Netflix really is a great service. (That is why I bought some shares in them after all) I like their core product offering, and I like that they're fairly switched on technically with their website. Now I also like their phone support. We were supposed to receive Clerks: Tenth Anniversary Edition, but we received the bonus disk instead (I'm not even sure how you can do that, it doesn't appear to come up when you search for "Clerks"). I reported it as mislabeled, via the website, but this wasn't really accurate: the sleeve said it was the bonus disk. We'd just been shipped the wrong disk. I wasn't sure whether the mistake was that we'd received the wrong disk, or that it was misrepresented in the DVD list on the website. I discovered that our $13.99 a month seems to entitle us to 24-hour telephone support (can you believe that?), so I called them up, bashed in our customer identification number, and in under a minute at 11:48pm on a Saturday night, was connected to an all-American sounding "Jill", who very quickly identified that we had indeed been shipped the wrong DVD, and so organised for the right one to be shipped out. The entire experience was delightful. Yay for Netflix having competent phone support.

Yesterday, I removed my new server from the rack and brought it back home, after the problems with the nVidia network chip (forcedeth) took down the NIC to the point that the IPMI chip, which is routed through the primary interface, wasn t reachable anymore. Even though a soft reboot fixed the problem, a bit of large-packet traffic, like downloading via IPv6, broke the card again. Since IPMI is also affected, I cannot remotely manage the machine and thus can t leave it in the rack. In fact, I am strongly considering to make use of the try&buy contract and return the thing. I cannot rule out a software problem, but given that the NIC goes into a state in which it gets unusable even to the IPMI system, which is completely independent of Linux, I somewhat doubt it. Instead, I suspect a hardware error, beyond the known problems with nVidia network chips and segmentation/checksum offloading. On the other hand, it s not news that drivers can break hardware, and the fact that I am using Linux is reason for hope. One alternative, which would allow me to potentially help in fixing this bug, is to use a riser card to stuff a different network card into the server. This would mean I didn t invest all the time into the server for nothing. Unfortunately, this workaround comes with extra costs, and would require Init Seven to allocate another switch port for the IPMI card, which I am not sure they ll be keen about. The bottom line of the story is that I will avoid nVidia even more in the future, and you might want to do so as well. Companies that produce crap hardware and do not cooperate with people writing free drivers for them do not deserve the money. Unfortunately, almost everyone out there uses the MCP55 chipset these days, and deny any problems with it. I guess I will take a look at HP and IBM, although I d really prefer not to pay for their brands, and not to enslave myself to their customer support standards. NP: Neil Young: Dead Man

I found the camera this morning, but I haven't taken pictures of the new place yet. I think that'll have to wait until this weekend.

I'm sitting in the corner of what will be the office space. Right now, it's got the cordless phone, the wifi router, the cable modem, and the Vonage (codec? modem? codec seems likely, how wonderfully archaic). Off to the side is a sewing table of some sort that the former owners left behind which has the power brick for our cell phones and Angie's laptop on it.

We're running laundry for the first time in the washing machine downstairs, and seasoning the new cast iron frying pan. Leif had a bath earlier and actually went down at about the normal time. He woke up at 05h30 this morning, probably due to the lack of curtains. It apparently starts to get bright early, and none of us are sleeping well with three of us in a double.

Our furniture is due to arrive somewhere between the 15th and the 18th. I phoned today and the moving company told us that the stuff hasn't left California yet. Ah well. We've purchased a toaster over and electric kettle so far. We bought the stove, washer and dryer from the former owner. There was a spare fridge downstairs that we're using, but mostly we're using the step outside the kitchen door. We're back in Quebec and it's cold enough to keep things out there. =)

This place is easily the largest place I've lived in since my parents split up when I was 8. Angie and I are really trying hard not to fill it with crap, but actually think through what we need.

I signed Angie and I up for gym memberships today after work. Yesterday was cell phones. Angie picked up some new pots and pans. Tomorrow will be towels and some dishes.

Anyone know if it's better to buy a fridge and dishwasher before Christmas or after? =)

The new home number, cell numbers and such will be in Facebook and Orkut in a moment.

I've recently noticed that one of our lab laptops running "testing" and "unstable" <strong>freezes</strong> the system whenever i close
the lid. Additionally, X does not always come up properly and rebooting is (besides typing blindly) the only way to get a
graphical login. The graphics chipset is an intel 955. After a bit of search we found a kernel bugreport, which provides a clue
where the problem occurs. root@orion:~# cat /proc/acpi/video/*/DOS
DOS setting: <0> To get it working for the HP Compaq 2510p, all you need to do is to set a value of "1" root@orion:~# echo '1' > /proc/acpi/video/*/DOS Then cross your fingers and close the lid. Hopefully your system did no freeze and is still up ;-) At work, we're using a modprobe post-install-Script to work around this which sets the working ACPI _DOS value if a ''ACPIvideo_DOS'' variable is set. This will hopefully be fixed soon in a newer kernel version. Afaik from Debconf8, Bdale also owns one of those notebooks. PS.: *rofl*

Waking up this morning, I noticed a low traffic in my incoming mail in "Debian work" mailboxes (PTS mailboxes, personal email, bugs, -release, etc.). Then I read -devel and understood. Everything is there. We have a new flamewar (apparently about NEW processing). It's interesting to see that the closer we get from a release, the biggest flamewars we are doing. Sounds like everybody is boring (have you notived the strong drop in the bug report rate?). Crap, there's a lot of work left to do, to release the damn Lenny:

• Zap down RC bugs (last time I checked 64 were both in lenny and unstable, not marked pending and not hinted)
• Release D-I RC2
• Test upgrade paths
• And, of course, I should not forget about the most important thing on earth: vote about firmware cra^W haircutt^W proposals

For $ DEITY 's sake, could we do that, so that developers stop boring, then go back to their development duties and the number of flamewars lowers down again (maybe after the squeeze release goals discussion which will probably be "interesting", also)? Please...your home page, these days, should really be http://bts.turmzimmer.net...

The title of this post was a headline that was probably written by an overly sensationalistic editor at http://www.searchenterpriselinux.com. The actual article, though, was written by Pam Derringer, was a pretty balanced piece (although it obviously could have been more in-depth; given length and time constraints, she talked to as many people as I think could have been expected, including a Sun spokeswoman, two analysts from different analyst companies, the chair of Apache Software Foundation, a Sun customer, and so on). I’m not sure I’d agree with Jim Jagielski when he claims that Sun has the “best and brightest business people in the world,” though. As I said in the article, and as I’ve said before, I have nothing but the highest respect for many of Sun’s engineers, especially those who work on Solaris. But their business people? I’m not so sure they have the best and brightest… in fact, I think that’s one of Sun’s greatest problems right now. Compare that with the job that Mark Hurd has done with HP, or with the work done by the executives at my employer (IBM), and I’m not so sure a strong case can be made for the excellence of Sun’s business folk. (I mean, how many people still believe that the $2 billion dollars which Sun spent to acquire Cobalt Networks, or the $4 billion dollars which Sun spent to acquire StorageTek, or the $1 billion dollars which Sun spent MySQL, were all good ideas? Sun is currently valued by the market at $2.4 billion dollars!) My bigger concern at the moment, however, is what happens if Sun gets purchased by a rival or by a corporate raider and gets broken up for parts? Since November 19th, when Sun’s stock price crashed through $3.27 (and has hit a low of $2.60 recently), it has been trading for less than its per-stock cash value. I say that not out of a sense of Schadenfreude, but out of concern about what happens if someone decides to buy the company, lay everyone off, and even after paying all of its debts, the resulting cash left over would be more than cost of completely buying the company — all of the real estate, the inventory, and the patent portfolio would all be pure profit. It’s the last I’m most concerned about; Sun has a very large patent portfolio! What if it fell into the hands of a patent troll? What damage could be done to not just Linux and the OSS comunity, but the software industry as a whole? Suppose Sun really does have patents that read upon many of NetApp’s products? If those patents fall into the hands of a patent troll, NetApp would no longer be able to negotiate a peace settlement based on its patents (if they survive the on-going patent re-examination process) that read on ZFS, since the patent troll would no longer be making any products based on ZFS. Maybe somewhere in Sun’s patent portfolio, there are patents that read on the GNOME and KDE desktops, but since Sun is trying to ship those with its Project Indiana/Open Solaris dekstop, it’s not bothering to assert them at this time? What if a patent troll, perhaps one funded by Microsoft, gets their hands on those patents? One final scary thought. Sun’s current market cap: $2.40 billion USD. Sun’s cash on hand: $2.63 billion USD. Microsoft’s current cash on hand: $19.71 billion USD. I can just imagine Steve Ballmer saying, “Chris, take it out of petty cash. I have an itsy-bitsy little acquistion I want to make…. Now I can embrace and extend Java all I want! And you know those term-limited, non-Open Source TCK licenses Sun gave to OpenJDK developers — not any more! They’re gone, within a year, the next time Red Hat needs to get the license renewed!” Could it happen? What do you think?

I got an iPhone on the very first day it was available officially in my country. I have used it every day since then and am now ready to decide how good it really is. Summary: it is a great piece of technology and the only tradeback is the locked down platform. I have abandoned my Palm and am not looking back. Hardware: the hardware is just perfect. 4 buttons (Home, Power, Volume Up and Down) and 1 switch (Mute) are all very clear, easy to find and press and frankly are enough. The touchscreen is reasonably fast and very precise nicely corrected by software that guides your presses toward UI points of interest if such are within your finger. The casing is absolutely solid - there is no gaps, no wobble, nothing. All glossy surfaces attract fingerprints, but a couple passes with a microfiber cloth (included) clean it up easily. The loudspeaker is phenomenal - all sound comes from a single small hole, but it can easily fill a small room with music. Call sound quality is impeccable. You can plug in any headphones, but if you use the included headphones you get a microphone with a button that can pickup and hand up calls, start/pause music and skip to the next track. I also love that the only charger included is a very small power brick that provides a power-only USB port and a USB charging cable. That is a good way to reduce number of power bricks for gadgets. The iPhone 3G (that is what I have) also has a GPS build-in, but let us be clear - it is not good enough to replace a car GPS, the iPhone GPS is slow (takes several seconds to refresh the location and tens of seconds to find it first time) and the precision is measured in meters or even tens of meters. The WiFi is very good at getting a connection and doing it very fast. Oh and there is an acceptable camera. Out of the box software: the software included surely is better than on any other phone I have seen (including Palm). The UI widgets are nicely written specially for a touchscreen interface - the best example is having click wheels instead of drop down menus. It is much easier mentally to flick a wheel up or down then to click on a list, click to scroll the list and then click to select an entry. And the click wheel makes it much easier to correct off-by-one errors. Switches that look like regular physical switches instead of checkboxes is another very useful UI concept. I think a lot of this can be reused on the desktop as well. iTunes: and here comes the bad spot, the lock-in part. To get anywhere with the iPhone you need to associate it with an installation of iTunes. It fails to work in Wine or even in a virtual machine - apparently there are some errors related to avahi or something. Unfortunately, this means that you need wither Windows or MacOS to do nything with your iPhone. iTunes is the only way to backup, restore and upgrade your iPhone, it is the only way to get contacts and music on the iPhone (there is an iTunes Store app in the newest version that allows purchasing music over the air). Even after doing a jailbreak (see further) it is currently not possible to add music to the iPhone from any third party applications, because the iTunes database has a hashed checksum that the build-in iPhone music player (and iTunes) check before doing anything. If the checksum is wrong the only thing you can do is a full restore of the phone from backup. Crypto geeks - please help decrypt that hash, so that we can sync iPhones to amaroK. The iTunes itself is a bit weird - to get music onto the phone you need to create a playlist and then you can sync that playlist over. One of the playlist options is a smart playlist with a random feature and a limit on number of matches. That is the way to get random music from your collection onto the phone. I do dislike the fact that iTunes syncs all the contacts from Google to the phone and not only contacts for a certain group or only those that have a phone number, for example. Search and favorites do help here. Third party software (iTunes Store): it is very easy to install new software on the phone over the WiFi and there is plenty to choose from. You do need a Mac to develop this software which restricts the developer base a bit. The main bases that I needed (or did not know I needed) are covered: Last.fm player, TwitterFon, LockBox password storage, Stanza ebook reader, Shazam music identificator, Wordpress client, BigOven cookbook and lots of fun games. Have not used any paid-for apps due to the fact that iTunes store is not available in Latvia and the official documentation recommends registering with a fake address in UK or US. Most of the software is rather stable and useful, but there is also a lot of fluff. User reviews and ratings help a lot, can we have those for Debian packages? Jailbreak and third party software (Cydia): thanks to some anonymous hackers, we have the ability to break the software jail on the iPhone and install software that Apple did not approve. The process is made very simple, but again it does require you to boot into Windows or MacOS X. The main thing the jailbreak process does is install an installer on the phone. Currently the best one is Cydia which is built on top of … apt-get and dpkg! After that is done, you can install a terminal, a ssh server and BossPrefs advanced preferences. There are also other interesting programs there - a different dock, file manager, caching youtube player, quake, themed app launcher with categories and startup page (winterboard). Theoretically the ssh server allows you to manage your music over WiFi from any platform, but unfortunately until the iTuned database hash algorithm is decoded, we can only copy music from the phone to the PC and not back. It is possible to copy files over using ssh and then play them using third-party players, but those players are very crude and featureless. To summarize: an iPhone is a great phone and a decent application platform. To make using an iPhone with Linux easier we need to make iTunes run in Wine (and allow it to see the iPhone) and reverse engineer the iTunes database hashing algorithm so that we can get music on our phones with Linux tools. I also wish there was a way to develop iPhone apps in Linux, but that really is reaching for the stars.

I’m looking for people who are interested in testing the first release of gksu-polkit. I uploaded the first tarball to http://people.debian.org/~kov/gksu/gksu-polkit-0.0.1.tar.gz. There are also x86 packages available (built on a sid with a lot of experimental stuff, so if you have trouble installing please email me and I’ll have that fixed =P). For some history and discussion on the whys and hows do take a look at the README which exists inside the tarball (or git repo), and on the small page I wrote about it. For those who want to fiddle with the code, and perhaps help me finding bugs and fixing them, here’s my public git tree: git://git.debian.org/~kov/gksu-polkit.git

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Kike in Iru a, a city I really like but had not been able to visit in five years. I spent three days with him, after a really awful Bilman trip during Friday night. The first thing that happened on Friday morning was quite unexpected. I went out, crossed a pair of streets to get to Carlos III, and going past the corner I found myself surrounded by all kinds of policemen: red, blue, green and yellow. There were press reporters all over the place, with TV and photo cameras ready to record something big. What the hell? I looked around, and there it was: a huge blue sign read Populares de Navarra, and Mariano Rajoy was seconds away from getting out of the new PP headquarters in Nafarroa. With a few dozen policemen looking at me in suspicion, and realising my current hair dress wasn't the most appropriate for that scenario, I decided to disappear as quickly as possible. Populares aside, the weekend was really productive. I had a great time trying to find the places I visited 9 and 5 years ago. It was sad to see the fantastic Iru ako Gaztetxea turned into an iron building surrounded by old, traditional houses in the centre of the city. With Kike, I had enough time to learn more about the origins of Iru a and the three cities from which it originated, and visit the Ciudadela. On Saturday, Kike, Ana and I went to have some fun on a snowy day around Orreaga and had dinner in a small town around the area, maybe Lintzoain? I'm afraid I forgot due to the mix of basque names in my head. We had dinner in lo viejo, where I spotted a poster of Solidari@s con Itoiz for the Itoitz hustu arte campaign, a copy of which I unsuccessfully tried to get in several places in the city. On Sunday, Kike and I took a bus to Donosti, and I travelled across the most beautiful highway I've seen. But of course, that was from my perspective seated in a bus. I can imagine the Leitzaran highway project must have been greatly contested by the people of the tiny towns nearby. The spoiled valleys and views must have been really impressive in the past and seem now irreversibly ruined by a scar and holes through the mountains. This was my first visit to Donosti, which held its annual Marathon, and were lucky to meet our friend Rub n when he was around kilometre 25 of his race. He managed to finish under 2:50, which was a bit better than what he aimed for in his first Marathon. Well done! The weather was horrible, and our visit to La Concha, the old harbour and the Casco Viejo was short, we were freezing and getting our feet wet. While I visited Donosti for the first time, Mikel Laboa, one of the most respected singers in the basque culture, was ebbing away. Laboa's songs always give me goosebumps, even if I need to read a translation for the basque lyrics. Many will remember his music from Julio Medem's documentary, La pelota vasca, featuring Txoria txori, which has become a symbol of basque culture over the years. Youtube has quite a few videos, and I'd recommend watching Txoria txori, Gure bazterrak, Lili bat or Baga biga higa performed by the Orfe n Donostiarra to name a few. Mikel Laboa, goian bego.

So, we’ve been strugling in the WebKit/GTK+ project to get things moving a bit quicker in the API front. This is much needed if we want to see applications really migrating to a WebKit-based implementation, specially for us to have an Epiphany/WebKit release. It seems like Holger Freyther has returned full-throttle into patch reviewing and commiting, and has already committed my patch to add WebInspector support, and the one to allow applications to handle requests of new windows, which had been reviewed in a meeting with many developers weeks ago. We should probably focus on reviewing and applying the web policy delegates one? Also, Holger has done a tremendously awesome work on getting the documentation that is already written available (and improved!), take a look!

I just received this email:

From: Greg Lindstrom
To: Tutorial List

Hello,

On behalf of the PyCon Tutorial Selection Committee, I'd like to inform you that you have been selected to present at least 1 tutorial at PyCon 2009 in Chicago. We had 50 proposals for the 32 available slots and many good proposals had to be rejected.

It means: I get to stand in front of people I don't know in Chicago and talk about web scraping! (Unless the talk is canceled because no one signs up.) So I guess it means I'll be going to PyCon 2009! It's in Chicago, from March 25 to April 2. If you'll be there, too, drop me a line!

When I have a moment, I’ll try to tally up the responses that I got to “An ethical question involving ebooks”and see if there are any interesting patterns based on self-identified generational markers. Obviously, this is not a properly controlled survey, so the results aren’t going to mean much, but it is interesting that some fairly passionately written comments came from folks who self-identified as coming from generations that broke with the common stereotypes of their respective demographic groups. If I were going to commission a study, one thing that I would almost certainly do is to ask pose a similar question about music and mp3’s, and do have the surveys asking the question about ebooks first, and half the surveys asking the questions about music first. It would be interesting to see if (a) there is a difference in attitudes between music and books, and (b) whether the order of the questions might influence the answers or not. A number of poeple have asked me about the author’s name and the title of the books/series involved. I deliberately didn’t include that information, for a number of reasons. First of all, I don’t believe idenifying the author/books/character involved is relevant to the question at hand, and in fact, might be distracting. Secondly, given the many comments, some of them quite passionate, I don’t think it would be fair to drag her name into the discussion without her permission first. I will say that the author does have a fairly extensive internet presence, and has apparently gotten a lot of questions about said character, and in fact whether those books would be made into ebooks. It’s been made quite clear that while those books were successful, they weren’t that successful, and so from an economic point of view, she chooses to write books that she (and her publishers) feel will be more economically viable. Because there will likely be no further books published containing this character, it is very unlikely that the publisher will reprint the original series of books — and when asked about whether they would be made available in ebook form, her response was effectively “it’s up to the publisher”, Apparently she has worked with a number of publishers, and while publisher X hasn’t been willing to publish her books in ebook form, publisher Y has. Furthermore, it seems that her contracts apparently delegate all decisions about how her books will be published, and whether a large Major Big City Law Firm with Fangs (aka MBCLFF) will go after copyright infringers to her publishers and her agent (who is a lawyer at said MBCLFF, and who could presumably inflict major Hurt on copyright infringers that curry the lawyer’s disfavor). I don’t know if this is true, or just her way of managing her relationship with her fans by disclaiming all responsibility about publication forms and enforcement decisions to others — but some authors do make such choices, if they are much more interested in the writing and storytelling end of things than the business side of things. Which brings up an interesting question with respect to copyright enforcement. It’s pretty obvious that many people will give different answers to the question relating to how much deference should be given to copyrights depending on whether they are owned by The Struggling Author versus whether they are owned by The Big Media Corporate Monolith, with many more allowances given if the question is framed as being primarily about the former rather than the latter. Another way in which how you frame the question radically changes the outcome depends on whether the focus is on making sure the author (and/or his surviving widow/widower/children) get paid or whether the focus is on control of one’s works. If you believe the primary justification is an economic one, then that leads to a series of ethical conclusions — the most obvious of which is that if it doesn’t result in a direct (or perhaps indirect) monetary loss to the author, there should not be a moral or ethical problem. There might be some question as to whether devaluing the secondary market might discourage the sale of new books, and hence indirectly harm the author sufficiently that this should be a concern, but those issues can be worked out. If however, you believe the primary issue at hand is one of control, a very different set of issues have to get factored into the conversation. For example, what if the author was ashamed of a book or series, and wants it to go quietly out of print, and hopefully disappear. How should that be weighed against fans who disagree with the author and who love the series? What is the right balance? For those who argue that the author’s wishes should be sacrosanct — should we move things more in that direction? What if all texts lived in DRM’ed, encrypted containers, and electronic readers had to ask permission of a central authorization server for the text could be displayed. This would allow the author to, after the fact, disable anyone from reading his or her works, if for some reason the author so desired it. Would that be a good thing? If not — and I hope most authors would agree this would be horrific power to give copyright holders — then it’s clear that author’s moral rights as creators should not be entirely sacrosanct, and that the society also has some claims on preserving its culture, and that once a book has been published and becomes part of the culture, society should have some claim on that book as part of culture. Whether that means that copyright terms should be 14 years or 20 years as opposed to whenever the Disney corporation feels like paying off more legislators to extend copyright terms is one way that question could be asked. Another is whether society should have the right to say that if after some number of years where a work has been abandoned for commercial exploitation, whether it should automatically enter the public domain. There are no obvious answers here. The final point that I want to make, which may be fairly controversial amongst the Open Source programmers in the room, is that if you believe that copyright should be fundamentally be about economic arguments of “no harm, no foul”, that this is in direct contradiction with the belief that lawsuits should be used in order to enforce the GPL. After all, the conditions imposed by the GPL are fundamentally about control, not about economic issues. Consider — if someone uses the Busybox project in an embedded device — especially if no changes has been made to the code — who has been harmed, economically? No harm, no foul, right? Or if someone uses GPLv3 code in a firmware which is protected by a digital signature — sure, it means that end users who want to modify the firmware and then use it to enhace/extend the device won’t be able to do so. But how does that economically harm the author of the GPLv3 code? Fundamentally, Copyleft schemes are all about extending control over how the code can be used. Hence, if you are an Free Software programmer who cheers on the activities of the SFLC, or who firmly believes that no one should be allowed to mix firmware which is not shipped with source with your GPL’ed software, it is completely and profoundly hypocritical to say, “F*ck the author’s wishes; if it’s not available in the from I want, I should be able to make a derived work to transfer the work into a form that I want.” What if the author is a luddite who hates eBooks and firmly believes and wants to enforce that their works should never be made available in eBook form. How is that fundamentally different from a Free Software Acolyte saying that because they abhor non-free firmware, and don’t want allow their code to be shipped alongside binary-only firmware?

This bottle was found in Mika's biosafety level 2 laboratory. To address any confusion, isoamyl alcohol is not drinking alcohol and this bottle was bought for use in a scientific lab from a scientific lab supply company. Explanations are welcome.

Space and place has long been important to hackers. Whether it was/is the university lab, the workplace, the hacker con, or the particularly high-tech city, hackers congregate and meet face to face, often and everyday. One semi-new development has been the explosion and proliferation of hacker labs and spaces, such as Noisebridge located in the Mission district of San Francisco Foulab in Montreal. I recently got back from San Francisco and was able to spend a few nights at Noisebridge and was jaw droppingly impressed. The space is, well, spacious and nice (and located right by the Bart, a real +++++), but more important is that it is a thriving collective with all sorts of geeky participants and they have just souped up the space with all sorts of equipment, from the usual suspects (lots of computers) to lots of electronic gear such as oscilloscopes. What I also was impressed by was not only the blizzard of events but the open and accessible nature of the organization, which seemed to sit in some contrast to NYC’s hacker collective, NYC Resistor. Like so many organizations in this metropolis, they apparently are lacking in space to grow and the word on the streets (which I cannot confirm or deny as I have had very little contact with them but have heard this repeatedly) is that the organization has had a tough time letting in new members. Some folks are understanding of this given their space limitation, others have been less kind, and have referred to the group as a clique. There are already a few other initiatives under way to find a larger space so as to accommodate a more open, participatory atmosphere for a hacker space (sign up for the email list here but I imagine that over time the culture and developments of NYC Resistor will also change as new spaces develops and do hope that this creates the conditions for more access rather than less (and again, I know next to nothing of the situation though I suspect space plays a real limiting role as it does with nearly everything else in NYC). And thankfully Rose White, a NYC-based sociology graduate student at CUNY, is paying close attention to the rise and development of these hacker spaces. She is well underway doing her dissertation dissertation on these hack spaces and I really look forward to her work. update: The Axis of Awesome is a hacker space in L.A. and as far as I am concerned, dons the best name.

After a brief look at the market, I decided to keep using my sturdy X40. Looking at what could be done to improve the 4 years old workhorse, three things came to mind:

* new battery (old one dies in 45min, new one lasts easily 5+h)
* replace the hard drive (preemptively before it breaks)
* more ram (from 512MB -> 1.5G)



The only one worth detailing is the hard drive upgrade, since I decided to go SSD. less moving parts, less heat, less power consumption. I followed the Thinkwiki CompactFlash boot howto. This basically involves getting a CF-IDE adapter (from ebay, around $5) and any CF card. The first CF-IDE adapter $2.99, but it didn't work. After some research it was concluded that the SMT soldering was bad. The second adapter bought worked fine, and as a bonus the dimensions match the X40 HD perfecty:

In order to minimize writing to flash:

* Make sure root filesystem is mounted noatime,nodiratime (see /etc/fstab)
* make /tmp a tmpfs partition
* disable swap
* more tips can been seen at Linux on Flash guide

Generally I'm very happy with the results of the upgrade. X40 is now most of the time completly silent, without the spinning and clicking HD. Fan turns on less often than previously. The cheapo compactflash is fast enough on reading, and the REALLY slow write speed is usually not a problem thanks to the loads of RAM. Ofcourse, the exception is when a application uses fsync() ... which leads to.

FIREFOX SUCKS GOAT BALLS WHEN RAN FROM A SLOW SSD

Seriously. It's like watching snail cross a tarpit. That's what happens when you fsync() a 30MB places.sqlite on a 6MB/s write speed flash media every fucking time a page has finished loading (and seeming every now and then too). Now here's a really simple workaround: make ~/.mozilla tmpfs and rsync it to/from a backup dir every time you log in/out.

* /etc/fstab: tmpfs /home/user/.mozilla tmpfs size=100m,user 0 0
* and two helper scripts:

aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-mount
#!/bin/sh
mount /home/$USER/.mozilla
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/ /home/$USER/.mozilla/
aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-umount
#!/bin/sh
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla/ /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/
umount /home/$USER/.mozilla

It does what mozilla should be doing in the first place - write to temporary files when running and on exit synchronize to the real database and fsync(). With this hack, suddenly the web browser UI doesn't freeze every time a page has finished loading.

You'll also want to disable the urlclassifier anti-forgery tool, which can grow to a over 50MB sqlite database which also gets fsynced all the time...

Interestingly, the just finished Extremadura QA + ftpmaster + i18n meeting also turned into a quite strong Bug "Smashing" party. Several participants were digging around the list of RC bugs affecting both lenny and unstable. Most often, it turned out to many bug downgrades (for many of which I'll take the blame). It's "funny" to see how sometimes our bug reporters tend to inflate their reports, most often because they feel that "bug should absolutely be fixed", but completely forgetting about the definition of 'serious' or 'grave'. I also feel that, in some way, several maintainers begin to be quite demotivated by the length of the process (which I personnally consider as being caused by several factors: decreasing (wo)manpower, haircutting about freeness of every single byte on Debian CD's or even shyness wrt correct actions needed to deal with bugs). And several of these bugs just needed a very simple action by the maintainer. And, therefore, just because we were about 15 people with a lot of time to devote to Debian for 3 days, we ended up digging in that pile of mud....removing most of the dust and sometimes very debatable RC bug reports, and finally having that count of bugs affecting both lenny and unstable go down again. This comforts me in the feeling that an aggressive approach is a good key to bug squashing. After all, if I'm sometimes too aggressive and inappropriately downgrade an RC bug, I'm sure that someone will correct me (and, anyway, I'm not that mad: sometimes I seek for advices). Ah, and "aggressive" also sometimes mean proposing to tag some bugs "lenny-ignore" (and, that needs to be very convincing with our release managers, believe me). So, what about you? Have you already smashed an RC bug today? If not, do it. Kill those nasty beasts, they deserve it. No mercy.

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character. Furthermore, the novels have gone out of print, and are only available from amazon.com as used books. Unfortunately, I travel a lot. So much so, that one of the few times that I have time to read is when I’m traveling. And I really dislike having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around; they take up far too much weight and space in my carry-on luggage. Unfortunately, these out-of-print novels were published by a Neanderthal Publishing company who hasn’t made any of the books available in ebook format, DRM’ed or no. Grumpy, I searched on Internet, and found all three novels were easily available for free download — in a pirated form, of course. Should I download them and convert them into a form which would allow me to read them on my Sony eReader? Well, according to Russell Davis, former chair (and now president of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) of the SFWA’s Copyright Committee, “electronic infringement is theft”. From a legal perspective, I suppose that is true. And given that as an Open Source programmer, I depend on Copyright Law to assure that my wishes as an author are upheld, it would be hypocritical for me assume that I should be able to ignore Copyright Law just because it is inconvenient. And yet… from a moral perspective, who has really lost anything? The argument made by Russell Davis is that infringement is bad because it is “harming authors and author estates”. Jerry Pournelle has indignantly proclaimed that e-piracy goes against a “specific (and very stern) Biblical injunction against stealing from widows and orphans”. Of course, in this case, the author is still alive (and is female, although I suppose stealing from widowers would be just as bad). Also, given that the author has publically stated she doesn’t plan to write any more books involving this character (since some of her more psychotic readers sent her death threats as a result of reading said books), the publisher is highly unlikely to re-release said novels — and if I buy used dead-tree versions of said novels, the author doesn’t receive any additional royalties. So, then, where is the moral bright line?

• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, and lug it around, inconveniencing me, causing more CO2 emissions by shipping the book to me, and in the airplane because of its added weight, as the only way I can comply with copyright law? Furthermore, should I do this to set an example to all of the younger generations that are treating copyright law much more casually, much as essentially all drivers casually ignore the law’s dictats to not drive faster than the speed limit? (Many have argued that the current state of affairs with respect to music and etexts and copyright law is bad because it encourages people to not respect the rule of law — I guess, as the argument goes, if people don’t respect the copyright law, what’s next? Torturing prisoners in Guantanomo in violation of the law? Oh, wait… too late…)
• Should I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, slice the binding off, and then run pages through a scanner and an OCR program, then spend hours reformatting it into an .LRF file so I can read it on the Sony eReader? Would that be considered fair use?
• What if I purchase a used dead-tree copy of the novel, but to save the time and effort of scanning the pages and correcting the OCR errors, download the pirated e-text, and convert it into an .LRF file and enjoy it on my Sony eReader?
• What if I don’t purchase the dead-tree copy of the book, download the pirated e-text, and send a money order (so it can’t be traced) for roughly the same amount of money as the cost of the used dead-tree version of the book to the author, with a letter explaining why she was receiving this check?
• What if I just download the pirated e-text, justifying my actions that no one is actually getting hurt my downloading the text and reading it; after all, since it is long out of print and not available from any booksellers as a new book, the author isn’t going to be getting any more royalties anyway.

Somewhere along this continuum, we’ve crossed over from the light-side to the dark-side. Setting aside the observation that the Neanderthal attitudes and business practices of the publisher involved has made it impossible for me to legitimiately follow the law, enjoy the novels, and direct money to the author via royalty payments — what do you think is the morally correct course of action? And why? And if you don’t mind saying so publically, roughly what generation are you from (i.e., Baby Boomer, Gen X, Gen Y, etc.)? I’m curious how attitudes are changing based on age, and whether folks who are currently in college might differ from those who can remember a time when the Internet didn’t exist… Update: I’ve posted a follow-up to this post here.