Playing with a Holux M-241 Here is how to download tracks from the Holux M-241:

gpsbabel -t -r -w -i m241 -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F  date +'%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S' .gpx

It might work also via bluetooth, but I have not tried yet. Now, until M-241 support will be released in a stable version of gpsbabel, here is how to compile the version from CVS. Get the sources:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@gpsbabel.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gpsbabel login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@gpsbabel.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gpsbabel co -P gpsbabel

Untar this to debianise the sources. If it does to compile because of some errors in lmx.c, apply this patch. Then you can install the resulting package and (hopefully) be happy. Note, after downloading the logs, gpsbabel currently turns on logging. Here is a patch to disable that behaviour. Finally, if you want to hack around a little on the unit, you can play with mtkbabel: the source code is simple, and most of the MTK protocol is implemented, so you can easily feed your own commands to the MTK. Documentation about the commands can be found here:

• http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pyCLH-0TdNe-5N-5tBokuOA&t=2046668448833862841
• http://www.rc-cam.com/misc/PMTK_commands.pdf
• http://www.tronico.fi/OH6NT/docs/NMEA0183.pdf
• http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/GPS/MTK%20Packet_User%20Manual.pdf

The links are taken from a post in the GPSPasSion forum. For a source of ideas of what commands you can send, you can look into the source code of BT747. For example, to set the M-241 to 2Hz fix, you can add this to mtkbabel:

packet_send('PMTK300,500,0,0,0.0,0.0');
$ret = packet_wait('PMTK001,300,3');

And if you want to set the MTK to an insane 5Hz fix rate, to take really fine grained gpx traces with your laptop, you can use this:

packet_send('PMTK300,200,0,0,0.0,0.0');
$ret = packet_wait('PMTK001,300,3');

Recently I’ve been having some problems with hardware dying. Having one item mysteriously fail is something that happens periodically, but having multiple items fail in a small amount of time is a concern. One problem I’ve had is with CD-ROM drives. I keep a pile of known good CD-ROM drives because as they have moving parts they periodically break and I often buy second-hand PCs with broken drives. On each of the last two occasions when I needed a CD-ROM drive I had to try several drives before I found one that worked. It appears that over the course of about a year of sitting on a shelf I have had four CD-ROM drives spontaneously die. I expect drives to die if they are used a lot from mechanical wear, I also expect them to die over time as the system cooling fans suck air through them and dust gets caught. I don’t expect them to stop working when stored in a nice dry room. I wonder whether I would find more dead drives if I tested all my CD and DVD drives or whether my practice of using the oldest drives for machines that I’m going to give away caused me to select the drives that were most likely to die. Today I had a problem with hard drives. I needed to test a Xen configuration for a client so I took two 20G disks from my pile of spare disks (which were only added to the pile after being tested). Normally I wouldn’t use a RAID-1 configuration for a test machine unless I was actually testing the RAID functionality, it was only the possibility that the client might want to borrow the machine that made me do it. But it was fortunate as one of the disks died a couple of hours later (just long enough to load all the data on the machine). Yay! RAID saved me losing my work! Then I made a mistake that I wouldn’t make on a real server (I only got lazy because it was a test machine and I didn’t have much risk). I had decided to instead make it a RAID-1 of 30G disks and to save some inconvenience I transfered the LVM from the degraded RAID on the old drive to a degraded RAID on a new disk. I was using a desktop machine and it wasn’t designed for three hard disks so it was easier to transfer the data in a way that doesn’t need to have more than two disks in the machine at any time. Then the new disk died as soon as I had finished moving the LVM data. I could have probably recovered that from the LVM backup data and even if that hadn’t worked I had only created a few LVs and they were contiguous so I could have worked out where the data was. Instead however I decided to cut my losses and reinstall it all. The ironic thing is that I had planned to make a backup of the data in question (so I would have copies of it on two disks in the RAID-1 and another separate disk), but I had a disk die before I got a chance to make a backup. Having two disks out of the four I selected die today is quite a bad result. I’m sure that some people would suggest simply buying newer parts. But I’m not convinced that a disk manufactured in 2007 would survive being kept on a shelf for a year any better than a disk manufactured in 2001. In fact there is some evidence that the failure rates are highest when a disk is new. Apart from stiction I wouldn’t expect drives to cease working from not being used, I would expect drives to last longer if not used. But my rate of losing disks in running machines is minute. Does anyone know of any research into disks dying while on the shelf?

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I have received a brand new USB card reader. At first sight, everything was working well “out of the box”, but when I have checked the log files, I could see the following lines repeated very frequently: I repeat everything seems to work OK, but I can’t stand this kind of messages, especially when it deals with storage (by experience, everything works well during the tests, you simply ignore error messages, and you loose your data the first time you really use your hardware!).
After some googling, I have found this issue is hardware related. A lot of people seem to get hit by this. Some have even reverted to USB 1 (UHCI)! Further googling pointed out this article. I have tried to disable USB auto-suspend, and changing the idle-delay time (default is 2 seconds). But it doesn’t help. Just for reference, this can be done like this:
echo -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend Note the following part of the documentation:
The idle-delay values for already existing devices will not be affected To make the change permanent, you need to append usbcore.autosuspend=-1 to the boot parameters (USB support is compiled into Debian kernels).
More information on: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/power-management.txt I can also see the following message at boot time: According to this recent discussion, it seems it is harmless. I have however noticed that unplugging the card reader and re-plugging it after the system has booted make these log entries disappear. Does someone have an idea? Note that I use the latest Debian 2.6.25 kernel:

Linuxtag 2008 is over. Like last year’s Linuxtag, it was a very nice event. We had a lot of visitors, answered a lot more questions and sold many t-shirts, posters and stickers at our eee-pc *cough* Debian booth. It was also very nice to meet some other people from Debian — one of the rare moments in life where I can feel really young again… sorry guys Of course there were many interesting talks and booths from other projects at this year’s Linuxtag. After Nico’s and my yearly Linuxtag raid, I had like a dozen different ball pens, a t-shirt, a handful of cookies, and many many gummy bears. Unlike last year, this year we had no Debian Day — but guess who showed up at our booth yesterday: that’s right, Ian Murdock himself! I was so nervous to meet him, that I almost forgot to ask for a picture. Apropos showing up at our booth: although we where fairly good manned at our booth, we felt that a few more helpers wouldn’t have hurt. We (the staff from this year’s Debian booth) just want to say, that you don’t have to be a Debian Developer / Maintainer or whatever to help at our booth. If you’re an enthusiastic Debian user and can spare some time, you’re very welcome. The tickets for the staff are usually free, so don’t hesitate to ask if you can help next year!

I’ve spent more or less the last few days of spare time trying to figure out why gcc-4.3 built kernels were so unhappy on parisc. Basically the symptom was that any IPv4 networking operation would only complete once and a while, for example, ping would drop 90% of packets. This turned out to be a really troublesome bug to track down, and the fix was only 7 characters long. gcc-4.2 wasn’t problematic, so that provided an interesting base. A bit of thinking ruled out some obvious parts of the kernel that would likely not be an issue. For instance, ARP appeared to be fine, so it likely wasn’t an issue at the network driver level. So rebuilding net/built-in.o on gcc-4.2, copying it to the gcc-4.3 tree, and rebuilding the tree using it resulted in a working kernel. Ok, excellent, we know it’s likely an issue in net/, what else can we rule out, and what do we know? ICMP is affected, so it’s probably not a TCP problem… Rebuilding the kernel with IPv6 enabled, and testing ping6? Ok, works. So it looks like an IPv4 issue. Test that assertion… yup, net/ipv4/built-in.o compiled with gcc-4.2 works. Ok, peachy. What now? Bisecting the contents of the directory results in ip_output.c being the problematic file… Not all that helpfully, the differences between the code generated by 4.2 and 4.3 are extensive. Well, ok, let’s try turning off a variety of the added compiler options… nope, no luck, but the file works when compiled at -O0. Next, I bisected the file until I found the problematic function (unfortunately for me starting in the middle, it ended up being the first function in the file.) Which was in a chain of inline functions, eventually calling some architecture specific inline assembly for ip_fast_csum. Ok, that looks like our canary in the coal mine… Look it up… SIGH. The routine touches memory, but didn’t have “memory” in the list of clobbers. Adding the clobber and everything magically works again. Wasn’t that a party? [ Of course, this makes things sound almost easy, except that at around 10 minutes to boot a test kernel, reboot, and boot a working kernel, this gets extremely tedious. I also didn't bother to talk about how many hours I probably wasted twiddling compiler flags trying to figure out which optimization pass might be broken... ]

As of yesterday, Czech is back to 3rd place, ahead of Portuguese, in the debconf translation ratio ranking. Funny competition, indeed, which result is....more l10n. Jacobo is now 80 strings from his ultimate goal: make Galician the most translated language from Spain, for debconf..:-) And French is missing 28 strings only...

OK, so I've spent my last money on the One Mini A110 subnotebook recently. Yep, yet another ASUS Eee PC clone, but this one has the great benefit of costing only 199.- Euros and has similar specs as the Eee PC 2G Surf (700), I think. This is really a great little machine as far as I can tell. It's a VIA C7-M ULV 1GHz with 512MB DDR2 RAM and a 2 GB Solid-State-Disk (SSD), 7" screen at supposedly 800x480, VGA out, card reader slot for SD/MMC/MS, 2x USB, wireless, modem, audio. No webcam, no bluetooth. Yesterday I created a wiki at a110wiki.de (for the A110, but also the A120 from the same vendor, which has a 4 GB SSD), where A110 users can collect information, HOWTOs, photos, etc. There's already quite some content there, especially some early tutorials and photos on the inner workings of the A110. Today I've installed a stock Debian unstable distro on the SSD with 2.6.25 kernel, and I'm currently checking which parts of the hardware work out of the box, and which need further fixing. There's a a bunch of source code tarballs and patches on the vendor website, but most of it seems to be meant for 2.6.22, we'll see if and/or how much work it'll take to merge all this upstream (if it's not already done)... My Debian Installation HOWTO is also available from the wiki, of course; I'll add more info and photos during the day. Now for all interested parties: The vendor of the A110 has (again) announced a special weekend offer (valid until Sunday, June 1, 2008, i.e. tomorrow) where they'll sell the A110 for 199,- Euros again, the regular price will be 229,- Euros after that. So if you're thinking about buying one, now is probably the right time. Check the wiki for issues which are important to you, some quirks remain at this point (but will probably mostly be figured out sooner or later), e.g. the wifi seems to have issues (the vendor said they'll send a driver update to all affected customers), the RAM is builtin and can't be upgraded, and some other, more or less important issues, depending on what you expect from the laptop. For real-time communication there's also the #a110 IRC channel on Freenode.

I have long wanted a pet pig but there was always the size and space problem. But now this problem has been solved. In fact, they are so small, you can probably get 2 at once.

I knew better when I neither advertised nor used my IITG Alumni forwarding email address, and I suppose I'll not do that, ever.

For one, the ID given was ridiculous, connected to my name in a rather weird fashion with a number thrown into it and nobody bothered to reply when I asked if I could change it. And now the domain-name part of the email ID has been changed forcing people to tell all their contacts about the change, but this takes the cake -- the service has been moved to Hotmail with 2GB free space.

Huh! Thanks but no thanks.

I really disapprove of such widespread services (which should really not have a commercial angle to them) being taken over by the Googles, Ciscos and the Microsofts of the world.

In the TechCrunch coverage of Google IO, I was impressed by this:

Not every team has the resources Google does to build for every platform. Google is betting on browser over time for mobile devices; it will be the entry point for many applications. But today, the only browsers capable for supporting mobile apps include iPhone and few others. So Google is developing Android, which includes world class Webkit browser.

Here at the world headquarters of DedaSys LLC (which for the time being happens to be "in front of David's computer, wherever that is"), we too have some suspicions about the browser becoming the platform of choice for mobile phones, although there is a big if: When will the carriers make always on, cheap internet connections widespread? Until that happens, client side apps will still probably dominate for many things. And of course for applications requiring hardware access, some kind of local program will be necessary as well for the foreseeable future. (And of course, Hecl is a good choice "for the time being", too!) Coming back to the phrase cited above, what blows me away about it is the sheer amount of time and money that they're investing in something that "over time", they're not really betting on, in the sense that they just want browsers everywhere? Jumping into a market with a new "OS", toolkit, etc... just to spread a platform with a decent browser? Wow. That is a company with a lot of spare change. Most people and companies in business are doing the best they can to stretch out their dollars or euros as best they can. I guess it really takes a behemoth to pour so much in the way of engineering talent and financial resources into something that's in some ways a bump in the road in terms of their long term vision. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into one phrase?

Reading CRANberries this morning I remembered that I’d never gotten around to packaging Amelia for Debian. So I dutifully filed my ITP and got to work on adapting the package to build with Debian, which thanks to Dirk’s hackery on R support in cdbs was pretty easy—copy over the debian directory from my Zelig package, update the copyright file, fix up the control file, update the Debian changelog, fix a lintian warning or two (FSF address in the copyright file), and it’s basically done. Then I discovered that Amelia also throws in a couple of Tcl/Tk libraries. One, BWidget is already packaged, so all I had to do was delete the copy that’s installed by the Amelia package and add a dependency on it. The other is Combobox, the exact license of which follows:

completely, totally, free. I retain copyright but you are free to use the code however you see fit. Don’t be mean.

Yay. I get to play license negotiator again. I really love creating extra work I really don’t need for myself…

I tried the installation of KDE 4.1 beta 1 on Debian, as described here. I ended up undoing this about an hour later. The environment isn't really usable yet, so my advice to the public is: don't do it, on a system you plan to actually use.

Here is a random assortment of problems I encountered:

• You can't configure size and appearance of the panel. This is a long-standing problem, but I thought it was fixed.
• In general, there don't appear to be all that many configuration options available to replicate various behaviors that I have become accustomed to.
• Rendering problems in the system tray; icons appear on top of each other.
• Various kicker widgets don't appear to be available for KDE 4 (yet?).
• Most applications don't copy their old settings, but it appears that some do?
• KMail doesn't interact well with encrypted IMAP accounts. I didn't try much beyond that, because I have no accounts that are not affected by that.
  
• Clicking on an RSS link in Konqueror doesn't link to Akregator anymore. Probably, various MIME type associations are missing.
• I couldn't get the environment to remember to open terminal windows maximized. Very annoying.
  
• I couldn't add any application icons to the panel. I'm not sure where on is supposed to store one's favorites now.
  

So it was quite obvious that that various pieces don't really fit together all that well yet. On the upside, I noticed many really good ideas that I would look forward to using if the overall environment worked.

The good news is that the packaging appears to be really robust (I found one packaging bug with a file conflict) and the upgrade and downgrade works well (you have to use aptitude, as described in Ana's post; apt craps out completely).
So when KDE 4 is actually usable, Debian will be ready. But not for lenny; that would be suicide in my opinion.

I used to help staff more exhibition stands than I do now. Part of the reason I stopped was that few free software people seem to appreciate the basics of running a good exhibition stand and I got bored of arguing that we should give people space, avoid putting a counter across the stand, keep notes of contacts made and basic stuff like that. So, it was good to read Connecting People: Making an exhibition of yourself - the exhibitor and the linked Business Startup Coach shares Exhibition & Trade show secrets which repeat many points I've made before. Don't want to listen to me? Listen to the marketing experts. Some time after noticing WDPRS, I tried reporting as much spam as possible for a while, to hosters and registrars based on WHOIS details. Some hosts and registrars were good at dealing with spam (Yahoo and walla.net.il were exceptionally good) many were bad (bresnan.net, registrationtek.com, publicdomainregistry.com (PDR), ait.com, omantel.co.om, ttnet.net.tr) and some were ugly (Tucows/OpenSRS wrote back to say they don't do anything about domains they register, while ENom and Moniker never sent human answers). So it's no surprise to see ENom, Moniker, PDR and AIT on the list of

"Top Ten Worst Spam Registrars Notified By ICANN"

ultimately taken from this report.

While I have been a little quiet with ftpmaster posts lately - I am still alive. I just had some other bits to do and didn’t get large enough changes done that would warrant an own post. Since my last post earlier this months there have only been 3 notable changes, namely

• fixing a bug in the transitions feature. Or better - working around one in python-syck which was inserting random “—” when it dumped a data structure. Which does break stuff.
• Changed the Maintainers name of the ftp.debian.org pseudopackage.
• Merged a little branch from Frans that enables automated byhand processing for the tasksel data.
• Started the last discussion on the data section/archive/component thingie and will end that soon with an implementation.

And only a few minutes ago I sent a “Bits from” mail to our debian-devel-announce mailinglist, which includes a summary of the recent activities and changes in our team, with the addition of Thomas and Kalle, me getting FTPMaster and Anthony and James resigning. We also ask for volunteers which we might add to the team later on. See, I write might. We keep the right to reject people, for whatever reason. Hopefully there won’t be many rejects, but still. And we will see how the volunteers get the tasks done we plan to assign to them. You can expect to see a little more in the near future from me again, I don’t plan on staying that quiet forever.

---

And in other news - I recently got another group added, mirroradm, as it did help to fix some mirror issues with packages.debian.org. With that I also got the mirrors@ alias additionally routed into my INBOX. Thats a nicely spammed role address and my tip for you, if you should ever get offered access to (any) role address - run as fast as you can, unless you have very good spam filters! :) Luckily my filters are pretty good, as I’m on a good number of role addresses for a long time already, only a few dozen spams getting through a day (and a thousand filtered away). Comments: 0

I’m so going to Debconf 8… Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:

• Dublin - Madrid, 7th August, 18:25-21:50, IB3183
• Madrid - Buenos Aires, 8th August, 01:25-08:40, IB 6843
• Buenos Aires - Madrid, 21st August, 21:45-14:30, IB 6844
• Madrid - Dublin, 22nd August, 16:10-17:35, IB 3184

All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :) And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)

Buch of quickies:

• First, I'm moving from livejournal to blogger. Mainly because blogger allows me to email pictures/videos from my cellphone and automatically converts them to blog entries. To avoid spamming planet with unnecessary entries, only postings tagged with "Debian" be syndicated to p.d.o.
  
• Was invited to UDS and Prague. Quite different from conferences where I've been before (debconf, FOSDEM). Less time spent with one person presenting and rest of room listen, more time people discussing the topic of session. Atleast this was the case in the Mobile track I mostly followed.
  
• Testing scripts now consider Armel a Release architecture. \o/. The armel debian-installer should also be part of debian-installer beta2 really soon(tm) . Only getting testing-security running properly is tricky at the moment...
• fuck I'm old now.
  

strftime's time format does not support fractional seconds, but a lot of people want to do that, based on a google search. It's been implemented as an extension to several programs. Each implementation I found uses a different conversion specification, and in each case the character chosen was already used by something else in the standard strftime. The only unused letters are: %f, %i %J %K %L %q %Q %w (and perhaps some punctuation). Of these, "%f" has a good mnemonic for fractional seconds. But I hestiate to poach from such a small space. Looking at glibc's extensions to the strftime format suggested a different approach. I suggest using "%.S" for fractional seconds. There's a good mnemoic and this seems unlikely to be used for anything else. This could be extended to include an optional precision ("%.4S"). It would also be nice to have a standard way of showing microseconds, nanoseconds, and milliseconds too. "%uS", "%nS", and "%mS" would be nice to use; unfortunatly, "%u", "%n", and "%m" are already used in strftime (so are "%U, "%N", and "%M"). I don't have a solution for these, but they're probably generally less useful than fractional seconds anyway.

---

Update: I neglected to mention the possibility of using the O modifier. Dirk Eddelbuettel points out that R uses "%OS" for fractional seconds. As compromises go, R has chosen a pretty good one. But SuSv3 actually defines the O modifier as causing the locale's alternative numeric symbols to be used, with an example of Roman Numerals. So fractional seconds is probably not quite what "%OS" is intended to do, unless you're in the locale for very fast living people. :-) In current versions of glibc, the alt_digits field used by the O modifier is only present for a few locales: fa_IR, ja_JP, and or_IN. Still, there are plenty of other numeral systems out there, so I still favor making up a new modifier like "%.S", rather than trading off localisation for precision.

With the cost of plane tickets approaching 2000 USD it is rather hard to sell me going to the Debconf 8 as that can be approximated as 3-4 months of my income. I did apply for travel sponsorship, but due to some kind of brainfart I misread “Amount I am unable to fund myself” as “Amount I am able to fund myself” and thus asked for far less money than I actually need. Therefore, after the Debconf team strictly stated that the requested amount can not be changed at this point, it has become clear that I cann’t come to Debconf 8. /sadpanda I would still love to come if there was sponsorship money to cover my fare and even suggested putting me to the end of the sponsorship priority list, but apparently that is not happening. Have fun, and see you all in Spain in 2009.

During the last 4 days, I didn't read Planet. So I started an interesting exercise and wanted to comment very briefly on a few entries I just read quickly to catch up. My Planet premium, so to say..

• (not Planet related...I read that on NASA mailing lists...some of which I'm subscribed since 1988) NASA's Phoenix lander successfully landed on Mars. This is actually the first successful soft landing on Mars since 1976 (recent landings were hard ones, with airbags....or failures). This stunning picture shows the spacecraft with its parachute during its descent on Mars. It was taken by the HiRISE camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The very first time a spacecraft photographs another one while it's landing. Amazing, right?
• Marga and the Spanish keymap: I can't disagree with your comments, Marga. Still, that's a though issue: changing the behaviour of a keymap that's used by millions of users is not a trivial change. OTOH, you're right and that tilde should be dead, indeed. I think there is barely no other option than a fork, here: have both keymaps, one with asciitilde and another one with dead_tilde on the same key combination and let users choose. That keymap should be named "es-standard" to avoid changing the existing "es".
• John Goerzen biking to work: John is among the people I never met but who I know I share ideas and vision of life with. So, seeing him comment on alternative ways to commute to/back work is a pleasure for me (alternative transportation systems with the goal of abandoning the heresy of individual cars is part of my hobbies....while I still don't always apply these principles myself). And, well, seeing someone writing that this is still possible in the flat MidWest of the country that contributes the most to climate change is a relief for me: change can happen.
• Joey reads USENET again. Long time since I last read news... In the past I used to have my own feed, through UUCP. I still receive a lot of my mails by UUCP, though (bubulle@kheops.frmug.org comes this way)
• Pollocks were in Europe. Andrew is another of these people I feel like having connections with while we never met. Next time, plan a stop in Bubulle Hotel and visit Paris, Andrew.
• Dirk mentioned Bike the Drive, which I assume to be a bike-related event in Chicago... Yet another occasion to see there's still some hope for alternatives to cars in the US of A...
• Kartik is back home in Mumbai after some months working in Bangalore (and not enjoying it). I'm happy for him that he can be again with his family.
• Ganneff also bikes. Of course, he does it the geek way. Would you have guessed? Joerg, are you ready for the DebConf daily running tour which I plan to do in Mar del Plata?
• Manoj is the last Emacs user, along with /me
• Jaldhar who I have much respect for in the project, still supports the US republican party, the most conservative party in the so-called western world. It is still completely out of my understanding how FLOSS "spirit" can fit with this (the same stands for the political stance of Eric "Gun" Raymond, indeed). Mysteries...
• Lucas wonders how to find cheap flights. Voyages SNCF (aka Expedia), the online travel agency of the French railway company, always gets my preference. Yes, French *railway*.
• MJ also posts about biking. I have to mention that easy bike-on-demande systems in cities are one of the best ways to develop this. Barcelona's system seems pretty cool. Paris' Velib is amazing and so is the system in Lyon (who initiated the movement in France). All this is something I personnally follow pretty closely (I'm a addicted reader of the French professionnal magazine named "Ville et Transport", "Town and Transportation") in the hope it also develops in my Suburbia.
• Too many technical issues on Planet. I can't follow..:-)