Since we uploaded Xfce 4.6 into Debian Sid, last week, not much have happened to most people. We had some bug reports, but mostly from amd64 users, because i386 and ppc packages are not yet available. The aren't all built at the moment. You can follow the build status here if you want. Most packages are built now, but xfce4-settings is waiting for libcanberra which is not installable because of a transition and a package waiting in NEW. It's quite painful to have this upload a bit harmed by this, but there's not much we could do. We already passed NEW when uploading to experimental to minimize the delay where unstable would be unusable, but we can't do that for packages we don't maintain but depend on. I'm wondering if, for Xfce 4.6.1 (which is supposed to be out this weekend but won't because of some problems on the release manager box), I won't disable the sound settings in xfce4-settings and thus get rid of the libcanberra build-dep. If you have keyboard (layout and shortcuts) related bugs, make sure to re-assign the shortcuts correctly, and re-set the keyboard model and layout in the keyboard settings. There was a quite large xorg update at the same time, which now use hal and console-setup stuff. So you may have problems with that and it can be a bit hard to know what's going wrong (settings migrations from Xfce 4.4 to Xfce 4.6, bugs in Xfce 4.6, configuration problems, conflicts, bugs in xorg etc.) But all in all, for amd64 users, it seems the transition is well received and not that bugs have been reported yet (I'm expecting bug reports to come more when i386 users begin upgrading).

At work, we have a bit of a vested interest in the Puppet and Facter packages that are in Debian, because we ultimately consume them in Ubuntu. We noticed that what was in Debian unstable was lagging a bit behind what was released upstream, and when one of my co-workers tried getting in contact with the Debian developers that were maintaining the Puppet package and got no response, I got involved. I got in touch with Micah Anderson and got myself and Nigel Kersten added to the Alioth project for Puppet. Despite Jamie Wilkinson being listed as the maintainer of the facter package in Debian, he claimed this was news to him, and Matt Palmer, who was listed as an uploader, didn't really claim much knowledge of maintaining the package either, so we took that as blessing to take over that package as well. This is where the fun begins. I've been meaning to try out Git ever since Debconf 7, where all the cool kids were using it and raving about it. I've been meaning to make the Debian DHCP package collaboratively-maintained, and use Git for the revision control, but I haven't quite gotten off my good intentions and done it yet. Part of the problem is not knowing exactly what workflow I should use, and suffering from paralysis by analysis, reluctant to experiment, because I don't want to go down the wrong path. Anyway, this is about Puppet, not DHCP. The Puppet package, as it turns out, is already maintained in Git on Alioth, so the problem here was more one of figuring out what the current workflow was, and trying to follow it. This is where Nigel came in. Conveniently, the upstream Puppet development is done in Git also, and Nigel is a contributor to Puppet upstream, so he had some Git-fu. So between the instructions on how to get started with Git on Alioth and what he knew, we could start fumbling around. It seems like the Alioth Git repository was also tracking the upstream Puppet repository, as there were commits in the Alioth one by Luke Kanies, and we didn't really imagine that he was doing Debian-specific stuff. Here's what we ended up doing to try and get what was in the Alioth repository up to the upstream version 0.24.8 of Puppet:

git clone ssh://apollock@git.debian.org/git/pkg-puppet/puppet.git

This part was fairly straight forward. Clone what's in Alioth locally.

git remote add reductive git://reductivelabs.com/puppet
git remote update
git fetch --tags reductive

Next, we added a remote branch that tracked upstream. We called it "reductive", and we updated it. The bit that took some fiddling with was fetching the tags. Nigel later figured out that tags are inherently private to a repository, and normally stay that way. So if I have a local clone of say the upstream Puppet repository, I can tag it to my heart's content, and normally those tags would stay in my local repository, because they're probably only meaningful to me.

git checkout -b upstream/0.24.8 0.24.8

This bit took a bit of work to arrive at as well. What we wanted to do was create a new branch called upstream/0.24.8, which was at what was tagged 0.24.8 in the reductive repository. Nigel pondered what would happen if you already had a tag or a branch called "0.24.8" before you added the remote repository. This is also why we had to fetch the tags from the remote repository, so we had something to check out.

git checkout master
git merge upstream/0.24.8

Next, we switched back to the master branch and merged the contents of our local upstream/0.24.8 branch that we just created. This now got the Puppet source in the master branch up to what was released as version 0.24.8. (and this is better than just running uupdate?) We did some fiddling with the debian/control file and debian/changelog and fixed up a few things that Lintian was bitching about, and were done. I'd set up a sid chroot with cowdancer previously, and had to do some faffing around with git-buildpackage to convince it to use pbuilder. I ended up using

git-buildpackage --git-builder="pdebuild --debbuildopts '-i\.git -I.git' --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/base-unstable.cow"

So now we've got most of what we want to ship checked into Git on Alioth. I have no idea if we've done it "right", I suspect we may have done something wrong by operating on the master branch. Looking at the revision history in the Git repository on Alioth, it looks like previously things have been done a few different ways. I certainly want to write up a definitive workflow once we've figured one out. We haven't uploaded the new package to unstable yet, because we're still trying to give it a modicum of testing, and we'd like to sort out the Facter package as well. The Facter package was a more greenfield exercise, as while there was already a Git repository on Alioth for it, it was empty. So Nigel had to do some futzing around to get it checked in the right way to make git-buildpackage want to build it. He did this by himself, so I'm not sure exactly what he did. I've since discovered that it's probably lacking some dependencies it needs, so that'll need to get fixed before it gets uploaded. I look forward to reading blog posts from the smart people who actually know how to use Git properly, telling me how we should have done it. I'm still very interested in coming up with a proper workflow for preparing packages and committing the changes, and for doing code review.

About a year ago, I read American Gothic by Steven Biel and the book has left a surprising lasting impression on me. The book describes the background, history, and life of "American Gothic: America's most famous painting" by Grant Wood. Even if you don't recognize the name "American Gothic", you are likely to recognize the picture or the scene. The book is a serious and -- as far as I can tell -- reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject that is interesting, insightful at points, and a breeze to read. Of course, the book is not actually about the painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago -- although it will certainly teach you more than you probably ever wanted to know about that painting, its subjects, its settings, etc. The book is really the story of how that paining has been received, understood, and used. Nearly half of the book focuses on examples of people who have remixed, reworked, reimagined, and reproduced the painting in myriad forms, formats, settings, and ways. The book contains scores of photographs of celebrities posing in American Gothic style settings, dozens of political cartoons based on the paintings, images of talk shows, magazine covers, Broadway plays, product advertisements, toys, gifts, kitch, and more, done up in recognizeable representations of the basic American Gothic form. There is a very incomplete of references to American Gothic in popular culture at Wikipedia that can give a tiny taste of what is out there. The last chapter of the book is devoted to these "parodies" and there's some brief talk of issues around copyright and control of the image. Wood's sister Nan was the owner of the copyright for much of the second half of the twentieth century and is also the woman in the painting. She famously charged several makers of more lurid take-offs with defamation and successfully blocked a number of remixes. In 1988, Nan transferred ownership to the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) which will hold the copyright until 2025. VAGA also claims "rights of publicity" in Nan's image which will last until 2060. VAGA takes a very expansive view of its copyright claims and argues that it has both veto power and royalty rights to any recognizably similar work. For example, VAGA does not want the American Gothic image used in alcohol advertisements and has successfully had such ads pulled. Biel's book contains no reference to the amount of money made from licensing the work but one can only conclude that it must be massive. VAGA blocked a plan by Iowa to use the picture on the back of the Iowa state quarter due to licensing disagreements; instead Iowa used a different Wood painting that was clearly in the public domain. What struck me most about Biel's book is related to just how deeply ingrained in American culture the American Gothic image has become. The book cites simple surveys that show that almost every American recognizes the painting (although only a small fraction know the painting's name or who painted it). The thousands of parodies that the book documents are testament to the fact that the painting has become a way of representing something essential about American culture and its values. But in a strange way, the painting's popularity and incessant reuse has also made it part of the culture that it so effectively captured. We can think of culture as a set of shared values and references that help us related to each other and to communicate. Just like idioms in language, culture helps us communicate more effectively, certainly, but also lets us communicate messages that would not be communicable otherwise. When Out Magazine, Coors, or any of several dozen others replace the figures in American Gothic with a gay or lesbian couple, they are succinctly sending a message about homosexual relationships and American traditional values that could not be made any other way. In this way, American Gothic -- both the painting and Biel's book -- represent a strong argument for free culture. If American Society has infused American Gothic with so much value, how can it be fair to let one person or organization own it? Are they not owning an essential mode through which a society can relate, experience, and communicate? I can't help but conclude that it shouldn't matter if VAGA does not like alcohol, advertisements, homosexuality, or wants to make a some money every time someone makes a cartoon parody. These are trivial concerns next to the importance of our society's need to communicate about these issues. If doing so requires the use of a shared cultural reference in VAGA's painting, I find it hard to justify VAGA's position of control. We need to be able to reproduce and reimagine American Gothic because it has become part of us. It's a striking example of the way that art becomes culture and the reason that truly free culture is the only appropriate response. We can't afford to let our experience of the world and each other -- to let ourselves at a very fundamental level -- be owned and controlled.

On our move down to California, Angie, Leif and I stopped by the Creationism Museum. I mentioned this a couple of Augusts ago. Unfortunately, I didn't want to post about it without having the pictures, and I've only just finally got around to uploading them. I suck, news at 11.

http://picasaweb.google.com/kaladron/CreationismMuseum

We went with Stephanie, and had a great time. We got there a bit late, so didn't get to see the floor show and stuff, but we did get a chance to see the exhibits. The people there were a little reminiscent of the TV show Circle Square, where the people were just a little too friendly, and blinked just a little too rarely.

How we heard about the creationism museum was from an Interview on CBC, where the guy who opened the museum talked about how they were trying to show a different interpretation of the results of archaelogical digs, and how they saw this as a religion, and that science is just another religion. We were a bit shocked when we got to the US to discover that the guy is somewhat less rational there, claiming that what they're doing is good pure science, etc.

The premise is an interesting one: They start with the literal truth of the bible and then interpret everything against that backdrop. The argument is a vaguely reasonable one: Scientists do this all the time using what they've learned in school. They've learned that the universe is billions of years old, and therefore will do carbon dating a certain way, etc. If you start with the bible saying that the universe is 6000-odd years old, then results wind up getting interpreted differently.

The key to most of how the world wound up the way it is is apparently tied up in two major events: First, the story with the apple (Sorry I'm a little light on details, I didn't grow up Christian) caused people to start eating meat and wearing clothes.

Aside of the moment, my in-laws have a great fridge magnet from restoringeden.org: "God's original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians"

The second big event was the great flood, which killed all the dinosaurs, caused turbulence, moved continents around, and some other stuff.

Amusingly enough, when looking for a link to the CBC review, I found a review of a complaint about the interview: http://www.cbc.ca/ombudsman/ombudsmanweb/39.htm

Anyhow, had a great time. Enjoy the photos. =)

While I did not think I would continue hacking on VoiDroid after achieving a semi-broken proof-of-concept implementation, it seems that I can t get out of it easily :-). I spent today trying to implement a solution which would allow the native C++ code to call into Java - for example, if we have a call in progress, and want to update the call status displayed to the user when it changes. The JNI library has some native callbacks which are getting called on call state changes, but getting the information to Java turned out to be a quite an experience, which, I thought, would be amusing to document, and, hopefully, save someone some quality bang-head-on-desk time. 1. Some of the threads calling native callbacks were initiated in Java (and thus known to JVM), and some where not, they were started in the native code. As JVM did not know anything about them, JNI calls would fail without too much explanation. Eventually I figured that out, and started attaching them as appropriate (JNI provides facilities for that). 2. Even after attaching, I could not resolve references to my classes from the native code, until I found a mysterious line in JNI docs: When a thread is attached to the VM, the context class loader is the bootstrap loader.. Basically, it means that when you attach a native thread, it is only capable of resolving built-in Java classes. 3. I later found a reference to a technique, suggesting to cache a good classloader from a Java-initiated thread, and later set the classloader for the attached thread to it. I implemented that, only to find out that Android s JVM is not your regular JVM, so things are slightly different here, and this technique does not work. 4. Luckily, there is an incredibly useful post describing the problem, and suggesting a workaround: caching an instance of needed class globally in native code, after calling NewGlobalRef on it, to avoid garbage collection on exit from a native function. I did that, however I only had access to the class, and Android JNI only supports calling NewGlobalRef on an object, so I had to create a dummy object in the native code (JNI_OnLoad() function, actually) and cache that. 5. That finally enabled me to call into Java from native, attached threads (w00t!). Unfortunately, you are not allowed to modify the UI (exactly what I wanted to do from my Java callback!) from a non-UI thread, which brought me right back to the drawing board. 6. As callbacks initiated from native code would not work for this reason, it was suggested to me to use a classic producer-consumer mechanism, getting Java call into the native library block until new information gets delivered by a native thread. Easily done with some pthread mutexes, and the goal is close, right? 7. Wrong! Now the problem was that if I started a UI Java thread, which would call the native function in a loop to retrieve the data (it would not actually spin, as the native function blocks until new data is available), then it would be declared not responding by the UI framework in a few seconds. I could start a non-UI thread for that, but you guessed it a non-UI thread is not allowed to update UI! Instead of resolving the problem we just shifted it into the Java land. 8. While I was simply thinking about stuffing the result into a class variable and passing it to the UI thread this way, this tutorial, showing how to display a progress indicator while doing some heavy calculations in the background, provided a more elegant idea. One can use Android s android.os.Handler class to pass messages (with arbitrary payload) between threads. That was the last piece of the puzzle, which allowed me to finally achieve a working implementation (some 10 hours or so later :-).

Rahul Basu pointed out an article by the eminent scientist Freeman Dyson. In the past Dyson has raised a number of interesting questions and has been thought-provoking, but it is difficult to read him when he writes like this. I have re-phrased what he has said (debunking climatologists) and turned it into an argument against the Large Hadron Collider so that we can see how obnoxious it sounds.¹

My first heresy says that all the fuss about the Higgs particle is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of high energy physicists and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe that the world is predicted by the standard model. Of course, they say, I have no degree in physics and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the standard model and I know what it can do. The model solves the equations of gauge theory in the simplest cases, and it does a very good job of describing the interactions of the known particles. It does a very poor job of describing how mass arises and the chemistry and the biology of phenomena we see everyday. It does not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on a lab coat and measure what is really happening in the complex phenomena of compounds and materials. That is why the high enery physicists end up believing their own models.

The rest of the article can then be similarly re-phrased but I will just summarise it as:

There is no reason for the rest of the world to believe the high energy physicists and squander billions of dollars into following their proposed unique solution to the questions of physics.

Of course, there is a good chance that Dyson will agree with the above point of view as well! The problem with controversialists'' like Dyson is that they believe that taking extreme positions helps clarify issues. Unfortunately, extremists are a-dime-a-dozen in today's world. I suppose I should clarify that I accept neither the extreme position on climatology nor the one on the LHC!

This is a really slim and really incomplete description of the events turning really bad for Romania and severely bad for Moldavian civilians.

• Moldavia calls his ambassador from Romania
• the peaceful protests turn violent on Tuesday (while Voronion recognised for Ria Novostni that they allowed the protesters to control for a day the Presidential building and the Parliament (in Romanian)
• the Moldavian public is kept in the dark by the authorities: the national radio-television doesn't cover the events, the independent media is not allowed to report the events
• in the rural areas of Moldavia no other media is accessible except the national television which is controlled by the Communists
• Moldavian police men tear down a wall close by the Moldavian Parliament during the violent turn of the protest
  
• Moldavia accuses Romania without any proof of implication in the events in Moldavia
  
• The Romanian ambassador Filip Teodorescu, and the Counseling Minister of the Romanian Embassy in Moldova, Gabriel Gaboran, are declared persona non grata in Moldavia; Romania can't do the same since the Moldavian ambassador is not in the country
• Vladimir Voronin announces visas will be introduced for Romanians (an abussive measure since the EU should have been announced of such a measure with 48 hours in advance)
  
• Romanian authorities respond by:
• a ferm denial of the unproven accusations - from what I have seen CNN and Euronews simply don't accurately represent the declaration, and the texts put under quotes - the word "provocation" - imply that the Romanian position is not honest
  
• they declared that they will NOT declare the Moldavian ambassador as a persona non grata and that the regime of gratuitous visas for the Moldavian citizens will not change
• EU DOES NOT ANSWER AT ALL TO THIS ABUSE AGAINST EU CITIZENS
  
• Wednesday protests are quiet but media access is highly restricted and inaccurate information is aired through the national Moldavian Television
• Romanian journalists from Antena 3 were harassed, followed and, fearing for their safety, they appealed OSCE authorities in Moldavia to be able to leave the country safely
  
• Wednesday and Thursday many arrests occur in Moldavia and the Romanian officials requested the Moldavian officials to tell them if among the arrested people are any Romanian citizens; no answer was provided by the Moldavian authorities
• France, Sweden and Czehia and some other EU members declare that they "understand the complexity of the relation sensible issue between Romania and Moldavia" and appeal to Moldavia to rebound the diplomatic relation with Romania - WHAT? In Diplomatic lingo that seems to mean something like "we know Romanians are idiots, but please, Moldavian authorities, let's get back to dialogue"
  
• Today, Friday 10, the Moldavians are called to protests and the authorities are authorized to use real ammunition
• Teachers, university administration personnel, opposition representatives announce that people should not attend the protests and measures will be taken against anyone allowing people (mostly youngsters) to attend the protests
• Russia declares that "the EU has a member state that hasn't clearly delimited its borders" which obviously refers to Romania, thus attacking Romania and alleging that Romania has unionist expansions; EU DOESN'T DO ANYTHING!

Are we living in a parallel world? What interests would Romania have to ever consider that it would be involved in this? Moldavia is the poorest country in Europe, has huge problems with justice, corruption, criminal activity, social security, border security (Transdnistria) and other issues which Romania does NOT want to import since we're already in a bad position by ourselves!


WHAT THE HELL IS EU DOING? Romania is a member of the EU and it seems all the attacks against Romania are not addressed in any way by the EU, on the contrary, EU members either assist passively, look the other way or even allow us to understand that indeed they think Romania is involved.

Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.

From the Bits from the Debian Installer team mail to d-d-a:

It has been decided that, in order to not slow down the development processes, D-I SVN should be branched when the work on preparing a release starts. Even if SVN doesn t make the process very easy, changing the VCS we use is currently not an option we prefer.

SVN, branching, d-i. There s no word to describe how painful it is to work on d-i using SVN. d-i is big, SVN is slow in about everything it does. Now add branches to the mix. That mail left me very disappointed; first because I thought switching to git was sort-of planned for after the release of Lenny, and now it s off the table, second because some things in this mail are just wrong. Oh well. No d-i for me, I guess, then.

A couple of months ago, I switched over to ThePhoneCoop s LLU package. The new service is good so far. The ADSL is blazingly fast (I wonder if it will remain so good) and the main drawbacks so far are a lack of reverse DNS (currently escalating that one up through tech support) and a slightly noisy dialling tone on the phone. I was initially switched to a dynamic IP address (which was a change I wasn t told about in advance), but got a static on request so we could restrict the VPNs a bit more. As usual, LUGgers were a source of help when it looked like going a bit wrong. Thanks to oddbloke for positive feedback about Buffalo routers (they work fine with OpenWRT, but not tried ADSL). Big thanks to Noodles for pointing out that the Buffalo router I linked wasn t an ADSL router, despite being listed as such, that the only ADSL chipset to have full open source support is the AR7 (but the wifi is dodgy) and that the Broadcom chipsets have 2.6 support but maybe with a binary blob. I m still not sure if a new router is necessary. The infernal Belkin seems to be working, but it s disconnecting and rebooting a lot more often. I seem to be on the TalkTalk/CPW network - anyone know of problems with Belkin routers? I ve not seen anything yet. Also, who else has unbundled and how was it for you?

Many people in the western world are completely unaware that in the Moldavian Republic there is an ongoing protest against the current Communist Party which is at power after the parliamentary elections held on Sunday. The protestants accuse the Communists of election fraud and there are numerous reports of dead people being recorded as voters, people which, by religion, chose not to vote, and other several people which couldn't have voted.

Tuesday the protests took a violent turn, apparently "aided" by some instigators which were reported to be seen as recording the protesters, taking notes and, generally, not fitting the picture. During the day the national television broadcasted absolutely no information on the events, and aired documentaries, cartoons and no news on any of the protests. To me, this looked very much alike what the Romanian Television aired during the Romanian Revolution in December '89 when during the fights in the streets of Bucharest the Television aired no images from the centre of Bucharest.

But, back to Moldavia, at the end of the day, sadly, the Parliament and Presidency buildings were devastated, making it easy for the Communist leaders to produce some disinformation propaganda based on real footage.

Yet again, sadly, but it seems under the protection of some of the aforementioned instigators, the flags of the EU and Romania were waved at the highest levels of the Parliament building during the time the protesters allegedly took over that building (there were several reports that the Police forces actually simply let them in, without actually needing/being forced to do that; also the passivity of the policemen seen in the footage from Romanian televisons was obvious).

As many Moldavian students live and study in Romania, some of them wanted to go home and take part at the protests happening in Chi in u. To their surprise, many of them were denied the right to enter their home country. Many, if not all, Romanian journalists were also denied access in the country accusing alternatively technical issues, lack of proper papers (although only the passport or the ID card was officially required), lack of safety, or simply refusing without reason.


Today, the Moldavian president Voronin, accused Romania as being behind the manifestations in Chi in u, Moldova's capital and said it will declare as a persona non grata the Ambasador of Romania in Moldova, and thus forcing him to leave Moldova within 24 hours. He went even further and said that visas will be required from now on for Romanian nationals. As soon as this was announced, it was one of the most invoked reasons by the Moldavian customs as a rejection reason, although, according to Moldavian Embassy officials in Romania, no rules or procedure were known for the release of visas for Romanian nationals.

Also, during Wenesday, Moldavian crossing points were opened and closed alternatively but incosistently accros the entire border for Moldavian nationals. Romanian nationals were denied in most cases (although some Romanian truck drivers were reported as allowed to cross). At some point during the day the Moldavian officials from the customs told the Moldavian students awating at the border that they are offered access on the condition they go direclty home with the buses provided by the Moldavian customs and were warned that going to Chi in u wasn't a smart choice for them. Some of the information from students which managed to enter their home country suggested that is advisable to not enter the country since they were going to be denied of the right to leave the country later, when they were to return to Romania to their studies (after Easter).

What's sadder is that the Moldavian voting system is built in such a way that the vote counting, in the end is done by Government officials behind closed doors, inside a Ministry. OTOH, the international official observed the things which happend in public, but did not see any of the dead voter lists (since they were not present when those votes were casted), and declared the vote as mostly legal and without major or significant incidents.


According to the media, before the elections, the Communists were credited with 35-37% of the votes in an independent poll, while in the exit poll conducted by the Communists themselves they were credited with 42-45% of the votes. In the end the last official partial results credited them with approximately 51% of the votes.

About Vladimir Voronin, it is a known fact that he has double citizenship, Moldavian and Russian and is a reserve general within the Russian Army and currently has a pretty nice pension from the Russian state.


All I can say is that, although the Moldavians' desire to have a real democracy is a legal and reasonable request, the western world chose, due to the international circumstances, to look the other way around and not to incommodate Russia in any way. Moreover, to accuse Romania to have unionist desires an act upon those desires is planly stupid since now Romania is part of the EU and Moldova uniting with Romania is simply impossible now, since Moldavia's economy would sunk even more the fragile and regressing Romanian economy and Romania would instantly fail the EU requirements which would mean disaster for us.

(The title is a bit strong, on purpose) LWN links to an article describing how to provide robust clustered storage with Linux and GFS. While explaining how to setup GFS can be nice, the incentive made me jump. The author writes:

Load balancing is difficult; often we need to share file systems via NFS or other mechanisms to provide a central location for the data. While you may be protected against a Web server node failure, you are still sharing fate with the central storage node. Using GFS, the free clustered file system in Linux, you can create a truly robust cluster that does not depend on other servers. In this article, we show you how to properly configure GFS.

In case you don t know, GFS is not exactly a clustered storage . It is more a shared storage . You have one storage, and several clients accessing it. You have one storage array, compared to the NFS case, where you have one central server for the data. But what is a storage array except a special (and expensive) kind of server ? You don t depend on other servers, but you depend on other servers ? How is that supposed to be different ?

Conceptually, a clustered file system allows multiple operating systems to mount the same file system, and write to it at the same time. There are many clustered file systems available including Sun s Lustre, OCFS from Oracle, and GFS for Linux.

OCFS and GFS are the same class of file systems, but Lustre is definitely out of league and would, actually, provide a truly robust cluster that does not depend on other servers. Lustre is a truly clustered filesystem, that distributes data on several nodes such that losing some nodes don t make you lose access to the data. With the incentive given by the author, and considering he lists Lustre as an example, I would actually have preferred an article about setting up Lustre.

I ve been tilting at windmills, recently. Windmill, actually. It s a Python program that lets your computer drive a web browser, without any human interference. We use it at Akoha to run tests that make sure that our website works with Firefox. We use it to help us test our site with Internet Explorer. So I dutifully set up a Windows machine and tried to get it to run our test suite. I quickly realized that our software was going to need something more Unix-like. Cygwin is the answer to that problem. It provides a full POSIX environment inside Windows. I built all our software and tried to fire up Windmill.

ImportError: No module named _winreg

Uh oh! Windmill needs to access the Windows Registry. According to the winreg documentation, it s only available for Windows. Apparently, Cygwin doesn t count as Windows. So I spent the weekend writing a library that fills in the gap. cygwinreg allows you to read, write, and explore the Windows Registry from inside Cygwin. Whenever you want to use winreg, use cygwinreg instead.

import sys
if sys.platform == "win32":
    try:
        import winreg
    except ImportError:
        import _winreg as winreg
elif sys.platform == "cygwin":
    import cygwinreg

After I did that, I plugged it in, stepped back and ran my tests. They worked!

Download cygwinreg
or install it with
easy_install cygwinreg

Or WebKitGTK+ gains localization support ! Continuing our quest to finish off old bugs, and plug the bigger and more visible missing holes in functionality, a lot of work went into making WebKitGTK+ l10n-capable. This work has been committed today. This means we will now be able to translate things like dialogs, context menus, form elements, and any other string that makes sense to translate and is generated by WebKitGTK+.

Don t be fooled by the fact that the context menu is talking about spell checking, by the way. This is still something we do not support, and is only there because Epiphany doesn t override WebKitGTK+ s default context menus. I know that diegoe is working on it, though.

NCBA invites you to pick the Monday, April 6th edition of the New York Times to check out the front section for a very special advertorial on cooperative business. NCBA will receive a copy of the Advertorial to place on its Web Site on Monday and we will distribute a link so you can post it on yours in the next edition of the eNews. However, we hope that you ll let everyone at your cooperative know to pick up the Monday New York Times as everyone in the cooperative community should be proud to be part of this national effort to promote cooperative awareness.

These are challenging times for all businesses, but cooperatives are well-placed to weather the storm. I ll report back from our Bristol co-ops event later or tomorrow.

Here is the Australian Electoral Commission documentation on how to register a political party [1]. It includes the requirement for A Microsoft compatible electronic membership list (and paper copy) providing the following information . So a prerequisite for registering a political party appears to be the ownership of a PC running Windows. While it may be the case that I could create a plain text file on a Linux machine and append some CR characters to each line, or create a CSV format spread-sheet/database file the most common interpretation of this is likely to be that MS-Office is required. Such blatant promotion of a software vendor in a government document is unacceptable. Anyone who wishes to use other software for their political activities should be permitted to do so without restriction.

• [1] http://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/Party_Registration/Handbook/application.htm

You are wondering if forgot my password of the blogging account? No I didn't, I just don't have much time to do blogging. I try to invest more time to just do things than to talk about what I have done or will do. Blogging needs time: you need a topic to blog about, you have to login, make a point, do spellchecking and so on. The result: you see about every 3 months a blog post from me. Don't get me wrong, I am doing geeky stuff every single day (except when I am on vacation maybe, but that was how many years ago, eh?).
Micro-Blogging to the rescue! You probably know micro-blogging ala twitter.com already, but for me thats something new You just post a single message with no more than 140 characters and you are done. So if you want to follow my activities, feel free to subscribe to my micro-blog found on twitter: http://twitter.com/meebey Smuxi is doing nice progress now, I made 2 important changes to archive constant progress: switch from Subversion to Git and with that switch from Trac to Redmine. Now everything is kept in feature-branches and I can switch more often between features and bug fixes without messing all up. More details about this can be found in this Smuxi blog post.

While Linux and Debian are plenty of programs for backing up your system, things change when you need a backup system for a common desktop user. In this area there is a lot of room for improvement, as programs for KDE and GNOME are years behind what programs for Windows and Mac OS X are offering.
There has been some programs intents of writing a good program, full featured and with a nice graphical interface, as Simple Backup, and its fork Not So Simple Backup, pybackpack, or TimeVault, an intent to clone Apple s TImeMachine, and it s fork TimeVaultNG written for KDE. Those are projects that start with a great impulse, even some of the mentored by Google Summer of Code, and when they reach some basic functionality, they get abandoned or not being properly maintained.
What I would like to see for a backup system for desktop user is:

• Desktop independent backend. Why implement and reimplement and reimplement again. A lot of effort is lost in early stages, until program starts to be functional. For this, using yet written utils as rdif-backup, duplicity or rdup would allow this step to get ready faster, and being more reliable.
• Frontend integrated with desktop, being it GNOME or KDE. This will imply implementing two desktop clients, so they can use technologies available to each one.
• Using dbus for communicating frontend and backend.
• Backend should be able to detect removable devicies as well as network based backups (think on NAS), and only perform the backup if they are present
• Allow to store backups also in Amazon S3. This could be in raw or even better, with a system that would allow mounting the remote device as a local HDD. This is something JungleDisk makes, and using fuse should not be hard to implement

A lot of improvement and innovation has taken place in Linux Desktop during all these years, but backups are also important for SOHO users, and they need a well integrated program for doing that, as console based solutions usually require configuration skills which desktop users don t have.
Updated 6th April 22:26 CEST: I have been recommended in comments to try Back in Time and D j Dup. Both are in active delopment, which is a bonus. The first one works in a similar way to TimeVault, while the second one works using duplicity as backend, but has support to upload the resulting files to a remote server using SSH or to Amazon S3. I will investigate more on these apps.

Here I am, utterly disgusted. Last Thursday, around 11pm, two dozens of members of Assembl e Nationale (one of the two parliament chambers in France) voted the infamous law nicknamed HADOPI. Great... For the record, this chamber in principle counts 577 members. This law is an awful blow to the Internet, the freedom of expression and the legal system in France. The official aim of this law is to put a stop to illegal file-sharing within France. With this law, specially appointed private companies will file accusations saying: this IP downloaded something illegal at this date to a central authority, and this authority will send two warnings before cutting the Internet connection of the alleged illegal downloader for up to a year. You will notice that there is no mention of what the incriminated person allegedly downloaded. There will be no possibility of appeal until the sanction is executed. This scares the hell out of me. This spits upon so many aspects of the French legal system that it is honestly impressive... What about the French principle that says that everyone is innocent until proven guilty ? Here, you are declared guilty based on a rather weak evidence (on IP address !), and you'll have to prove your innocence. What about the principle that there needs to be a fair trial before the execution of the sanction ? You'll have to prove you are innocent after the execution, with the additional fun that it will turn almost impossible to prove it. Not to mention the fact that the companies harvesting IP addresses of alleged offenders will have a great deal of access to data you're exchanging; what about privacy ? For the record, this privilege, violating the way justice works in France, had only ever be granted to anti-terrorist cells. The fun thing is that this law is useless, at least in terms of the its official goal: the day it comes into application, illegal file sharers will encrypt their exchanges or fake their IP addresses, or do whatever else they might want to do to guarantee their anonymity, and no company will ever be able to find out what it is they exchange. I won't even mention the number of false positive of these automatic accusations: many innocent French web surfers will have their connection cut without ever knowing why and without any possibility to fight back. So, what is the real goal ? Or what will be the use ? I can only speculate, of course, but it is tempting to think that this law could be used to regulate what is being expressed from France on the web. Someone is saying disturbing things ? Well, easy to shut him/her up: either fake downloads from his/her IP address or bribe a company into filing false accusations, and you'll effectively remove his/her connection while having the opportunity to further discredit the person by publicly disclosing that he/she is such a pirate that their connection was cut... Sounds neat, doesn't it ? In my childhood, teachers kept on saying that France is the country of human rights, but I can't help thinking this is less and less the case[1]. Well. That was a long rant. But I can't keep it inside: this is touching me too much. I'll add that I'm not downloading anything, and I don't have anything a priori against laws which would tend to regulate illegal file sharing. I just don't think that the (small) profits of a few justify spitting upon the freedom and the elementary rights of all people living in France. Further information, in French, can be found there. The full text of the project can be found on the website of Assembl e Nationale. [1] Please don't get me wrong. There are many countries where life is definitely more difficult than here, and where human rights are constantly scorned upon, which is fortunately not the case here yet.

Neil put me onto this guy who is also doing monitoring of his cat water bowl. Unlike my way of doing it, he seems to be doing it without any probes in the water, which would make refilling the water bowl a lot less fiddly, although adds the requirement to have a rig above the bowl. This ultrasonic sensor thing sounds very interesting. I foresee the soldering iron making a reappearance in the near future...