Dear LazyWeb, I use the standard ciabot.pl script in a git post-receive hook. This works ok, except in the case where changes are made in a published branch, and then that branch is merged into a second published branch. In that case, ciabot.pl reports all the changes twice, once when they're committed to the published branch, and again when the branch is merged. This is worst when I sync up two branches; if there were a lot of changes made on either branch, they all flood into the irc channel again. Am I using the ciabot.pl script wrong, or is there a better script I should use? Or maybe there's a CIA alternative that is smarter about git commits, so it will filter out duplicates? Here, FWIW, is how I currently use it in my post-receive hook.

while read oldrev newrev refname; do
    refname=$ refname#refs/heads/ 
    [ "$refname" = "master" ] && refname=
    for merged in $(git rev-list --reverse $newrev ^$oldrev); do
        ciabot_git.pl $merged $refname
    done
done

---

Update: After hints and discussion from Buxy, I arrived at the following:

while read oldrev newrev refname; do
    branchname=$ refname#refs/heads/ 
    [ "$branchname" = "master" ] && branchname=
    for merged in $(git rev-parse --symbolic-full-name --not --branches   egrep -v "^\^$refname$"   git rev-list --reverse --stdin $oldrev..$newrev); do
        ciabot_git.pl $merged $branchname
    done
done

With this, changes available in another published branch are not sent to CIA. There might still be some bugs with this.

Wow, a pile of people seem to have friended me recently. I wish this thing sent me email when that happened.

Anyhow, I've friended those of you who:

1) I could figure out WTH you are; and
2) I don't mind you seeing the occasional either slightly personal rant, or information about where my travels.
3) From what I've seen on your journals, I won't gouge my eyes out reading them on my friends page.

I'll try to check there more often. And maybe I'll figure out who some of the rest of you are. =)

Late last year, I spent some time disentangling aptitude's internal UI library and packaging it as a separate library, which I named cwidget. This article is the first in what will hopefully become a series describing the basic concepts and APIs of cwidget. It applies to the versions of cwidget currently available in Debian sid and lenny, 0.5.11-1 and 0.5.12-1. Autogenerated documentation of cwidget can be found here (but beware that as of this writing it is somewhat incomplete).

---

In this tutorial, I will walk through a simple program (hello.cc) that initializes cwidget, displays a simple message box, and then terminates the program when the user confirms the message. I assume a basic familiarity with C++. The first thing to do is to include the portions of cwidget that our program will use. Most importantly, we need the top level cwidget routines. These are the global routines that initialize cwidget, shut it down, and control its main loop (among other things).

#include <cwidget/toplevel.h>

cwidget comes with a collection of stock dialog boxes for things like displaying messages to the user. To access the routines that build these dialogs, we write:

#include <cwidget/dialogs.h>

All the symbols provided by the cwidget library are in the cwidget namespace. Using the full library name means that there's a reasonable chance that its names will not conflict with the names provided by other libraries; however, it's a real pain to type cwidget over and over. Since this is the only namespaced library we are using in this program, it's handy to define cw as an alias for cwidget:

namespace cw = cwidget;

Now we're ready to write the main routine. The first interaction of client code with the cwidget library is to initialize it. This will initialize the ncurses library and put the terminal into a mode suitable for a full-screen curses program.

cw::toplevel::init();

Next, we create a dialog box that will be displayed to the user. There are two things to note about this code:

1. cwidget is Unicode-aware and the ok() routine expects the message string to be a wide-character string. In this case, that means that we need to pass in a wide-character string (indicated by typing L in front of the string).
2. The second argument tells cwidget what to do when the ok button is pressed. The expression

     sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain);
   

   creates a slot using libsigc++. Briefly, a slot is a reference to a function or to a method of a class instance. When invoked, this particular slot will call cwidget::toplevel::exitmain(), which causes the main cwidget loop to exit. The slot is wrapped in cwidget::util::arg, a utility function that handles passing slots as optional arguments.

cw::widgets::widget_ref dialog =
    cw::dialogs::ok(L"Hello, world!",
                    cw::util::arg(sigc::ptr_fun(cw::toplevel::exitmain)));

Now that we have a widget, the next step is to arrange for it to appear on the terminal. In cwidget, control of the terminal is assigned to a single top-level widget: whatever it displays is what gets displayed on the terminal, and all user input is passed directly to it. In a real program this widget will typically manage a collection of sub-widgets and assign each one a screen region, but for now let's just display the dialog box we created:

cw::toplevel::settoplevel(dialog);

With everything initialized, we're ready to start the main loop. mainloop() will keep the display up-to-date and dispatch incoming events (for instance, keystrokes and mouse presses) until exitmain() is invoked.

cw::toplevel::mainloop();

When the user presses Enter or clicks on the Ok button in the dialog, exitmain() will be invoked by the binding that we set up earlier. Once this happens, we need to shut down cwidget in order to restore the terminal to its original state. If you skip this step, the terminal will be garbled and will not work properly when your program exits.

cw::toplevel::shutdown();

And that's it! To compile the program, change to the directory containing hello.cc and run:

$ g++ -o hello hello.cc $(pkg-config --cflags --libs cwidget)

Of course, you'll need to have the g++ and libcwidget-dev packages installed for this to work!

Yesterday, my friend Marc had to visit a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an electoral penalty. Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets. For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona. Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday, infringing the Spanish electoral law. He presented his allegations to the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine ranging from 180 to 1800 or community work (which he would, again, object to perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in court and see how it goes) is unprecedented. While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far. His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some Catalan media like VilaWeb. Some people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine. The response so far has been surprisingly positive. Marc, molta sort i una abra ada!

Well, the gauntlet is down (BTW - desktop power integration. Cool!). The use case Ted talks about is actually quite interesting - we were at UDS last month, waiting on a SVN server that was apparently so slow we could have walked to it and copied stuff onto harddisk more quickly. (Really. No kidding). bzr was idling and blocked on network IO the whole time... kudos for the plugin Ted! For my response, may I present a new index format, (branch url) 70% smaller than bzr's current default, equally fast at most workloads, up to 20 times faster at others. I started this this week, and John jumped in in overlapping time periods, but I think it counts! Note that the perfromance wins are a component improvement - other things we haven't addressed yet can make the index improvements less visible. But several early adopters have told me that they see a 25-30% reduction in 'time bzr log > /dev/null' or other commands. To install: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~lifeless/+junk/bzr-index2 ~/.bazaar/plugins/index2 bzr branch https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jameinel/+junk/pybloom ~/.bazaar/plugins/pybloom To use: cd <repository you want to experiment on> bzr upgrade --btree-plain (or --btree-rich-root for bzr-svn users). A version of this will be going to trunk soon, and it will be able to upgrade from any repository that you have that uses the plugin as long as you keep the plugin installed.

My Dell PowerEdge T105 server (as referenced in my previous post [1]) is now working. It has new memory (why replace just the broken DIMM when you can replace both) and a new BIOS (Dell released an “Urgent” update yesterday that fixes a problem with memory timing and Opteron CPUs). The BIOS update can be installed from a DOS executable (traditionally done from a floppy disk) or an i386 Linux executable. As I didn’t have a floppy drive in my new server I had to use Linux (not that I object to using Linux, but I’d rather have had the technician do it all for me). I used rescue mode from a Fedora 9 CD that was convenient, mounted a USB stick that I had used to store the BIOS update, and then ran it. The Dell service was quite good, on-site service and the problem was fixed approximately 27 hours after I called them. Replacing a couple of DIMMs is hardly a test of skill for the repair-man (unlike the time in Amsterdam when a Dell repair-man swapped a motherboard in a server with only 20 minutes of down-time). So I haven’t seen evidence of them doing anything really great, but getting someone on-site close to 24 hours after the report is quite decent, especially considering that I paid for the cheapest support that they offer. When I got it working I was a little surprised by the memory speed, I had hoped that a new 2GHz Opteron would perform similarly to an Intel E2160 and better than an old Pentium-D (see the results here [2]). Also the memtest86+ run took ages on the step of writing random numbers (I don’t recall ever seeing that step on previous runs, let alone having a system spend half an hour doing it). It seems that the CPU (Opteron 1212) doesn’t perform well for random number generation. In terms of actual operation all I’ve done so far is to install Debian. The process of installing Debian packages was quite fast (even with a RAID-1 reconstruction occurring at the same time) and the boot time is also very quick. The hard drive “rails” seemed a little flimsy. The way they attach to the drive is that they have screws that end in pins, so you screw them into plastic and the pins just sit in the holes in the drive where screws normally attach. I think that it would make more sense to have them not screw onto the plastic and instead screw onto the disk. Then if the plastic part that connects the two sides was to break it would still be usable. In fact they could just make the “rails” be separate rails as most other manufacturers do. One thing that surprised me was the lack of PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. I had expected that such ports would last longer than serial ports and floppy drives. However my Dell has a power connector for a floppy drive and has a built-in serial port (with some BIOS support for management via a serial port - I have not investigated this because I always plan to use a keyboard and monitor). Of course I expect that most other machines will start shipping without PS/2 ports now and I will have to dispose of my stockpile of PS/2 keyboards and mouses. I generally like to keep a few on hand so that I can give friends and relatives a chance to try a selection and discover which type suits them the best. But I probably don’t need a dozen of them for that purpose. While a comment on my previous post noted that the floppy drive bay can be used for another disk, it seems that a disk is not going to fit in there easily. It looks like I might be able to install a disk there from the front if I unscrew the face-plate - but that’s more effort than I’m prepared to exert for testing the system (for production I will only have two disks). In terms of noise, the Dell seems considerably better than a NEC machine which was designed for desktop use. Of course it’s difficult to be certain as part of the noise is from hard disks and one of the disks I’ve installed in the Dell is a WD “Green” disk and the other may have newer technology to minimise noise. Also the mounting brackets for disks in a server may be better at damping vibrations than screwing a disk to the chassis of a desktop machine. Finally the NEC machine does seem to make more noise now than it used to, so maybe it would be best to compare after a few months use to allow for minor wear on the moving parts. One interesting feature is the Broadcom Gig-E port on the motherboard, it supports iSCSI as a boot protocol which is an interesting alternative to PXE, so if you have a server attached to a SAN via iSCSI you can use the same protocol for booting. There is a USB port inside the case (for permanently attached USB devices), however the USB boot option states that it is offering the option to boot from front USB ports - and it claims that no operating system is found on the USB stick that I use to boot my Thinkpad. The down-side is that the bnx2 module in the Debian/Etch kernel doesn’t seem to work with it. I want the machine to have three Ethernet ports, I have a two-port PCI card and if I can get the port on the motherboard to work then I’ll have enough. Otherwise I need to buy a PCIe Ethernet card (the machine only has one PCI slot). I ended up installing CentOS on the machine after the Debian/Etch Xen kernel started falling over on disk IO load (a problem I had seen on another Debian/Etch 64bit Xen machine). CentOS 5.1 supports the built-in Ethernet device, but didn’t work correctly with Xen (my DomU’s would just hang or abort). CentOS 5.2 is now working correctly.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/26/dell-poweredge-t105/


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/

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About a month ago, I bought me a Samsung YP-T10 media player. I didn't want a device for which the Linux and/or Ogg Vorbis support was against the explicit wishes of the device's manufacturer, such as in the case of the iPod; because the more devices such manufacturers sell, the more they're encouraged to keep their systems closed. Definately not something I'd like to see. In that regard, the YP-T10 is pretty okayish. It supports Ogg Vorbis out of the box, and it has a reasonable set of features for a portable media player. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way. The set of features on the device is simply astonishing; apart from the obvious music playback stuff, it sports an FM radio, a text file reader, a voice recorder, a picture viewer, and a movie player. Given the size and clarity of the screen, this is actually a useful way to view a movie clip, too, although not a very comfortable one. Apart from the obvious USB cable, the device also has bluetooth connectivity which can be used to send and receive files, or to connect a bluetooth headset—especially interesting if you consider the modern stereo headphones that sound just like 'normal' headphones. Once you upgrade the firmware, the device gains the ability to play a few games, and to store vCard files. Very impressive, for such a small device. Unfortunately, not all is well. There's an RSS reader thingy on the device, which could be interesting; but it only works in companion with a Windows program, which obviously doesn't run on my (powerpc) laptop. There's only one way to charge the battery, and that's by connecting the device to a USB port. Unfortunately, that also means you cannot use the device while it's charging, since it switches to the MTP mode in which to receive files. That also goes for bluetooth, BTW -- if you're playing something, and the device receives bluetooth data, the playback is paused until receiving that data is finished. The USB cable is a nonstandard one. Given my track record of losing cables and stuff, I'm sure I'll get in trouble at some point. Hopefully Samsung will still sell those at that point. If not, well, I guess I'll see what happens then. Another point of this cable is that it's impossible to remove it from the device while the headphones are connected; you have to push a button which is physically placed in the direction of the headphone connector, about a millimeter away from it—not very interesting if I just want to connect the device to store one or two media files on there... The headphones that came with the device were not too bad, but the protective sleeves that came with it were too loose; after about a week or so, I'd lost both of them and had to buy me a new set of headphones. Luckily, that involves a simple standard headphone connector, so no problem there. All these are just minor annoyances, however. I don't really need an RSS reader, anyway. What really is a problem is the lack of tag support in Ogg files; while I can at least play them, the display will show 'Unknown' for artist, album, or title for any Ogg file—which is a real PITA. Altogether, however, I don't think the disadvantages of the device outweigh the advantages, and I've had quite some fun with it already. Having said that, given the lack of tag support in Ogg files, I don't feel I can really recommend it, at least not if you want to use it to play your Ogg Vorbis collection.

Just read on Farewell LUGRadio? [theangryangel] and Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... Lugradio is at an end [sungate] that the most famous UK Free Software podcast is ending at the end of this year. I don't know the reasons yet, but it seems a shame. I've been listening again since they proved me wrong and sorted out the dumb licensing terms so it's clearly legal to cut the shows up and only copy the bits that interest me, and Season 5 seems more interesting than previous ones. Then again, I enjoyed Red Dwarf VIII, so what do I know? (but VI and VII did drag a lot) Maybe I will go to Lugradio Live 2008 in Wolverhampton on 19-20 July now I know when it is! (Why is the date only as a large slow graphic on the event page? D'oh! (Yeah I know I should have emailed them, but I had an unfun experience with the show, so I'd rather shout this in public. Wow. I guess I'm still unhappy about them regressing to school playground name-calling.)) There are some suggested alternatives on theangryangel, but most are more Ubuntu-centric (which wasn't a good thing about LR), non-Ogg and/or non-European, so it looks like I'll give LinuxOutlaws a try. Any other recommendations?

MJ Ray noticed that LugRadio is going to end soon and asks for alternatives. I’d recommend to give Linux Action Show a try. I’ve always preferred it over LugRadio. It is funny, informative and not quite as vulgar as LugRadio.

I just uploaded belpic 2.6.0-4, with a few minor changes, and one major one. The minor changes are, first, a fix to beid-register-pkcs11.html so that it tries to install libbeidpkcs11.so.2, rather than just the .so file, into iceweasel; otherwise you have to install the -dev package (or manually install the library, or change the .html file) to be able to use beid in your browser. Second, there were some typo fixes of which a bugreport had been open embarrasingly long. Oops. The major change, however, is the fact that the debian packages now no longer have support for OpenCT as an alternative to PC/SC Lite. This isn't actually supported by the belpic upstream; and while the Debian packages did include support for such cardreaders, I do have a feeling that it was causing some problems. So why did I include it in the first place, you ask? Well, because my very own cardreader wasn't supported by PC/SC Lite. You see, when I originally packaged the eID software back in 2004, most people didn't have an eID yet, let alone a cardreader; and the fairly common ACR38U-based smartcard readers that are thrown to people's heads these days were nowhere to be found yet. So, I googled for a smartcard manufacturer, found Gemplus who claimed Linux support for (at least some of) their models, found the distributor for Belgium, and ordered a smartcardreader. It did work with Linux allright—but OpenCT, only. Only later on did I find that belpic expects PC/SC Lite. In itself, this was no problem; the first versions of belpic (up to and including 2.3.13) did have the OpenCT and other reader drivers still compiled in, anyway; only with 2.5 and later did Zetes choose to remove them. That's when I started patching, and that's when I discovered that problems began... So, anyway. No more mr nice guy OpenCT. I needed to do my tax declaration, and since it'd been a while since I last tried to do some belpic stuff (since before the move, actually), I discovered that I couldn't find my cardreader anymore. So, I bought me a proper ACR38U-based one, and did my tax declarations before doing the upload. How's that for testing? In any case, if anyone beside me was using the OpenCT bits in belpic, they're now out of luck. Go get yourself an ACR38U-based reader—they're only 15ish, anyway...

An hour ago the ttf-liberation package finally migrated to Lenny, yay! In case this doesn't ring a bell for you, check out wikipedia or the original announcement. Those are free fonts with the same metrics as Times, Arial and Courier.

My thanks go to Alan Baghumian, the Debian maintainer, and Max Spevack, Tom Callaway and some unnamed lawyers from RedHat, for helping resolving some licence questions, plus the unnamed artist(s) at RedHat, who made the fonts.

Now that Tim Connors has taken the lid off it, I feel I should opine on the matter. Microblogging is just not terribly exciting for the reader. I don't see the point in aggregating it. I don't particularly find Mikal's blatherings terribly exciting reading. I don't find Stewart's twitterings much fun either. I think Facebook's status updates are a better way to poll such things, myself, and it's where I confine my "microblogging" to. I think one of the things that used to make reading blogs more worthwhile than reading mailing lists was the high signal-to-noise ratio. Back in the day, there was a bit of a "cost" or barrier to entry for writing a blog post. For most blogs, it wasn't as easy as writing an email. I still hand-craft my blog posts in HTML, so for me to write something, I have to have enough inclination to fire up an editor and write the words. Often I run out of motivation half way through a blog post, and just end up scrapping it. I'm sitting on a few more lengthy posts that I haven't managed to summon up the energy to write at all yet. I think some of the "push-button publishing" out there is rapidly commoditising blogging, to the point where it becomes as easy or easier than writing an email. And we all know what happened to email... Blogging for me is essentially a journal. I like to use it to refer back to. To share what I'm doing with others. Occasionally it can be cathartic. Often it's a substitute for going to work and telling my co-workers about what crazy geeky thing I've done in my spare time. Mostly it's for me. The fact that I choose to share it with the world is not really a primary motivating factor for me, it just makes it more accessible for me, and sometimes helpful for others.

I've been working hard on a new project for the last couple of months, which I'm glad to be able to share with you now. For the impatient: today my company Control Yourself, Inc. is launching Identi.ca, a new microblogging service. (There's a press release on the Control Yourself site). Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web. The difference between Identi.ca and other services like Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce is that it is Open Source software. I tried to meet the requirements of the Open Service Definition -- Free Software and Free Data. In the same spirit, Identi.ca supports open standards like OpenID and OpenMicroBlogging, to integrate with other Web sites and services. A little background: in March of this year, I was privileged to take part in a summit at the Free Software Foundation about open network services. The summit brought together a number of people involved in Open Source and Open Content to discuss problems with "software as a service" and how to solve them. More and more, people are depending on Web sites and other network services "in the cloud" to do much of their computing tasks. Examples: using Yahoo! Maps instead of a desktop mapping application, or using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. Software-as-a-service can be extremely convenient -- data on remote servers stays up-to-date, software gets updated regularly, and you can use different computers or mobile devices to get at the same data. The sacrifice, however, is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn't work the way you want, you can't tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your Web site, you need Yahoo!'s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they're hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren't allowed to touch. There aren't a lot of clear answers to this. But our loosely-organized summit group is moving forward to promote and support Free/Open Network Services. These are Web sites (or other services) that use Free/Open Source software (with the source available) and provide Open Content data (except for data that users mark as private). There are a lot of them popping up -- like OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Others are close on the software side, although the data side is a little less clear -- like Wordpress.com, Reddit, or LiveJournal. After the summit, I wanted to try to see what I could do personally to further this mission. I think several of the sites I work on now -- like Vinismo and Keiki -- would qualify. But I also wanted to break some new ground and challenge people's assumptions about software services. And the services I was using, and getting invited to, the most were microblogging sites. Clearly that was the area to dig into further. To do it, I started Laconica, the software underlying Identi.ca. It's AGPL'd PHP using MySQL as a backend -- probably the most accessible platform on the planet right now. I used lots of existing libraries to make development easier, and I hired a great designer (Montreal's Marie-Claude Doyon) to give the site a professional look. Almost as important as the Open Source and Open Content is the distributed nature of Identi.ca. I designed an open protocol called OpenMicroBlogging, based on OAuth, to make it easy for users on one Laconica server to subscribe to notices by users on another server. I hope this will make the service more robust, develop a rich and diverse social network, and stimulate innovation. Because in the end, that's the Internet that we all want to be part of. As a society we rejected "walled gardens" like AOL, Compuserve, and MSN in the early 90s in favor of the distributed, open nature of the World Wide Web. And I think that the new walled gardens like Facebook and Google, need to be replaced with open protocols and standards. Will Open Network Services be the basis of "Web 3.0", the next stage of Web culture? I truly think so, but that's still an open question. People have been using Identi.ca for a few weeks now, although I've asked that folks wait until the software was more mature before posting public links. Today I'm lifting that embargo and asking friends and colleagues to join and participate in the conversation. I hope that people who are sympathetic with the ideals of Identi.ca will take the time to blog about it, invite their friends, and start using the site regularly. And of course I'd love to get feedback on bugs, requested features, and ideas for the future. Please also subscribe to me on the site -- see http://identi.ca/evan -- so I can see who's out there. There are still so many standard services on the Web that I'd like to see open sourced, open content, and distributed -- advertising, storage, image and file sharing, comments, portal pages, social news, social bookmarks, search engines. There's a real business potential for taking the lead in these areas, and I hope more people jump in.

Actual I’m involved into a project which maybe of interest for you if you like opera particular when you are a Richard Wagner enthusiast.
Since long time, the waiting period for obtaining tickets increases a lot. At the moment I think you have to wait around 8 years, which is a worse.
Time changes also at Bayreuth Festival, they seems to refocus their audience. Looks like the aspects of huge waiting list and new medias influenced that process. This year the opera “Die Meistersinger” is broadcasted online under the slogan “live dabei” (live there) via the great thing called “Internet” and to a public viewing area in Bayreuth, which is a premiere in both cases. So if you don’t have a ticket for the Festspielhaus and not in a position to make use of the public viewing but interested to have a look at the opera, you may want to check if your system matches the technical requirements and give it a try.

Netgear has jumped the bandwagon and released Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L). Like the earlier Linksys WRT54GL, it's an existing model with a Linux "L" added to end. It does not really add any hardware to make it community friendly, the "open source" part feels like just a marketing gimmick.

With just a couple of small features, these devices could really become community friendly:

• Serial port. A kingdom for a router or NAS with a proper serial port! Or at least a pre-solder the serial headers and provide a cable with a TTL shifter.
  
• Unbrickable bootloader. Alternatively, a relatively hard to brick bootloader like Linksys NSLU-2 has.
  
• Mainlined kernel. No "Linux 2.4.22 + binary drivers" crap, like this netgear device.
  
• Widespread availability. The community is around the world.
  
• Documentation.
  

Not as necessary, but nice to have features for a community-oriented product:

• JTAG. So one gets to unbrick it in case bootloader went bonkers. Also allows the community to develop the bootloader.
  
• Extensibility. Just adding a USB port gives any device huge amount of extra possible uses. A SD slot would give loads of storage space. etc..
  
• Contacts with engineers and developers from the manufacturer. Don't just market to the community, be part of the community :)
  

It's official, I am revoking my gpg key because after my laptop returned from service[1] I realized is a bad idea to change the passphrase just before a long break away from a routine that would help the brain to cement the new passphrase. In other words, I forgot the passphrase.

So, let's get the revocation certificate printout and revoke that gpg and generate a new one. All is good and fine until you realize that I (capital i) and l (low case L ) look very much the same on paper. Oops!

So, what do you do? How many I/l -s are there in the certificate? Let's find out...


0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: A revocation certificate should follow

iEkEIBECAAkFAkbYOQUCHQIACgkQY8Chqv3NRNquGgCgxdMDrhycNcoJsaeeg7hk
8vVJZzsAnRicsfjcZnUtmLIsys6KK48FbJ4h
=I5o9
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Well, I'm not going to count, I'll remove the header and footer and see from there...

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template.in tr -d '[a-zA-HJ-Z0-9=]'
II
I
I

Ok, so we have 16 possible combinations, not that many.

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in sed -e "s#I#$i#" -e "s#I#$j#" -e "s#I#$k#" -e "s#I#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIII.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IIIl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IIlI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IIll.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 IlII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IlIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc IllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc Illl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIlI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lIll.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llll.mid

Oops, that's not ok... I guess I've been replacing some of the characters more than once.

Take 2:
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in tr 'Il' '-' sed -e "s#-#$i#" -e "s#-#$j#" -e "s#-#$k#" -e "s#-#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIII.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIIl.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIlI.mid
eab3a5e312bc0314ac2b3d4536bda2f6 IIll.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IlII.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IlIl.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 IllI.mid
7150fa775c83c276223a30d373671333 Illl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIII.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIIl.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIlI.mid
63a9dd10e381b8ff5c758ab3467a5c45 lIll.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llII.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llIl.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc lllI.mid
919d8494c9990c68f50bc9df61f269bc llll.mid

Oops, that's not good either. Doh, sed works on lines.

Take 3:

Make a one line out of the template and try again:

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ cat template.in
iEkEIBECAAkFAkbYOQUCHQIACgkQY8Chqv3NRNquGgCgxdMDrhycNcoJsaeeg7hk8vVJZzsAnRicsfjcZnUtmLIsys6KK48FbJ4h=I5o9

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for i in l I ; do for j in l I ; do for k in l I ; do for l in l I ; do cat template.in tr 'I' '-' tr 'l' '-' sed -e "s#-#$i#" -e "s#-#$j#" -e "s#-#$k#" -e "s#-#$l#" > $i$j$k$l.mid ; done ; done ; done ; done
0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ md5sum *.mid
66ab0a0bed219db8499debabb9a41c0b IIII.mid
e02c1751c4491ce5db1ebe9e64d8eadc IIIl.mid
c96a33f821d3fba84f655aa986084320 IIlI.mid
998c5c4219a5afdd77f82c9fc9818f6f IIll.mid
e08fe6c5380765d12c4f5e4090a7d9c6 IlII.mid
24241b58c231900b02ebb0410183983e IlIl.mid
72040a77e7cca9a91abf2bb0d51c00dd IllI.mid
a02e8645f3593f5c3549b49adef04bc2 Illl.mid
99a1a47c853ed760ef1f58cba7b75916 lIII.mid
c48bf75f30be46ec576a46a1d5664a93 lIIl.mid
717e9dfdc0d3fba973ba66ccb57d69dc lIlI.mid
3e9a2c937fd269d85c09b449b4da17de lIll.mid
4d283333d1d62086328dbc72425a645d llII.mid
542a7c00e99aad5137975581e57a92c9 llIl.mid
ef0e0a2daad7a933b620331a86455c23 lllI.mid
bdf852887308830475a506f8daad9624 llll.mid

That's better. Now let's put those lines back in place:

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for I in *.mid ; do cat $I sed -e 's#\(eeg7hk\)#\1-#' -e 's#\(K48FbJ4h\)#\1-#' tr '-' '\n' > $I.good ; done


And revoke that key...

0 eddy@bounty ~/tmp/revoke $ for I in *.mid.good ; do echo "$I:" && (cat header $I footer) > template && gpg --import -a template ; done
IIII.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 73689A - 239A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0
IIIl.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 73689A - 979A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0
IIlI.mid.good:
gpg: key FDCD44DA: "Eddy Petri or " revocation certificate imported
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: new key revocations: 1
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987014 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987014 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: public key 67D8E867 is 987029 seconds newer than the signature
gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model
gpg: depth: 0 valid: 2 signed: 139 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 2u
gpg: depth: 1 valid: 139 signed: 667 trust: 138-, 0q, 0n, 1m, 0f, 0u
gpg: next trustdb check due at 2008-10-09
IIll.mid.good:
gpg: CRC error; 239A3D - 979A3D
gpg: read_block: read error: invalid keyring
gpg: import from template' failed: invalid keyring
gpg: Total number processed: 0


Cool!


[1] I know is almost a half a year, but I've been busy and hoping

I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don't think it really made sense. Let's look at the 7 ways they highlighted:

1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites

The article states:

Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.

Actually, that's not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:

Fiducia -- trusting in God. Borg says, "Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place."

Fidelitas -- loyalty, or "the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the 'heart'. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God."

Visio -- a way of seeing -- "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing 'what is'. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a 'willingness to spend and be spent' for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves."

Assensus -- perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is "faith as belief." Borg goes on to add:

The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a "head" matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of "belief".

This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.

As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.

2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas

The author says that "Stem Cells weren t the first time a body of research didn t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs." Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer's qualify?

I think the author's point should have been "exremists have odd views." Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.

3. Religion Removes the Need For Science

The author says:

When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.

That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers "how". Religion answers "why". Science cannot answer the question "Why was there a big bang?" or "Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?"

Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.

4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science

The author of "7 Ways" cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.

Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.

5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources

The original author states that "The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations." This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.

6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources

The original author says "if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today." It's not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it's open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.

It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.

7. Religion is A Strong Meme

The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls "literal-factual" religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "evangelicals" or the "religious right"; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.

More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for "scientific" ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.

That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today's Western world -- so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant -- both throughout history and today -- view of Christianity that is "more than" Science, not at odds with science.

I've just changed the behaviour of oldsys-preseed in the case when a static IP address is set in the configuration of the device that is the default setting from the vendor. In the past, oldsys-preseed would try to be smart in this case and do DHCP in the assumption that the users never configured the static IP address themselves and might not want to have that setting. However, Mike (mwester) convinced me that doing DHCP when the configuration clearly says to use a static IP is a bad idea. Apparently quite a few users got confused by the old behaviour of oldsys-preseed. The new behaviour exists as of version 2.0 of oldsys-preseed which will be in rc1 of debian-installer for lenny. This change affects the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100.

I put the Nokia E51, which I had previously acquired, onto Ebay last night, and it sold within minutes. Even though I made a 50 loss on the whole affair, this made me very happy! The phone is crap in so many ways that it made me quite angry. I now consider those 50 the investment I had to make to bring you this post: First of all, the reason why I bought the phone was because it sports wireless LAN as well as Voice-over-IP. Since I ve recently gotten into VoIP, I was looking for reasonable VoIP phones and even though the Siemens C450IP DECT phone works very well, it only does so at home, or where I find a switch port for it. So my theory was to get this Wifi+VoIP phone and be able to use my VoIP infrastructure from anywhere around the world. Penny has the Nokia E65 and loves it, so I went for the E51, a newer model that promised to address some of the issues she had with hers. All of the following is based on the E51 with the 100.34.20 firmware dated 29 September 2007, which runs the (crippled) Symbian S60r3 operating system.

Good things Let s start with the few good things up front: the E51 comes with a regular USB jack, allowing you to plug it into any computer and use it as mass storage device without the need for any Nokia-specific cables. I also liked the remote lock functionality: in the event of a stolen phone, you could send it a pre-defined passphrase that would cause the phone to lock itself. Also, the phone could be configured to lock itself (like a screensaver) after a given amount of idle time. Other than that, I could not find anything outstanding, so let s turn to the downsides, of which there are many more:

VoIP/SIP shortcomings I had previously dismissed the E series phones for good reasons, but both the E65 and the E51 improved their SIP clients a fair bit, and with the SIP VoIP settings utility, it was even possible to configure STUN. But unfortunately, the SIP client, while a nice toy, ended up being unusable in production. Here are some of the reasons: I got VoIP working at home and in some other places, but definitely not everywhere. It may be that some of those networks blocked the SIP port (5060/udp), or that the phone didn t feel well on the day, but in the majority of cases, I could not get the SIP client to connect. And there was no way to find out what was going on, as the client would just claim that registration failed without any additional information. It was also hard to retry, often requiring the phone to be restarted. Whenever if failed, the client would helpfully tell me that it could not establish a connection to the connection network . To get the phone to log on to the SIP server automatically, I had to define a home network for the SIP profile. Changing the access point for that network required a phone reboot to get SIP working again. It was possible to define multiple SIP profiles with different access points and add them all to the one, global VoIP profile, and theoretically get auto-login to work across multiple Wifi networks; unfortunately, I cannot say that this worked, there were always some problems requiring me to change defaults and shift things around. Also, after I had defined a few of those profiles and needed to make a change to the SIP settings (move the SIP port to 53/udp), I had to modify all profiles in turn; it was not possible to share settings. On the other hand, NAT traversal settings and timeouts, which can only be configured with the aforementioned SIP VoIP settings utility, applied to a VoIP profile and thus to all SIP profiles, without exception. I found it mildly annoying that I couldn t use # and * as part of the number/SIP address to call, nor was it possible to dial single-digit extensions the phone will ask you to associate a quick dial number with the key, even if quick dial has been explicitly disabled). I could also not dial a SIP address ad-hoc if I wanted to call sip:someone@sip.somewhere.org, I had to define a contact and add the Internet phone address. One can define Internet calls to be the default call type, thus routing all calls via VoIP if available. Unfortunately, once I dialed a number, the event was hardwired to the call type: I could not redial a number used previously for a VoIP call when all I had available was GSM coverage.

Gripes with the IMAP client The IMAP client, while an interesting addition to my day, turned out to be pretty unusable. The first mistake I made was to tell it to synchronise all messages in some of my larger mailboxes, which caused the phone to take tens of seconds until it switched a folder, and a few seconds just to scroll to the next screen in any given folder. I found that once any mailbox accumulates more than 100 messages, the client turns useless (Nokia s default is to synchronise 30 messages). I could tell the client to synchronise every hour, but only if I locked it to an access point, the home network . If I roamed to a different Wifi network, I could no longer connect to the IMAP server, as this access point would not be found. The phone would not let me use a different access point unless I changed the home access point, but changing that turned off the automatic mail sycnhronisation. If I say mail synchronisation, I mean header synchronisation. Even though there is an option for Headers only , it only applies to POP3; it is impossible to have the phone download message bodies automatically, only manually and then only per-message or per-folder, not for all folders at once. The IMAP client could delete messages, but it could not move a message to a different folder, nor create or delete folders. And even though I could turn off the message tone the phone would play when it received new email, it insisted on vibrating nevertheless. The only other IMAP client I found for Symbian phones is ProfiMail, which looked interesting and much more powerful, but which would randomly crash on me while browsing or operating on larger mailboxes.

Connection hickups While the an application was running that was using the network, the Wifi connection stayed open, but I could not make it stay open between sessions. The phone would obtains an IP, do what I asked it to, and then immediately close the connection. From a power management perspective, this makes sense, but not from the usability angle. I could not make the phone connect to a Wifi network that advertised both, WPA and WPA2 and had to disable WPA at home to let it connect. At times, it was not possible to reuse an existing connection. I haven t been able to figure out the details, but it seemed to me that whenever an application like the IMAP client was locked to an access point, it would be unable to make a connection to the IMAP server, even if e.g. the VoIP client was connected to the server by way of exactly the same access point. The phone would just say that a connection was already active and that I should close it and try again . I had a really hard time working with SSL-enabled websites and IMAP servers, because even though the phone presented me with the server certificate and offered the choice of accepting it permanently, it didn t and would ask the question again and again (which made the phone pretty unusable if the IMAP client was running in the background). Only after I had found out how to import the CACert root certificates, did this problem become irrelevant.

Other pet-peeves The phone came with a lot of smaller issues that made me ask the question of whether its designed ever had to use it too often. Possibly the most annoying aspect of the phone was its speed. It s a lot faster than the E61, but it still takes on the order of seconds to update screens or display simple text messages. Speaking of text messages, I am a little spoiled by the Sony Ericsson K610i (to which I now return), which would offer the contacts with whom I d recently interacted instead of presenting me with the full list, like the E51 does. I could filter the full list, but only by typing the start of the name substring matching was not implemented. It was impossible to receive text files via bluetooth and have them put onto the filesystem. On receipt, the phone just said text file saved , and it took me a while to figure out that it had stored them into the notepad, from where it could not be exported. To get my SSH identity onto the filesystem for PuTTY to use required me to access the phone via USB. The phone could receive vCards with new contacts, but it only offered to import the first contact, even though the standard allows for an arbitrary number of contacts per file. What s even worse though is that the phone silently failed to import contacts with non-ASCII characters in their name, such as or they just didn t show up even though the phone gave every indication of a successful import; creating such contacts on the phone worked, on the other hand. Each time I started the phone, the Nokia greeting screen would show up, accompanied with the Nokia tune, which could not be disabled. Enough said. The last problem I feel worth mentioning is hardly a Nokia or Symbian problem: battery life. With Wifi turned on, the phone would last about 24 hours on standby, which makes it pretty unusable for roaming Wifi or even VoIP usage.

Summing up I am happy to have sold the phone and look forward to returning to my Sony Ericsson K610i. After checking out the E61/E71 a bit, playing with the E65, and trying the E51 out for several weeks, I can conclude that Nokia has a long way to go before they can offer a usable smartphone with Wifi/VoIP capability. It would be a good step forward if they would open-source the Symbian operating system, but until that s done, I am going to look at the OpenMoko FreeRunner next. The E51 once again made it perfectly clear for me that proprietary software is no alternative for my use case. NP: Fat Freddy s Drop: Live at the Matterhorn