I'm in Portland, Oregon for the week where I'll be at OSCON. I'll be giving two talks on the final day of the conference (July 25): the first will be a 15 minute keynote on Revealing Errors at 8:45 in the Portland Ballroom; the second is a full-length normal talk on Selectricity at 11:35AM in Portland 255. It will be my first long-form talk about Selectricity and I'm looking forward to it. Because myself, a few Free Software Foundation staff members including Campaign Manager Joshua Gay, and quite a few FSF associate members will be in town, we're going to hold a small FSF Associate Members event in Portland (the first outside Boston!). It's going to be in the form of a pizza party with a few small talks from FSF folk including myself. Here are the details:

FSF Associate Members (& friends!) Event

July 22nd 6:30-9:00PM

Old Town Pizza

226 NW Davis St

Portland, OR 97209

It's free and open to all but is designed to provide a forum for members and friends. If you are an FSF member, please consider coming. If you're not a member yet, please don't let it keep you away; staff will be able to sign up new members there. RSVPs to Deborah Nicholson aren't necessary to attend but would be welcome. I'll be heading to Seattle right after the conference for a few days. If you would like to meet up in Seattle or Portland this week, please don't hesitate to get in contact.

I have just bought a EeePC 701 [1], I chose the old model because it’s significantly smaller than the 90x series and a bit lighter too and it had Linux pre-loaded. Also it was going cheap, while I am not paying for it I give the same attention to saving my clients’ money as to saving my own. I ruled out everything that was heavier or larger than an EeePC 901 and everything that cost more than $700. That left only the Linux version of the EeePC 901 (which I couldn’t find on sale) and the EeePC 701 as my options. I also excluded the EeePC 900 because it is bigger and heavier than the 701 but has the same CPU (and therefore can’t run Xen). In terms of it’s prime purpose (a SSH client) 96*22 characters is the size of a konsole screen with the default (medium) font size when the window is maximised, that is 5% more characters than the standard terminal size of 80*25 but the smaller number of lines is a problem. When using the small font I can get 129*29 which I find quite comfortable to read (it would be impossible for me to read withut glasses - which means having almost average vision for someone in their 30’s). Then I can get 129*31 if I dismiss the tool bar at the bottom of the screen and could probably get another couple of rows if I removed the tabs that Konsole uses to switch between sessions. That would only be viable if using screen extensively as a single session without the ability to switch between programs is not particularly useful (I don’t think that ALT-TAB is adequate for switching between terminal sessions). When running Debian I can get 130*32 with the same font due to smaller window controls, but I’ll write more about converting to Debian in another post. Note that while the OS that ships with the Linux based EeePC machines is based on Debian, it is heavily customised and has some notable differences from a typical Debian install. It has some proprietary software, and uses unionfs for the root and /home filesystems. The first issue is that Console (the KDE terminal program) can only be accessed from the file manager (via the tools menu or ^t), the machine clearly doesn’t have defaults for someone like me. In principle it’s a multi-user system that can be fully customised, but in practice it’s configured as a single-user machine. Once you have a Console window open you can run “su -” and the root password is the password for the “user” account. I wonder whether I could get more than 42 rows or more than 140 columns of text that is readable. If so then I could have two console windows fully displayed on screen. The screen is bright and clear, this is essential as the number of pixels per character is going to be low for any reasonable amount of text to be displayed on screen. The password that you set when you first use the machine also works for “su -” (in fact that is the only real use as I expect that almost everyone will choose the automatic login option). The display comprises a significant portion of the weight, if the screen is fully open (about 150 degrees) then it will tip over. Even when the screen is not as far open it will tip due to bumps if resting on your lap on a tram. It’s a pity that the screen is connected at the very back of the base, if the attachment point was a bit closer then it would balance better and also be easy to hold with one hand. The depth of the machine combined with the angle at the back makes it impossible for me to get a good one-handed grip from the base, so typing while standing on a moving tram or bus will be extremely difficult (unlike my iPaQ which I can use at full speed on any form of public transport). Inidentally it would be good if there was an attachment point for a wrist-strap, every camera and most mobile phones have them so it would be good to have the same safety feature in a laptop to facilitate use on public transport. Another reason for not using it as a PDA is the fact that it takes about 7 seconds to resume after hibernating (when the lid is closed). The PSU is almost as small as that of a mobile phone! This is a major benefit as in the past I have often stored a Thinkpad PSU at a client site for 9-5 jobs as it is heavy enough that I didn’t want to carry it on public transport. The EeePC PSU is light enough that it won’t be unpleasant to carry, and small enough to fit easily into a jacket pocket. The OS installation is very well done for the basics. It’s easy to launch applications and there is a good selection of educational programs (including the periodic table, planetarium, typing, letters, and hangman, drawing, and a link to www.skoool.com). It’s a pity that they organised the folders according to the area rather than the age, but generally the OS is very well done. Most of the reviews focus on the speed of the CPU, the RAM expansion options, etc, but miss the fact that it is a really nice machine for using as-is. It is a much better machine for teaching children than any of the machines I’ve seen which are sold specifically for children (see my previous post about an awful computer for kids [2]). I believe that you could give an EeePC to any 3yo and have them doing something useful in a matter of minutes! The ability to freely install new software should not be overlooked when considering a computer for children to use. Someone who buys one now could use it for a few years as an ssh client and then reinstall the original OS and give it to a child as an educational toy. It has a program to create OGG video files from it’s built-in camera and mic, at this moment it’s the only device I own that can create OGG files (this is a good thing). OGG compression takes a really long time, the Atom CPU in the 901 and 1000x series would be good for this. It’s a pity that the microphone is directly below the mouse buttons, it clearly records the mouse click used to finish recording. The version of mplayer which is installed to play OGG files can also play FLV files downloaded from youtube with youtube-dl (althrough the file association is not set). When I tried to play a MP4 file from ted.com it only gave audio (the video works on a full Debian/Etch installation). There is a full set of office software, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird email client, and all the other stuff you might expect. I find that the biggest problem for using it is the size of the keyboard, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to touch-type properly on it. Not only are the keys small but the positions of non-alphabetical keys are slightly different from most keyboards. Another problem is that the space-bar needs to be pressed near the centre, I usually like to press near the end but that doesn’t work. Those issues are all trade-offs of the small size. My T series Thinkpad is reasonably portable and has a great keyboard so I have the serious typing while travelling angle covered. One real mistake in the keyboard design is the lack of a LED to indicate whether caps-lock is enabled (there are four status LEDs, adding number five couldn’t be that expensive), this is a real problem when using the vi editor (which uses letters as editor commands and is case-sensitive). It will also occasionally cause problems when entering passwords. There is a caps-lock indicator on screen, but that is in the toolbar at the bottom of the scren (which I like to dismiss to gain an extra two lines of text). It would be good if I could display the status of the caps and num lock keys in the right side of the title-bar of the active window (the only bit of unused space on the screen). The cooling fan makes an annoying buzz. It’s significantly louder than Thinkpads which dissipate a lot more heat. The other problems are all software, which is OK as I plan to reinstall it. Firstly it is using Debian and shipped with the broken openssl library. There is a GUI for installing upgrades, but it recommends rebooting after installing each one! Naturally I didn’t choose to reboot, I installed the security update #1. Then I clicked on the button to install a BIOS update. It told me that it had to reboot to apply the update and gave only one button (OK), I tried closing the window but it rebooted anyway (fortunately the vi swap file allowed me to recover this post - which I am entirely writing on the EeePC). Aftere booting up again I discovered that the libssl bug still wasn’t fixed and that there was a second udate to apply! Why can’t they have a “apply all updates” button and also have it not automatically reboot? This must be the only Debian-based distribution that forces Windows-style reboots. But that said, while they made some mistakes in their software it generally provides a good user experience

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeepc


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/07/awful-computers-for-kids/

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Last news I gave for D-I and related stuff l10n completion was on June 15th. We're now one month later, so let's see what happened since then. D-I "level 1" (ie the core D-I) had several templates changes which bringed the translation ratio from 100% to 99% and below several times, for all languages. Several teams have still been able to cope with that. Other levels had no changes and I therefore spent some time nagging them to complete the missing bits here and there. The current status is:

• Level 1 (core D-I): 20 complete languages (be cs de eu fi fr gl gu ja ko nl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sv th tr vi) just like we had on June 15th
• Level 1 + Level 2 (packages with strings used in default installs): 20 complete languages as well (the same ones of course). Big improvement here as we had only 11 of them in June.
• Level 1-3 (pkgs prompting during default desktop installs or important for desktop installs): 16 complete languages. We "lose" Belarusian, Gujarati, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian.
• Level 1-4 (adding pkgs prompting during other tasks): 16 (the same ones)
• Level 1-5 (adding important stuff such as apt, dpkg, aptitude): 9 complete languages. Those languages reaching the Grand Slam are: German, French, Galician, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Vietnamese

Changes are still planned for level 1: D-I developers are really active these days, particularly with the great "come back" of J r my Bobbio and the constant QA work by Frans Pop. I also tried to merge in some work done in Ubuntu's Rosetta and then interest those people who translate there to collaborate to D-I "upstream". This lead me to merge updates for Icelandic, Kazakh, Afrikaans, Malay, Welsh and Serbian. Contacts were made with the relevant translators:

• For Icelandic, the translation updates in Rosetta come from a woman whose login is "eeinarsdottir" but I couldn't succeed in getting an e-mail address to get in touch with her. She apparently lives in Finland if I believe Google and is also using "zorglubb" as nickname. Any hint to get in touch with her would be appreciated.
• For Kazakh, I tried to get in touch with the person who translated in Rosetta but got no answer as of now. In the same time, I tried to re-wake up Talgat, who's registered as the D-I translator but wasn't very successful.
• For Afrikaans, Friedel Wolff, the main maintainer of Pootle, is very interested in working on the translation, through Pootle of course. He was however very reluctant wrt our current policy to activate languages only when people complete "sublevels" 1 and 2....which would require about 6000 words to be updated. Scary for him, as it seems. I tried to get in touch with the translator in Rosetta....but got no answer.
• For Malay, the current translator (NB Liang) was very happy to get more strings translated because of the merge with Rosetta translations. He proposed the Rosetta translator to collaborate: no answer.
• For Welsh, I got a positive contact with Jonathan Price who did some work in Rosetta, completing the old work by Daffyd Harries (Welsh used to be complete in D-I in the past). We'll see if that goes further than "I'll have a look at it".
• By far the most positive contact was for Serbian. In about one week, I managed to get in touch with Veselin Mijuskovic and Marko Uskokovic, who work for the cp6linux project, funded by the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society of the Republic of Serbia. This project is aimed at creating a fully localized Linux-based distribution for use in Serbia, with support for Serbian (both cyrillic and latin), as well as regional languages of Serbia. Their distribution is currently based on Ubuntu. They did a lot of l10n work which, unfortunately, did not end up upstream as of now. They gave me access to their Pootle server and I'll try to get some of their work back in Debian.

My conclusion about all this is mitigated: I'm somewhat sorry to see some work happening in Rosetta, still without any connection with "upstream" work, with people apparently working without even some internal coordination and quite anonymously. I wonder if these people know that their work has few chances to end up anywhere, except in Ubuntu (for D-I translation, I even doubt it ends up somewhere: this is just unused work....until I grab it for D-I "suptream").

Over the past few nights I've managed to successfully migrate the Debian Administration website to the jQuery javascript library This means that my own javascript library code has been removed, replaced, and improved! The site itself doesn't use very much javascript - there are a couple of places where focus is set to a couple of elements, but other than that we're only talking about:

• Adding tags to articles, blog entrys, & polls
• Looking at the tag cloud
• Using the messaging system

Still there are a couple of enhancements that I've got planned which will make the site neater and more featureful for those users who've chosen to enable javascript in their browsers. Here's my list of previous javascript usage - out of date now that I've basically chosen to use jQuery for everything. ObQuote: Short Circuit.

One of the reasons that I didn’t post much last week was that I was contacting some of my MEPs as part of the Telecom Packet Action in order to help defend cooperative software distribution and use. This is a bit longer than my usual posts and no software is announced below, but I’m posting it here in the hope that more people will take part in this campaign that affects every EU internet user. In short, some MEPs that I remember from the Software Patent campaign proposed amendments that would enable the unpopular three-strikes regime, where internet users could be disconnected and fined if they had three allegations of copyright infringement made (not necessarily proved AIUI) against them, and ISPs could be required to block legal peer-to-peer cooperative distribution systems like BitTorrent. ISPs would also have to distribute official advice about proper internet use and I remember how good that often is. Note that three-strikes wasn’t explicit in the amendments, but there did appear to be loopholes which could be used to allow it, such as only prohibiting technical feature requirements. For longer descriptions, see articles by La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) and The Open Rights Group. The UK Independence Party MEPs replied quickly that they would vote against, mainly because of the source of the legislation. I don’t completely agree with that, but at least UKIP does what it says on the tin. Neil Parish MEP of the Conservatives sent me back a reply which referred to unknown numbering (H1, K1 and so on) and generally seemed like a mish-mash of replies that other people had received. I replied with questions about several aspects, including asking where his numbering came from, and I’ve not seen an answer yet. I’ll email him again in a few days because it’s been over a week. I was really annoyed by the reported complaints by Malcolm Harbour (Conservatives lead MEP on this issue) about how voters have reacted to these amendments, where he called it “scaremongering” amongst other things. No mongering was required - those amendments are damn scary. See comments from a media solicitor at the end of a BBC report:-

“The amendment will cause several problems, firstly, many broadband users routinely transfer large files which are encrypted. “Many of these are acting quite legitimately and in order to determine whether or not such large files are or are not the produce of illicit file sharing the ISP will have to carry out an unprecedented degree of analysis of its customers’ traffic. “Furthermore, computers are frequently shared - within offices, within homes, within educational institutions and inadvertently, where wrong-doers “piggy back” on an inadequately secured Wi-Fi connection. “All this raises the spectre of people losing internet access - for reasons which are no fault of their own.”

The main thing that these actions over the last few years have taught me is the broken state of European Union decision-making. I know I’m sometimes dissatisfied with problems in local and civil democracy, but the EU is a good idea whose democracy and accountability seems broken on a massive scale. There are just too many disconnects, as far as the ordinary voter can see. We put things in to elections and consultations and get bizarre law-making like this. If we act to correct the bizarre law-making, some MEPs start criticising us quite severely. And what kind of stupid representative system allows the representatives to repeatedly blame the voters but still be safely elected because of their high position on their party’s list? I’d love a simple, reformist constitution that’s simple enough for people to actually understand, approve in referendums and participate in the EU effectively. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, though.

Mancoosi paper for DebConf8 now available As previously announced, I'll be attending DebConf this year, as I did for the past 3 years. Beside the usual projects and ideas one carries with himself on his way to a DebConf, this time I will also be there to present part of my everyday work in the Mancoosi project. Very briefly (and a bit too simplistic) Mancoosi is working on pushing forward the research and technology needed to deliver better package managers to the users of open source software distributions. The project presentation event proposed by me and Ralf Treinen has been accepted in the DebConf main track. The presentation will discuss what the former EDOS project did, what Mancoosi is doing right now, trying to focus on their relationships with Debian. In case you are interested I suggest to attend the talk which will be delivered by yours truly (what else can I suggest? ) In the meantime, the accompanying paper is now available, you can take a sneak peek if you are interested in knowing more about Mancoosi right ahead. The paper is available in .pdf format from both my homepage and from the Pentabarf event page as an attachment (the latter, as all Pentabarf events, needs login for reasons that I still fail to understand ...). Download

• paper (PDF format, 316 Kb)

Just over three weeks ago I started a new job, I left my position as a Network Manager to start a job as a Linux Consultant. On my last day I was given a rather generous collection from everyone there. The purpose of this post is to show everyone that the money was well spent, the picture shows the books and DVDs that I bought. Thanks guys.

This can't be true! How can someone trust such a key?

Does anybody have a reasonable explanation for such an abomination?



Update: It seems it is unclear to some people what is the problem with this key. There are multiple identities (apparently different people) for the same key. So, in layman's terms, multiple different people are using exactly the same key to certify their identity.

I really don't understand how this could work in real life. Maybe is a case of misunderstanding what gpg is about?

I've been rather disconnected lately, trying to finish my PhD, find a job, etc. I got permission from my committee to start writing my thesis a few weeks ago, so I've been trying to get that in gear, as well as finishing up data for publication. This should all be done by November, if all goes well, so I can get back to spending more time on the things that I love.

I've tried to stay somewhat current with what's going on, and there's been a noticeable change over the past couple weeks in the tone of discussion around the community. I've personally been fascinated by the appearance of two things: the Linux Hater's Blog and the debate about Gtk 3.0. What's striking about both of these things is that they focus very much on the more consumer-oriented side of Linux. It's all about pleasing the independent vendors and grandma, and not about doing cool things. This is a huge shift from a few years ago. When I (and I assume many of us) got started with Free Software it wasn't really about these things, but more about getting your own work done and less about pleasing other people. Pleasing others was good of course, but it wasn't really expected. Just getting the system up and running was cool at the time, but using it exclusively for all your work? Only if you were in the right line of work!

We've come to a point where we expect a hell of a lot more though. We've got very vocal community members who want to spread Linux far and wide, and they want to do it today. And arguably, Linux is ready for it. We have good software that works rather well, can be easily installed and set up, and will run most of what people need. Yay us. On the other hand, after spending the better part of the decade using Linux on the desktop I'm finding that I agree with almost everything that the Linux Hater's Blog says. It's hard to argue with the truth, and the truth is that things are still difficult for people. I've spent the last few years trying to make X in Debian easier for people to deal with, and I've barely made a dent in just this one problem. And there's plenty more to pick and choose from. Sure, you can talk about how Windows and OSX have problems too, but we can't just be as good as them. We have to be better if we want to spread Linux and Free Software far and wide.

But do we really want to do that? Well, to be honest, I don't think it matters. No matter whether or not you care about grandma using Linux, we all want to have systems that work well and are easy to manage. Currently we have a lot of things in modern distros that could be a hell of a lot better. And many of them are directly related to fundamental assumptions we've made that don't really hold up as well as they should. They lead to lots of extra work leading to a sub-par product. We can do better and we should do better. If we have the absolute best system, world domination would be a natural side effect.

That's why I think that things like this need to stop and that we need more things like this. Sure, one is a hell of a lot harder, but no one cares if you solve an easy problem. It's the hard ones that matter, and provide the real payoff in the end. We need a better system to stop the hemorrhage of developers to OSX. When Miguel talks about how the people pushing for gtk 3.0 are all using OSX, I get very worried. If we want to be in control of our own destiny then we need to face our problems head on, and solve them.

revamping w3-recs: new specs, misc improvements After quite a lot from my initial adoption, I've spent some time to update w3-recs. Beside the long overdue update of shipped recommendations (quite a few new specification was released, mostly related to SPARQL, but a few more have been edited, including CSS 1 and 2), I've also uploaded some pending improvements. A couple of bug fixes were about dangling links and registration of recommendations with the GNOME devhelp stuff. Additionally, I've also moved all the documents registered with doc-base under the new Help/Standards section of doc-base, which seems to be fit for W3C Recommendations. Apparently we have finally managed to have a proper section tree for doc-base, the decoupling of that tree from the Debian menu one will not be missed (at least not by me). During the process I've also discovered a (recent?) change in debhelper semantics. Thus far I used to have broken doc-base document IDs in w3-recs, as they contained uppercase letters, which are prohibited according to /usr/share/doc/doc-base/doc-base.txt.gz. My fault, I concur, but in the past the documents got installed anyhow without any problem. On the contrary, with the latest debhelper all documents got written to the very same file, apparently stripping away the part of their names which do not match the used lowercase regular expression. Well, not too bad, I fixed one more bug, but with a warning fixing that would have been quicker. Also, /me wonders, if everything (but package build ) worked properly with uppercase document IDs, why the heck one should forbid them in the doc-base specification?

There has been a lot of fuss recently about the release of the iPhone [1] in Australia. But I have not been impressed. I read an interesting post Why I don’t want an iPhone [2] which summarises some of the issues of it not being an open platform (and not having SSH client support). Given all the fuss about iPhones (which have just arrived in Australia) I had been thinking of writing my own post about this, but TK covered most of the issues that matter to me. One other thing I have to mention is the fact that I want a more fully powered PC with me. So even if I had a Green Phone (which doesn’t seem to be on general sale) [3] or OpenMoko [4] I would still want at least a PDA running Familiar and preferrably a laptop - I often carry both. A Nokia N8×0 series Internet Tablet [4] would satisfy my PDA needs (and also remove the need to carry an MP3/MP4 player and audio recorder). When doing serious travelling I carry a laptop, a PDA, and a MP3 player all areas of my digital needs are covered better than an iPhone could reasonably manage. Finally mobile phones tend to not work or not work well ($1 per minute calls is part of my definition of “not well”) in other countries. While I haven’t been doing a lot of traveling recently I still try to avoid buying things that won’t work in other countries. I had planned to just mention TK’s post in a links post. But then a client offered to buy me an iPhone. He wants me to be able to carry a ssh client with me most places that I go so that whenever his systems break I can login. Now apart from the lack of ssh client support an iPhone seems ideal. :-# The cheapest Optus iPhone plan seems to be $19 per month for calls and data (which includes 100M of data) and $21 per month over 24 months for the iPhone thus giving a cost of $40 per month for 100M of data transfer (and a nice phone). There is a plan ofr a $19 per month iPhone, but that has a $19 per month un-capped phone plan and doesn’t sound like a good way of saving $2 per month. The “Three” phone company offers USB 3G modems for $5 per month (on a 24 month contract) and their cheapest plan is $15 per month which gives you 1GB of data per month and $0.10/M for additional data transfer. So it’s $20 per month for 1G (which requires a laptop) vs $40 per month for 100M. Three also has a range of phone plans that allow 3G data access over bluetooth to a PC, it seems that a Nokia N8×0 tablet can be used with that which gives a result of two devices the size of mobile phones. But that costs $20 per month (on top of a regular Three bill) for a plan that offers 500M of data and still requires two devices while not giving the full PC benefits. In the past I’ve done a lot of support work with a Nokia Communicator, so I’ve found that anything less than a regular keyboard really slows things down. While a EeePC keyboard is not nearly as good as a full sized keyboard it is significantly better than a touch-screen keyboard on a PDA (IE the Nokia N8×0 or the OpenMoko). At the moment I’m looking at the option of carrying an EeePC with a USB Internet access device. That will cost $20 per month for net access. The cost of the EeePC is around $300 for a low-end model or about $650 for a 901 series that can run Xen (as noted in my previous post I’m considering the possibilities for having a mobile Xen simulation of a production network [5]). The savings of $20 per month over 24 months will entirely cover the cost of a low-end EeePC (ssh terminal, web browsing, and local storage of documentation) and cover most of the cost of a high-end EeePC. Another possibility to consider is using an old Toshiba Satellite I have hanging around (which I used to use as a mobile SE Linux demonstration machine) for a few months while the price on the EeePC 901 drops (as soon as the 70x series is entirely sold out and the 1000 series is available I expect that the 901 will get a lot cheaper).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphone


• [2] http://arctanx.id.au/blog/?p=49


• [3] http://trolltech.com/products/qtopia


• [4] http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Freerunner


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/16/xen-and-eeepc/

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So apparently the Belgian 'government' has failed to meet its deadline; and as a result, the prime minister has handed in the 'government's resignation to the King. I say 'government', because these people have been doing quite a lot of things—all except governing... I must say I can't be surprised. I never liked Leterme; not before the elections, and not after. Now that more than a year has passed since his winning the elections, they have managed to accomplish exactly nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. There's a pattern here:

• June 2007. Leterme wins the election, and starts talking. He accomplishes exactly nothing.
• August 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up. The King hands the initiative to some other people, who manage to get basic agreements about things in the course of a few weeks.
• September 2007. Leterme is put at the wheel again.
• December 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up a second time. The King asks Verhofstadt to form an interim government. He does so in 2 weeks.
• March 2008. Leterme gets parties to agree on some basic things, and promises "a second package of state reforms by July 15, 2008".
• July 15, 2008. Surprise: Leterme has accomplished exactly nothing, and has to hand in his resignation. A third time.

And even after that horrible track record, CD&V/N-VA is still not willing to put Leterme aside as a candidate for the prime ministry. Now I'm sure some people will tell me that Leterme did indeed, accomplish something, such as the budget agreement of a few days ago. Well, here's a news flash: if you want to get a government set up, then not accomplishing that is pretty critical; something routine and simple as a budget is hardly noteworthy, then. The one thing I do not understand, have never understood, and will not ever understand, is why the larger parties in Belgium feel so compelled to create "cartels" with small extremist fringe parties. They all fell into that trap; VLD (liberals) with Vivant (economic strangelings); CD&V (catholic democrats) with N-VA (flemish nationalists), and SP.A (socialists) with Spirit (left-wing something). I have no trouble understanding why the fringe parties want to do this (gives them power where occasionally they wouldn't have any), but the large parties? It only causes trouble (as the CD&V/N-VA cartel has now proven beyond any doubt); and I seriously doubt it causes them a net win in votes. I could say that some other things about the past deb cle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise; but given the idiocy explained in the previous paragraph, I should hardly be surprised. Sigh. I wish I had some decent politicians in this country; but the people I voted for lost seriously, and were not part of the negotiations. I guess that should mean I have to say: told you so; but then, that's not very productive either. Here's for hoping they can still find some way out of this mess...

Lenny general freeze is approaching, so I'm walking thru my packages bugs and I found this one reported against fdupes.

I got 4Gb of memory, so how to reproduce an OoM? Let's start with a rather large file base, but I need a script to generate it. With 4 cores and a fast Raptor hd, I want something to stess them while learning something: Python + ParallelPython was the answer!

I wrote a small script that takes 3 parameters: the destination directory, the number of dirs to create and the number of files (with random contents) to created inside each of the created dirs. I ran it with 1000 dirs and 1000 files, so it generated 1M files set to work on.

But even with so many files, fdupes ran fine... At that point I realized that ulimit could be my friend, and the "-v" option would have saved me some time, but without the fun to write the script :)

If you don't know pp, here is a little explanation of the main part of the script (I forgot to comment the script well enough):

• job_server = pp.Server() is the pp job server: with no parameter, it allocates execution slots for the number of cores/CPUs on your system (you can force more/less)
  
• jobs.append(job_server.submit(gen_dir_set, (dirname+'/'+str(i),fileno), (), ('random',))) appends to jobs list the function returned by job_server.submit: this command takes the function to execute, the parameters tuple, the functions called by the first one (here empty) and the tuple of needed modules for the called function (here random).
• for job in jobs: job() execute each item in jobs: they are functions that return the results for every jobs (here they are discarded, but you could aggregate them to obtain the final result)
• job_server.print_stats() prints some stats about jobs executions (I love stats :D )

ParallelPython is more powerful than this: for examples, it allows to send your jobs to job nodes, machine dedicated to execute tasks (while you keep your own machine as the administration one), and more! Give it a try ;)

Well, to be charitable, it was a bit late and so perhaps what I said came out wrong, but in this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/14/android_developer_unrest/ I'm quoted as saying the problem is with "upper management", which I don't really believe to be the case, going by snippets of conversations and things I've read. Frankly, at this point in time, I have no idea why Google can't talk about Android. Also, I had several other positive things to say to the reporter, but I guess the 'focus' of the piece was about the problems that Android is currently experiencing. Notwithstanding the recent weirdness, I'm quite happy that someone with a lot of money and muscle is going to be backing an open source mobile phone system, and hope that the current troubles are merely a small speed bump.

After many years with ion, I've switched to using the Awesome window manager. This took three tries; the latest try seems to have stuck. I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about. One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error. But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse". So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like. And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things. So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesh't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."

Plans for the month:

18th-20th: Wolverhampton for Lugradio Live where I'll be doing some sort of presentation on some sort of power management stuff.
22nd-27th: Portland for OSCON and the Oregon Brewers Festival (which I guess settles any arguments about how to spell plumbers)
28th-30th: San Francisco for a meeting that's been moved to the week before I'm there
31st-4th: Boston in order to meet some of the people that I actually work with

Things not planned for the month:

Genocide
Puritanism
upskirt photos
Telling women who fail to cover their legs that they're asking for it

Yesterday I was forced to test my backup system in anger, on a large scale, for the first time in months. A broken package upgrade meant that my anti-spam system lost the contents of all its MySQL databases. That was a little traumatic, to say the least. But happily I have a good scheme of backups in place, and only a single MX machine was affected. So, whilst there was approximately an hour of downtime on the primary MX the service as a whole continued to run, and the secondary (+ trial tertiary) MX machines managed to handle the load between them. I'm almost pleased I had to suffer this downtime, because it did convince me that my split-architecture is stable - and that the loss of the primary MX machine isn't a catastrophic failure. The main reason for panicing was that I was late for a night in the pub. Thankfully the people I were due to meet believe in flexible approaches to start times - something I personally don't really believe in. Anyway the mail service is running well, and I've setup "instant activation now", combined with a full month of free service which is helping attract more users. Apart from that I've continued my plan of migrating away from Xen, and toward KVM. That is going well. I've got a few guests up and running, and I'm impressed at how stable, fast, and simple the whole process is. :) ObQuote: Brief Encounter (That is a great film; and a true classic. Recommended.)

Autobuilder Summary:
138 packages built successfully. 19 packages failed to cross build. 2 packages are tagged for a manual upload. (Dependency issues - rather than break the archive, these packages will not be uploaded until relevant dependencies have been fixed and uploaded.)
Stats
87% built OK
12% failed
Notes:

1. All these packages built previously and fail at the latest versions in Debian Sid. Many could be upstream errors. All exist in Emdebian at
   previous versions (only 1 failure is known to contain bugs in the current versions in Emdebian and this only affects GUI installations. Two other GUI packages contains bugs but build OK.).
2. Some of the packages in the repository (including some of the failures) are not used in *any* of the default emsandbox configurations. Two need to be removed from the repository completely.
3. Some fixes are waiting for updates in Debian, either new uploads migrating to mirrors or pending fixes awaiting upload by me. (Probably tomorrow.)
4. The history of each package is now available via the Emdebian Autobuilder Report. The package name links to the history of previous build attempts for this package. The version string links to the repository data for the current version in Emdebian. The result of the build links to the build log.
5. A comparison with Debian unstable is constantly updated.
6. 254 source packages exist in Emdebian but only 137 are currently built by the autobuilder. The rest will be built when new versions are uploaded to Debian (in some cases, that won't be until after Lenny). If I get time, I'll add build logs for these packages.
7. The repository contains a fair number of packages that we don't currently use. This is a reflection of the problems of determining the "path" through the dependencies when starting at the bottom (glibc uClibc etc.). Bear this in mind when considering new architectures and new package sets. The process involves a lot of trial and error, particularly as cross-building potentially alters the dependency path at each iteration.

Problems

1. libselinux and libsepol have just been uploaded with a bug fix that is needed for e2fsprogs and file cross-builds, amongst others. Waiting
   for the ARM mirror to receive the new builds, hopefully tomorrow.
2. gtk+2.0 fails to cross-build because the patches now try to build the udeb which comes up against a bug in dpkg-cross. I'll be uploading the new version (including a couple of other bug fixes) tonight. (Final testing currently in progress.). The Gtk package also needs some work to run /usr/lib/libgtk2.0-0/update-gdkpixbuf-loaders so that the icons can be read in the GUI.
3. pango1.0 also needs a fix to update the pango modules. This is usually done at build time but it means running a cross-built binary. It is a minor task and not CPU intensive so I plan to do this in postinst. Without this fix, no text is rendered in the GUI, only empty glyphs.
4. xfonts-base is way too large still. More work is needed here to optimise just what is meant by the 'fixed' font for X, precisely which font files can be removed, which might be needed outside C or English locales etc.
5. Other packages not currently cross-building include: (NOTE: Some of these build logs are VERY large.)
   • adduser - needs to be removed from the repository, it is perl and we implement it via busybox.
   • cups cupsys - /usr/include/pthread.h:653: warning: '__regparm__' attribute directive ignored.
   • gcc-4.2 - needs to be removed from the repository, it no longer builds libgcc1 which was the main reason for cross-building it.
   • glib2.0 - more generated content: /bin/sh: line 2: /usr/bin/glib-genmarshal: No such file or directory
   • gnomevfs - hasn't built for ages and isn't usable anyway due to dependency issues. Currently preventing the use of gpe-filemanager. Due to be replaced by GIO in Debian.
   • libusb - build failure, so far resistant to usual fixes.
   • ncurses - build failure - uses gcc in wide char support build.
   • ntp - build failure - assembly error. authkeys.c:445: error: invalid 'asm': invalid operand for code 'w'
   • pcre3 - build failure - apparently simply unresolved symbols resistant to usual fixes.
   
   
   • slang2 - possibly needs a patch update, tries to build -pic archives and then fails.
   • xorg-server - build failure: make[4]: *** No rule to make target -L/usr/arm-linux-gnu/lib', needed by Xprt'. Stop.

Of the problems above, only problems 2, 3 and 4 (gtk, pango and xfonts-base) are "critical" as these are the only ones where the current packages are sufficiently broken that the new version is essential before Emdebian can make a "release" of a series of three root filesystems for ARM. Sizes are still larger than desired - a fix for that requires changes in glibc which I hope to investigate during DebConf.

Any help on the above issues is appreciated.

Problem-solving:
$ emsource -c $package
$ cd /path/to/$package
$ emdebuild

If you have SVN access, use 'emdebuild --svn-only' to commit your changes (even if your changes don't solve all the problems).

Without SVN access, post the result of 'svn diff ../emdebian*' to this list (or 'svn diff ../debian*' if you have added a patch for the upstream code to debian/patches/).

Platforms:
All the above is based solely on Emdebian ARM for balloon3:
Linux balloon 2.6.25.2-pxa270 #1 Sun May 18 22:38:11 BST 2008 armv5tel unknown
balloon3 in CUED case
http://balloonboard.org/gallery/300/balloon3-0v1-fpga.jpg

AFAICT no other ARM platforms have been tested.

I have a few fixes for the balloon3-config package that also needs an update in Emdebian - I've had some feedback from the touchscreen driver
upstream that we might be trying to use the wrong device (/dev/input/mice is the wrong target for the symlink, we can set whatever device we want in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the driver will use that in preference to /dev/event0). As this is device-specific, /etc/X11/xorg.conf will be put into balloon3-config which is available via Emdebian SVN.

It’s been on the TODO list for ages now, and Soeren finally tackled it: compositing support for gpomme. This is the only change in this release. Please report any issue with gpomme and compositing, as this code has only been tested on a limited number of configurations. For people not running a compositing manager (like myself), don’t worry, gpomme works just as before.