This is interesting. It's obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware - there's no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you've won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

None of this should be surprising. Secure boot is predicated upon the firmware only executing trusted material until the OS handoff. If you can sidestep that restriction then the entire chain of trust falls down. We're talking about a large body of code that was written without the assumption that it would have to be resistant to sustained attack, and which has now been put in a context where people are actively trying to break it. Bugs are pretty inevitable. I'd expect a lot of work to be done on firmware implementations between now and Windows 8 ship date.

(Update: It's probably worth pointing out that although Ars talk about it defeating secure boot, the primary sources don't seem to mention secure boot at all. Windows 8 will boot without secure boot, so it's possible that this attack merely handles the non-secure boot case)

(Further update: It turns out to be a purely BIOS based attack. In other words, it's an example of the kind of thing that secure boot is intended to prevent, not any kind of compromise of a secure boot implementation)

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Starting with Fedora 16 we're installing using GPT disklabels by default, even on BIOS-based systems. This is worth noting because most BIOSes have absolutely no idea what GPT is, which you'd think would create some problems. And, unsurprisingly, it does. Shock. But let's have an overview.

GPT, or GUID Partition Table, is part of the UEFI specification. It defines a partition table format that allows up to 128 partitions per disk, with 64 bit start and end values allowing partitions up to 9.4ZB (assuming 512 byte blocks). This is great, because the existing MBR partitioning format only allows up to 2.2TB when using 512 byte blocks. But most BIOSes (and most older operating systems) don't understand GPT, so plugging in a GPT-partitioned disk would result in the system believing that the drive was uninitialised. This is avoided by specifying a protective MBR. This is a valid MBR partition table with a single partition covering the entire disk (or the first 2.2TB of the disk if it's larger than that) and the partition type set to 0xee ("GPT Protective"). GPT-unaware BIOSes and operating systems will see a partition they don't understand and simply ignore it.

But how do we boot a GPT-labelled disk with a protective MBR on a system that doesn't understand GPT? The key here is that BIOS is pretty dumb. Typically a BIOS will see a disk and just attempt to execute the code in the first sector. This MBR code knows how to do the rest of the boot, including parsing the partition table if necessary. The BIOS doesn't need to care at all.

Of course, some BIOSes choose to care. We've seen a small number of machines that, when exposed to a GPT disk, refuse to boot because they parse the MBR partition map and don't like what they see. This is typically accompanied by a message along the lines of "No operating system found". What we've found is that they're looking for a partition marked with the bootable flag, and if no partitions are marked bootable they assume that there's no OS. This is in contrast to the traditional use of the flag, which is merely a hint to the MBR as to which partition boot code it should execute.

So, should we set that flag? The UEFI specification specifically forbids it - table 15 states that the BootIndicator byte must be set to 0. Once again we're left in an unfortunate position where the specification and reality collide in an awkward way.

If this happens to you after a Fedora 16 install, you have two choices. The first is to reinstall with the "nogpt" boot argument. The installer will then set up a traditional MBR partition table. The second is to boot off a live CD and run fdisk against the boot disk. It'll give a bunch of scary warnings. Ignore them. Hit "a", then "1", then "w" to write it to disk. Things ought to work then. We'll figure out something better for F17.

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I probably don t have to present Mark Shuttleworth he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1). I have met Mark during Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico), we were both trying to find ways to enhance the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. The least I can say is that Mark is opinionated but any leader usually is, and in particular the self-appointed ones! Read on to discover his view on the Ubuntu-Debian relationship and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Mark: At heart I m an explorer, inventor and strategist. Change in technology, society and business is what fascinates me, and I devote almost all of my time and wealth to the catalysis of change in a direction that I hope improves society and the environment. I m 38, studied information systems and finance at the University of Cape Town. My hearts home is Cape Town, and I ve lived there and in Star City and in London, now I live in the Isle of Man with my girlfriend Claire and 14 precocious ducks. I joined Debian in around 1995 because I was helping to setup web servers for as many groups as possible, and I thought Debian s approach to packaging was very sensible but there was no package for Apache. In those days, the NM process was a little easier Raphael: What was your initial motivation when you decided to create Ubuntu 7 years ago? Mark: Ubuntu is designed to fulfill a dream of change; a belief that the potential of free software was to have a profound impact on the economics of software as well as its technology. It s obvious that the technology world is enormously influenced by Linux, GNU and the free software ecosystem, but the economics of software are still essentially unchanged. Before Ubuntu, we have a two-tier world of Linux: there s the community world (Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo) where you support yourself, and the restricted, commercial world of RHEL and SLES/SLED. While the community distributions are wonderful in many regards, they don t and can t meet the needs of the whole of society; one can t find them pre-installed, one can t get certified and build a career around them, one can t expect a school to deploy at scale a platform which is not blessed by a wide range of institutions. And the community distributions cannot create the institutions that would fix that. Ubuntu brings those two worlds together, into one whole, with a commercial-grade release (inheriting the goodness of Debian) that is freely available but also backed by an institution. The key to that dream is economics, and as always, a change in economics; it was clear to me that the flow of money around personal software would change from licensing ( buying Windows ) to services ( paying for your Ubuntu ONE storage ). If that change was coming, then there might be room for a truly free, free software distribution, with an institution that could make all the commitments needed to match the commercial Linux world. And that would be the achievement of a lifetime. So I decided to dedicate a chunk of my lifetime to the attempt, and found a number of wonderful people who shared that vision to help with the attempt. It made sense to me to include Debian in that vision; I knew it well as both a user and insider, and believed that it would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions. I share Debian s values and those values are compatible with those we set for Ubuntu.

Debian would always be the most rigorous of the community distributions.

Debian on its own, as an institution, could not be a partner for industry or enterprise. The bits are brilliant, but the design of an institution for independence implies making it difficult to be decisive counterparty, or contractual provider. It would be essentially impossible to achieve the goals of pre-installation, certification and support for third-party hardware and software inside an institution that is designed for neutrality, impartiality and independence. However, two complementary institutions could cover both sides of this coin. So Ubuntu is the second half of a complete Debian-Ubuntu ecosystem. Debian s strengths complement Ubuntu s, Ubuntu can achieve things that Debian cannot (not because its members are not capable, but because the institution has chosen other priorities) and conversely, Debian delivers things which Ubuntu cannot, not because its members are not capable, but because it chooses other priorities as an institution. Many people are starting to understand this: Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow. Neither instrument is particularly useful on its own, except in a museum of anthropology

Ubuntu is Debian s arrow, Debian is Ubuntu s bow.

So the worst and most frustrating attitude comes from those who think Debian and Ubuntu compete. If you care about Debian, and want it to compete on every level with Ubuntu, you are going to be rather miserable; you will want Debian to lose some of its best qualities and change some of its most important practices. However, if you see the Ubuntu-Debian ecosystem as a coherent whole, you will celebrate the strengths and accomplishments of both, and more importantly, work to make Debian a better Debian and Ubuntu a better Ubuntu, as opposed to wishing Ubuntu was more like Debian and vice versa. Raphael: The Ubuntu-Debian relationship was rather hectic at the start, it took several years to mature . If you had to start over, would you do some things differently? Mark: Yes, there are lessons learned, but none of them are fundamental. Some of the tension was based on human factors that cannot really be altered: some of the harshest DD critics of Canonical and Ubuntu are folk who applied for but were not selected for positions at Canonical. I can t change that, and wouldn t change that, and would understand the consequences are, emotionally, what they are. Nevertheless, it would have been good to be wiser about the way people would react to some approaches. We famously went to DebConf 5 in Porto Allegre and hacked in a room at the conference. It had an open door, and many people popped a head in, but I think the not-a-cabal collection of people in there was intimidating and the story became one of exclusion. If we d wanted to be exclusive, we would have gone somewhere else! So I would have worked harder to make that clear at the time if I d known how many times that story would be used to paint Canonical in a bad light. As for engagement with Debian, I think the situation is one of highs and lows. As a high, it is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer in Debian on a problem in which there is mutual interest. There are exceptions, but those exceptions are as problematic within Debian as between Debian and outsiders. As a low, it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution, because of the design of the institution.

It is generally possible to collaborate with any given maintainer [ ] [but] it is impossible to collaborate with Debian as an institution.

In order to collaborate, two parties must make and keep commitments. So while one Debian developer and one Ubuntu developer can make personal commitments to each other, Debian cannot make commitments to Ubuntu, because there is no person or body that can make such commitments on behalf of the institution, on any sort of agile basis. A GR is not agile . I don t say this as a critique of Debian; remember, I think Debian has made some very important choices, one of those is the complete independence of its developers, which means they are under no obligation to follow a decision made by anyone else. It s also important to understand the difference between collaboration and teamwork. When two people have exactly the same goal and produce the same output, that s just teamwork. When two people have different goals and produce different product, but still find ways to improve one anothers product, that s collaboration. So in order to have great collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian, we need to start with mutual recognition of the value and importance of the differences in our approach. When someone criticises Ubuntu because it exists, or because it does not do things the same way as Debian, or because it does not structure every process with the primary goal of improving Debian, it s sad. The differences between us are valuable: Ubuntu can take Debian places Debian cannot go, and Debian s debianness brings a whole raft of goodness for Ubuntu. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Mark: Internal tension about the vision and goals of Debian make it difficult to create a harmonious environment, which is compounded by an unwillingness to censure destructive behaviour. Does Debian measure its success by the number of installs? The number of maintainers? The number of flamewars? The number of packages? The number of messages to mailing lists? The quality of Debian Policy? The quality of packages? The freshness of packages? The length and quality of maintenance of releases? The frequency or infrequency of releases? The breadth of derivatives? Many of these metrics are in direct tension with one another; as a consequence, the fact that different DD s prioritise all of these (and other goals) differently makes for interesting debate. The sort of debate that goes on and on because there is no way to choose between the goals when everyone has different ones. You know the sort of debate I mean Raphael: Do you think that the Debian community improved in the last 7 years? If yes, do you think that the coopetition with Ubuntu partly explains it? Mark: Yes, I think some of the areas that concern me have improved. Much of this is to do with time giving people the opportunity to consider a thought from different perspectives, perhaps with the benefit of maturity. Time also allows ideas to flow and and of course introduces new people into the mix. There are plenty of DD s now who became DD s after Ubuntu existed, so it s not as if this new supernova has suddenly gone off in their galactic neighbourhood. And many of them became DD s because of Ubuntu. So at least from the perspective of the Ubuntu-Debian relationship, things are much healthier. We could do much better. Now that we are on track for four consecutive Ubuntu LTS releases, on a two-year cadence, it s clear we could collaborate beautifully if we shared a freeze date. Canonical offered to help with Squeeze on that basis, but institutional commitment phobia reared its head and scotched it. And with the proposal to put Debian s first planned freeze exactly in the middle of Ubuntu s LTS cycle, our alignment in interests will be at a minimum, not a maximum. Pure <facepalm />. Raphael: What would you suggest to people (like me) who do not feel like joining Canonical and would like to be paid to work on improving Debian? Mark: We share the problem; I would like to be paid to work on improving Ubuntu, but that s also a long term dream Raphael: What about using the earnings of the dormant Ubuntu Foundation to fund some Debian projects? Mark: The Foundation is there in the event of Canonical s failure to ensure that commitments, like LTS maintenance, are met. It will hopefully be dormant for good Raphael: The crowdfunding campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is still going on and I briefly envisioned the possibility to create the Ubuntu Administrator s Handbook. What do you think of this project? Mark: Crowdfunding is a great match for free software and open content, so I hope this works out very well for you. I also think you d find a bigger market for an Ubuntu book, not because Ubuntu is any more important than Debian but because it is likely to appeal to people who are more inclined to buy or download a book than to dive into the source. Again, this is about understanding the difference in audiences, not judging the projects or the products. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Mark: Zack is the best DPL since 1995; it s an impossible job which he handles with grace and distinction. I hope praise from me doesn t tarnish his reputation in the project!

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

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It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite economical vacations. The cheapest prices tend to be around $100 per person per night for an inside cabin (IE no window) with two people (there is a significant extra fee for having a cabin with only one person). If you book a room in a half-decent hotel with a pool in some moderately desirable place then you will probably pay about $200 per night which might get you free breakfast but won t include lunch or dinner. Cruises include all the free food you can eat for at least 16 hours of the day with maybe an extra fee for getting food in the middle of the night. When a cruise ship stops at the port you can pay for an expensive shore trip arranged by the cruise company or have a cheap trip that involves walking on the beach or taking a taxi to somewhere local. Of course there are lots of extras that can make a cruise really expensive, but if you don t plan to eat at speciality restaurants or drink much alcohol then that shouldn t be a problem. I ve just booked a short luxury cruise, mostly as a trial of the cruise concept. The process of doing so was difficult enough that even if I hadn t previously needed a holiday then I d probably need one now. It would be interesting to compare the amount of time that a reasonable person would be likely to spend choosing a holiday and purchasing it for the different types of holiday, I expect that cruising would be a long way behind everything that involves flying to a foreign city and staying in a hotel. The Issues of Booking When booking a regular holiday you choose where to visit, then choose the time of year, the accommodation, and travel. While the order can vary it s generally a sequential process without too many variables at any stage. With a cruise one of the first decisions is to choose the cruise line, different lines cater to various market segments it s clear what Disney cruises aim for but often not so clear for others. Apart from Disney the other cruise lines don t seem to make clear statements about who they are and aren t targeting. Then there are a variety of ships run by each cruise line which in many cases offer different features, do you want 1 pool or 4? Do you want ice skating? The cruise lines that I have investigated don t offer clear comparisons of their ships. As a cruise ship is essentially a hotel, a collection of restaurants, and some other entertainment you can t just arbitrarily choose one the way you might choose a random hotel with a suitable price and rating. Now while you can choose a hotel and generally get a room when you want a cruise booking has to be made when the ship is in a convenient port. So your holiday needs to be scheduled around the availability of the ship. CruiseCritic.com is an excellent source of information on cruises and has a very active and useful advice forum [1]. The forum appears to be dominated by retirees, presumably because retirees have time to just wait for a ship they like to visit their local port while people who have to schedule holidays around work projects etc. When booking a hotel I have found that Wotif.com is really good for comparing hotels and finding a reasonably cheap one and they also have periodic mail-outs about special deals. I have made a couple of short vacations based on Wotif offering me unusually good prices on a hotel in a place that I was mildly interested in visiting. There are also special deals on cruises, but it s a lot more difficult to take them. Firstly as cruises aren t as interchangeable as hotels it s not as appealing to take an offer of a cruise you didn t previously consider because it s going cheap. The second factor is that according to cruise reviews there is more variation among cabins than there is among hotel rooms. The design of the ship that is needed to cram everything in the available space means that some cabins apparently have noise pollution from various activities on the ship while others are considered to have problems for people prone to sea-sickness. Discounts probably only apply after people who pay non-discount rates have had a chance to book what might be considered the better cabins. Of course it could be a good thing to have most of the ship booked out, CruiseCritic.com has some reviews of individual cabins and presumably there are people who compare hundreds of cabins to discover what is ideal for them. The Problem with Princess I have booked a Princess cruise. I chose it because it was going cheap, but the first two travel agents that advertised it were unable to take my order because Princess only allows US based agencies (which means the discount agents on the net) to sell to US customers I don t think that the people who run the Princess cruise company know what the Internet is about. So I booked the cruise through the Princess web site, they took my money, told me that a good chunk of that money would never be returned if I cancelled, and then sent me to the web page for providing all the information that they need which is a lot. The big problem was when their web site absolutely demanded a passport number and said that I would not be allowed to board without one even though their FAQ (and common sense) indicated that a cruise which doesn t involve any international travel has no need of a passport. Taking someone s money and then telling them that they can t attend due to not having a valid passport is one way of making a future passenger very unhappy. I called the support people (which was Carnival) and had to listen to some really strange hold music it was difficult to determine if the music was produced by someone with unusual tastes in electronic music vastly different from my own preference or whether the computer which manages the phone calls was producing noise instead of music. Eventually I got through to an operator who was very helpful and stored my drivers license number which was adequate. While on the topic of their web site, when booking a cruise with Princess they list which types of cabin (interior, balcony, etc) are available and list the price for the cheapest category of cabin in each price. However if the cheapest category is all sold out then it will still list that cheapest price and thus be advertising a price that can t be booked. This is misleading and annoying. Further Hassle But the difficulty doesn t end here. On a cruise you have to book in advance for which dinner seating you desire which is usually only early or late but some ships offer anytime . Then if you happen to be travelling with people who are in a separate cabin and paying separately (which one would expect to be fairly common) there is no obvious way of synchronising dinner preferences the ship people might assign people to different tables. I admit that I haven t fully explored the post-booking part of the Princess web site, maybe I can arrange a shared table but for the moment my pain threshold for the cruise booking process has been exceeded. Other Cruising Stuff Insight Cruises (formerly Geek Cruises) offers a variety of educational cruises including science, astronomy, chess, art, history, and some other things [2]. From a casual inspection of their web site it seems that the cruise prices are around $300 per night for a 2 person cabin and the registration fees for the conferences are between $1200 and $1500. Most readers of my blog will consider this to be unreasonably expensive as registration for a Linux conference tends to be a lot less than $1000. But when compared to typical for-profit conferences $1500 isn t anywhere near the high end of the range. Also while someone who is choosing a cruise holiday can easily get a cruise that costs less than $200 per day for a 2 person cabin, for commercial conferences it s not uncommon to spend more than $300 per night for two people on accommodation and food. So the only noteworthy part about the cost is that accommodation will be quite expensive if you aren t sharing a room. If you want to run a conference on a cruise there are companies which specialise in such things, Landry and Kling is one company that specialises in planning corporate events [3]. They do seem to aim for the high end of the market, including chartering a small cruise ship or half a large cruise ship that means ~1000 passengers. While there are some conferences with more than 1000 delegates it seems that most conferences top out at about 500 delegates. However I know that some conferences have limited the number of delegates to the maximum capacity of the biggest lecture hall available as some cruise ships have a theater with more than 1000 seats it seems that similar conferences could potentially arrange a half ship charter. A half ship charter apparently allows exclusive access to one of the theaters (at least when it s not needed for evening entertainment) and exclusive seating at the main dining room. It s a standard feature that cruise ships have all the equipment you might need to run a conference. Autism on the Seas is a brand used by the Alumni Cruise company for their holiday packages for special needs children [4]. They sell cruise tickets at the regular list price and the commission that they receive when acting as a travel agency is enough to hire staff to look after the kids while presumably still running at a profit. It seems to me that a similar model could be used for a computer conference, make a profit on cruise ticket sales and then have no extra costs for the conference for people sharing a room that would be cheaper than most Linux conferences I ve attended. For smaller conferences and un-conferences there is no minimum reservation size. One down-side for a computer conference is the cost of Internet access, according to Wikipedia a personal installation of satellite net access costs $5 per megabyte and ship pricing for their Internet access is up around $30-$100 per hour per person! But in the old days when attending a conference meant a week of no net access we survived somehow. It also seems to me that if a company had a small development team it could be productive to put everyone on a cruise ship with a server for testing and version control. They could do 9 hour days on board and still have lots of time for relaxation as it s only a few minutes walk to the pool. Of course this wouldn t work if some members of the team wanted to stay home due to slow and expensive net access.

• [1] http://www.cruisecritic.com/
• [2] http://insightcruises.com/
• [3] http://landrykling.com/
• [4] http://alumnicruises.org/Autism/Autism_Home.htm

A few snippets so far from our train trip from Kansas to Portland. Terah, Jacob, Oliver, and I are on the trip, which is about 2.5 days on the train. The Parenting Dilemma So, if you are eating dinner, and your 5-year-old falls asleep with his head on the table, and you know he had been excitedly waiting for raspberry sorbet for dessert, and know there will be tears when he later realizes he missed it, what do you do? Let him sleep, or wake him up (with possible tears right then in the dining car?) As it turned out, I tried to quietly ask him if he wanted dessert. He woke up with a start, banged his head on the table, and then, yes, there were tears. I asked him if he wanted dessert or if he wanted to keep sleeping, and he gave a pathetic, sniffling, dessert. But by the time dessert arrived, he had fallen asleep again. I finally woke him up again, asked if he wanted to eat, and he just ignored me. I asked twice more and then he all of a sudden realized what he was being asked, sat bolt upright, and dug in. Graffiti Jacob noticed graffiti in Los Angeles. He called it silly words and kept commenting about it as we passed it. Bears Oliver always sleeps with a stuffed bear, which is his favorite comfort animal. But Oliver is 2, and when he says bear , it sounds more like beer . Plus, the boys still seem to be operating on Central Time. So at 4:15AM yesterday, Oliver awakened us saying: Beer! Beer! Beer! Where s beer? Where s beer? Need beer! Beeeeeer! Butterflies Jacob always sleeps with a stuffed butterfly, which he likes just like Oliver likes his bear. Jacob had this conversation with me this morning: Jacob: My butterfly knows all the people in the world. And all the animals, too! Me: Does butterfly even know Nash? (our cat) Jacob: Yeah, and he knows Sam and Edna too! (the cats across the road) Me: Wow. I think butterfly knows a lot more people and animals than I do. Jacob: *brief pause, then* Oh, silly dad! *collapses laughing*

There's been a lot of noise with Microsoft requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 OEMs. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Secure Boot requires that the boot chain is signed, and this 'feature' must be enabled by default. Although I have been unable to find specific details, it appears that the chain of trust needs to extend from BIOS/UEFI all the way down to the kernel. Obviously, requiring a signed boot chain makes using FOSS platforms like Ubuntu or Debian an impossibility short of having the UEFI Platform Key and resigning the entire chain.

Steven Sinofsky's MSDN blog has a fairly good overview how it works. Canonical and Red Hat also have a good white paper on why secure boot is a serious problem for Linux distributions. Even if secure boot itself can be disabled, it *greatly* rises the bar for general end-users to successfully install Ubuntu on their machine. In addition, it is the responsibility of OEM and BIOS manufacturers to provide the option to disable it.

There already has been a long history of OEMs removing BIOS options or introducing DRM; for instance, locking out VTx on Sony laptops, or restricting laptops to only accept 'branded' wifi and 3G cards. Given this track record, can OEMs realistically be trusted to have this option available?

What most people don't realize is that secure boot itself is not a new concept; its simply part of the Trusted Computing initiative, and has been implemented on embedded platforms for many years. If you own any iPhone, or one of the vast majority of Android devices, you are using a device that either has the secure boot feature, or something very close. This especially painful in Android as Google's security system restricts users to a *very* limited shell and subset of utilities which can be used on non-rooted devices. WebOS, Maemo, and to my knowledge Meego give the end-user full unrestricted access to the boot chain and you can swap kernels and even the entire OS out if one was so motivated.

Although it is still an ongoing problem, several vendors such as HTC, Samsung, Motorola (kinda), and even Sony. In the Android community, having unlockable bootloaders has been a welcome middle ground in the traditionally restrictive and locked-down world of cellular devices.

While some may argue that such locks are necessary to protect consumers, it is perfectly feasible to create devices with unlocked bootloaders that are still secure. The Nook Color's is an Android powered eReader. It's stock firmware doesn't allow sideloaded applications or even access to a user shell via adb, but the BootROM on the device attempts to boot from the microSD card before eMMC, making it possible for enterprising users to easily modify the underlying OS (as well as making it physically impossible to brick the device due to a bad flash). Barnes and Nobles even sells a book on rooting the Nook Color; it was right next to the devices on display at the time. In addition, they've continued the tradition of easily modifiable devices with both the Nook Simple Touch, and the Nook Tablet.

One of the most impressive attributes is the possibility of running Ubuntu on it. The absolute poster child for this is the Toshiba AC100. For those of you unfamiliar, it ultralight netbook that shipped with Android 2.1/2.2 with easy access to the built in flash via the mini-USB port on the side of the device. Due to the valiant efforts of the AC100 community, Ubuntu was ported to this device, and became a supported platform with images available on cdimages.ubuntu.com. If you were an attendee at UDS, you likely saw several AC100s all running Ubuntu.

This brings me to the point that motivated me to write this post in the first place. One of the most impressive tablets I've seen to date is the ASUS eeePad Transformer, an Android tablet with fully dockable keyboard. I have one of these devices, and its one of the most impressive and usable Android tablets I own. Sadly, such a powerful device was hobbled from its true potential due to ASUS's decision to ship the device with a locked and encrypted bootloader. Surprisingly, the Secure Boot Key (SBK) was acquired and released to the wild, making it possible to reflash the device. Sadly, even with the SBK, the device's bootloader is still extremely hobbled compared to the AC100 making flashing a slow and difficult process.

In response, ASUS refreshed the eeePad's hardware to the new B70 SKU, which has a new Secure Boot. Despite this, a root exploit was recently found to allow people to circumvent these restrictions and install customs ROMs. It is however only a manor of time before ASUS responds and releases a new update that fixes this bug.

Steven Barker (lilstevie) on xda-developers successfully created a port of Ubuntu to the Transformer. Currently, installing Ubuntu on the Transformer requires nvflash access, so its not possible to use his image on the newly liberated B70 devices. I am certain that a new method of installing via an update.zip will be developed for those of us with hobbled devices.

It is a showcase of what is possible when you have open hardware, and also proves one indisputable point: any 'trusted boot' or DRM scheme can and will be defeated; at best you piss off your userbase, and at worst, you force users to exploit bugs to gain control of their device. As it is impossible to reflash these devices from the bootloader, a failed kernel flash WILL brick these devices, increasing warranty and support costs as users try to return their now broken devices.

In closing, while there have been some victories in ongoing war of open hardware vs. trusted comptuing, the road ahead still remains very murky. Victories in the mobile market have shown that there is a market for open devices. Google's own Nexus One was sold as a developers phone and as a way to encourage manufacturers to raise the bar. It sold well enough to recoup its development costs.. While there is no official statements, the Nokia N900 is suspected to have broken all sales expectations, backed up by the fact that Angry Birds sold extremely well on the Ovi Store for the N900.

From the article in question:

What reaction have you had in terms of sales and customer feedback?

Angry Birds had already been launched on App Store before it came out on Ovi Store, and it had a great review average from iPhone reviewers and users alike, so we expected a good reception from N900 users as well.

Even so, we were quite surprised by just how the N900 community immediately took the game to heart. The game obviously made many people very happy, and that is really the greatest achievement that anyone who creates entertainment for a living can hope for. Well, maybe the greatest achievement is huge bundles of cash, but making people happy comes a close second.

In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable.

That being said, with Microsoft pushing secure boot and trusted computing down everyone's throats with Windows 8, it is hard to say what the future might hold for those of us who want to own our devices.

Yesterday, I finally took closer look at long standing GePeS bug on displaying speed and altitude wrongly (which I've mentioned in very first posts). For some reason I believed it is not my bug, but in QML bindings and let it be there. Receiving complain from Maarten ter Huurne, that this does not work made me look into it more deeply. Of course I found out it was caused by stupid typo and quickly fixed it. New release is now available on GePeS homepage and will be available shortly in Nokia store.

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We just released a sample chapter of the Debian Administrator s Handbook. It covers the APT family of tools: apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, update-manager, etc.

Click here to get your free sample chapter I m sure you will enjoy it. There are many interesting things to learn:

• How to customize the sources.list file
• The various APT repositories that Debian offers (Security Updates, Stable Updates, Proposed Updates, Backports, Experimental, etc.)
• How to select the best Debian mirror for you
• How to find old package versions
• How to install the same selection of packages on multiple computers
• How to install and remove a package on a single command-line
• How to reinstall packages and how to install a specific version of a package
• How to pass options to dpkg via APT
• How to configure a proxy for APT
• How to set priorities to various package sources (APT pinning)
• How to safely mix packages from several distributions on a single system
• How to use aptitude s text-mode graphical interface
• How to use the tracking of automatically installed packages to keep a clean system
• How APT checks the authenticity of packages that it downloads
• How to add supplementary GnuPG keys to APT s trusted keyring
• How to upgrade from one stable distribution to the next
• How to handles problems after an upgrade
• How to keep a system up-to-date
• How to automate upgrades
• How to find the package that you re looking for

If you liked this chapter, click here to contribute a few euros towards the liberation of the whole book. That way you ll get a copy of the ebook as soon as it s available. Thank you! I also invite you to share this sample chapter as widely as possible. We re only at 40% of the liberation fund and there s less than 2 weeks left. I hope this book extract will convince enough people that the book is going to be great, and that it really deserves to be liberated and bundled with Debian!

8 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Recently my installation of Qt SDK I use for development of applications for Nokia N950 (N9) got broken. It happened by update some postinst script failed what caused almost no part of Harmattan SDK to be installed. I hoped this to be temporary error which will get fixed by later updates, but it turned out to persist even for 1.1.4 which has been released week ago. Yesterday I finally got time to look into it and after some debugging I found out that it was trying to install x86_64 version, which was not downloaded because I was using 32bit installer. I quickly realized this was caused by using 64-bit kernel, while running 32-bit userspace, for which the installer somehow was not prepared. Fortunately there is easy workaround for that:

linux32 ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_online_v1_1_4_en.run

What will run the binary in 32-bit personality and make kernel pretend it is compiled for 32-bit.

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Last Friday (11 November 2011), I was at the Cooperatives-SW annual conference at the Cube Cinema in Bristol, titled Growing Your Co-operative and sponsored by the Co-operative Membership South and West. It was another sold-out event, featuring headline talks from Co-op Party member and Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, Eli Sarre of Essential Trading worker co-op (pictured), Carole Theyer of Sparks Inc and Jim Pettipher from Co-operative Futures. There were also some great workshops I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems. The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

We've had sporadic Altus Metrum customer reports about RF susceptibility issues with their TeleMetrum installations. In almost every case, these problems have been completely resolved by either making sure the system battery has sufficient charge before launch, or through the application of standard engineering techniques such as twisting wire pairs to reduce differential coupling. However, even when every technique we could think of had been applied, once in a while someone still had issues. Around the time of LDRS this year, the incidence of such reports seemed to increase. One customer, in particular, had an installation in which he virtually always saw continuous resets of the board once his 54mm airframe was put on a launch rail, and several customers reported seeing board resets during ejection charge firing. Keith and I saw a board reset during main charge firing happen in person at NCR's Oktoberfest, and with a couple days available to work together after that launch, we decided it was time to figure out what was really going on. Here's what we've learned. In bench testing, it quickly became clear that the problem was the 3.3 volt power supply rail getting pulled down far enough to reset the CPU. This most frequently happened during ejection charge firing, when the input of the LDO regulator is pulled down by the near-short presented by the e-match when a pyro FET is turned on. To keep the 3.3 volt rail voltage up during firing, we include a 100uF bulk capacitor on the regulator's output. In all of our prior bench testing, we never saw the 3.3 volt rail droop significantly. Clearly something had changed... or maybe several things had changed? The first thing I wondered about was whether the new Kalman filtering code, which requires more compute cycles from the processor, might be consuming enough more power to pull the rail down faster during charge firing. After poking around at it, though, we have no data to suggest the new code makes a measurable difference in power consumption. The next thing we pondered was that at least some of the e-matches we and others are using in the hobby now come from the fireworks industry, where it is apparently considered a feature for the match to retain continuity after firing. This means the input of the LDO gets held down for longer than with the e-matches we used to use and Quest Q2G2 igniters that open when fired. But that still didn't make sense as the root cause, as we chose the FET firing time such that even with a dead short across the igniter terminals, the 3.3 volt rail wouldn't be pulled down far enough to cause trouble during firing. One of the big changes between v1.0 and v1.1 on TeleMetrum was that the newer boards incorporate a better reset circuit. This helps ensure the GPS chip always comes up running at power on, which was a problem at temperature extremes with older boards. However, a side-effect of this change is that a v1.1 board will reset any time the 3.3 volt rail drops below 3.15 volts, whereas older boards didn't trip until a much lower voltage. So the recent increase in reports might just be related to more v1.1 boards being placed in service? While experimenting on the bench, we observed that injecting RF energy into the input of the LDO regulator had the effect of pulling down the output voltage, presumably because the internal reference source accumulates charge and is fooled into thinking the output is too high. Since our designs all have the power switch contacts ahead of the LDO, the wires going out to the switch and back are effectively an antenna... as are, to a lesser extent, the wires going to the e-matches. There is some variability from part to part in just how badly the LDO reacts. But by attaching a tuned length of wire as an antenna to the LDO input and playing around, we were finally able to reproduce the problem reliably on a test board at my bench! On further analysis, we realized that the output of the USB battery charger chip and the input of the LDO both expect a 1uF bypass cap to ground. At some point, those looked redundant and we eliminated one of the two. Unfortunately, we weren't internalizing the fact that the switch leads were between the two caps, and the one we left was on the output of the charger and not at the input of the LDO. Placing a suitable bypass cap right at the input of the LDO turns out to have a truly dramatic effect on RF immunity! Once we realized that RF getting into the LDO input was the problem, Keith pointed out that we used to see "noise" in the accelerometer data on earlier boards that was caused by the 3.3 volt rail moving slightly during radio transmit, which we fixed with a hardware change on v1.1. We are now convinced that this was at least partly related to RF coupling to the LDO input, not just the change in power consumption on the LDO output. We didn't realize what was going on in earlier testing because we often didn't have ematches wired up, so RF coupling was minimal. But going back to flights logged with v1.0 boards that included deployment, and studying the magnitude of the "steps" in acceleration data observed when the transmitter was on, Keith was able to compute the amount the 3.3 volt rail must have sagged if the real acceleration wasn't changing... which in some cases was as much as 180mV! We think this proves that RFI could cause the LDO to drop its output voltage below the reset controller set point on v1.1 boards. Based on these observations, I'm making two hardware changes for the next version of TeleMetrum (version 1.2), and Keith is also making a software change. We have tested all of these changes on real boards both on the bench and in test flights, and the net effect is a major improvement in the RF immunity of TeleMetrum. The first hardware change is moving to a slightly lower trip voltage on the reset controller. Instead of 3.15, the new part trips at 3.00 volts nominal. This gives us more "headroom" to tolerate 3.3 volt rail droop during charge firing, and will allow the board to operate longer on a given battery charge. This change is not relevant for v1.0 and prior. The second hardware change is adding an appropriate bypass capacitor right at the LDO input. This requires a PCB update, but it's possible for me to update existing production boards by adding an 0402 cap right across the appropriate pins on the regulator chip. The software change prevents our altimeters from turning on the radio transmitter while an ejection charge is firing. Since the RF transmitter draws substantial additional power, this should help keep the 3.3 volt rail from drooping. This may not really matter, but it feels like the right thing to do. This change will be part of our next stable firmware release. We think most TeleMetrum customers need not worry about these updates. But if you have seen odd resets on the rail or during ejection charge firing in flight with a TeleMetrum v1.1, feel free to contact me about updating your existing board to include these improvements.

Back in the dark ages of the web, before the introduction of CSS 3, browsers could only display fonts available on the client system. Thanks to the introduction of @font-face and its now widespread support, this is over. Now, Web designers have access to a large selection of fonts and most users will be able to appreciate them. Typekit provides a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on websites. I expose here my own, mostly uneducated¹ on the typographic side, look on this service.

Fonts embedding 101 There are several ways to embed fonts for the Web. Let s have a look at the most common ones.

Self-hosting and @font-face A first possibility is to host fonts yourself and provide a CSS file with the appropriate @font-face declarations. There are five important things to know:

1. There is no common format. You will need to host different versions of the same font to support most browsers.
2. Of course, Internet Explorer comes with its own quirks that you need to work around.
3. Most browsers enforce a same origin policy. You need to serve your fonts from the same domain as the requesting page. You can circumvent such a limitation by enabling cross-origin resource sharing: add an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header when serving fonts.
4. Fonts are unlikely to change. To leverage caching, configure an explicit expiration date far in the future. Something like 30 days.
5. There is no MIME types registered for fonts. Don t bother setting one, even if Google Chrome likes to complain about them in the console.

One great resource is Font Squirrel which provides kits with fonts and the appropriate CSS declarations. You choose your font family (or upload one of your own), the formats that you want to use (check them all) and you will get a ZIP archive with all fonts and a CSS file. You may want to tweak it a bit to enable automatic use of the bold variant when needed and to use a local copy if available. For example, if you choose Crimson, an oldstyle typeface, you may want to declare the bold version with font-weight: bold and add local names:

@font-face  
    font-family: 'Crimson';
    src: url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot');
    src: local('Crimson Bold'), local('Crimson Text Bold'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'),
         url('Crimson-Bold-webfont.svg#CrimsonBold') format('svg');
    font-weight: bold;
    font-style: normal;
 

Google Web Fonts For open-source fonts, you can also use Google Web Fonts instead of hosting the files yourself. Build a collection of fonts and choose the variants that you want to use for each of them. You will then be provided with a code snippet to paste in the <head> element of your page. For example, for Crimson:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Crimson+Text:400,700,400italic'
      rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Why choose this solution over self-hosting?

1. You don t use your own bandwith to serve fonts. This may be important if you pay for it.
2. Google uses its own CDN to serve fonts. If you don t use a CDN yourself, this can be a major performance improvement.
3. Caching is more efficient since many sites will use the same font.
4. It s easier to do it right.

Unless you are concerned about Google tracking your users², I think this is a better solution than self-hosting. Quick delivery of fonts is pretty important since content rendering can be delayed by them.

Paid services If you would like to use commercial fonts, like Adobe Minion Pro or Paratype Futura PT, a convenient option is to rent them. Typekit is service providing such an option. Pricing depends on volume and the number of fonts you want to have access to. There is a free plan and the first paid plan is US$24.99 per year. Other similar services exist. Feel free to compare. Once registered, the workflow is similar to Google Web Fonts. You choose your fonts, assemble them in a kit and publish it. Instead of directly providing a CSS file, Typekit provides some Javascript which will in turn download a CSS file containing all fonts in the appropriate format for the browser (on most browsers, fonts are inlined).

<script type="text/javascript"
        src="//use.typekit.com/tyt0atd.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  try Typekit.load(); catch(e) 
</script>

Typekit: the good parts So, why choose Typekit? First, there is the very large choice of fonts. The first paid plan comes with more than 500 fonts from about 80 foundries. There are about a hundred serif fonts and a couple hundred sans serif ones. Typekit provides a convenient interface to browse fonts. You can either search fonts by name or by characteristics. In the last case, you can filter on properties like the classification (serif, sans serif, decorative, etc.), weight, width, contrast, x-height, recommended use or language support. Once a font is selected and added to your kit, you can easily choose what variants you want. The kit total size is displayed. If you happen to meet any problem or have some questions, Typekit support is very responsive. I got clear and crisp answers in less than a few hours in the week-end.

and the bad ones Unfortunately, Typekit has also some shortcomings. One of the most commonly cited is that Javascript is mandatory. No Javascript, no fonts. If you want to display the appropriate fonts for users without Javascript, you should just not use Typekit.

Not free, nor free While Typekit offers some open-source fonts, most of them are not. Moreover, only a few of them are available in the free plan. While I would prefer to use open-source fonts, I don t consider this a strong requirement: if you are dissatisfied for some reason, switching back to open-source fonts (or another service) is fast and easy. I like serif fonts a lot and they get less attention from the FLOSS world: it is difficult to find one whose readability on screen is excellent. Droid Serif is a nice font but is a bit too black for me. Maybe Cardo would be a good match. You may disagree and in this case, Google Web Fonts or self-hosting seem the perfect match.

Difficulty to choose and test fonts While browsing fonts is easy and smooth, choosing and testing them is another matter. For example, Typekit is missing some interface to compare font rendering for whole paragraphs at a given size. It also misses a way to check how two fonts render together, one for headings and one for paragraphs. Here, Google Web Fonts is more versatile. Things become really difficult when you want to test your selected fonts for real. Except if you have invested into one of the expensive plans, you can only include a limited number of fonts in your kit. Each time you want to try another set of fonts, you need to modify your kit and wait for it to be distributed across Typekit network. You may have to wait five or ten minutes between each change! Another inconvenient thing is that once you publish your site, any change to the kit will affect the published version. Therefore, you need to use a second kit for development and play back and forth with those two kits. What would be convenient here is a special kit with all fonts from the library with restricted access to some IP to avoid abuse. This is something done by Fontdeck, a competitor.

Poor subset support Because you want to keep the font size small (about 30 kB for each variant), Typekit usually proposes two subsets: the default one contains only latin characters and the complete one with all glyphs. If some glyph is absent from the default subset, you need to use the complete one which is roughly two to four times the size of the default one. This is a bit huge for only one character. What would be nice is to have subsets for each language. In my case, I would take a French subset because I need the glyph which appears in French in words like c ur (heart or core) or il (eye). I don t want to select the complete subset just for this character. When a glyph is absent, the next font in the CSS stack is used. For example, if the selected font is FF Tisa Web Pro and the next font in the stack is Droid Serif, here is how the word c ur may be rendered. On the first line, FF Tisa Web Pro contains the appropriate glyph. On the second line, the glyph is absent and taken from Droid Serif. Since x-height and contrast are a bit different, the replaced glyph seems out of tone. At small sizes, the difference accounts for more than 10%. I have also added a third line where the ligature is built from o and e and the following style is applied to e :

.lf-ligature  
    margin-left: -0.172em;
    zoom: 1; /* Here to trigger hasLayout on IE7 */
 

As you can see, the result seems good. I have a piece of Javascript turning a ligature into the appropriate markup. It can be extended to handle more ligatures and could be adapted to handle other composed characters (like the ones in Anton n Dvo k ).

Defective caching Because a document can only be rendered after the fonts have been loaded³, it is pretty important to deliver fonts as fast as possible. Typekit uses Edgecast as a CDN and DynECT for DNS hosting. Two files are downloaded. Both of them are hosted on use.typekit.com. The first one is a script that will act as a loader. Based on the characteristics of your browser, it will choose how to download the requested fonts for best rendering. The second file is generally a big CSS file containing the fonts. Here are the headers returned for the first file:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:34:16 GMT
ETag: "388467610+gzip"
Expires: Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:39:16 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 05 Nov 2011 09:31:57 GMT
Server: ECS (cdg/D624)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT
Content-Length: 7440

First, notice that the content is served compressed. Good point. The next headers to look at are Cache-Control, Date, ETag and Expires: the server requests the content to be cached for 5 minutes. When the browser notices that its copy is out-of-date, it will issue a new request including a If-None-Match: 388467610+gzip header. Unless the kit has been modified, the server will answer with 304 Not Modified and no content. The copy of the browser will be valid for another 5 minutes. This means that after 5 minutes, at least 3 round-trips are needed to check if our fonts are up-to-date. Worse, sometimes, Typekit servers may be just slow. They can wait one second before answering, just to send a 304. Since the first file is a script embedded in <head>, the whole page is blocked until you get the answer. Here is an illustrative example with Chromium 14 where a page using Typekit is loaded while all static assets are in the navigator cache and things have gone wrong (which is pretty rare): Since fonts are needed, the rendering has been paused for 3.5 seconds until Typekit was fully loaded. If we look more closely, we may also notice we got a status 200 from the server instead of 304. Here is an excerpt of the browser request:

GET /tyt0atd.js HTTP/1.1
Host: use.typekit.com
Connection: keep-alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
If-None-Match: "2200251225+gzip"
If-Modified-Since: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT

And here is an excerpt of the answer headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Content-Type: text/javascript
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:10:03 GMT
ETag: "2200251225"
Expires: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:15:03 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:38:11 GMT
Server: EOS (lax001/54E5)
Content-Length: 25755

What happened? For some unknown reason, the server denied the access to the compressed version of the resource: there is no Content-Encoding: gzip while the browser did send Accept-Encoding: gzip. The tag provided by the browser (2200251225+gzip) came obviously from the compressed resource and therefore does not match. RFC 2616 requests If-Modified-Since header to be ignored if the tag does not match. Consequently, the server answers with 200 OK and resend the whole file. The same problem happened with the CSS file. Let me stress again how important the problem is: we had to download again the two files but we also downloaded the non-compressed version. Now, let s suppose that we did not run into this problem and the server answered with 304 Not Modified. The result is still not satisfactory: we would have waited 1.3 seconds to get both answers from the server. Keep in mind that most of the time, Typekit is pretty fast. Here is how I think this should have been done: each time you modify your font kit, you get a new URL to use (containing the version of the font kit for example). This resource and the associated fonts (whose URL is also versioned) are requested to be cached for several days. As a sidenote, this also enables to modify a kit for your development environment without modifying the kit for your production site. I suspect that Typekit did not go this way to track kit usage more accurately and enforce the appropriate pricing. Having multiple versions of the same kit would also allow us to use more fonts that we are paying for. UPDATED: Typekit support knows the problem and is working on it:

You ve identified a small bug in our CDN provider that we re working with them to fix. Hopefully I can give an explanation of what s happening. The CDN edge servers have a cache of recently served kits on them. Any request that is served from that cache will be correctly Gzipped and handle ETags. Unfortunately, if the content isn t already in cache and needs to be fetched from the master origin server then the request won t be gzipped correctly which has the side effect of breaking ETags. [ ] We are working to on getting this bug fixed, but any change to a globally distributed CDN will take some time. We re also working on having our content cached longer than 5 minutes whilst still allowing people to quickly update their site.

Conclusion I have mixed feelings about Typekit. While the difficulty to test fonts and the lack of language-related subsets are annoying, I have been able to work around them. However, the caching problem is more annoying. I am still considering going back to Google Web Fonts just because of this.

---

1. While I have a high interest in typography, have my own copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst and have throughly read The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web , I am still fairly novice on this matter.
2. Google serves fonts from a cookie-less domain. Technically, they could still do some kind of tracking but I believe they don t.
3. In fact, browsers have different strategies on how to render before fonts availability. Paul Irish wrote a comprehensive article on FOUT. One common strategy is to render a blank space until downloaded fonts are available. If this takes too much time, fallback fonts may be used.

Two days ago, I finally brought my system up-to-date with regard to the GNOME packages that I use. I was very reluctant because I am using a heavily customized gnome-panel and I waited until all the applets that I use have been ported to gtk3 and the libgnome-applet library. I am the Debian maintainer of one of these applets, link-notification-daemon, and I have made the changes and tested them in a chroot before, but now that I am actually using it, I found and fixed more visual glitches. I think by now it is as usable as it was before on GNOME 2. I am still looking for someone to step up as the new upstream maintainer for it! I had some trouble with gnome-session and notification-daemon, thought I found the cause and reported it, but a day later I could not reproduce it anymore. Weird. Other problems, such as the busy cursor not disappearing after the session start, or evolution going into a freeze also have stopped occurring by themselves.
Other problems I found and fixed, for example the battery status applet was not visible until a major state change, or panel applets were not loaded due to a race condition, or tooltips not working (which called for a fix in gtk+ itself). I also added to the xmonad package the files required to allow the user to select GNOME with Xmonad in GDM, and found out how to have Galeon appear in the list of possible default browsers.
I don t really have to say much about GNOME3 itself. I disliked the default font, Cantarell, mostly because of the extra spacing that reduced the number of folders and mail I can see in evolution. (Also see what nekohayo has to say about that.) I also was under the impression that the font is much lighter, and I started to adjust the position of my laptop monitor to increase the contrast. So I switch back to DejaVu Sans.
I also disabled the sleep-on-lid-close feature I often run backups, or download stuff, or compile stuff, or calculate stuff, so I want better control over this. So, I guess, now that everything is almost as it was in GNOME2, I can say I like it...

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See also parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. This is the biggest highlight of our trip to Greece for me. I enjoy having the chance to meet people, visit for awhile, and make new friends and that certainly happened in Greece. In one of the shops we happened to step into, I noticed a radio behind the counter. That s not unusual itself; radios often catch my eye these days. But this radio was tuned to 21.070, an amateur radio frequency. So I asked the shop owner if he happened to be a ham. And indeed he was. He was Lakis (SV5KKU), and Terah and I had a great time visiting with him. Terah took some photos of us, and then we made our purchases and headed out. I had brought my HT (handheld radio, weighs a few ounces and is powered by batteries) with me, and Lakis told me about the repeaters in the area. I had known about some of that since I had emailed Panos of the amatuer radio club in Rhodes before leaving home (I found his name via Google). A couple of days later, on Tuesday, we found ourselves back in Lindos. It was mid-afternoon, so the shops were quiet. After a late lunch, I thought it would be nice to drop in on Lakis one more time, since we were scheduled to fly back the following morning. I m not sure how long we stayed it must have been at least an hour and enjoyed the fresh orange juice he prepared. After we got back to our hotel Tuesday, I learned that our flights on Wednesday were canceled due to a nationwide air traffic controller strike in Greece. After 3 hours on the phone with Delta (more on that experience later), we got rescheduled to fly back Friday. On Wednesday morning, I remembered that the Rhodes amateur radio club meets every Wednesday evening, and now I would be able to go! I knew how to contact Lakis by email and on the radio, and he kindly offered to pick me up and take me there. So that evening, I got a tour of his impressive mountaintop installation, and then it was on to the club the Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese (SZ5RDS). There I met Panos, whom I had emailed earlier (and I think surprised him a bit). It was a friendly group, and they translated into English for me every so often so I knew what was being discussed. When I was about to leave, they gave me this: The translation, partly from my memory and partly with the help of Google Translate, is:

Radio Amateur Association of the Dodecanese, SZ5RDS Our friend and radio colleague KR0L JOHN GOERZEN, who visited the island, has our recognition as an HONORARY CLUB MEMBER. PRESIDENT KAVALAKIS PANAGIOTIS SV5AZK (Panos) SECRETARY PAPADIMITRIOU CHRISTOS SV5DDT RHODES Oct. 5, 2011

(I hope that any Greeks reading this will send me corrections.) I truly appreciated that gesture and meeting all the people in the club. On the way back to the hotel, Lakis and I stopped by a restaurant, which I believe had the best souvlaki I ve ever tasted thanks! We brought some back for Terah. She had chosen to stay at the hotel that evening and had a small hotel meal earlier, but enjoyed the souvlaki and pita. Terah had explained to the ma tre d that I wasn t along that evening because I had gone to an amateur radio club meeting. Judging by the surprised reaction, this was probably the first time they had heard that particular comment! Experiences like this make travel fun and worthwhile. Thank you very much, Lakis and everyone in the club I hope to have a chance to visit again.

The Age reports that Adobe has ceased development of Flash for mobile systems [1]. This is described as leading to an improvement in the web experience for iPhone and iPad users, but the more important thing is that it will improve the experience for everyone. The Flash plugin has always been a resource hog and has never been properly supported on all the common platforms. Also most sites that use Flash never needed to as there were other ways of getting equal or better results without it. Now that Flash is officially on the path to obsolescence everyone can move to HTML5. I use the following configuration directives in my Squid configuration to block Flash, I selectively enable Flash for the few web sites which use it for useful things. Blocking flash in this manner means that desktop systems which have the Flash plugin installed probably won t be vulnerable to Flash security flaws as it is unlikely that one of the few sites that I permit to send Flash to my network would end up hosting hostile Flash code. acl swf url_regex swf$ swf\?
acl swftype req_mime_type -i ^application/x-shockwave-flash$
http_access deny swf
http_access deny swftype Wikipedia has a comparison of HTML5 and Flash. One interesting benefit that is claimed for Flash is that it allows DRM and it supports inserting commercials and in other ways giving the user an experience that they don t want. It seems that to put some more nails in the Flash coffin we need tools to suck video from Flash sites regardless of DRM and which skip commercials.

• [1] http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/adobe-surrenders-to-apple-in-mobile-flash-war-20111110-1n85p.html

The other day, I was asked if it was really possible to get build-arch support in Wheezy (as in, buildds using build-arch) by adding these optional targets. Lets have a look at the data that is available to us:

• At least ~500 packages must be fixed (the reduced set )
• The Wheezy freeze is expected in June (as I recall, I may be off)
• NMUs can take quite a while, so lets reduce it to May.

To simplify my calculation I will assume we can fix packages over a course of 150 days (which is 5 months of ~30 days or every day in Dec to April). So 500/150 = 10/3 =~ 3.3 packages from the reduced set should be fixed every day. Erring on the side of caution, we should make that 4 packages every day. So if we fix 4 packages from the reduced set every day, we will definitely fix all of them before Wheezy. But the reduced set are only the source packages that could possibly benefit from having a build-arch target (it builds both arch:all and non-arch:all packages). There could (and probably will) still be sources building non-arch:all packages without a build-arch target. Furthermore, with the rate of 4 a day we will only have a month to get dpkg and buildd support In short, no. I do not expect us to get archive-wide build-arch support on buildds for Wheezy. But I will do my best to ensure that option #4 flip the switch becomes very attractive early in the Wheezy + 1 development schedule. I hope you will join us in this endeavour. Most of the time it is a trivial 3-4 line fix and often you can even throw in some hardening flags to spice it up a bit. The easiest way to help is to fix your (team s) packages listed in the reduced set . Once you are done with that you can look at the rest of your (team s) packages (see the full dd-list). The most important thing to remember is that Build-Depends-Indep is still broken! That is, you cannot rely on Build-Depends-Indep being installed on a buildd in the build target. So any existing workarounds have to stay for now (i.e. check for certain commands or deferring indep till binary-indep is called). If you are in doubt about how to fix a certain package feel free to ask for help. Note: I pull the data directly from lintian.d.o (full set) and UDD (reduced set). I try to remember to refresh it daily. The full set is basically (z)grep cut uniq on the lintian log, the reduced set is found using the UDD query from this script (based on a query done by Jakub Wilk). Since all data is (in)directly based on lintian.d.o only packages that are in sid are considered.

http://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20111110.144615.333c5288.en.html Date: 2011-11-10 16:46 +200
To: DebConf Team
CC: debconf-discuss
Subject: [Debconf-team] Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia bid
Hello all, I will be concise and to the point. This email is a formal bid to organize Debconf13 in Riga, Latvia. You can find all the relevant information on the appropriate wiki page: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf13/Latvia All the plans have been solidified over the last few months and the backup options are there only for unforeseen disaster scenarios (like a big fire burning down the primary venue or something like that). The only details that are not nailed down are the final location for the day trip and formal dinner as the vendors did not want to give us such quotes and tentative reservations so far in advance, but even there we have primary and backup options planned already. We are trying to keep everything about this bid simple and predictable, so we hope you ll enjoy it.
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs

First event of my trip was somewhat a gimmick: Give a 30 minutes talk on FreedomBox to an audience of 1 person, in the transit area of Heathrow airport, London. A guy from India now living in London helped preparing my visit to India, an was eager to participate - so much that he was willing to drive out to the airport to meet me. The meeting failed, unfortunately: My flight got delayed, and my one-man "audience" got caught in other duties. Fun to try nevertheless. Also looking back, that crazy attempt to squeeze in a meeting during a 1 hour stop-over was an indicator of the general pace of the India trip This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

phpMyAdmin demo server got some updates recently. First of all I've updated MySQL and MariaDB version it uses (MySQL is now on 5.5.7 and MariaDB on 5.3.2). Later I've finally found time to make mentions of demo server less intrusive and fit more in existing interface. I've used jQuery to inject information about demo server to main page as one of standard boxes. It fits there nicely and puts information on main page where most users land anyway (you can see it for example here). With most important information on main page, the other pages could be reduced and now only mentions demo server and Git revision it is using. This brings user experience closer to real phpMyAdmin without intrusive information shown on top of every page. I hope you will like it :-).

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In the past few weeks I ve been preparing the Debian packages of FileTea and its companion EventDance. They re finally available. FileTea is a free, web-based file sharing system that just works. It only requires a browser, and no user registration is needed. If you want to know more about it, you can read my previous blog post. For a more detailed description, read Nathan Willis s excellent article on LWN.net. There have been a few changes since that article (HTTPS support in particular) but it s still the best one you can find on the net. Igalia still provides a FileTea server at http://filetea.me/, that you can use to share your files and see how it works. We plan to keep offering this service, but you don t need to trust it/depend on it anymore: now you can apt-get install filetea and have your own.