to facilitate the decryption of protected content, though details are still sketchy as to how this system will work with devices like PVRs. Physical CableCARDs will apparently not be needed to access basic two-way services and non-encrypted channels.

Meaning that, in order to get anything you can’t get already with broadcast TV (”non-encrypted”), you still need a cable company tech to come out and install the CableCARD. And they don’t know how all of this will integrate with the new video recorders like TiVo. Why is this so hard? It’s producer paranoia. If they don’t play these games, you might watch some show for free, or share it so others can watch it for free, instead of… well, watching it for free live. And you might cut the commercials out, instead of… cutting the commercials out by getting up for more chips during the commercial breaks. (But that’s stealing, so you shouldn’t do that either.) Our family keeps edging closer to deciding to get a HDTV. But then I see stuff like this, and notice that the old tube TV still works fine…

I’m not sure which is the second-largest of the projects supported by Software in the Public Interest, but I thought that OpenOffice.org was up there with them. It’s been a bit of a surprise to me that SPI hasn’t done more for them since they joined back in March: only about $1,000 has been donated that way, none spent and I’ve not noticed their liaison being very active yet. Following the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0, I took a bit of a closer look. Stuff Michael Meeks is doing: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org suggests that the project is much smaller than I thought:

“In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see this in OpenOffice.org. Indeed, quite the opposite we appear to have the lowest number of active developers on OO.o since records began: 24, this contrasts negatively with Linux’s recent low of 160+. Even spun in the most positive way, OO.o is at best stagnating from a development perspective. “

OpenOffice.org is a project that produces something I don’t use much, but I recognise the significance of it. I’ve looked at contributing a couple of times in the past (nothing major, just bug reports and offers of help), but got utterly lost in the maze of websites and copious verbose descriptions written in management buzzspeak. (I spotted a “Report a Bug” link taking me to a page titled “Submit an Issue” for example.) Looking again now, OOo doesn’t seem much easier to navigate. I did find that SPI doesn’t appear to be listed on their donation page yet, which probably explains the low donation amount. Another confusing thing: they don’t use bugzilla, but a less accessible fork called Issue Tracker. Even simple contributions seemed to want multiple registrations to websites, mailing lists and whatnot - that seemed to contradict a claim that “Joining OpenOffice.org is purely optional” - and a confused email question to an address listed on the website got a rejection/error in reply. I’m sorry to say that I got confused, discouraged and moved onto other, easier things that I’d use more. Anyone else looked at contributing? How did it go for you? Anyone understand how this associated project works?

I just wanted to fix some RC bugs till I'll go home, so I looked at the list of open ones and randomly chosen two bugs about roxen fonts which looked like low hanging fruits. Both were in fact same issue, just copied to two packages. I worked on the fix, creating some intermediate version and then I finally wanted to upload the package. Unfortunately in this step I somehow managed to use the intermediate version, which did not really fix the issue. As packages were already uploaded, there was not much I could do except yet another NMU, now with full set of changes. Just as accepted emails arrived I also noticed that I messed up bug numbers in changelog - I used same bug number in both changelogs. Okay, manually closing the bug worked around this. But now I'm afraid what else did I mess up. Probably it's time to go for a dinner and stop working on computer for now :-).

As most people probably know by now, the Android source code is available, as promised: http://source.android.com/ The next part is the interesting part, though, in my opinion. Source code is wonderful, and a huge gift from Google, but the real "secret sauce" for the most successful open source projects is the community. It will be interesting to see how Google manages this aspect of their project. It could be a situation where they create, and the public consumes, and it's fairly one way, with the odd patch here and there going back. Or it could be that they'll really let people get involved. Running a community for something this big, with this much code, and this much interest to the world at large is a daunting task, but Google certainly has the open source expertise to figure it out, so what we end up seeing will depend on exactly how Google wants to manage things. All in all though, a big step for open source - congratulations to all the people at Google who made it happen!

I just published new Gammu testing version. Major changes are in handling some special Nokia responses, handling of Siemens phonebook entries and introduction of automatic testing using CDash on http://cdash.cihar.com/index.php?project=Gammu. Full list of changes:

• Sign Windows binaries during build.
• Detect long FM station names (bug #727).
• Add ID for Nokia 2630b.
• Handle properly very long lines in vcards (bug #728).
• Do not build and install locales if gettext is not compiled.
• Increase number of calendar entries (bug #725).
• Leak free test runs.
• Support backup of phone phonebook from Siemens (bug #732).
• Properly handle GetNextMemory on Siemens (bug #732).
• Save textual category to backup (bug #737).
• Enable dashboard testing using CTest/CDash.
• Add option to do coverage analysis.
• Properly handle debug file closing.
• Add test case for debug logging.
• Fix decoding of some SMS messages from Nokia phones (bug #735).
• Hack for (still) unknown error code (bug #733).

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

You know you've got a bunch of Mennonites together when the pastor spontaneously asks the church to sing "Jesus Loves Me" while the children walk up for their children's story. And, without music, everybody spontaneously breaks into beautiful 4-part harmony. It must be genetic or something.

It was a day of beautiful singing of hymns a week ago for Tabor Mennonite Church's centennial. It's hard to write about that weekend, in fact -- it was such a nice experience.

Sunday ended with opening the box sealed in the church's cornerstone back in 1965 when the current building was built. Rudy Schmidt, the person that sealed it up back then, was on hand to open it back up. They took out the stone and removed the box. Before the box was opened, Rudy told a story:

Back in 1965, I was the one to solder this box shut. While I was doing this, all of a sudden I smelled burning from inside. I figured I must have caught something inside on fire. I asked Jake Koehn (another person on the building committee) what to do. Jake said, "Nobody will ever see it again, just put it in." So let's open it!

I think Rudy has been wondering all these years whether he set it on fire or not.

The box was opened, and other than a few scorch marks on an envelope, was completely intact and in good shape. There was a copy of a local newspaper from 1965 with a headline about Goldwater, copies of programs of dedication for the new building and parsonage, a Bible, copies of the church constitution, and all sorts of other interesting things. To that we will add a copy of our centennial book (which I helped develop), CDs with recordings of our centennial activities, programs from the centennial celebration, and photos of the weekend.

Earlier on Sunday, we had a long but good worship service with sermons from two former pastors. The choir sang, including a song commissioned for the occasion by Larry Nickel. We got applause after that one (which happens occasionally, but not regularly, in our church). All the living former pastors, and the widow of one of them, served communion as well.

The service ended with the congregation singing the "Mennonite Anthem". I think it was the most beautiful singing of that song I've ever heard. We had 352 people in church that day, and it seemed that not one person was going to let the moment go by without singing.

Saturday had started off with outdoor activities in the church park. There was old-fashioned soap making, remembering how church members used to store fat all year, then get together to make soap for use in their homes and to donate to the needy. There was rope making, wool spinning, and rides for the children. Under the tent, we had some great music the local Greenhorns band, and the former pastors all shared some memories and stories about their time here.

On Saturday evening, we had a meal and a drama -- and managed to somehow fit 321 people into the church basement for the meal. We think that's a record! The drama was written for the occasion by one of our members. John Gaeddert, a pastor here in the early 1970s, has become an expert wood carver in his spare time. He had carved a piece for us to celebrate the occasion, and presented it during the drama. That fit right in, because the drama was called "Bring Your Own Hedgepost" -- back in the early days of the church, each member was supposed to do just that so they would have a place to tie their horses.

Friday night was a lecture by James Juhnke about our first paster, P. H. Richert, who was pastor for nearly 40 years. Quite entertaining and interesting.

I think the highlight of the weekend for me was getting to talk to some of the former pastors I never knew well. I had a few minutes to chat with John Gaeddert. I introduced myself, and he said, "Oh! I don't think I've met you, but I've heard your name a few times this weekend. You're on the centennial committee, right?" Yes indeed. I was born after he left this church, but he knew my grandparents -- which means he also knows exactly where we live. John and his wife Mary are both such warm and friendly people that it feels like I've known them much longer than a few days!

I got to chat with Jim Schrag too. He was pastor at Tabor until I was about 5 or 6. He didn't remember me specifically, but he was also interesting to talk with. He was one of the people that worked on a detailed history book in 1983 for the church's 75th anniversary. He told me that he processed most of the black and white photos for that book in a darkroom in his basement. I hadn't known that -- and mentioned I had found all those photos in the church archives and had scanned them all in. Jim requested a copy.

Terah found Lenore Waltner, wife of former pastor James Waltner, who passed away about a year ago. James had started his career as a pastor at Tabor, and ended it at College Mennonite Church in Goshen, IN, where Terah grew up. So she knew him, but I didn't. Terah introduced herself to Lenore, who seemed quite excited to make this sort of family connection!

And Brenda Martin Hurst, another former pastor, found Terah and introduced herself. Terah said that Brenda said something like, "Hi, I'm Brenda, and I don't think I know you!" These pastors all want to get to know everybody, I think!

Sometimes, I m becoming really pestered by the number of issues, especially hardware issues, that remain prominent in the Linux system after so many years. And I m convinced that one of the root causes is the kernel development model. While far to be the only one, you understand a lot when you have a look at it. The stable API nonsense To explain the development model, the kernel documentation contains a document written by Greg Kroah-Hartman called stable_api_nonsense.txt. I think this document gets one thing very right: advertising it is complete nonsense. Many things in this document can get you a good laugh if you are used to software development, unfortunately they are not funny given how much they affect us as users and developers. Let s start with the executive summary:

You think you want a stable kernel interface, but you really do not, and you don't even know it. What you want is a stable running driver, and you get that only if your driver is in the main kernel tree. You also get lots of other good benefits if your driver is in the main kernel tree, all of which has made Linux into such a strong, stable, and mature operating system which is the reason you are using it in the first place.

What it should say instead is:

You know you want a stable kernel interface, but you don't have it, and we will never provide it. You want stable interfaces to focus on fixing bugs in your driver instead of updating it for interface changes, and to make integration of your driver in the main kernel tree easy. You would get a lot of good benefits if your driver was in the main kernel tree, but it won't make it unless you adapt to our bizarre processes, all of which have made the Linux kernel into a constantly moving target which is the reason many hardware vendors don't want to support it in the first place.

Our compiler does not have the same ABI as yours This is what happens when the only thing that interests people in charge is to code. Writing this means that these developers have no interest in making the system usable. This becomes more unbearable when such technically sharp people make up false technical arguments:

Depending on the version of the C compiler you use, different kernel data structures will contain different alignment of structures, and possibly include different functions in different ways (putting functions inline or not.)

Really, I wonder how the Microsoft developers, the GNOME guys, the glibc guys, and basically all library developers who know what they are talking about, manage to have stable ABIs despite the compiler changing all the time. One of the incredibly complicated techniques they use is to only rely on guaranteed functionality of the C specification, instead of doing many clever and funky hacks. For things more related to development itself, there are also incredibly complicated techniques like opaque structures, which save a lot of ABI breakage. Actually the only thing you need, if you design your ABI properly, is to be rigorous.

Depending on what kernel build options you select, a wide range of different things can be assumed by the kernel

This statement of a problem also contains the solution: stop making available build options no one cares about (remember, people install binary packages from their distributions) to guarantee stability instead. Instead of implementing the solution, kernel developers deliberately choose to deal with this insanity in the worst possible way: by encouraging it. Only lame developers need stable APIs But the nonsense doesn't stop to the ABI, which after all is merely a problem for distributors. To be more annoying to developers themselves, let s make up reasons to break the API all the time:

Linux kernel development is continuous and at a rapid pace, never stopping to slow down. As such, the kernel developers find bugs in current interfaces, or figure out a better way to do things.

Explained this way, it looks like a good thing. If you've done serious development or integration, you know that actually it is a problem. If you never slow down to look at what you've done, you're only going to add new bugs while you're trying to fix the others.

When they do so, function names may change, structures may grow or shrink, and function parameters may be reworked. If this happens, all of the instances of where this interface is used within the kernel are fixed up at the same time, ensuring that everything continues to work properly.

Everything is said. In the Linux kernel, changes are not done in a continuous way. Every non-minor change is going to have an impact on hundreds of different modules. The amount of work needed to accomplish these changes is absolutely insane. When a project like GNOME decides to phase-out an API, it takes several years before being actually replaced. In the kernel, it can simply happen between two minor releases, together with a rewrite of the whole ATA stack. The lolution Of course, Greg KH has a simple solution for you, in the What to do section.

So, if you have a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel tree, what are you, a developer, supposed to do? Releasing a binary driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface is also a rough job.

No shit !

Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree.

Simple, isn't it? Unfortunately this is not going to happen while you are too busy adapting it for the constantly moving interfaces. This is quite feasible if you are writing a driver for an Ethernet network adapter, but for a video card this is another story, and for a virtualization layer? Well, the Xen developers have been struggling for years to integrate their technology in the kernel, and it is still far from done. No wonder why you get good drivers only for ethernet cards and not for 3D cards or even wifi chips. This doesn t go without other, worse consequences for users and distributors. Not everyone can afford to run Ubuntu, Debian unstable or Fedora, especially if they have simple requirements like not changing the whole system every 6 months. Corporate users using Debian stable, RHEL, SLES or Ubuntu LTS need a stable kernel that doesn t move, and that doesn t break everything when upgraded. The introduction of projects like DKMS to distribute drivers in a sourceful way while keeping them easily installable is a step in the good direction, despite being a workaround for a broken situation underneath. However these efforts are ruined by the constantly changing APIs that will go on requiring changes to the sources as well as the binaries. Why it can still work In fact, with such processes, you can wonder how it is possible that the system is actually usable. The answer is simple: while being smaller than many other projects, the Linux kernel has much, much more developers. A rough estimation shows that Linux has 2000 developers, many of which are paid full-time to work on it, to work on a 15 Mloc codebase. You can compare it with X.org, which has a few dozens of developers for 3 Mloc. Or with GNOME, 400 developers for 20 Mloc. With OOo, 150 developers for 10 Mloc. Yes, you need 10 times as many people to maintain the kernel code than for another comparable project. That's of course what happens when you keep them busy with a permanent refactoring of the code. This development method, while certainly having the advantage of bringing lots of innovation and fast integration of new features, is also driving away a very large portion of the open source community to work on rewriting Firewire stacks every 6 months. And as long as they are busy with this, they are not writing correct X drivers nor fixing bugs in the applications.

Just received this comment from Jimmy Kaplowitz over in the US: “yuck, your country continues to turn into Big Brother: BBC News: Giant database plan ‘Orwellian’” Hell, yeah. That’s a reason why my support for the party is so weak at the moment. I’ve been working and writing against this since ST@ND and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which we were told was essential for crime-fighting, but actually helps gov.uk spy on parents making school place applications. Currently, I’m telling people Gov.UK Consults on Forced ISP Snooping: Please Say NO. If anyone has any doubt that the database state will be abused, look at some examples of Labour’s “terrorists” (at least, they had supposedly anti-terror measures used against them) since 2001:-

1. Wolfie, an 82-year-old peace-campaigning heckler at a Labour conference
2. Indymedia
3. a Frenchman in Suffolk who downloaded the Anarchists’ Cookbook
4. an Algerian pilot
5. the country of Iceland

and that’s ignoring gov.uk’s frequent data leaks. Noodles replied: “There’s a quote somewhere that goes along the lines of “If the Tory policy is looking sane compared to what you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong” that’s been applied to the Labour fascist state stuff.” Our terrorism measures are a joke, with loopholes that gov.uk can drive a truck through. They should be repealed and clearly-limited ones enacted, shouldn’t they?

For the last few months I've been running the latest git versions of xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd on my $WORK laptop with a Mobility Radeon X1300.

And actually I like them more then fglrx: they crash less and I actually have xrandr support so giving presentations and using the second screen no longer involves reloads of X.

A remaining problem was that they would sig11 when I enable DRI. Yesterday I went investigating and found out that the ati driver was crashing in the line:

Bool RADEONDRIGetVersion(ScrnInfoPtr pScrn)
 
...
    /* Low level DRM open */
    fd = drmOpen(RADEON_DRIVER_NAME, busId);

After giving some message that it cannot open /dev/dri/card0. Some research showed that this was because I forgot to load the kernel module. /me hits table.

modprobe radeon and DRI works. Obviously it doesn't do 3D because the mesa library is too old. Installing mesa 7.2 from experimental and I see:

 $ glxinfo   grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

And all the whoos effects... well ... whoos.

Now off to Ana's blog to find out how I can get KDE 4.1 in unstable....

Christian worries about how to grow the desktop share in the free desktop. Some recent events (Chromium, Geode) have led me to believe that … We've won … already. For example let's look at the reactions to Chromium (which I believe was released way too early):

• Linux and Mac versions have not been launched
• Google announce ... Linux version ... delayed. Why do they do this by not considering ... Linux
• Chromium for Linux & Mac OS X

I've just picked three links but the trend is clear. The digirati want to use Linux and Mac OS X to evaluate new technologies NOT Windows. Sure, some of them still have those boxes around for “client work”. But that is not what they use day-to-day. Now let's take a look at Mozillas' Geode. Here is the Introduction to Geode. Look at the comments:

• Why is it not compatible with Linux (first one)
• Ele é compativel com linux? (seventh one)
• 15th and 16th comments

In fact the outcry was enough for lack of Linux support that is merited a follow-up Common Geode Q&As:

Geode is meant as a temporary solution to allow websites to experiment with geolocation today. … Skyhook is built in. A side effect is that Linux isn't supported for the simple reason that Skyhook hasn't implemented Linux drivers. Although not ideal. …

A year ago this would not have happened. This amount of push-back from the digirati that the new technology they are supposed to look at and evaluate is not available on their platform would have been accepted as a matter of course. Now, though, they all expect it on their platform of choice. We've won, already. Whilst the largest user-base remains the Windows market, if you want the digirati to look at and evaluate what you have to offer it needs to work on Linux & Mac OS X. Another example, while I remember, is Adobe releasing Flash 10 for Linux on the same day as other platforms. Unheard of. So what does mean for Christian's question?

1. Within 12 months it will be inconcievable for software to NOT be released on Windows + Linux (and maybe Mac OS X)
2. Within 24 months we will have power users asking for Free Software (probably not Linux but more likely OpenOffice 3.x & Firefox) routinely
3. Within 36 months Linux will be 10% of the desktop market. Bigger than Mac OS X. That is a lot of people you can not afford to ignore if you are a company, it will mean that ‘web-based’ will be more and more common — integration between desktop and the web will be key.

I’ve just set up a poll on my site asking: what topics do you want to read here? Since this July, when cycling and most local and political themes were split off into other blogs, this site has been mostly Web Development and GNU/Linux topics, with an SPI article appearing most weeks, and minor themes of Koha news and ideas and general internet/telecoms issues around ThePhoneCoop. Finally, Drupal, OSCommerce and general business topics appear less frequently. By traffic, the SPI series seems by far the most popular (but at least one of those is heavily spam-attacked now, so I’d discount it), followed by other political themes, then the technical posts. I suspect that politics is getting a temporary boost because of the US and Canadian elections, even though I’ve not written about them much. But is there some other theme that people want to read about? The poll box on the right column lets you tick as many or as few as you want. It requires javascript, but if you don’t have javascript, please leave a comment on my site. If you want to suggest a new topic which I should add, please leave that in a comment too.

I finally catched up with Gammu backlog from holidays and now it is time to move it a bit further. Automatic testing During this week I set up CDash instance for acquiring results of automatic nightly checks of Gammu. Each night Gammu is build on several hosts (currently Debian x86_64, Debian x86, SUSE x86_64 and crosscompilation for Windows on Debian) and results are posted to the dashboard. If you have some other architecture which could participate in testing, you are welcome to contribute! It is simple - just checkout svn, create build directory and configure there Gammu using cmake. You can enable coverage tests (-DCOVERAGE=ON). Then just run every night make Nightly for regular testing or make NightlyMemoryCheck to do dynamic allocation analysis. There is more detailed documentation in sources (INSTALL file). Thanks to this, I can hopefully sooner spot regressions and possible problems on different architectures. Roadmap With upgrade of Mantis, new feature called roadmaps arrived. I started to use it for planning features in future Gammu releases, so you can see what bugs should be fixed in future releases in Gammu roadmap. Currently there are not much things planned, because till now I had to focus only on bug fixing, but I think with 1.21.0 we have reached much better quality than in past releases and now is time to do some important changes in the core. Nokia phone required As you can already see in roadmap, I plan some bigger changes to Gammu core. I currently have on Sony-Ericsson phone and I would not be able to properly test how these changes will affect Nokia drivers. So for start I will need at least Nokia Series 40 3rd edition phone. Nokia 6233 (or 6234) currently looks as a reasonable choice, but if you have any hints for cheaper one with similar features, just drop me an email. Perfect would be if somebody would have half broken phone (I do not intend to use it for anything else than Gammu development, so broken camera, speaker, microphone or display does not really matter) and will be willing to donate it to me. If this will not work out, I'll have to buy used one and I will try to collect funds for this. If you want to contribute, check my donations page for possibilities.

One of the many interesting ideas in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn series [1] is that of Combat Wasps. These are robots used in space combat which may be armed with some combination of projectile weapons, MASERs, thermo-nuclear and anti-matter weapons. In a lot of science fiction the space combat is limited to capital ships, a large source of this problem is technological issues such as the Star Trek process of making models of ships - it’s too expensive and time consuming to make lots of small models. Shows such as Babylon 5 [2] have fighters which make more sense. Sustaining life in space is difficult at the best of times and it seems likely for battles in space to have few if any survivors. So sending out fighters allows the capital ships to have a chance to survive. I suspect that a major motivating factor in the space battles in Babylon 5 was making it fit on a TV screen. Dramatic TV portrayal of small groups of fighters engaging in a battle is an art that has been perfected over the course of 80+ years. It’s about individuals being shown, whether it’s riders on horseback, pilots of biplanes, or space pilots, it’s much the same. But a reasonable analysis of the facts suggests that without some strange religious motive adopted by all parties in a war (as used in Dune [3]) the trend in warfare is to ever greater mechanisation. So while a medium size starship might be able to carry dozens or even hundreds of fighter craft, if using small robotic craft then thousands of fighters could be carried. So the issue is how to effectively use such robots. It seems likely that an effective strategy would involve large numbers of robots performing different tasks, some would detonate thermo-nuclear weapons to remove enemies from an area while others would prepare to advance into the breach. The result would be a battle lasting seconds that involves large numbers of robots (too many to focus on in a group) while each robot matters to little that there’s no interest in following one. Therefore it just wouldn’t work on TV and in a book it’s given a couple of sentences to describe what would have been an epic battle if humans had done anything other than press the launch buttons. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time would be to write a Combat Wasp simulator. There are already quite a number of computer games based on the idea of writing a program to control a robot and then having the robots do battle. This would be another variation on the theme but based in space. In a comment on my previous post about programming and games for children [4], Don Marti suggests that a RTS game could allow programming the units. It seems to me that the current common settings for controlling units in RTS games (attack particular enemies, attach whichever enemies get in range, patrol, move to location, retreat, and defend other units or strategic positions) are about as complex as you can get without getting to the full programming language stage. Then of course if you have any real programming language for a unit then changing it takes more time than an RTS game allows, and if the programming is good then there won’t be much for a human to do during the game anyway. So I can’t imagine much potential for anything between RTS and fully programmed games. There is some interesting research being conducted by the US military in simulating large numbers of people in combat situations. I think that the techniques in question could be more productively used in determining which of the various science fiction ideas for space combat could be most effectively implemented.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night’s_dawn


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_5


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_universe


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/16/programming-games-children/

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