Search Results: "ron"

27 March 2009

David Welton: CodingHorror and Open Source Economics

Jeff Atwood writes about the economics of open source software: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001247.html Well, he actually doesn't say as much, but that's what it's about. Someone really ought to do a book about this subject. I have some ideas - any takers? It's always tough to write about because there's so much material. It's a topic that is near and dear to my heart - almost 10 years ago, I joined the Free Software Business mailing list, as I got curious about the intersection of free software and business, and how the whole thing worked. I've learned a lot in the meantime, including a stint at Linuxcare, which was one of the Linux companies during the dot com boom, and am still fascinated by the subject. Before we get started, let's reiterate something:
  • It's clear that open source software works. There's just no doubt about it - it's been through ups and downs, the dot com boom and bust, and it will trundle happily (well, as happy as anyone is with this economy) through the recession too.
That point bears repeating. Everything else needs to take it into consideration. Could it work better? Differently? Perhaps, but it does work, so you need to understand it very well before you fiddle with it. Jeff writes:
for the average user? Heck, how realistic is this for the average programmer? Even if you're the type of macho, gung-ho programmer who can master an alien code base just to get some small pet feature or bugfix in -- do you honestly have the kind of time it would take to do that? Sometimes, when people say this:
The source code is freely available. If you feel so strongly about this bugfix/tweak/feature/plugin, why don't you code it yourself?
They're really saying this:
F**k you.
Which is of course a terrible analysis of open source, and its pros and cons. I wrote the following comment on Hacker News:
Heck, how realistic is this for the average programmer? ...
"Actually, I have submitted lots of (mostly small and inconsequential) bugs and minor features over the years, to projects such as the Linux Kernel, Tcl, Erlang, Ruby, Rails, Apache, and probably lots of others I'm forgetting right now. I actually enjoy it quite a bit, come to think of it - there's something cool about diving in and studying something new and different, and a thrill that comes with nailing the bug. Sometimes, the knowledge required to actually fix it is too much, and you have to settle for sending in a good bug report, but in other cases it's very much possible to hack up quick, useful things despite not knowing much about the system in question. And, no, I'm not really that great a programmer... I'd consider myself fairly average." And I know I'm not alone, as I see similar sorts of people in Debian and the Apache Software Foundation. Debian, infact, is all about those kinds of tweaks to improve the operating system as a whole. And this sort of exchange goes on all the time, as evidenced by the huge success of a large number of open source projects. Now, granted, most projects are really driven by one or a few really committed hackers, who do the lion's share of the work. However, that large network of people who contribute, test, document, and suggest is certainly important to any open source project. As long as we're looking at my anecdote, let's look at it in a bit more depth - most of those projects are developer tools or closely related. A cynic might note that Jeff comes from the world of Microsoft, where the core developer tools are provided by a company and 'giving back' is limited to payments and bug reports. But leaving that be, I think the enormous success of stuff like Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Apache, Linux, GCC, and on and on and on indicates that, at least in terms of stuff that developers share between one another, open source works. However, there are problems, one of which is that he (or, in unfortunately rather rarer cases, she) who writes the code does not necessarily get the money. And without money, he or she who writes the code must dedicate themselves to some means to actually accumulate a bit of money in order to pay for living expenses. Most likely, this is time taken away from the open source project, which is a loss for all the people who benefit from it. Proprietary software solves this feedback loop in a neater way (generally) - companies that create good products get money for their efforts, which can then be reinvested in development. Jeff suggests that "sponsorship seems like a constructive way for people who are unable or unwilling to write code to affect the direction of a project.", which is ok as far as it goes, and more or less works here and there, but hopefully he's not thinking about trying it on a larger scale. This sort of thing has been tried before, and never really seems to take off. Part of the problem is that it can work on a person-to-person basis, but is almost impossible to standardize in a way that it makes sense to have some kind of clearinghouse that operates as a business. There are simply too many factors - what kind of open source project it is, what motivates the people behind it, how the transaction costs of defining a specification, monitoring the results, sending money and so on compare to the actual value of a fix... the list goes on. Ultimately, it's a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to work out too well in practice. Anyway, while it's a good thought on Jeff's part, at the end of the day, it is fairly evident that he doesn't have a lot of first hand knowledge of open source business and economics. That said, to some degree, open source took everyone by surprise, and, lacking the nice, simple feedback loop that proprietary software has, can be a lot more difficult to get a handle on. I find it quite pleasant that way - it attracts both hard-headed business types and social-experiment idealist visionaries; both huge corporations (IBM!) and a huge number of individuals; both people who have gotten quite wealthy from open source as well as most of the rest of us who manage to make ends meet but still love it. It's not something that's easy to pigeonhole, and as such it's hard enough to figure out the many ways in which it does work, let alone figure out how to improve on it. Stay tuned for further installments: Software Economics - Public Goods

David Welton: CodingHorror and Open Source Economics

Jeff Atwood writes about the economics of open source software: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001247.html Well, he actually doesn't say as much, but that's what it's about. Someone really ought to do a book about this subject. I have some ideas - any takers? It's always tough to write about because there's so much material. It's a topic that is near and dear to my heart - almost 10 years ago, I joined the Free Software Business mailing list, as I got curious about the intersection of free software and business, and how the whole thing worked. I've learned a lot in the meantime, including a stint at Linuxcare, which was one of the Linux companies during the dot com boom, and am still fascinated by the subject. Before we get started, let's reiterate something:
  • It's clear that open source software works. There's just no doubt about it - it's been through ups and downs, the dot com boom and bust, and it will trundle happily (well, as happy as anyone is with this economy) through the recession too.
That point bears repeating. Everything else needs to take it into consideration. Could it work better? Differently? Perhaps, but it does work, so you need to understand it very well before you fiddle with it. Jeff writes:
for the average user? Heck, how realistic is this for the average programmer? Even if you're the type of macho, gung-ho programmer who can master an alien code base just to get some small pet feature or bugfix in -- do you honestly have the kind of time it would take to do that? Sometimes, when people say this:
The source code is freely available. If you feel so strongly about this bugfix/tweak/feature/plugin, why don't you code it yourself?
They're really saying this:
F**k you.
Which is of course a terrible analysis of open source, and its pros and cons. I wrote the following comment on Hacker News:
Heck, how realistic is this for the average programmer? ...
"Actually, I have submitted lots of (mostly small and inconsequential) bugs and minor features over the years, to projects such as the Linux Kernel, Tcl, Erlang, Ruby, Rails, Apache, and probably lots of others I'm forgetting right now. I actually enjoy it quite a bit, come to think of it - there's something cool about diving in and studying something new and different, and a thrill that comes with nailing the bug. Sometimes, the knowledge required to actually fix it is too much, and you have to settle for sending in a good bug report, but in other cases it's very much possible to hack up quick, useful things despite not knowing much about the system in question. And, no, I'm not really that great a programmer... I'd consider myself fairly average." And I know I'm not alone, as I see similar sorts of people in Debian and the Apache Software Foundation. Debian, infact, is all about those kinds of tweaks to improve the operating system as a whole. And this sort of exchange goes on all the time, as evidenced by the huge success of a large number of open source projects. Now, granted, most projects are really driven by one or a few really committed hackers, who do the lion's share of the work. However, that large network of people who contribute, test, document, and suggest is certainly important to any open source project. As long as we're looking at my anecdote, let's look at it in a bit more depth - most of those projects are developer tools or closely related. A cynic might note that Jeff comes from the world of Microsoft, where the core developer tools are provided by a company and 'giving back' is limited to payments and bug reports. But leaving that be, I think the enormous success of stuff like Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Apache, Linux, GCC, and on and on and on indicates that, at least in terms of stuff that developers share between one another, open source works. However, there are problems, one of which is that he (or, in unfortunately rather rarer cases, she) who writes the code does not necessarily get the money. And without money, he or she who writes the code must dedicate themselves to some means to actually accumulate a bit of money in order to pay for living expenses. Most likely, this is time taken away from the open source project, which is a loss for all the people who benefit from it. Proprietary software solves this feedback loop in a neater way (generally) - companies that create good products get money for their efforts, which can then be reinvested in development. Jeff suggests that "sponsorship seems like a constructive way for people who are unable or unwilling to write code to affect the direction of a project.", which is ok as far as it goes, and more or less works here and there, but hopefully he's not thinking about trying it on a larger scale. This sort of thing has been tried before, and never really seems to take off. Part of the problem is that it can work on a person-to-person basis, but is almost impossible to standardize in a way that it makes sense to have some kind of clearinghouse that operates as a business. There are simply too many factors - what kind of open source project it is, what motivates the people behind it, how the transaction costs of defining a specification, monitoring the results, sending money and so on compare to the actual value of a fix... the list goes on. Ultimately, it's a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to work out too well in practice. Anyway, while it's a good thought on Jeff's part, at the end of the day, it is fairly evident that he doesn't have a lot of first hand knowledge of open source business and economics. That said, to some degree, open source took everyone by surprise, and, lacking the nice, simple feedback loop that proprietary software has, can be a lot more difficult to get a handle on. I find it quite pleasant that way - it attracts both hard-headed business types and social-experiment idealist visionaries; both huge corporations (IBM!) and a huge number of individuals; both people who have gotten quite wealthy from open source as well as most of the rest of us who manage to make ends meet but still love it. It's not something that's easy to pigeonhole, and as such it's hard enough to figure out the many ways in which it does work, let alone figure out how to improve on it. Stay tuned for further installments: Software Economics - Public Goods

Bdale Garbee: TeleMetrum Working

Keith and I have been plugging away for the last couple weeks turning on and testing the various bits of TeleMetrum, and I can now very happily report that we have all the hardware working! Amazingly, we got almost everything right in the hardware design. Only two things need to be changed. We need to be able to control the chip select line on the the SPI non-volatile memory chip, which means we need one more GPIO line to it from the processor. To free up a line, we gave up the ability to put the accelerometer in to self test mode. Two trace cuts and two jumpers to the current board implement this change. The last thing we got working just this evening was the ability to sense the presence of an ejection charge igniter. We need another resistor in each of the two sense circuits to form a voltage divider so that we don't overload the ADC input. Not sure how we missed that in our many design reviews! Oh well. To ensure robust ignition of the electric matches we prefer to use for ejection charges, we charge a 1000uF cap to a voltage higher than our ADC inputs can handle. Fixing this problem on the current boards requires changing the values of two resistors, then tacking extra resistor to one end of each of the existing ones and then wiring the other ends of the new resistors to ground. Since the resistors in question are all 0402 surface mount parts, this is a royal pain... but with my finest dental-pick soldering iron tip, and working under the inspection microscope, it is indeed possible. Alternatively, if the ability to sense igniter continuity isn't important, just leaving off R14 and R15 at least prevents the 3.3V processor from going whacko due to having 5V applied to two ADC inputs! I'm really impressed at how well these first two boards reflow soldered in the electric skillet in my basement came out. Getting the right amount of solder paste on the board is something I'm likely to get better at with practice, but so far we've only had a few (very obvious during inspection) shorts to clean up, and a couple poorly soldered pins. All in all, I couldn't be happier with how this has gone... and I'm really looking forward to flying one of these boards sometime soon as an auxiliarly payload to gather some initial flight data!

John Goerzen: Peace

Today over lunch, I and 6 others went to visit Grandma. She was in her room, looking better physically today than yesterday. When I walked in, I said brightly, Hi Grandma! She took my hand warmly, and said to me, Now I don t think we ve met. Who are you? I knew that moment would happen someday, but still was surprised when it happened. Mom told her that we were there to tell her we love her. Grandma counted out the seven of us, and said, All these wonderful people here to tell that to ME? That s Grandma still there! It was a difficult moment. Many of us were tearful, and Grandma was sick enough that she sometimes lost the battle to stay awake. But we were all glad it was happening. Mom thought it right (me too) that she should tell Grandma about the latest word from the doctors. The conversation went, in part, something like this, with my mom addressing her mother: My Mom: Mom, the doctors say your heart is probably wearing out. My Grandma: *shrug* Yeah. My Mom: And your body is probably tiring out too. My Gramdma: Yes it is. I m 94. It s not that Grandma was depressed or anything. Just that she had long ago been at peace with the idea of death, and actually told us more than once that the was rather surprised that she has lived to be as old as she has. So it wasn t frightening or surprising to her to confront her own mortality. To her, it was a fact, and an obvious one at that. My brother brought along Grandma s old Bible. She had given it to him a few years ago. It was filled with highlights and handwritten notes from cover to cover. She had carefully analyzed it, and when she bought a new Bible, had carefully copied the notes to it. My brother read to her two passages that she had highlighted:Psalm 23: (which she has noted as a favorite of many Christians ) and Numbers 6:24-26. He then held her hand and said a prayer with her. Then he said a blessing for her, and as he was getting to the end, she interrupted, saying the last word for him: forever! She still had her sense of humor, and made us all laugh several times. She said, as she always has when any of us stop by to visit, how happy she is that we came by, and what a wonderful family she has. She said several times Danke sch n, Danke sch n, Danke sch n! (Thank you, thank you, thank you! she had made sure to teach a few German words to all of us as kids.) When it was time to go, she got lots of hugs from us, and made a point to tell each of us individually thank you for coming! As we walked down the hall, I was reminded of her old tradition going back many years. Whenever we would leave her house, she d wave to us from the porch. And, if it was dark, we d turn on the car light and wave back. Since she s been in the nursing home, she ll wave to us from her doorway as we walk down the hall. And, sure enough, today s visit ended with her waving to us from her doorway with both hands (as she always does) and a big smile. We all waved back with a smile as we walked away, too. I don t know if this will be the last goodbye with her, but if it is, I can t think of a better one.

26 March 2009

Holger Levsen: Ada Lovelace naming scheme

Two days ago I read about the Ada Lovelace day, which was an event were men and women were asked to blog about the women in technology which made an impact on them, in an effort to present girls (and women) all over the world with female role models in technology.

In similar though more personal motivation I choose my machine naming scheme at home two years ago: my (virtual) machines at home are named after women who made a difference, mostly in IT, but also some in more general science. Even though this list is not 100% in the spirit of pointing out the one woman who made a personal difference to one self, I thought I share my list, as I found it very interesting to learn about these great women myself.

goldberg is named after Adele Goldberg, who pioneered the smalltalk programming language in the 70s. According to a sympathetic annecdote she refused to show the system to Steve Jobs and only did so after her superiors ordered her to do so. Thats were Apple got many ideas which made them famous for being innovative...

goldwasser is named after Shafi Goldwasser, who is a RSA professor at MIT, doing research in complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs.

lovelace is named after Ada Lovelace, and is widely recognized as the first programmer, who wrote a program (something that manipulated symbols according to rules) for a machine which has not even been build at that time. Of course, some men on this planet object to her being the first programmer, as work by women is always insignificant... </irony or maybe sarcasm>

bunten is named afer Danielle Bunten Berry, who was a game designer and programmer best known for the games M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold.

holberton is named after Betty Holberton, who was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, during and after World War II.

hopper is named after Grace Hopper who wrote the first compiler ever, the A compiler. She was also heavily involved in creating COBOL and standardizing COBOL and FORTRAN.

koller is named after Daphne Koller who does AI research at MIT and who seems to behind the idea of bayesian machine learning, which you might know from your spam filters... (I can only state her involvement in bayesian learning so vaguely as I'm basically clueless about the topic :)

leveson is named after Nancy Leveson who is also an MIT professior and is an expert in systems and software safety.

Last but not least I like to remark that none of the women above is even nearly covered with what I wrote here or what is written in wikipedia, which I used as my main source for this blog post. It's simple impossible to sum up one life that brief and be close to accurate.

And then there is another group of women whose achievements are noteworthy as well and who choose to present themselves on that webpage to show others that Debian is not a mens club. Thank you (a lot) for that and for your other contributions to Debian! If you want to learn more about these giants, I recommend this talk. Guess who's achievements I admire most in this group ;-)

Somewhat unrelated I wish to shout cheers to Yvonne, who tought me many things and who died six years ago today. You will also not be forgotten, though the pain is mostly gone now (well, it's gone, except for days like today). Thank you, among other stuff, for teaching me to celebrate and cheer every day, even if not everything is cheerful. Wenn die Nacht am tiefsten, ist der Tag am n chsten! :-)

Sven Mueller: Apache SSL oddity

If you ever have the problem described below, you have to realize that Apache HTTPD is selecting the SSL certificate (and/or key) not based on you VirtualHost definition, but based on the ServerName in the current context. This means that you have two virtual hosts with the same ServerName, but on two different IPs, and are wondering why the wrong key (and/or certificate) is used, it might be because of this. Assume we have the following (simplified) configuration:
<VirtualHost a.b.c.d:443>
ServerName a.b.c.d
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/a.b.c.d_443.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/certs/a.b.c.d_443-key.pem
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost a.b.c.d:444>
ServerName a.b.c.d
SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/a.b.c.d_444.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/certs/a.b.c.d_444-key.pem
</VirtualHost>

(note: This happened to me when wanting to open a SSL server for subversion on a host that also had Apache run as a reverse/application proxy for some specific application that managed its own CA) Both VirtualHosts will use the very same certificate and key (as far as I was able to tell, but at least the same key), in my case that of the specific application (which was(is?), in its way, broken regarding SSL). This might as well be a bug or a design decision (AKA feature), I don t know. However the workaround that worked for us was to change one of the server names to something else (since it seems it is unused anyway, unless the apache decides to generate a self-refering URL, which it certainly won t do for the reverse/application proxy part). Update: Fixed formatting on configuration sample to make it clear this is not about namebased virtual hosts.

John Goerzen: Time

When I was a child, I was learning to play piano. My parents didn t have one at the time, but my grandparents did. Every evening, we d go over to their house so I could practice. I suspect I was more interested in other things most of the time, though whether Grandma has some cherry moos in her fridge, or whether Grandpa would play chess with me or do something fun in his workshop. Grandma would often be in her curlers, and we d often leave her in the evening saying goodbye in the pink fluorescent lights she had shining on her plants by the door. Other times, we d just go to visit, or I d ride my bike over. I liked helping Grandma cook or bake peppernuts. And when I was trying to learn chess from Grandpa, and Grandma thought he was being too hard on me, she d say something to him in German and I d magically start winning. Grandma volunteered at a local thrift store weaving rugs. These were made by hand on old looms in a traditional way, mainly out of donated clothes and drapes that were too tattered to sell. My mom used to drop me off with grandma while she went shopping. I maybe brought my lunch, and watched grandma, until one time I asked her if I could help. She let me, and eventually the store manager told grandma that I ought to be able to work on my own loom. Pretty soon we had a routine down: in summer, Grandma would pick me up at home, I d read a computing magazine in the car to town, and work at a loom side-by-side with Grandma. That lasted until I got too busy in high school. But ever since then, Grandma delighted in telling this whole story almost every time she saw me, and she remembered word for word what the store manager said something I never quite could remember. I remember watching Grandma care for my brothers when they were sick, or helping out my parents with whatever they needed help with. We had a tradition for a number of years of spending New Year s Eve at Grandma and Grandpa s house, and going back home the next morning. The three of us boys slept in a cold upstairs room, but we didn t care because the bed had more layers on it than we could count, and an electric blanket besides. When my Grandpa Klassen passed away in 1990, Grandma missed him but didn t get too worked up about it. She was convinced that he was in a better place, and appeared to be at peace with it. Death was a normal part of life to her, and it didn t surprise her that it happened. In the last few years, Grandma s health has been failing. Her knees have been bothering her for years, and she has also been struggling with dementia for a few years. It s been hard on me to visit her, because in some ways she hasn t been the same person I remember for awhile now, and in other ways she s exactly the same. Lately she hasn t always remembered where I live, or what Terah and Jacob s names are, we knew to expect that and are respectful of the situation. For years now, Grandma has been saying, I don t know why the Good Lord doesn t take me up to be with him yet. My bags are packed and I m ready! Last time I saw her, I mentioned that we used to do weaving together, and she couldn t remember. That was a sure sign to me that things had taken a turn for the worse. Our last several visits have ended with a big hug, and her still iron grip on my hand, with her saying, Thank you for coming! My family is so good to me. We love each other! She s been battling infections and heart problems the past few weeks. This evening, I got an email from my mom saying It s time to say our goodbyes. She had been to see Grandma today, and Grandma still managed to tell her, We love each other. As much as time has changed her in the past few years, she s still there, the same loving Grandma as ever.

25 March 2009

Pablo Lorenzzoni: FISL10 Subscriptions and Call for Papers Opened

One of the largest FLOSS events in the world, FISL (International Free Software Forum in english) subscriptions are already being accepted. They also already called for papers! They re calling this year s a special edition since they expect to reach 10-thousand attendees (last year exceeded 7-thousand)... this is pretty big if you ask me. As usual, it will take place at Porto Alegre, and is scheduled from June 24th to 27th. I think we can expect the usual activities (Programming Arena, Interesting Workshops, FLOSS shows, Great Speakers, Brazilian Government), but I think the special edition is not just due to the number of attendees. What surprises are being cooked by the Organization Committee is just something we ll have to wait and see :-) See you there!

Bastian Venthur: Reportbug finally has a GUI!

It s good to see that reportbug 4 finally has a graphical user interface it s GTK, but nobody s perfect :) Anyways, I m really glad to see reportbug aiming to improve it s usability. Reportbug finally shows all the bugreports for a package in a list which is easily filterable. So when you re confronted with a huge list of bugreports but searching for a specific problem, you can just enter a few letters in the filter and the buglist will shrink immediately. This missing feature was basically the most important reason why I developed reportbug-ng: Users are expected to don t report bugs which are already filed against a package, but the main tool which was used back then to report the bugs didn t make this task trivial. Now it does and it s a good thing! reportbug and reportbug-ng Compared to reportbug-ng, reportbug shows the bugreports of a package in a tree-view, while rng shows them in a table-view. The difference is that reportbug could theoretically group serveral bugs together, like merged bugs. It currently only uses this feature to group bugs of the same severity and status. Rng does that by coloring the lines. Unfortunately in reportbug all nodes are collapsed by default, which is not very usable since you have to expand every node in order to see all bugreports. This costs the user several clicks in order to see all bugreports. It s also not possible to sort the bugs via the columns of the table, e.g. sort by date of last action which I think is a huge feature in order to quickly find certain kind of bugs (old bugs, bugs sorted by date of last activity) but that s probably easy to fix. Another good news is that Reportbug now brings it s own editor so the user is not forced anymore to use an console based- and maybe unfamiliar editor to compose his bugreport. This is a huge step forward regarding usability. It also moves the concept of writing a mail to the BTS a bit more away from the user which is a good thing. Maybe the BTS will support an alternative way to receive bugreports in the future so mail clients may become superfluous for reporting bugs. Under the hood reportbug still parses the HTML from http://bugs.debian.org/ go gain the bugreport instead of the BTS SOAP interface. This coupling is of course dangerous since even the smallest change in the BTS webdesign could break reportbug. But SOAP support is already on the todo list of reportbug s devs. I can only encourage this step, when reportbug-ng moved away from HTML-parsing to SOAP the actual amount of work it took was much less then I thought, I think it took me just one or two days and as a result there is python-debianbts which provides a bridge between the SOAP interface and Python. In summary I think this is an important improvement for reportbug. There are still some minor issues like the welcome screen always showing, the nodes collapsed by default and the columns not beeing sortable but those are small issues and easy to fix. I m very happy to see this improvement, since it will motivate the not so tech-savvy folks to report bugs, and more bugreports will ultimately lead to a better distribution. Good work guys!

Martin F. Krafft: The demise of the Swiss train experience

On trains from Germany to Switzerland you used to notice the crossing of the border not only due to the appearance of the passport control folks in the train: once the Swiss train team replaced their German colleagues, passengers were finally able to travel in peace. Once you crossed the border, there would be no more almost-continuous blather through the speakers about where to find the restaurant, how lovely and relaxing it would be to enjoy fine cuisine there (I bet they never actually ate there themselves), and that the train crew regrets that some passengers are going to leave at the next stop, how much they hope that they ll soon come back, and how happy they are to welcome new passengers. Each announcement would last somewhere around 30 long seconds, and when it was finally over, they d repeat it in horrific English: wrong words, bad grammar, and pronunciation that made me cringe every time. But apparently, the German railway needs more business and their PR department seems to think that this is the way forward. Not the Swiss, or at least I thought until today. Heck, I even gave myself a GA for my 30th birthday, a year subscription for all Swiss public transport, because I enjoy travelling in Switzerland, and even if it s just to get work done. But just now, on the train from Fribourg back home, the productive and calm silence was interrupted by an announcement where to find the restaurant in four languages, and when the minibar passed the upper deck of our wagon, the voice again made sure we knew. It seems that the days on Swiss trains are gone, when short, smooth, and unobtrusive announcements would let you know about the next station, just in time for you to pack up and get ready to go, or a similarly pleasant message greeted you as you boarded the train, allowing you to make sure that you got on the right line. What a shame.

Neil Williams: cross-building is still hard

OK, it's gone 2am and I'm still battling with what was meant to be a simple task - check the latest (unreleased) changes in tslib on my touchscreen device.

First problem was that I forgot that the balloon is running Lenny, so I suddenly needed the armel libc6 from Sid. OK, that's not bad, a bit of a pain to have to install it but less pain than creating a Lenny chroot to cross-build tslib - marginally.

Second problem was more awkward - turns out that emdebian-tools 1.6.1 has broken the more fragile cross-build support which carefully wraps broken libtool installations. I was intending to work out how to fix each one of those before Squeeze anyway. The fix for the workaround was relatively straightforward and will be in 1.6.2, due for release once I've had some sleep.

Third problem was something much older - turns out that this broken libtool wrapper had only been able to work for the default cross-building architecture since about emdebian-tools 1.4 or 1.5 and if asked to build for a different arch, it got the wrong symbols. Hmm.

The diffs for each of these changes appear simple but, as ever, identifying the cause of the bug was harder. (In this case, sometimes the error showed up as "C++ compiler unable to create executables" - thanks autotools, that's really handy to know; other times it showed up as ERROR, symbols from ./.libs/libfoo are ABI 4 but symbols from libc are ABI version 0 - still cryptic but at least it is entirely accurate.)

Still, I've now been able to test tslib 1.0-7 and it works just fine and I've got an extra upload of emdebian-tools 1.6.2 to make tomorrow. Ah well.

24 March 2009

Jordi Mallach: Stepping down as the GNOME Catalan translations coordinator

As of this morning, Damned Lies finally reflects what has been the de-facto reality for at least four major GNOME releases. I started to invest a lot of time on translating GNOME to Catalan in the middle of the long 1.5 journey towards GNOME 2.0. That was a long time ago, and somehow was the way I ended being abduced by Softcatal to eventually work with them on the localisation of some other projects. However, I've been watching how my free time and motivation has been slowly shrinking, until the point I was no longer doing some of the stuff I was expected to do, or was doing it badly and late. Luckily, Softcatal 's GNOME team, a model for our organisation, has been able to smoothly replace heavily contributing members with a constant stream of new blood. In my case, I first stopped having that many modules assigned, then focused on coordination and finally stopped doing even that. Gil Forcada has filled the gap perfectly and has been the main lead of effort for a pair of years. Passing the baton was long overdue; I think GNOME is lucky to count on Gil's amazing drive and motivation. Gil, congrats on earning yet another marronet! ;)

Evan Prodromou: 4 Germinal CCXVII

Identi.ca is one of the contestants in the Internet March Mayhem e-Tournament. We're up against LinkedIn in the first round. Help us out by clicking the "Identi.ca" link in the lower left-hand part of the tree. tags

Ada Lovelace Day FAIL Updated. I signed up for the Ada Lovelace Day pledge a few months ago, so I wrote a churlish, short, and ill-tempered blog post on the subject. (Since redacted.) Among other things, I said, "I dislike the canonization of Ada Lovelace as a patron saint of women in computing. [...] Hundreds of thousands if not millions of women have written more code that mattered more for people's real lives than anything Ada Lovelace did. [...] Maybe instead of honoring Ada Lovelace, we need to honor these other women instead." But on re-reading the pledge, I realized that I totally missed the point of Ada Lovelace Day, and that this is exactly what people are supposed to do. Oops. See #ald09 for some nice posts about women in computing. Oh, and to pick a woman in technology I admire: Eve Maler, one of the co-creators of XML. I met her when she was chairing the SAML committee, and she led that group of competitive egos through some very difficult security and protocol design issues with great intelligence and diplomacy. tags:

Adeodato Sim : Multa por dar de comer a las palomas

Marga escribe una entrada sobre las palomas de ciudad. Cuenta la historia de c mo erradicaron las palomas de Trafalgar Square en Londres una vez prohibieron dar de comer a estos animales. En Alicante tambi n est prohibido alimentar a las palomas. Hay unos signos en grande que as lo anuncian, so pena de multa de 601,01 euros. Este curioso n mero da cuenta de que la prohibici n ya lleva algunos a os con nosotros: la multa ya exist a cuando a n us bamos pesetas, y era por entonces de 100.000 pesetas. Que, escrupulosamente traducidas a euros, son 601,01.

23 March 2009

Daniel Burrows: Sometimes, tools are useful.

I generally try not to get caught up in writing auxiliary tools for my free software projects. My experience in the past has been that given how little spare time I have each week, a tool that takes more than an hour or two to write quickly ends up becoming a time sink that prevents me from making progress on the main project. But occasionally it's worth the effort. screenshot I spent the last couple weeks putting together a tool to extract information about a dependency search from a log trace of aptitude's resolver. The search is displayed in a log interface that shows both the steps of the search in order, and the tree structure of the search. It took a long time to write, but after working with it for just a few hours, I was able to track down the bugs in the resolver modifications I was trying to write; without a tool like this, it would have taken a lot of painful grepping through log files to get all the information I needed. In other news, the resolver now stores the choices it has made as a single set of choices, instead of using two different sets for the two types of choices it can make. There's no user-visible change (although I did fix another performance problem that affected safe-upgrade), but this will pave the way for adding more types of choices in a cleaner way: in particular, the resolver should get explicit support for package replacements in the near future. The code for this is available in the tools directory of aptitude's experimental Mercurial repository, http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/post-lenny. When I get around to merging it this with the main repository, it will also be available at http://hg.debian.org/hg/aptitude/head.
A brief digression regarding the implementation language The tool is implemented in Haskell, a decision that I'm not sure was the right one. Haskell's data model was perfect for this task: having algebraic datatypes allows me to precisely represent cases where parts of the structure can't be inferred from the log file, or can only be inferred incompletely. And of course there are the other well-known benefits of Haskell (pure, a strong type system, good support for higher-order programming, etc). But all those benefits were wiped out by the time I spent fighting the runtime. The thing is, Haskell is a lazy language. In theory, this means that it never evaluates anything you don't need and that you can work with arbitrarily large (even infinite) values and only allocate the parts you actually use. In practice, this means that you have to pay excruciatingly close attention to every single expression you write, or as soon as you run your program on non-trivial input, it will either run very slowly, eat all your memory, die with a stack overflow, or all of the above. Oh, and did I mention that laziness means that you can't have a runtime debugger, that trace statements are mostly-useless, because your program doesn't run in any predictable order, and that it's impossible to get backtraces when there's a fatal error? I think if I were doing this over again, I'd use O'Caml. I'm less familiar with it and its syntax is clunkier, but I have used it productively in the past and it provides the core stuff I wanted from Haskell (functional programming with algebraic datatypes). If someone could make a language that was pure, had Haskell's nice syntax and type features, but was also strict, and that had decent tool support and development resources, I think I'd be in nerd heaven.

Adeodato Sim : Five films (#4)

Wow, long time without one of these posts. I actually have material that will have to wait for the next issue already!

Jaldhar Vyas: New Laptop

Today is my 38th birthday. (Chronologically that is. It was on Thursday by tithi.) As a present I got an Acer Extensa EX 4630-3922 laptop. I added an extra 2GB of RAM to the listed configuration and still managed to spend less than $500. It came with Windows Vista but shrinking that to a minimum and installing Linux (Kubuntu Intrepid) on it was completely uneventful. Now the next step will be to learn about Xen or KVM (Who's winning these days?) so I can add Debian Lenny and RHEL 5.2 to the mix. The only complaint I have so far is the anemic battery life which barely reaches 2.5 hours though perhaps that might improve with a bit of tweaking.

22 March 2009

Rob Taylor: Codethink anniversary

Last month, Codethink turned 2 years old, to coincide we had a company-wide hackfest in Brussels straight after FOSDEM. It really brought home how much it d grown. Just a year ago there was just me and Mark. Now we are 8! So i m gonna take a moment to shout out to the great job these guys are doing. In order of appearence . Mark Doffman
Mark has been consistently working on transforming AT-SPI (the GNOME Accessibility and UI automation technology) into a D-Bus based cross-desktop project. From nothing a year ago, working with Mike Gorse from Novell, he s now got something that more or less works and it s getting a lot of focus and testing as we plan for GNOME 3.0. I m looking forward to a brave new future for cross toolkit accessibility on the Linux desktop. John Carr
John came to us from working on Conduit, and he s continued on his dream of making all the devices and web services of the world talk seamlessly to each other. John s been in charge of pushing the Wizbit project along and now the core of this is pretty stable, he is going to be turning his eye to working on using Wizbit for synchronisation. J rg Billeter
A stunning hacker who needs no introduction! J rg s been continuing to hack on Vala and it s getting more and more mature each week. His main work, however has been on the stunning tracker-vstore, a branch of tracker that brings full RDF capabilities, which Philip van Hoof has been blogging about. I ll be writing a biggish blog post on this soon and what RDF could really mean for the desktop experience. Karl Lattimer
Karl came to us from working on UI at Nokia. At Codethink he s continued to focus on graphics technology and user experience, bringing his keen eye to Wizbit, amongst other things. One of the most impressive things I ve seen for a while was Karl s kinetic scrolling widget for the Wizbit timeline view. I m hoping we can turn this into something more general in the future. Ryan Lortie
Another hacker who needs no introduction, Ryan s our low-level infrastructure guy. He s been working on GNIO, a library to do network operations using GIO stream abstractions and continuing to hack on DConf, which is gradually coming together. He s also been helping J rg out with Vala. Mukund Sivaraman
I knew Muks from his GIMP work, and his work on Herb is really impressive. Muks is mostly working on top secret stuff that we can t talk about, unfortunately! Peter Charlton
Our documentation guy. This guy knows how to write and knows how to take something vague and unintelligable and turn it into crystal clarity. Invaluable! Of course, through all this I ve been here, dancing about architecture and generally doing the best I can to hold the whole shebang together. I ve been mostly working on some top secret stuff which hopefully will be getting opened up soon. I ll dance about that then

Martin Michlmayr: Debian lenny images and docs for Debian on D-Link DNS-323

After integrating Matt Palmer's installer patches for D-Link DNS-323, I have now created installer images based on Debian lenny. They will work both on the D-Link DNS-323 as well as the Conceptronic CH3SNAS. I've also written an installation guide and other information, including how to use the recovery mechanism through the serial console.

Biella Coleman: You don t need to choose one over the other.

So, one of th raging debates in medical science over the last two decades concerns the importance of genetics vs environmental factors for diseases: Are diseases genetically based or due to environmental factors, such as pesticides and toxins? This debate is one that might soon change its course (and collapse) due to the fascinating field of epigenetics, which blows this binary to pieces, by examining how lifestyle and environment can alter the expression of genes. Nova has a fascinating video about epigenetics, which is definitely worth watching.

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