I've released version 0.23 of Obnam, my backup application. USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• restore now shows a progress bar.
• fsck now has more useful progress reporting, and does more checking, including the integrity of the contents of file content.
• fsck now also checks the integrity of the B-trees in the repository, so that it is not necessary to run fsck-larch manually anymore. This works remotely as well, whereas fsck-larch only worked on B-trees on the local filesystem.
• force-lock now gives a warning if the client does not exist in the repository.
• Subcommands for encryption now give a warning if encryption key is not given.
• The --fsck-fix option will now instruct obnam fsck to try to fix problems found. For this release, it only means fixing B-tree missing node problems, but more will follow.
• The default sizes have been changed for B-tree nodes (256 KiB) and file contents chunks (1 MiB), based on benchmarking.
• SFTP protocol use has been optimized, which should result in some more speed. This also highlights the need to change obnam so it can do uploads in the background.
• If a client does not exist in the repository, force-lock now gives a warning to the user, rather than ignoring it silently.

DEVELOPER CHANGES:

• New --sftp-delay=100 option can be used to simulate SFTP backups over networks with long round trip times.
• obnam-benchmark can now use --sftp-delay and other changes to make it more useful.

INTERNAL CHANGES:

• Got rid of terminal status plugin. Now, the Application class provides a ttystatus.TerminalStatus instance instead, in the ts attribute. Other plugings are supposed to use that for progress reporting and messaging to the user.
• The posix_fadvise system call is used only if available. This should improve Obnam's portability a bit.

The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world.If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now.The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world. If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now. DAViCal at CeBIT 2011 CeBIT in Hannover is said to be the largest trade fair in the world, attracting over 300,000 visitors during it's five days. Late last year a DAViCal user in Germany suggested that I apply for a free booth for DAViCal in the Linux New Media Open Source Project Lounge . When DAViCal was accepted, I realised I needed some funding to help me travel around the world to attend, so I applied for a grant from InternetNZ who were kind enough to agree to cover part of my travel costs, and I was on my way. Germany in March is cold, especially for me coming from Summer! My travel allowed for a couple of days in Germany before CeBIT because that was when I could get the cheapest flights, and I wanted to have a little time to recover from the journey. Everyone had warned me to pack my winter woollies, and they were definitely needed! I stayed with a friend in Hamburg for two days and on the the second day we walked through the frozen park, past the frozen lake and over the frozen streams to see the Attraktor Hackerspace in Hamburg Nord where the CCC also hold their meetings a very impressive hackerspace in a repurposed bank (including the vault :-) with several separated areas for talks, meetings and workplaces. The day before CeBIT I travelled to Hannover to take a look at my booth space, fetch exhibitor passes for myself and volunteers and generally prepare to do battle with the crowds. The following day the fair started and it was up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the 7:38 train out to the fairgrounds. Although the fair opens at 9:00 there was always something to do between eight o'clock or so when I arrived at my booth and when the attendees started wandering past.
I was fortunate to have two volunteers for my booth who were there all week, as well as a couple more who turned up on the first two days. Not only did this mean that I got to spend a few hours during the week actually wandering the fairgrounds, but that I had some knowledgeable native german speakers for the occasional visitor who could not speak English. DAViCal has been translated into a dozen languages, and there had been some extra work put in to update the German translation before CeBIT also. As well as showing DAViCal, I was also able to demonstrate a new project at the fair which was aCal - a CalDAV Calendar Client for Android which I had released into the market just a few days beforehand for a token sum (it is licensed GPL v3 or later and the source code is available on gitorious.org). Having the smartphone devices available was great for giving live demonstrations, and I used the timetable for events at the Open Source Forum across the aisle from the Open Source Lounge to populate a calendar that we shared among a variety of devices. The first day was really the calm before the storm, and we saw lots of people asking what we were about, and had some good conversations with people wanting to know more, or telling us they used the software and were very happy with it.
CeBIT closes the gates at 18:00 with the visitor supply drying up pretty quickly around then and the secret lives of the exhibitors are revealed with people starting to relax and joke, and beer or wine starting to come out and some booth parties kicking off... if you have the stamina! I didn't, so it was off back to the train, to Hildesheim, to dinner and to bed. That first day blurred into the next, and the next and by Friday I was starting to lose my voice with all the talking I had been doing. I was visited by a chap from Posnan University who are a DAViCal user and he invited me down to the Polish stand to tell me about what they do there, and he agreed that they would love to help get the Polish translation improved. Another DAViCal user turned up with some bavarian wheat beer and a special beer glass for it by way of thanks. In some spare moments I fixed a bug in aCal's handling of character sets and uploaded a new version, so that we could use umlauts in events. Many people came past to talk to us, some of whom want to help with them project or have ideas for interesting things to do with DAViCal, some were already users of DAViCal and some went away thinking that they would be in the future. The last day of CeBIT is a little different: it's a Saturday and the doors are opened to the public and the minimum age is lowered to allow children to attend the event. I had been warned that this day is a madhouse, and it did indeed seem to be so for many booths. For DAViCal it was probably quieter than the day before, I think perhaps because calendar server software is inherently less sexy than many of the other things on display. We still had plenty of great discussions with interested people nonetheless and to be honest I was fairly happy to be spared the further exhaustion that had been threatened. Sunday was spent recuperating: discovering that Hildesheim has a great little restaurant that does traditional german pancakes for breakfast and then wandering around the small city soaking in the sunshine that I'd seen through the windows outside all week. On Monday I caught the train to M nchengladbach to meet with an organisation that might provide support for DAViCal in Germany, but who hadn't been able to come to the fair to see me due to illness. I was encouraged to spend the night in Aachen a beautiful little city , which I did, arriving around sunset and I spent a couple more days before flying home being intensely antisocial to recover from the furious week beforehand. Is CeBIT worth it? CeBIT seemed to me to be quite a different business model, or perhaps on a different scale. I've seen trade fairs in New Zealand for other purposes, but not to showcase software and services in quite this way. To give an idea of it's scale, consider that I had a tiny booth in a hall that was probably four times the size of the TSB Arena, and CeBIT included around 20 such buildings , packed with exhibitors, with free buses to get around the campus, acres of multi-storey parking buildings, two train stations, and so on. The scale of the event is incredible. As a result of this scale, CeBIT boasts impressive visitor numbers, and while a visitor will usually attend with a specific area of interest in relation to their business they will also wander the fair to see other areas of more personal interest, or just to see what is around. Open Source is a specific area of interest to a significant percentage of business in Germany, and Deutsche Messe, the fair operators, recognise the value of having an open source area as a draw for visitors, with the primary open source area placed in Hall 2, directly off the main north entrance. Within the open source area, the Open Source Project Lounge , where DAViCal was located, is a series of booths sponsored by Linux New Media AG. Projects in the Open Source Lounge are selected by a jury of Linux New Media, Deutsche Messe and several community advisors, so as such there is a range of interesting projects on show and the draw of any given project has a flow-on effect to the others. As an example, at one point while briefly minding the adjacent stand for the OpenEmbedded project I was unable to help an inquiring visitor, but I was able to talk about DAViCal with him until the exhibitor returned to answer his question. His interest in DAViCal was definitely increased in this process, and I'm sure that many people came into our area of the lounge attracted by a specific exhibitor and moving on to see some of the others. Outside of this association with open source, however, CeBIT offers something which general free software events cannot: an association with mainstream software and services. This presentation of Open Source alongside IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle, Software AG, Apple, Microsoft and so forth makes inclusion at this event particularly valuable. Free software solutions can have good brand recognition within the open ecosystem itself and yet be practically unheard of outside it. Most traditional methods of communication with suppliers don't work well with Open Source projects: a request for proposal will sail silently by, unless noted by a related commercial entity. In general there is no sales department, and marketing is frequently a desultory hit or miss affair. The fair is different. The fair is about talking with people. While there is still plenty of collateral marketing with brochures, signs, presentations and giveaway knick-knacks those things are just there to bring people into range: the real action happens when you engage a person in conversation, and at that point a humble free software project can be on an equal footing with a larger booth staffed with eager young salesmen. Of course there are a number of places where free software can get a booth. Linuxtag is a German example where there are many booths for free software projects, linux.conf.au also offers booths to free software projects during it's more outreach Open Day and software freedom day events happen all around the world where booths are available, but the audience arriving at these events are all largely pre-sold on openness and free software. So in presenting this broad blend of people, in a way in which free software projects can present on a roughly equal footing with their commercial brethren, CeBIT is an opportunity not to be missed. The numbers speak for themselves, too: traffic to the DAViCal websites has increased by about 50% around CeBIT with 25% coming from Germany, but significant increases also from France, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. Traffic to the DAViCal wiki has doubled over the last 12 months in a steady increase to around 200,000 page views each month. This sudden increase to around 10000/day in March, with some days during CeBIT peaking at over 20000/day The Future I won't be returning to CeBIT to represent DAViCal in Hannover next year as the sponsored booth is pretty much a one-time thing and the costs involved in purchasing a booth for attendance at the fair are significant (around NZD$15000 for a small 3m x 2m stall). It's possible that I will return next year in a different capacity, as one of the larger stand organisers has confidentially indicated he will invite me to attend as part of an Open Source Apps area that he is considering running on his stand, somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Lounge . Time will tell, I guess, but if invited I think I would definitely go for that. I will definitely be suggesting to a few specific free software projects that they should apply for the Linux New Media opportunity when it comes around again. Koha is one project that immediately springs to mind, but of course there are many, many worthy free software projects and this opportunity seems to be little-understood outside of Germany. If I do convince a project to apply, and they are successful, I will also try and give them some assistance and background knowledge to understand the fair, and how best they can take advantage of the opportunity it offers. Some basic tips would be:

• Book accommodation early, a small apartment or B&B is good. CeBIT accommodation prices are exceptionally high 3 or more times normal rates. There are companies that specialise in renting apartments for the week of CeBIT which are more reasonably priced.
• The fair is in Hannover , except that really it is some distance to the southeast. Exhibitors tickets provide free transport within greater Hannover for the whole week, so you don't actually need to be that close. Options like Hildesheim, a city of some 120k people south of Hannover (where I stayed), are also good although they add a small transport cost.
• Have a pop-up banner for your project.
• Develop a slideshow which tells people about your project and which can just be left running on a larger screen.
• Have a flyer you can hand out to interested people.
• Get at least one committed person to assist on the stand for the whole week.
• Get some more volunteers to assist on the stand for one day each.
• Pace yourself: get to bed early and try not to overdo the partying it's a long week!
• If you want to take a look around the fair don't wait until Friday or Saturday do it on Thursday or earlier.

and finally... I would like to express my appreciation to InternetNZ for the grant to partially cover my travel costs to Hannover, making my attendance at this outstanding event much more achievable. My thanks also to Britta Wulfling who supported all of the projects in the Open Source Lounge. My friends Alexander & Meike in Hildesheim who supplied somewhere for me to recuperate, and accompanied me to the fair every day to run the Debian booth. Thanks also, of course, to the German Linux Magazine for selecting DAViCal for a free booth, and to Benny who pointed the opportunity out, encouraged me to apply, and came along and helped out for the whole week.

Being tired of feeling embarrassed when noticing some warning in a buildd log only after having it uploaded and looking at the buildd logs of the other architectures, I've decided to write some little infrastructure to scan buildd logs for things that can be found in buildd logs. The result can be visited at https://buildd.debian.org/~brlink/. Note that it currently only has one real check (looking for E: Package builds NAME_all.deb when binary-indep target is not called.) yet and additionally two little warnings (dh_clean -k and dh_installmanpages deprecation output) which lintian could at catch just as well. The large size of the many logs to scan is a surprisingly small problem. (As some tests indicated it would only take a couple of minutes for a full scan, I couldn't help to run one full scan, only to learn afterwards that wb-team was doing the import of the new architectures at that time. Oops!) More surprising for me using small files to keep track of logs already scanned does not scale at all with the large number of source packages. File system overhead is gigantic and it makes the whole process needlessly IO bound. That problem was be easily solved using sqlite to track things done, though as buildd.debian.org doesn't have that installed yet, so no automatic updates yet. [Update: already installed, will be some semi-automatic days first, though anyway] The next thing to do is writing more checks, where I hope for some help from you: What kind of diagnostics do you know from buildd logs that you would like to be more prominently visible (hopefully soon on packages.qa.debian.org, wishlist item already filed)? Trivial target is everything that can be identified from regular expression applied to every line of the buildd log. For such cases the most complicated part is writing a short description of what this message means. (So if you sent me some suggestions, I'd be very happy to also get a short text suitable for that, together with the message to looks for and ideally some example package having that message in its buildd log). I'm also considering some more complicated tests. I'd really like to have something to test for packages being built multiple times to due Makefile errors and stuff like that.

Tomorrow (25th November) evening, I will be giving a short talk about PostgreSQL at the monthly Munich Open-Source-Treffen event.

The meetings start around 6PM and are always in Cafe Netzwerk in Luisenstr. 11, a nice and cosy hangout and hackerspace for young Munich students near Hauptbahnhof.

Could you not trust this man?Max and Fraser are very interested in this year's election. I guess political awareness starts at the first election after you turn 10, or so. They're both very curious about how mum and dad are voting, and while their mother will not tell (though we all have our suspicions :-) I don't see any reason not to discuss my political leanings with them.I've been what is commonly termed a 'floating' voter for most of my voting life. I imagine the politicians themselves might term people like me 'floaters', with an eye to the scatalogical implications. After all, their livelihoods are on the line!So, after reading this blog post I thought I might as well also share my personal voting plans with the world.

On occasion I receive death threats in comments on my blog. This doesn t bother me, I had more than a few pathetic losers say similar things to me in high school but the difference is that a pathetic loser on the other side of the world can t do much about it. The latest one is on my post Is Asperger Syndrome a Good Thing? [1]. At 11:04AM my time (00:04 UTC) on the 23rd of November someone using IP address 82.14.50.190 (registered to NTL Infrastructure for Tesco Guildford ) and with the claimed email address of sharkbait @ tesco.net told me that I m on his to kill list . He was angry because my post apparently didn t satisfy his need to prove to people that they don t want AS . As it s not possible to choose your DNA there is really no point in trying to prove that one set of genes is better than another, unless of course you want to harass people who have different genes to you. Naturally he didn t read my post, in fact the differences between his comment and what I wrote made me suspect that it s something he was pasting in to lots of blogs, but it seems unlikely that he would use an iPhone for such a copy/paste job so he must just not read. For example he rhetorically asks did you even mention it was a form of autism in your negative points when I gave a link to the proposed DSM changes where Asperger Syndrome is being merged with Autistic Disorder and the word Autism appears 5 times in the post. He has one specific complaint about people he knows who are on the Autism Spectrum, he says Every time someone speaks to them they get angry and tell said person to back the fuck off. I ve been on the receiving end. Generally there are two possible reasons for being told to fuck off , one is that the person telling you is an asshole and the other is that you are being an asshole. If you are the type of person who sends death threats to bloggers then you really should consider the latter explanation. He also suggests that I watch Boston Legal presumably because that show has one character who is an Aspie. Now I have actually watched that show and it s the worst legal show I ve ever seen, when a legal show has such unrealistic portrayal of court scenes I don t think it should be relied on for information on any other topic. I watched a couple of episodes of Boston Legal and only saw one scene with the Aspie guy, so I can t even determine whether it s a realistic portrayal he s a minor character. In any case there are plenty of Aspie guys in the Free Software community who I interact with regularly, I read forums such as AspiesForFreedom.com, and I ve read some text books on the topic. So even if a TV show had a very accurate portrayal of an Aspie character I still doubt that I would learn anything by watching it. As a general tip for flamers, if you want to accuse someone of being a member of a NAZI or KKK type organisation then the word you are after is Aryan not ayrien . If you don t know a word then don t use it. Please note the conditions of sending me email [2], I reserve the right to publish all threats in any way that I wish. A Final Note Thanks sharkbait for adding me to your to kill list , I m sure that there are lots of nice people on it and I ve got good company. If I didn t get the occasional death threat I would worry that I m not writing well enough or failing to address important issues. I will write more about Autism in the future.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/03/26/asperger-good/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/legal/conditions-email/

Since my last post about Firefox extensions I've enabled two other addons:

Through the comments I got pointed to Fox to Phone which enables you to send links from your browser directly to your Android phone with Chrome to Phone installed. Thanks for that.

Another useful extension that was recommended to me is LeechBlock. You give it a list of news sites you regularly frequent and it will make sure that you only spend a given time budget on them per day or that you only browse them in the evenings (or even a combination of both).

As I expected I did deactivate RequestPolicy again. That said, Facebook recently switched its certificates, so Certificate Patrol was unhappy. It's impressive and sad how many pages actually do cross-site requests to embed Facebook's buttons. If somebody would invent something less annoying to stop this mess, that would be great.

Yesterday evening I updated my server to remove MySQL:

steve:~# dpkg --purge mysql-client-5.1 \
                      mysql-common     \
                      mysql-server-5.1 \
                      mysql-server-core-5.1 \
                      python-mysqldb        \
                      libdbd-mysql-perl     \
                      libdatetime-format-mysql-perl

Until last month I had two database in use, one each for a pair of web-applications. As of now one is using redis - which I'm already using for my image hosting - and the other application is using SQLite. Until recently I had a high opinion of SQLite, although that has now been downgraded a little, it is still a thoroughly excellent piece of software. I was just surprised at little things it was missing, to the extent I had to rewrite my applications SQL. Still one less service is a good thing, and the migration wasn't so painful.. In more productive news I recently acquired a nice external flash - the Yongnuo YN-460 II is (very) cheap and cheerful, it can be fired remotely with my triggers so I've had a lot of fun with opportunistically taking pictures and experimenting with lighting. Most of the results are NSFW, but there are some other examples lurking around including the first time I managed to successfully capture a falling water-drop. (Not the best picture, not the most explicit effect, but fun regardless. I both can and will do better next time!)

Somebody recently asked me to write about "camera stuff under linux" and happily I declined. Why decline? Because there are so many good tools, applications, and utilities. (I use local tools for organisation and duplicate detection, rawtherapee for RAW conversion and GIMP for touchups). Having many available options is fantastic though, and something hard to appreciate for "newcomers" to Linux. (Yeah I waited 90 seconds - if I remembered to add -nojava - for Netscape Navigator to start, under X10, with 8Mb of RAM. Happier days are here. Sure DRM is bad, secure boot .. an open question, but damn we have it good compared to almost any previous point in time!)

ObQuote: "Yeah, obviously it is only a tactical party. I'm only having a party to eventually get sex." - Peep Show

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness. I hope I don t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd ) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front. I ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of those small things of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work we re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it s hosted on my current money source s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples code). Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, ) ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

It s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest and I m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli accepted my invitation. He has a difficult role in the community, but he s doing a really great job of it. He s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion. Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Stefano: I m Stefano Zacchiroli, but I prefer to be called Zack, both on the Internet and in real life. I m 32, Italian, emigrated to France about 4 years ago. I live in Paris, and I find it to be one of the most gorgeous and exciting cities in the world. As my day job I m a Computer Science researcher and teacher at University Paris Diderot and IRILL. In my copious free time I contribute to Debian, and I m firmly convinced that doing so is an effective way to help the cause of Free Software. Besides, I find it to be a lot of fun! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Stefano: Flash back to 1999, when I was a 2nd year student in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Back then in Italy it was uncommon for young geeks to get exposed to Free Software: Internet was way less pervasive than today and most computer magazines didn t pay much attention to GNU/Linux. Luckily for me, the professor in charge of the student lab was a Free Software enthusiast and all students machines there were running Debian. Not only that, but there was also a student program that allowed volunteers to become sysadmins after having shown their skills and convinced the director they were trustworthy. Becoming one of those volunteer Debian admins quickly became one of my top objectives for the year, and that is were I ve learned using Debian. The year after that, I got in touch with a research group that was to become the happy bunch of hackers with whom I would have done both my master and PhD theses. They were designing a new proof assistant. Most of the development was in OCaml and happened on Debian. OCaml was available in Debian, but many of the libraries we needed were not. So I approached the Debian OCaml Team offering to help. Before I realize what was going on I was (co-)maintainer of tens of OCaml-related packages. At some point I got told I think you should apply as a Debian Developer . So I did and in a couple of months I went through the New Member (NM) process, that was back then in its infancy. I still remember my happiness while reading the account created mail, the day after my 22nd birthday. I know the NM process went through some bad publicity in the past, but I m happy to see that nowadays the process can be as swift as it has been for me 10 years ago. Raphael: It s your second year as Debian Project Leader (DPL). Are you feeling more productive in the role? Do you fear to burn out? Stefano: I m feeling way more productive, no doubts. The task of the Debian Project Leader is not necessarily difficult, but it is a complex and scarcely documented one. It is also profoundly different from any other task that Debian people usually work on, so that experience doesn t help much in getting started. Before becoming effective as DPL one needs to get to know many people and mechanisms he is not familiar with. More importantly, one needs to set up a personal work-flow that allows to keep up with day-to-day DPL tasks (which are aplenty) as well as with urgencies (that tend to pop-up in the leader@debian.org INBOX at the least convenient time). Finally, one also needs to do proper traffic shaping and always retain enough motivation bandwidth to keep the Project informed about what is going on in DPL-land. Finding the right balance among all these ingredients can take some time. Once one is past it, everything goes way more smoothly. The above is why I m constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL s TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next. Regarding burn out, I don t feel prone to its risk these days. If I look back, I can say that my contributions as DPL have been pretty constant in volume over time; my enthusiasm for the task, if anything, is on the rise. The effectiveness of my contributions as DPL are, on the other hand, not mine to judge. Raphael: If you had to single out two achievements where you were involved as DPL, what would they be? Stefano: I d go for the following two, in no particular order:

• Dialogue with derivatives. When I became DPL ~1.5 years ago the situation on that front was pretty dire. In the specific case of Ubuntu, by far the most successful and customized of all Debian derivatives, I remember being scared of raising the topic of collaboration with them on mailing lists. More generally, we had no specific initiatives to foster technical collaboration with and among derivatives. A huge potential of (forwarded) contributions to Debian was being wasted. Today things look much better, as I ve documented in recent talks at DebConf11 and UDS-P. The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum and many people who apply to become Debian Developers come from derivatives. Conflict situations still exist, for good reasons that we still have to either fix or figure out entirely. But I m positive we re on the right track.

  The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum

  This is by far not an achievement of mine alone. In particular, many of the activity of the Derivatives Front Desk have been organized by other enthusiastic volunteers. But I ve done my part, especially in breaking the ice and in proposing a vision of Free Software distribution where all distros play a role and are welcome to join the game, as long as they give back and give credit to their respective upstreams.
• Process membership. I m proud of having promoted the general resolution (GR) that has clarified (and advertised to the world) that Debian welcomes all kind of contributions, and that they all equally matter to become proper members of the Project. I notice only now while writing this that the GR title, traditionally chosen by the secretary, was Debian Project Members . That choice harmonically closes the circle with the recent renaming of the NM process to New Member process. Today, we have several project members (AKA Debian Developers ) that are active citizen of Debian with voting rights, even though they take care of tasks other than packaging. Anyone can become a Debian citizen, as long as they are ready to abide by Debian s values, have a track record of verifiable contributions to Debian, and are committed to keep them coming in the future.

  We have several project members that [ ] take care of tasks other than packaging.

  Once gain, this is by far not an achievement of mine alone, very little project-wide achievements are. DAM has helped a lot and support from the project as a whole has been immense.

OK, let me cheat and add a third one I m also proud of having been able to report to the Project my whereabouts as DPL, thoroughly and periodically, since the very beginning is first term. People annoyed by my reporting logorrhea now have all my sympathies. Raphael: Among the possible new features of Debian Wheezy, which one gets you excited most? Stefano: It s multi-arch, no doubt. Even though it is not a directly user visible change, it s a very far reaching one. It is also one of those changes that make me feel that moment of truth of coders, when you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

It s multi-arch [ ] you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

Raphael: If you were not DPL and could spend all your time on Debian, what project would you do? Stefano: I would sit down and do software development for Debian. It s impressive how many important and beneficial changes for Debian could be delivered by specific software improvements in various parts of our infrastructure. We tend to attract many packagers, but not so many people willing to maintain Debian infrastructure softwares like dak, britney, debbugs, the PTS, etc. Their maintenance burden then falls on the shoulders of the respective teams which are generally very busy with other important tasks. As a project, we seem to be more appealing to packagers than to software developers. That is a pity given the amount of exciting coding tasks that are everywhere in Debian. Part of the reason we are not appealing to developers is that we are not particularly good at collecting coding tasks in a place where interested developers could easily pick them up. It also takes quite a bit of inside knowledge to spot infrastructure bugs and understand how to fix them. I long for some spare hacking time to check if I m still good enough of a coder to hunt down longstanding bugs in our infrastructure, which have ended up being my pet peeves. I d also love to dive again into RCBW. It s less committing than package maintenance, more diverse and challenging, and also an immensely useful activity to get Debian releases done. Raphael: Martin Michlmayr is worried that there is so few paid opportunities around Debian. Do you agree with his sentiment, and if yes do you have ideas on how to improve this situation? Stefano: The idealistic me wishes Debian to be a community made only of volunteers that devote their free time to the Project. Oh, and that me also wishes Debian to be competitive with similar projects, no matter how many full-time employees others have! That is coherent with a view of society where everyone has a day job, but also engages in volunteering activities ensuring that public interest is pursued by people motivated by interests other than profit. But I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role. I admire projects that strike a good balance between volunteer and paid work. The Linux kernel is emblematic in that respect: many developers are paid by companies that have a commercial or strategic interest in Linux. Nevertheless volunteers contributions are aplenty and the Linux community gives a convincing impression that choices are driven by the community itself (or by its benevolent dictator) without money-driven impositions.

I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role.

Such an ecosystem does not exist around Debian. We do have a partner program that allows for it to happen, but we have very few partners with an interest in doing distribution development work. Like Martin, I m worried by this state of affairs, because it de facto means we lag behind in terms of available people power. In a community of volunteers, that might frustrate people and that is not good. To improve over the status quo the first step is to federate together small and medium companies that have a strategic interest in Debian and listen to their needs. I m already in touch with representatives of such companies that, in many cases, already employ Debian Developers to do some distribution work in Debian. We will be soon sending out a call to reach out to more such companies, but since we are discussing this, why waiting? If some of our readers here are representative of such companies, I encourage them to get in touch with me about this. Raphael: You know that the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is on good track but the liberation of the book is not yet assured. What do you think of this project? Stefano: I m happy about the project, to the point that I ve accepted writing a testimonial for it . I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian and I welcome any initiative that might help closing that gap.

I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian.

Free Culture is a great offspring of Free Software and I m convinced we need to stand up against double standards in the two camps. Letting aside software-specific licensing details, the basic freedoms to be defended are the same. They are those freedoms that ensure that a reader is in full control of his book, pretty much as they ensure that a computer user is in full control of the software that runs on it. I m therefore proud that Debian has long resolved that the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) apply not only to software but also to books and other pieces of documentation. But the status quo implies that not only we have very few up to date, high quality books about Debian. It also implies that, at present, we have no such book that we can distribute in the Debian archive, showing off the Free Software (and Free Culture!) values we stand for.
Crowdfunding is considered to be a good mate for Free Culture, where the services model that applies to Free Software is more difficult to exploit. I so wish any luck to yours and Roland s initiative. A different matter is whether Debian, as a project, should endorse the initiative and actively campaign for it. As you know, I think it should not. While we do advertise general project donations, we don t do mission-specific fundraising campaign for Debian itself. Coherently with that, I don t think we should relay crowdfunding campaigns for 3rd parties, even when the result would be beneficial to Debian. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Stefano: There are two classes of people that I particularly admire in Debian:

• Those with an uncanny ability to guide discussions towards constructive conclusions. We are lucky to have many in Debian and I admire all of them. Having to single out one I d name Russ Allbery, in honor of whom I hereby propose the periodic Russ Allbery s Distinguished Flametamer Award .
• People stepping up for responsibility roles, especially when the responsibility put them in tough spots. Release teams, ftp-masters, DSA, DAM, as well as past and present members of teams with similarly hot seats have all my admiration.

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Thank you to Zack for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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Today, while merging changes to phpMyAdmin from our translation server I was very surprised that we have two languages which already reached 100% - Slovenian and Turkish (and four more just few strings from 100%). The huge amount of new strings introduced during 3.5 development (mostly being MySQL advisor hints) made me thing it will take very long time till they all get translated, but I was proven wrong. Anyway there is still lot of work to do, so feel free to join our translators team.

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In september I visited Brussels, Belgium. EPFSUG had kindly invited me to give a talk about FreedomBox in the European Parliament, and together we extended to also visit other organizations - both grassroots and more formal. I returned home exhausted but also fuelled with renewed energy and passion, and decided to engage in more such activities. Also, an old promise of mine to visit friends in the Aceh region of Indonesia (whom I met in Taiwan a few years back) rumbled in the back of my head. After a bit of juggling with travel routes and sponsoring options, my course was set for a 2 month journey with Debian Pure Blends as main theme:

1. England: London
2. India: Khammam, Hyderabad, Mangaluru, Bengaluru
3. Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho
4. Thailand: Bangkok
5. Malaysia: Putrajaya
6. Indonesia: Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Bogor, Banda Aceh, Takengon
7. England: Cambridge

Debian will be sponsoring East Asia part, and Debian enthusiasts in India seek sponsorship for India part.

This announcement was provided by Martin Erik Werner. I m reproducing it for Planet Ubuntu. The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join! It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26. The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you re new to the Team, say hi! Then we ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways? Next we ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more? Next up it s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done? Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET? Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games? Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there! Related posts:

1. Debious A dubious Debian packaging GUI
2. One week with Debian
3. A list of some commercial GNU/Linux games

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Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2011. Permalink License Post tags: Debian, games, packaging

Many of us out there writes small tools to just solve a simple task that you need. Here, I will present a tool I needed last night. I have a small job doing a wordpress site for some people, and I needed a image with the site title in a font matching some specific criteria (like a double story lowercase A and a small serif on lowercase L, while in general being a Sans Serif type). So what I needed was a application that let me write a word or a phrase, and see it written with all available fonts on the system. So, it took a little more than a effective hour and 120 lines of code to come up with this: Click to see image And if anyone cares, I have pushed the sources to git.kde.org. I m sure many of you also have various such small apps. Let s see them. That s also you Eike and your svgtoy app :) Another thing I learned from this app is that the ukij fonts targetted the Uyghyr language actually is very interesting also for western europeans.

Galaxy S Review I ve just been given an indefinite loan of a Samsung Galaxy S which is more useful than the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 that I own. I think that the main benefit is that it runs Android 2.2 instead of Android 2.1 on the Xperia. 2.2 is what gives it USB tethering support without extra software (something I haven t tested yet but will use a lot if it works correctly) and Wifi AP support. Both phones are about the same size, the Galaxy S has slightly more RAM (reported as 304M vs 280M which doesn t really matter) and a lot more main storage (1.87G vs 465M usable after the OS is loaded). The main down-sides of the Galaxy S is that it lacks a flash . I m not aware of any phone camera having a proper flash, but the limited LED flash is useful for taking pictures at times and there are a variety of programs that can turn it on for use as a torch. Also I wonder whether the Samsung people actually test their phones in real use or whether they just build them to spec. When you read the specs it sounds nice to have a phone that s only 9.9mm thick (apart from the bulge at the bottom), but that makes it really difficult to hold. The Xperia X10 is 13mm thick and isn t as slick so you are much less likely to drop it. I sometimes wonder whether phone companies are designing their products to be broken so that they can sell replacements. Three Networking Sucks My parents use 3G broadband from Three as their only connection to the Internet, this is fast enough for viewing Youtube on occasion and generally works well for them. However whenever I try to transfer any data to their system which has integrity checks it turns out to be corrupted. About every megabyte of data transferred has a corrupt packet that has a matching checksum presumably it s a bug in Three s network. Because Three are desperate for customers they have given me a free 6 month subscription to a data SIM [1]. I ve been using that SIM with my Galaxy S and found the same data corruption problem and I ve reproduced it in many places around Melbourne so this isn t just one unreliable cell tower, it s something broken in the core of the Three network. The obvious solution to this is to use a VPN so the corrupt packets will be dropped. So I set up a PPTP VPN only to discover that it seems impossible to make the default route be via the VPN, there has been a bug report about this since 2009 the iPhone allows configuring whether Internet traffic should go via the VPN, it can t be that hard [2]. There is an option to use a proxy for web access, but when I tried that on Android 2.1 it only worked for the system web browser not for things like the Android Market. But there is no option for configuring a proxy for use when the VPN is active, so it doesn t seem likely that I could run a proxy on the VPN network and direct all traffic to it. Due to corruption on the Three network and the inability to get a VPN working correctly it seems that I can t use the Three SIM. Android isn t Really Free Software While Android implementations generally stick to the GPL and other free software licenses that are involved they seem to be a poor example of providing freedom to users. My Xperia X10 is running Android 2.1 because Sony-Ericsson has locked the boot loader so I can t install a newer kernel. They don t care enough to release a new version this is stupid of them because it means that I am much less likely to recommend their products. If Sony-Ericsson releases a newer Android release then it will be a total OS reinstall, unlike the way I can upgrade a Debian system an application at a time. I can t install new packages that replace system packages, so the Email and SMS programs that I ve installed sit along side the ones that came with the system. Periodically the unwanted SMS and Email programs show up. I can t make my Android phones perform basic networking tasks that I ve done on Linux systems since the early 90 s. Hiding the complexity from the newbies is OK, but they need to make the full capabilities of the system available to experts. It seems to me that Android effectively gives the majority of users no more freedom than the iPhone does. Even for the small minority of us who are technically capable of rooting phones and installing CyanogenMod etc it s often limited by technical measures and the amount of time required. Update: Philipp Kern pointed out that his Galaxy S has a front facing camera. I have checked my phone and discovered that it has one too. When I published this post I criticised the Galaxy S for not having a front facing camera for video-calls based on a misunderstanding of the Wikipedia page (which says that SOME models lack it) and not testing it. Thanks for the correction Philipp and sorry for publishing wrong data.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/06/04/leaving-three/
• [2] http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4205

The Debian/Ubuntu games team is organizing another meeting, if you're into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join! It will be held next Saturday, on the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net). More information is available on the meeting wiki page. The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you're new to the team, say hi! Then we'll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what's up with the /usr/games/ path anyways? Next we'll be moving onto how the games team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more? Next up it's the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the games team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done? Then onto the recurring question of sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET? Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games? Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there! (This text provided by Martin Erik Werner)

A few days ago, Conrad Sanderson released the first pre-release version of what will be Armadillo 2.4.*, giving it the 2.3.91 release handle. We folded this into RcppArmadillo release 0.2.30, with Romain making a few adjustments to our template structure to accomodate Conrad's underlying changes in Armadillo itself. Armadillo is a wonderfully expressive (thanks to clever modern template programming), powerful yet simple-to-use C++ library for linear algebra, making expressions in C++ as easy as writing in Matlab or R. By deploying our seamless Rcpp glue between R and C++, RcppArmadillo brings this nice C++ library to R users. The CRAN page for RcppArmadillo now lists ten packages using the RcppArmadillo package. There was also an earlier bug-fix release 0.2.29 which I had not blogged about separately. The NEWS entries summarising the changes for both are below:

0.2.30  2011-11-19
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo test release 2.3.91 "Loco Lounge Lizard (Beta 1)"
          * added shorter forms of transposes: .t() and .st()
          * added optional use of 64 bit indices, allowing matrices to have
            more than 4 billion elements
          * added experimental support for C++11 initialiser lists
          * faster pinv()
          * faster inplace transpose
          * bugfixes for handling expressions with aliasing and submatrices
          * refactored code to eliminate warnings when using the Clang C++
            compiler
          * .print_trans() and .raw_print_trans() are deprecated 
0.2.29  2011-09-01
    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 2.2.3
          * Release fixes a speed issue in the as_scalar() function.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there are also diffstat reports for 0.2.30 relative to 0.2.29 and for 0.2.29 relative to 0.2.28. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

Yesterday I wrote about an alleged attack on the Windows 8 secure boot implementation. As I later clarified, it turns out that the story was, to put it charitably, entirely wrong. The attack is a boot kit targeted towards BIOS-based boots. It lives in the MBR. It'll never be executed on any UEFI systems, let alone secure boot ones. In fact, this is precisely the kind of attack that secure boot is intended to protect against. So, context.

The MBR contains code that's executed by the BIOS at boot time. This code is unverifiable - it's permitted to have arbitrary functionality. There's only 440 bytes, but that's enough to jump to somewhere else and read code from elsewhere. There's no way for the BIOS to know that this code is malicious. And one thing this code can obviously do is load the normal boot code and modify it to behave differently. Any self-validation code in the loader can be patched out at this point. The modified loader will then load the kernel, and potentially also modify it. At this point, you've lost. Any attempts to validate the code can be redirected to the original code and so everything will look fine, up until the point where the user runs a specific application and suddenly your kernel is sending all your keystrokes over UDP to someone in Nigeria.

These attacks exist now. They're in the wild. In a normal UEFI world you'd do the same thing by just replacing the UEFI bootloader. But with secure boot you'll be able to validate that the bootloader is appropriately signed and if someone's modified it you'll drop into some remediation mode that recovers your files, from install media if necessary.

Obviously, this protection is based on all the components of secure boot (ie, everything that runs before ExitBootServices() is called) being perfect. As I said, if any of them accept untrusted input and misinterpret it in such a way that they can be tricked into running arbitrary code, you'll still have problems. But when discussing the pros and cons of secure boot, it's important to make sure that we're talking about reality rather than making provably false assertions.

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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop). Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2011 schedule might give you some inspiration. Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: your name, the title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects) and a short abstract of one or two paragraphs. The deadline for submissions is December 20th 2011. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4-5 February 2012. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devroom@lists.fosdem.org Also, if you are attending FOSDEM 2012, please add yourself to the KDE community wiki page so that we organize better. We need volunteers for the booth!