* The GE Soft White electric 60 bulbs are CFLs that are much more pleasant than the other's we've tried. Sometimes it's surprising that name-brand can be better. =) We've now got 6 of them in the house. We'll have more as soon as I find a brand that works in a dimmer. I've read that they exist, and this brand doesn't say "not for use in dimmers" like the other ones do. We'll see. =)

The weather in Montr al is supposed to be a high of 16 C on Saturday. In January. C'mon people, it's time to do more than we have been. I don't care if you don't believe using less electricity, less gas, eating less meat, etc. will help fix global warming. Doing nothing certainly *won't* help and until you have a better plan, put down your cheese burger, get out of your SUV and bloody well go for a walk to buy some CFLs.

* auzure_skies is 33 weeks pregnant today! =)

* PHP 5 sucks far less than I thought it would. The object model seems to actually match what I expect for umpteen years of other programming. Further, the Eclipse PHP editor has already helped me catch some mistakes. I did wind up installing IBM's JDK for PPC in order to get the speed to where I needed it to be, though. Java 7 should rock. =) I've been hacking on a project for the church called 'ConnectUU', and the code had crufted pretty badly over a handful of maintainers and upgrades from what looks like early php3. One file in particular was special:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 jbailey users 623863 Dec 17 02:37 events.php

And that's been split nicely now into 37 classes.

* Various friends, family etc have asked to be notified when the child is born. The best I can say is 'well, alright'. If seeing it here on the LJ isn't good enough, let me know and I'll add you to the super-secret-mailing-list. But don't expect anything exciting. Probably something along the lines of 'Showtime, Synergy'.

* Oh: Happy New Year! For this year I've made no resolutions. I can't predict my future more than about 6 weeks out, and I'd be totally fooling myself if I claimed otherwise. But hey. =)

* We've totally finished moving now. Pictures are coming soon, but I'm trying to get ones without boxes and mess in the background. I've put a few up so far at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbailey/tags/4537/

Since I am on "maternity leave" now and basicly run the household and try to keep the children entertained, my time to get things done is randomly fragmented and I want to plan the things better that I have on the plate. Liw's blog post reminded me of GTD and today I was looking for planning tools. On Wikipedia's GTD page they mention two: A Firefox plugin to use with gmail (and therefor everywhere where I would have internet) and ThinkingRock, a java app which aparently would fit on a USB key. Of course i wonder which one might be better? The ThinkingRock one seems to be a heavy weight GTD tool. Does that spoil GTD's light weight character? I watched the demos and it seems to be pretty feature complete. I would like to hear from people who use GTD and am interested in their oppinions. Thanks!

Debian Work Meetings - Extremadura evaluation
8 people already managed to send in their evaluations or feedback mails to me regarding the Extremadura work meetings. That is surprisingly few, given the fact that we had 6 meetings with an average of 20 people. And so far I got only one reply from someone who could not attend eventhough she was very interested, explaining why (different continent, too far, too expensive) etc. I had expected more replies in that category, given that we had mostly europeans coming to Extremadura and I had intended to spread out future meetings over the globe more evenly. So I ask both those that attended and did not manage to send in some evaluation and also those that would have liked to come and could not to mail me!

For nearly two years, I have been pondering about a good and failure-resilient DNS setup to implement for my own domains. In the last days, I have set the first prototype into use. No, I haven’t dared to touch zugschlus.de, my most important domain, yet. This is planned for the weekend. So, if you experience difficulties in accessing any of my Internet services, please inform me and allow me to fix the issue. However, zugschl.us, marc-haber.de and a number of less important test domains have already been moved to the new, svn-driven Scheme and delegation has been changed to the new DNS servers, dns1.nosuid.net, dns2.notwork.de and dns3.mxonly.de. q.bofh.de, my old main DNS server, continues to run as a slave for a transition period, and it continues to feed the slave servers run by various commercial and non-commercial entities that have kindly been serving the zones in the last years. The new servers are all run by myself. dns1 and dns2 are dedicated servers (“real” machines that both have other duties as well) located at two different ISPs/hosters located in different parts of Germany, while dns3 is a vServer located in the US (which only does DNS due to its rather severely limited amount of memory). The three domains the servers are located in are in two different top level domains, are registered through two different registrars and are not used for anything besides DNS (and providing the host name for ivanova.notwork.de, one of the DNS servers and the machine hosting this blog). The two .de-Domains mxonly.de and notwork.de are MX only domains, which means that they are not delegated outside of the .de zone but their resource records are directly written to the .de TLD zone. This reduces the chance of the domains becoming unavailable due to failures in the delegated servers (because there are none), and we depend on .de being available anyway. A downside of MX only domains is that the number of registrars that support them through their automatisms is rather limited. The .net zone is served by the registrar’s name servers since .de is the only TLD I know of that has reasonable prices and offers MX only domains. One can argument that the .net zone is a weak point here, but I suspect that I’m reasonably safe with the MX only .de domains that the .net domain is only a paranoid safety catch anyway.

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because - as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out - they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 - and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC. By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios. Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.) Other interesting links regarding Vista:

• The Inquirer - Charlie Demerjian: Microsoft Vista is not an option
• The Register - Scott Granneman: Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
• Juha Saarinen: DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers… and fear the new content protection
• Techworld.com - Chris Mellor: Vista crippled by content protection
• The Register - Andrew Orlowski: Vista’s Suicide Bomb: Who gets hurt?

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies. Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies? Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video - if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

I have just been installing a Xen domU on Debian Etch. I'll blog about installing dom0 later when I have a test system that I can re-install on (my production Xen machines have the dom0 set up already). The following documents a basic Xen domU (virtual machine) installation that has an IP address in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network address space and masquerades outbound network data. It is as general as possible.

lvcreate -n xen1 -L 2G /dev/vg

Firstly use the above command to create a block device for the domU, this can be a regular file but a LVM block device gives better performance. The above command is for a LV named xen1 on an LVM Volume Group named vg.

mke2fs -j /dev/vg/xen1

Then create the filesystem with the above command.

mount /dev/vg/xen1 /mnt/tmp
mount -o loop /tmp/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/cd
cd /mnt/tmp
debootstrap etch . file:///mnt/cd/
chroot . bin/bash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/hosts /etc/hostname
apt-get update
apt-get install libc6-xen linux-image-xen-686 openssh-server
apt-get dist-upgrade

Then perform the basic Debian install with the above commands. Make sure that you change to the correct directory before running the debootstrap command. The /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname files need to be edited to have the correct contents for the Xen image (the default is an empty /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname has the name of the parent machine). The file /etc/apt/sources.list needs to have the appropriate configuration for the version of Debian you use and for your preferred mirror. libc6-xen is needed to stop a large number of kernel warning messages on boot. It's a little bit of work before you get the virtual machine working on the network so it's best to do these commands (and other package installs) before the following steps. After the above type exit to leave the chroot and run umount /mnt/tmp.

lvcreate -n xen1-swap -L 128M /dev/vg
mkswap /dev/vg/xen1-swap

Create a swap device with the above commands.

auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr0
post-down brctl delbr xenbr0
post-up iptables -t nat -F
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 10.1.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
address 10.1.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
bridge_fd 0
bridge_hello 0
bridge_stp off

Add the above to /etc/network/interfaces and use the command ifup xenbr0 to enable it. Note that this masquerades all outbound data from the machine that has a source address in the 10.1.0.0/24 range.

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

Put the above in /etc/sysctl.conf, run sysctl -p and echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/forwarding to enable it.

cp /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-xen-686 /boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz

Set up an initial initrd (actually initramfs) for the domU with a command such as the above. Once the Xen domU is working you can create the initrd from within it which gives a smaller image.

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-xen-686"
ramdisk = "/boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz"
memory = 64
name = "xen1"
vif = [ '' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w' ]
root = "/dev/hda ro"
extra = "2 selinux=1 enforcing=0"

The above is a sample Xen config file that can go in /etc/xen/xen1. Note that this will discover an appropriate bridge device by default, if you only plan to have one bridge then it's quite safe, if you want multiple bridges then things will be a little more complex. Also note that there are two block devices created as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, obviously if we wanted to have a dozen block devices then we would want to make them separate partitions with a virtual partition table. But in most cases a domU will be a simple install and won't need more than two block devices.

xm create -c xen1

Now start the Xen domU with the above command. The -c option means to take the Xen console (use ^] to detach). After that you can login as root at the Xen console with no password, now is a good time to set the password.

Run the command apt-get install udev, this could not be done in the chroot before as it might mess up the dom0 environment. Edit /etc/inittab and disable gettys on tty2 to tty6, I don't know if it's possible to use them (the default and only option for xen console commands is tty1) and in any case you would not want 6, saving a few getty processes will save some memory.

Now you should have a basically functional Xen domU. Of course a pre-requisite for this is having a machine with a working dom0 installation. But the dom0 part is easier (and I will document it in a future blog post).

Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we ve got people coming round for dinner (it s been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried.

If you have a little patience, you can cut their nails either with a cat nail trimmer (5 euros I paid, and that s the best money I ever spent on these cats, aside from neutering) or plain normal human nail clippers.

I have been doing it for Vi and Emacs since they were kittens, and then for Jazz when he replaced Emacs and who had never had his nails trimmed. I even do it for Lola, who is declawed and a very alpha female cat, on her back paw's nails.

Sure, it takes patience, it is best not to do it by force, so wait until they are happily asleep and pet them, then cut one. Get them used to you touching their nails, by making them go out of their claw when you pet them. Do one nail at a time, until they are all used to it and will just let you go through the whole 4 paws at once.

You can google around for techniques, but start reading this. The whole about.com site is filled with great advice for cat owners.

My furniture is still in good shape after two years of cats at home, yes, they love to bite the curtains, they scratch my favourite chair, they drop stuff on the floor and break it, they help me in whatever I am doing (painting, sawing, making the bed...), and they steal cat toys away from me and hide them in secret cat hiding places.

But things are just things, stuff is just stuff, curtains are replaceable, so is furniture. Start trimming their nails the sooner the better, and do not regret these three furry friends found you.

The Debian project is afflicted with several damaging memes. One that is causing problems at the moment is the idea that life should be fair. Unfortunately life is inherently unfair, it's not fair that those of us who were born in first-world countries (the majority of Debian developers) have so many more opportunities than most people who are born in "developing" countries, and things just continue to be unfair as you go through life. Unfair things will happen to you, deal with it and do what is necessary to have a productive life!

When one developer has regular long-term disputes with many other developers the conclusion is that the one person who can't get along is at fault. We can debate about whether one or two significant disputes are a criteria for this or whether having a dozen developers disagreeing with them is the final point. But the fact is that if there is a large group of people who work together well and an individual who can't work with any of them then there is only one realistic option, the individual needs to go find some people that they can work with - they can resign or be expelled. The fact that something slightly unfair might have happened a year ago is no reason for pandering to an anti-social developer. The fact that expelling a developer for being anti-social is unfair to them is no reason for damaging the productivity of all Debian developers.

Another problemmatic meme is the idea that we have to tolerate everyone - even those who are intolerant (known as the Limp Liberal meme). When someone has no tolerance for others (EG being racist or practicing sexual discrimination) then they have no place in a community such as Debian. They need to be removed sooner rather than later. All Debian developers know the problems caused by deferring such expulsion.

The final damaging meme that I have observed is you can't force a volunteer to do any work. On it's own that statement is OK, but the interpretation commonly used in Debian is you can't take their job away from them either. The most common example of this is when a developer is not maintaining a package and someone else does an NMU (non-maintainer upload) to fix a bug, the developer then flames the person who did this (usually to fix a severe bug). It seems to be believed that a Debian developer owns their packages and has a right to prevent other people from working on them. This attitude also extends to all other aspects of Debian, there are many positions of responsibility in Debian that are not being adequately performed and for which volunteers are offering to help out but being refused.

The idea of the GPL is that when a program is not being developed adequately it can be taken over by another person. However when that program is in a Debian package the developer who owns it can refuse to allow this.

Regarding my previous posting, the first thing that I wanted to release is called "Stuff To Do", and is a simple, elegant priority queue for getting things done. It lets you reprioritize, track time spent on tasks, generate reports on time spent, and most importantly, share with other users. You can create groups of people who can view one another's tasks, and give tasks to other users, all via a very intuitive interface (javascript is, however, required). It's all meant to stay out of your way as much as possible, even the time tracking requires only that you visit the browser window every so often to let it know you're there, rather than fiddling with (and sooner or later forgetting about) start and stop buttons. Perhaps it's not accurate down to the second, but the idea is to give you a general idea of what you've been up to, rather than something you have to slavishly click on all the time. The group interface is also meant to be easy to use to get a quick idea of what other people are working on, or share tasks with other people. For instance, if you're a project manager, you could create a bunch of tasks, and then just drag and drop them to other people in the system. You can't change other people's priorities (yet), because I think it's better if you simply ask them yourself - technology isn't a substitute for communication! While I work on the paypal interface (I looked into Google Checkout, but it's still got some limitations), I'm going to let people sign up for the group-enabled version with six months for free. It won't cost too much per user when I roll it out in any case, probably somewhere south of $20. The basic version is likely to remain free as long as I can cover hosting costs. I've been using it myself at work and home for the past month or so, along with a few of my colleagues, and it seems to fill a nice niche in between more heavyweight issue tracking tools like JIRA, and the index cards/bulletin board we'd been using. Check it out - I hope you like it! In any case, let me know what you think.

Ok. Since I have uploaded 1.0.9746 I need to make a packaging change regarding the 1.0.9631 drivers which are now another legacy version, but not as legacy as 7184 if that makes sense. 7184 might become something like -ancient if it still be kept around.

If you need 1.0.9631 you can find it here http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2006/12/08/debian/pool/non-free/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers/
for now.

Russel pointed me to Andre Pang's blog entry.  Yep, I share this annoyance.  Especially because I recently received an email with a 3 or 4 line disclaimer at the top of the email, and an additional, longer one at the bottom.  Occasionally, I use that one:

The content of this message may or may not reflect the opinion of me, my
employer, my girlfriend, my cat or anybody else, regardless of the fact
whether such an employer, girlfriend, cat, or anybody else exists.  I
(or my employer, girlfriend, cat or whoever) disclaim any legal
obligations resulting from the above message.  You, as the reader of
this message, may or may not have the permission to redistribute this
message as a whole or in parts, verbatim or in modified form, or to
distribute any message at all.

(Daniel Baumann: Please note the spaces I've added in this post, extra for you!)

What is Debian Desktop?
Debian Desktop is a Debian's subproject created to be a joint effort of
all groups involved or related with the desktop to give our users a
better environment to use and easier to install experience.

Actually we've members from: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago,
tasksel and utnubu. We count with help from d-i and debian-cd members too.
The initiative merged the former Debian Desktop development page, debian-desktop
mailing list for the discussions and debian-desktop alioth project - its svn actually
hosts the desktop-base source package.

We did our best to deliver for our users a interesting desktop experience (including
laptop users) and it includes GNOME, KDE or Xfce (that's your choice) in our upcoming release: 4.0 (Etch).

What will be into Debian Etch Desktop ?
The desktop (task: desktop, installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• X Window System: Xorg 7.1
• Office suite: OpenOffice 2.0.4
• Graphics suite: GIMP 2.2.13

It also includes a simple window manager (twm), zeroconf (avahi), printing (cups) and scanning (sane) support

GNOME desktop (task: gnome-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• GNOME core: 2.14 with some 2.16 modules, eg.: totem (xine backend as default)
• Web Browser: Firefox 1.5 and Epiphany 2.14.3
• Feeds Manager: Liferea 1.0.26 (Liferea is Epiphany friendly)
  
• Mail/Calendar app: Evolution 2.6.3
• Instant Messaging Tool: GAIM 2.0.0beta5
• Multimedia Player: Rhythmbox 0.9.6
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: Network Manager 0.6.4
• Graphical Package Manager: Synaptic 0.57.11 with update-notifier
  
• Graphical Partition Manager: GParted 0.2.5
• CD/DVD Creation: GNOMEBaker 0.6.0
  
• Power Management Tool: GNOME Power Manager 2.14.3

It also includes bluetooth (bluez-gnome) support, multimedia in the browser support (totem mozilla plugin), bittorrent support (gnome-btdownload)

KDE desktop (task: kde-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• KDE: KDE 3.5.5 (base, pim, multimedia, graphics, artwork, network, utils and admin)
  
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: KNetworkManager 0.1
• CD/DVD Creation: k3b

We tried to add all the gnome task features into kde task too. KDE itself already contains a lot of them, if you find something missing please tell us at debian-desktop@lists.debian.org for a better next release, and wait your contribution enter Lenny.

Xfce desktop (task: xfce-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• Xfce: Xfce 4.3.99
• Calendar tool: orage 4.3.99
• Text editor: Mousepad 0.2.8

It also includes multimedia support and xfce goodies.

What if i've Debian testing or sid installed using GNOME or KDE or Xfce?
Open a terminal, check your /etc/apt/sources.list and run as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install desktop $foo-desktop

Please replace $foo with GNOME, KDE, Xfce - e.g: aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop

Note that desktop and $foo-desktop aren't metapackages - packages that usually contains just a few files (the required) to be installed in the system and its main feature is depend, conflict, recommend or suggest other packages. desktop and $foo-desktop are tasks and are in the tasksel source package, maintained by the tasksel team. The debian-installer uses tasksel to install a set of packages, and you should too.

How can i download Debian Desktop for tests?
The easier way to install is downloading a CD or DVD image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer . Please download
Debian Etch RC1 images or later for GNOME and something newer
(eg: weekly builds) for KDE or Xfce. Please note that DVD usage
is preferred, if you're going to use a CD broadband is recommended.

There are special first CDs images containing not GNOME key packages
but KDE or Xfce, look for debian-testing-i386-$foo-CD-1.iso (don't worry,
we've at least amd64 and powerpc images too) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/

How can i install Debian Desktop GNOME?
The first DVD image contains the entire GNOME set of packages, just
follow the installer and after the base system install select "default
desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for you and
proceed - no network is required during installation.

The first CD image doesn't contains the entire GNOME set of packages,
just follow the installer and after the base system install select
"default desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for
you and proceed - broadband connection is recommended.

How can i install Debian Desktop KDE?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=kde-desktop

* The first DVD image contains the entire KDE set of packages - no
network is required during installation.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire KDE set of packages -
broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

How can i install Debian Desktop Xfce?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=xfce-desktop

* The first DVD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

Inspired by Julien Goodwin's post I created a new blog for myself named Source Dump. Source is different to other blog content in that updates to fix bugs may be required (generally I believe that ideally blog posts should not be edited once published and in the rare cases of editing being necessary all such edits should be appended to the end), and in that it may be longer than is suitable for a Planet feed. Finally Planet and other aggregators may mess up source code. If the source is only visible through my blog then I can be reasonably sure that it is usable by everyone who sees it.

So when I have source code to publish that is related to blog postings or mailing list postings I now have a place for it (I haven't yet made a posting).

I will not be submitting my Source Dump blog for syndication anywhere, but if anyone wants to syndicate it they are welcome to do so. I don't desire that it not be syndicated, I merely recommend that it not be syndicated for the convenience of readers due to the potential large size of postings and the potential for postings to be broken by aggregation.

I've been feeling sick since the day after Christmas. Maj says that when you push your body too hard, it gives you a cold to tell you to sit back and take it easy for a little while, fercryinoutloud. I think that's what happened to me -- almost as soon as I had some free time, I got a sore throat, body aches, stuffy sinuses, fatigue. It's been OK, though -- I've had a lot of time to sit at my parents' house, fool around on the computer without doing anything serious, and read books. I got a proposal for a new project done, and some API designs, but I also am almost finished with James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder, which has been a real enjoyable book. I picked it up in Lake Placid while we were there at the beginning of the month, and I'm just getting around to finishing it. I guess I'm just getting myself on a Colonial New York kick. I've also watched about 400 episodes of It's a Big, Big World, a great kids show starring a good-natured stoner sloth and some spazzy monkeys. They deal with lots of interesting issues, but mostly the answer to their problems is, "Get over yourself, chill the hell out, and do some tai chi." Which I think is a pretty good piece of advice for everybody. tags: lazy pathfinder james fenimore cooper cold tai chi big big world the wisdom of sloths

Edinburgh So, I just registered for Debconf7, the 7th annual Debian conference, to be held in June 2007 in Edinburgh. I'm excited to go -- I've never been to Scotland, and I'm looking forward to the visit. Nor have I been to a Debconf before! I also submitted an abstract for a paper on the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup, a kind of extended history from the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup Report?. I want to cover the details of the relationship between Debian and CC, the history of the workgroup, and give some lessons learned from the process. I'd also like to draw some conclusions about using one of Debian's greatest assets -- our moral authority in the Free Software world -- to shape the future of FLOSS and Free Content. tags: edinburgh free software debian debconf7 cc free content

Mysteries of Web comics I guess there are just some things I'll never understand about the aesthetics and economics of Web comics. Like, why hasn't Patrick Farley, author of the great e-sheep comics, published anything since 2003? e-sheep is some of the most moving, intelligent, and deep work of any kind on the Internet. I'd really love to see more. Conversely, why did the lurid, absurd, and obnoxious Leisuretown go off the air entirely for a few years? And why did it come back? And if it's back, why hasn't the enigmatic Tristan A. Farnon added any new comics? Also, I still wonder if that's his given name, or if he's stuck with a BBS handle from back in the day when he thought All Creatures Great and Small was really cool. Leisuretown is another of the best things on the Web -- crude, angry, existential. I really like it. tags: webcomics leisuretown e-sheep

Now either I'm really astonished or somebody has seriously strange metrics. I suspect it's the second. According to Aleksandar Vasovic (working at the university of K ln (Cologne) in Germany):

[...] we analysed the debian mailing list archives, especially the debian-devel mailing list, as it is a good representation of the whole network. [...] we identified the 100 main actors and therefor came across your email address.

So, somebody who talks quite a bit on the mailing lists, but really only maintains one package is already one of the top 100 "actors" in Debian? I seriously doubt it. (And yes, receiving the mail I quoted and seeing that the questionnaire is not online yet(?) does not improve my impression either.) Now (more talk) of course the right thing to do would be to define as many metrics as possible and see how often I am in the top 100. Anyway, when I feel I have to say something I will continue to do so, and otherwise just thank the (at most 99 ;-) people who do more for Debian than I for creating and maintaining all the cool stuff I can use for free. And, obviously, I also have to mention the upstream authors who make Debian possible in the first place. Still, metrics got me thinking. One metric I'd be really interested in is a weighted "I respect person X" one: everybody submits rankings of people who (s)he thinks do a very good job in Debian and who tend to do the "right" things, both in technical matters but also regarding community or organisation stuff. Then, from these rankings, a overall ranking is calculated, but with a twist: have the opinions of people high in the overall ranking count more than those with lower rankings - after all, the latter are inclined to trust the former people's judgement. Now, the obvious thing to do would be to elect the DPL with this ranking. But it could go further: maintain the ranking continuously (i.e. let people adjust their ranking at any time) instead of only polling once a year, publish the ranking (or perhaps just the top 20 or top 50?), let the top 5 be a leadership team instead of having a single DPL, adjust the leadership team as often as necessary as the top 5 of the ranking change (minimum terms of 3 months and only change the team when somebody falls out of the top 5 for at least a month or so to keep things from boiling over too quickly). Obviously, rankings have their problems, and this approach wouldn't suddenly solve all of the project's problems and would probably also introduce new ones, but I feel the continuous monitoring by the project's members might make those leaders more realistic when stating their goals by eliminating the campaign frenzy. #include stuff about people not actually wanting to be part of the leadership team and stuff about requiring some regular confirmation from the electorate to weed out people who just recorded a ranking at some time but don't follow events anymore. Ok, now this was absolutely in the Talk Is Cheap™ category.

While its not the normal action people usually expect from me, I just felt the need to have a little posting saying Thanks to somebody. Who? Well. All of you doing work on a regular basis, like * Application Managers, who regularly process people that want to get Debian Developer status. They are doing a lot of work, asking questions, giving tips and in the end submit their report. Usually thats a process of multiple days up to some months work, depending on the time the Applicant and the AM has. * FrontDesk. who makes sure that the process keeps on running by managing all sorts of weird things people come up with, * Sponsors, who help non-DDs to get their package into the Debian Archive, * The release team, who always tries to get the best possible release out of the door, * All those people that make Debian what it is - the biggest and best distribution ever, * everyone that goes and fixes bugs in debian packages to keep the quality as high as possible, * all people that help people by answering questions on one of our mailinglists, on IRC or in web forums, * every upstream author that releases his software under a free license and happily works together with distribution maintainers to make their software the best it can be, * all those that help to organize DebConf, the yearly Debian Conference with all the time-consuming tasks that that includes, * the people that keep the infrastructure running that allows us to develop our own little gems, like the Debian Admins, SPI Admins, Alioth Admins, IRC Network Operators and anyone who provides and maintains machines for a free project out there, * those behind everyone I mentioned - the families. Who have to look for something else during the time people do all the mentioned work, * everyone who can resist feeding a flamewar, Did I forgot someone? I’m sure I did, so - start your own post and say thanks, without people spending a lot of their spare time you would not have such a great distribution to use and ease your life! Have a good new year and continue the good work!

I’ve been asked to keep my blog up to date with regard to Linux support of the MacBook Pro, so here are my latest findings. For more background, see the previous post on the same subject. Anything that I don’t mention here or in another post can be assumed to work (or I just haven’t tested that particular thing yet, though I’m doing some extensive tests).

• Sound: still nothing, none of the various patches floating are good enough
• Battery life: no news here, 1h30 is the max you’ll get. You need to suspend to disk if you want to swap the battery, it’s not possible to do that in suspend to ram like it was on the PowerBook (G4 500, at least). Sad.
• Heat/fan noise: catastrophic. Fans running at 4000-4200 rpm on a typical desktop or on my laps, down to 3000 rpm on a glass desktop. More on the SMC below.
• ATI drivers: still suck. No PowerPLAY support on amd64, which means the GPU is running at the highest clock rate, consuming a lot of power and generating a lot of heat. XVideo makes the X server segfault, watching a short movie using vlc’s OpenGL output managed to crash the box hard, corrupting part of the kernel memory. fglrx kills the machine on resume.

In a previous post, I was reporting a lot of timeouts from the applesmc “driver”. After a (very) quick look at the AppleSMC kext for OS X, I know why this happens. It looks like the OS X driver uses an interrupt and configures the SMC for that. So it probably doesn’t poll the SMC 20 times per second like the applesmc “driver” does. It also looks like the OS X driver uses SMC keys we know nothing about. I could also confirm that the SMC has access to temperature sensors for the CPU, GPU and memory, but it looks like we have no idea of the corresponding SMC keys. With this information, it’d be possible to switch the SMC to manual mode with a userspace governor. What probably happens when we run Linux on this machine is that the SMC stays in automatic mode, and it’s very conservative in this mode. It won’t hesitate to run the fans at high speed to keep the machine safe. It is highly probable that the OS X driver is taking over the fan control to keep the machine both cool and quiet. This is mostly speculation, as the better device power management in OS X plays a role too, and the SMC could very well still be in automatic mode under OS X keeping the fans at low speed just because the machine generates way less heat. Unfortunately, the AppleSMC kext isn’t released as part of Darwin, so we’ll have to wait until it is. Could be a long wait, though. The SMC handles a lot of things. I don’t feel safe running an OS without a proper driver for the SMC on this machine. The fans probably aren’t designed to run at 4000+ rpm for 3 years and will probably fail early or something.

Replace nautilus with pcmanfm I'm sponsoring the upload of pcmanfm and I think it's a very interesting piece of software. There's a new upload coming, and I'd like it to have some instructions on how to replace nautilus with pcmanfm, and possibly how to go back to nautilus. Here's the best I found. Replacing nautilus with pcmanfm To have pcmanfm start instead of nautilus:

1. Go to Desktop -> Preferences -> Session manager
2. Go to the 'Current Session' tab
3. There's an entry like 40 Restart nautilus --sm-config-prefix /nautilus-SoMeThInG/: remove it
4. Go to the 'Startup Programs'
5. Add an entry to run pcmanfm

Alternatively:

1. Run gnome-session-remove nautilus
2. Go to Desktop -> Preferences -> Session manager
3. Go to the 'Startup Programs'
4. Add an entry to run pcmanfm

To configure pcmanfm to draw the background:

1. Run pcmanfm
2. Go to Edit -> Preferences
3. Go to the Desktop tab
4. Enable "Show file icons on desktop"
5. Customise wallpaper as you wish

Alternatively, I wrote a little script that will generate a ~/.pcmanfm/main configuration file from you taking some settings from gconf:

#!/bin/bash
# Generate a pcmanfm configuration file reading values from gconf
echo "# ~/.pcmanfm/main configuration file generated by $0"
echo
echo '[General]'
echo 'terminal=gnome-terminal'
echo
echo '[Desktop]'
echo 'showDesktop=1'
# Detect wallpaper setting
WALLPAPER= gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename 
if ! [ -z "$WALLPAPER" ]
then
    echo 'showWallpaper=1'
    echo "wallpaper=$WALLPAPER"
fi
# Detect color setting (doesn't really work: I could not find significant keys)
#COLOR= gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color 
#if ! [ -z "$COLOR" ]
#then
#   R=$(( $(printf %d 0x$ COLOR:1:2 ) * 65536 / 256 ))
#   G=$(( $(printf %d 0x$ COLOR:3:2 ) * 65536 / 256 ))
#   B=$(( $(printf %d 0x$ COLOR:5:2 ) * 65536 / 256 ))
#   echo "Bg1=$R,$G,$B"
#fi

Getting nautilus again

1. Kill pcmanfm
2. Run nautilus: it will register itself with the session manager

Open questions Originally, I had nautilus registered in the session manager as something like nautilus --sm-config-prefix /nautilus-SoMeThInG/. After removing it and having it reregister itself, I have it only as nautilus. I have not been able to find out what is the difference. It would also be cool to have a little program that registers pcmanfm as a 'Restart' entry with priority 40, just like nautilus.

My Christmas day was primarily spent at home watching Red Dwarf. Apart from that I made new releases of xen-shell and xen-tools. I was suprised to recieve a sudden flurry of bug reports. No less than ten bugs reported by two users in one day! Still I fixed most of them and made a new release. It was nice to notice Isaac Clerencia writing about using xen-tools for automated testing. The idea has occurred to me before: Create a fresh Xen installation of Debian then run a test suite and trash the system afterwards. I even setup a test Yawns builder for a while. Are people finding interesting users for xen-tools? I’d love to have some use-cases, and more user-feedback is always appreciated. Feel free to get in touch or comment here. Personally I use a few Xen guests on my home LAN and I regularly create new Sarge images for building backported Xen packages. Only recently did I move my home cfengine setup onto a domU. In other news I recently received a copy of Programming Ruby from my Amazon wishlist, I’m learning a lot about Ruby and I think I’m in love. The only downside is the mental confusion I experience when I see “@variable” and “$variable” used. I am too wedded to Perl to stop thinking “array” and “string” respectively. I should find a toy project to write in Ruby to get used to it. Right now nothing occurs, but I’m sure it is just a matter of time.

Merry Christmas to everyone today!

Today, and for the next few days, I'm going to write about some of my Christmas memories from earlier years. Then I'll finish up with some photos from this year.

This post is about Christmas at home growing up.

One of the first signs of Christmas happened when my dad put up the lights on the outside of our house.



My brothers and I had (and still do) stockings that got one piece of candy per day during December, then got stuffed full when we opened our presents. The tree went up over the Thanksgiving weekend, and it was always a lot of fun to help with that.



On Christmas Eve, we'd always go to the program at church. It was the kids' Christmas play. Church would be packed. On the way out, everyone got a gift sack with fruit (apples or oranges), some peanuts, and maybe some candy. Then we'd go home. Mom or dad would read the Christmas story from the Bible, and after a prayer, it was time to open presents. In addition to the regular presents, dad would always give us a large paper gift sack. It would usually have a 12-pack of pop and some sort of nut (peanuts, pastachios, or maybe peanut brittle).

Sometimes we'd all stand still long enough for a photo.



We'd usually stay up late into the night Christmas Eve and sleep in on Christmas day.

These are my ten wishes for 2007. Since Santa didn’t arrive in this part of the world, I think I’m asking this to the Three Wise Men (in spite of they were brought here by the Spanish catolicism, but hey):

1. Dignity, land and respect to the Mexican indigenous groups.
2. Return and good health for Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro.
3. Strongest antineoliberalism in the Latin American region.
4. Right wing oppression brought down in Bolivia.
5. Good year socially, economically and politically to Nicaragua with its new hope.
6. An even better year in Cuban trades; they were the best growing economy in Latin America by exporting to South America and China.
7. Stop to the free trade agreement and military bases with the US in Ecuador.
8. Peaceful solution to the Colombia-Ecuador border conflict.
9. Democracy established in some of those countries where it’s more needed, like Central America.
10. More social successful programs in Venezuela.

And my bonus one:

• Peace from R o Grande all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.