There are many amazing things in Puerto Rico and one of them is the technologically (and I would add, aesthetically) stunning Arecibo Observatory, which was featured prominently in the Jodi Foster movie, Contact. Due to massive funding cuts, its future is threatened. This is a site of great scientific and cultural importance for PR, so I really hope they manage to find the funding that will make it survive far into the future. There is a facebook group
(by the name of “Do NOT close the Arecibo Observatory: Earth’s largest radiotelescope”) opposing the closure but I don’t yet know of any other site for halting the cuts. I will post one once I do. And if we lose the observatory, we might sadly lose another fine creature, the mysterious chupacabra who apparently was first called into his goat sucking action thanks to the great observatory of ours, which does send signals to find alien life. So sans Arecibo, we lose a great scientific instrument and may lose the beloved mascot of goat terror, the Chupacabra

My personal email account was spammed by Jennifer Kirkham-Sandy (Phone 0800 6 121 151) of Total Language Solutions Limited, 3 The Courtyard, New North Road, Exeter EX4 4EP, Devon. Registered number (England and Wales) at the above address: 03933805. They seemed to be using a service called qwertywordmarketing. I've reported it to the hosting company, so we'll see what happens.

Over in alt.anarchism rages a discussion on the "efficiency" of markets, mostly circling around the medical sector as an extreme example (lots of government interference). Since this is Usenet, we haven't found consensus on the definition of a free market yet. The definition I learned in school was that free markets are fully transparent, i.e. buyers and sellers both have the necessary knowledge to determine a product's quality and are aware of the other market participants. The proponents of anarcho-capitalism contend that a free market is one that is devoid of regulation. These definitions are pretty much opposites in highly specialised fields (such as medicine), as patients usually lack the expertise to recognise "quality", so market regulations are established to promote transparency and establish a free market. So, which definition were you taught? Update: corrected the name of the group.

In Spain, the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, the bad guy in The Lives of Others, is the voice of Ross Geller, from Friends. That is so rude.

gimp-plugin-registry 0.3.1-1 Some hours ago the new 0.3.1-1 version of my gimp-plugin-registry package was uploaded to unstable. Thanks to Ari Pollak - not only for sponsoring the upload, but also for asking me to include the GIMP Liquid rescale plug-in, which is one of the most amazing plugins I've ever seen for The GIMP. If you have no clue what 'liquid rescaling' means, here's a YouTube video for you (if anybody finds a non-flash version of that video in the net - please let me know and I'll link it): (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NcIJXTlugc) And again, if you'd like to see a plugin included, please let me know.

I am stumbling again on the problem of not being able to install libgnome-dev and libsvn-dev side by side, namely bug #429025.

For some reason, I was under the impression that the bug was fixed... but apr-util is behind :-(.

For my diploma thesis (on clustering of high dimensional data, especially correlation clustering, i.e. clustering data by properties such as data correlation) I needed an easy way to filter out data from CSV files as used by gnuplot (actually, they are whitespace-separated).I hacked together a small tool that would allow me to easily 'grep' out certain parts of the datasets. If you know of a similar tool, please send me an email to erich AT debian DOT org.Currently, the tool allows you to do commands such as:

gpgrep "1~5$" "1200"  out/3d-2lin-noise.variances

to select ('grep') all sets where the first column ends with a 5 (regular expression match) and where the first column is less than 199.The tool is still in early development. Syntax may change, and I guess I'll add some more filters. But you get the idea. Focus is on a very compact syntax.A future filter I'm considering would e.g. select 20 random rows (with a fixed seed value, so it's reproduceable!) for sampling and a modulo-match to select e.g. every 7th row.Maybe I'll also add some output processing later, such as averaging values, calculating variances and mean deviations, stripping away columns (but you can do that in Gnuplot already). I don't want to overdo it though - it's just meant as a mini filter you can add to script output visualization. It's not meant to replace a full statistics toolkit.So if you know of a simple tool that can do that already, please tell me.P.S. a few people have pointed out awk. Yes, it can do most of this. One thing I also need, and I'm not sure on how to do that the easiest way in awk is to preserve 'blocking'. That is empty lines. Because the data set

1 1
2 2

1 2 2 1 are two lines with two points each in gnuplot, not one with four points. I guess you could just do a "/^$/ print ", though... hmm... looks like I finally have to learn awk. So far I've always been refusing to learn awk, I was happy with sed, perl and python...

How weird is that a bug get closed by a spam email? Today I checked my email and found that #210857 got closed by a spam email of US army nurses and doctors...!

I think I'm about ready to start running my SMTP proxy/filter for people now. I've got two users setup and it seems to be holding up just fine. I've managed to remove the need to manually create things, so I'm capable of adding new domains on the fly. For my personal mail handling yesterday was the first day I've received over 10,000 messages. These are the stats from yesterday showing what happens at SMTP-time:

Total Mails    : 13302
Total SPAM     : 12620 (bounced back)
Total Accepted : 682
Spam Percentage: 94.87%

So I've dropped 95% of incoming mail at SMTP time, which is a big win. Of the mail which was actually delivered I'd guess that pyzor, razor, and spambayes marked a further 50% of it as spam. So my proxy needs to do better ... but it's pretty impressive. TODO: Find people to run as guinea pigs, register a domain, profit.

My new flatmate just got his keys, and brought an entire box of that excellent Jasmine tea that I couldn't find in any of the "Asia shops" around here. Please imagine a picture of a cat with wide open eyes captioned "I is happy, and very awake" in this space.

I did this Friday night:

cat /etc/debian_version
lenny/sid

The good:

• the upgrade was pretty painless, including the kernel upgrade (I just spent about an hour to resolve/force the upgrade path for some packages since aptitude was stubbornly refusing to upgrade since some recommends were not satisfied)
  
• the kernel doesn't seem to need any options to make the headphones work
• I can use a free driver for the wlan (bcm43xx instead of ndiswrapper)
• as a bonus, now I can suspend-to-disk while the wlan interface is turned on (with ndis+2.6.18-5 the system hanged during suspend)
  

The bad:

• the two icons I got on the desktop for the crypto partition I have mounted under /crypto are still both there (the worse thing is that I don't remember/can't find the bug number)
  
• suspend-to-ram still doesn't work - I suspect flgrx being the culprit
  
• there are now two icons for xchat in the systray. Should I be removing xchat-systray? Apparently yes, although there are a few things that xchat-systray had which are not available in the native systray thingie:

This is xchat-systray's menu:


And this is xchat's native menu:
By the way, the Hide menu entry there hides xchat itself, not the tray icon.

---

Update:
one more bad: this is still not fixed.

---

Update++:
I am a moron: apparently this is a known problem and a workaround exists. Now I can have my sincle xchat-systray icon :-) .

There is this guy whose blog I found about a week ago. He does some really nice and funny sketches mostly with issues regarding Bucharest and things he finds out/encounters.

The fact that he is smart to see some of the rudeness happening in Bucharest doesn't help him notice he is manipulated by the press (and himself) and writes:

"La 6 ani de la 11 septembrie 2001, Osama bin Laden a scos capu' din vagauna cu o noua inregistrare video in care da lumii intregi 2 alternative: convertirea la Islam sau moartea!"

Which translates approximately to:

"Six years after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden shows his face out from his hiding place and makes a new video in which gives the whole wolrd 2 alternatives: converting to Islam or death!"

(I won't take into discussion the correct translation of the message from Osama, if the message is authentic, if Osama is payed by somebody interested in keeping the conflict open, if Osama's forces are actually active in Iraq, if Bush is Osama himself, if we're actually living in 1984 and Osama is already dead but the American manipulative government is using all sorts of recordings from him to keep people inside a cage and fed them propaganda, < insert your theory/idea here >....)

He links to this article, whose title might make one to think what the guy said is true (according to the article)...

But, if read carefully is clear that there are a few twists (in order of apparition):

• the alternatives were given to the American people ("urged the American people")
• the alternatives were for the ending of the war in Iraq ("there are two ways to end the war in Iraq")
• the first alternative is escalation of the conflict, not death; that would translate, IMHO, into "we will be fighting in Iraq and you can give up, but we will not", so I'd say surrender/retreat/keep fighting and probably die are all viable alternatives for the first one
• apparently he says converting to Islam is an alternative ("The second way, he continues, is to reject America's democratic system and convert to Islam.")
• but, if we read on we see that he actually says just to acknowledge that democracy is not at all a successful model, unless by success one thinks in terms of a system that achieves the interests of the corporations ("It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations")
• and more importantly, converting to Islam is not actually a condition, but there is an invitation to do that ("I invite you to embrace Islam,")

So, the conclusion is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing what the titles and headlines suggest, rather than what the articles actually say, especially if you keep your head open only to single stream of ideas (I guess you, my dear reader, are smart enough to see what I mean here).


Disclaimer, my analysis might be off, my English sucks, I might be Osama, I might be Bush, I didn't saw the recording, there's a cat on a freezer...

The release plan for Xserver 1.5 and Xorg 7.4 was discussed during the X.org Developers' Summit in Cambridge (September 10-12th). This is what we expect to ship with Lenny, so here are some details about the upcoming. Timeline As usual, there will be a 6 months release cycle. So Xorg 7.4 is expected on March 1st, 2008. There won't probably be any new Xserver release before that since some changes (already merged) require all drivers to be updated anyway. So Xserver 1.5 is expected on the same date. Since there are already some known problems in Xserver, they also plan to release Xserver 1.4.1 on November 1st. PCI Rework The master branch of Xserver already contains the long-expected pci-rework which is supposed to fix all the PCI domains and other non-trivial PCI hierarchy support (important for ia64, but also for some powerpc and sparc users). RandR People having Intel, ATI or recent Nvidia boards learnt to love the RandR 1.2 extension which provides the ability to enable/disable, resize, rotate, move outputs within a single big virtual screen. More transformations should be possible with RandR 1.3. Hopefully, there will also be some standardization regarding output names in various drivers, or at least a way to retrieve the type of each output (LVDS, DVI, VGA, TV, ...). And the server should get an abstraction object to describe GPUs, which might make the support for multiple boards easier. Input On the input side, XKB 2 and XGE should be merged, which shouldn't be really visible to end-users but should make internals much better. Then MPX (Multi-Pointer X server) might be in Xserver 1.5 too (if all semantics issues get fixed first). It would mean support for multiple independent keyboard/mouse pairs or so. See the MPX page for details. Compositing Compositing still gets a lot of attention. Several distributions are actually thinking of enabling Compiz by default. EXA (the new acceleration architecture that has been designed for compositing) got improved a lot in Xserver 1.4. Several drivers including Intel and ATI r300 already work great with EXA (no need to use XAA + XAANoOffscreenPixmaps anymore) which means Compiz works very smoothly, even when resizing windows. XAA won't be removed soon though since lots of things needs to be fixed before that. There are also several videos available online, like this one. But one big piece is still missing for compositing: directed rendering to redirected windows. So far, if you start glxgears in Compiz, you will see that the gears completely ignore wobbli-ness of windows, other windows overriding them, cube rotation, ... they keep rendering of top of everything without any effect. Getting true support for compositing such windows requires lots of work in all parts of the DRI stack. Kristian H gsberg got it to work (and we even get a great demo). See Kristian's blog for details. Upstream devs are now working on integrating all modifications nicely in upstream Xserver, drivers, DRM module, Mesa, ... Once this works, you can get GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap for both direct and indirect rendering, and full support for GLX 1.4 in the server (only 1.2 is supported as of now). Also, redirected windows (let's say a wobbly window on a side of Compiz' cube) should get input events correctly thanks to input transformation in Xserver 1.5 (event coordinates will be converted into the redirected window coordinate space before being passed to the client application). Kernel-related reworks Compositing improvements actually require a large rework of the memory management in the server. Basically, we need a global management for both 2D and 3D object allocations, so that you can get both to work fine without having to change config options (things like XAANoOffscreenPixmaps or FbTexPercent). All this is related to the TTM (Translation Table Maps, see these slides for details) which has been under development for a while. It requires to change the interface with the kernel DRM modules, and it won't happen before 2.6.24. The Xserver part of the work is not big, so it might still be done before 1.5 is released. Fortunately, once all this is ready, people should stop complaining about memory allocation failures, Compiz being slow because one option is not enabled by default, ... Another hot topic in the X.org/kernel area is about moving modesetting in the kernel. When you get a kernel panic, you only actually see it if not running X (or if logging kernel messages through the network). So your machine freezes, you don't know why, you have no way to know, and you just reboot. Getting panic messages on X would be much better. To do so, the kernel needs to now which mode is currently in use on the monitor and then it will render the message on the framebuffer. This require lots of work, so it will unlikely be in Xserver 1.5 though. Miscellaneous Xserver 1.5 will also contain XACE (security framework), the cleanup of the ABI (explicit _X_EXPORT required), and possibly glucose (OpenGL acceleration for X, see Zack Rusin's blog). I asked whether there was actually some work on building the GLcore server module as a part of Mesa so that building Xserver does not require the whole Mesa source anymore. People seem to agree the current situation is a real pain for distributions and we should make this change happen. But the actual work has to be done in Mesa anyway, we'll see what happens.

For people wondering if I'm dead, I'm not yet, bad luck. I'm running everywhere, and don't have much time to do things I'd like to. My job don't really leave me a spare minute, and I'm preparing my move to a new city in the next months with my girlfriend. However, I'll may be able to catch up on Debian and others in the next days I hope

With all the excitement of the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain (which I’m off to watch today), I’d missed that the Tour de Pologne also started on Sunday. TVP Polonia has coverage and broadcasts free-to-air to Europe at 19, 13 and 7 east. I think it may also be visible in Australia in a GlobeCast package (can you see it? Please tell me by leaving a comment.) Scheduled shows:-

Tue 11.09.2007 to Fri 14.09.2007

15:10-16:30 CET (live) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

Sat 15.09.2007

13:25-15:05 CET (live, final stage) and 20:00-20:05 CET (summary)

I can’t actually watch this at 19 east except in perfect conditions at the moment because my dish is slightly mis-aligned. I don’t want to adjust it until after the Vuelta finishes, just in case I make a mistake and lose reception completely.

Now in dpkg I found this:

dpkg: no, cannot proceed with %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s

Before there was something like:

dpkg: no, cannot remove %s (--auto-deconfigure will help):\n
%s


This is going backwards wrt to i18n since one of the basic rules of i18n is to have complete sentences, while keeping the verb covered behind some parameter is not a good way of doing that.

Given that Hecl is very much tied to the Java ME platform, this question is pretty important to me. I was thinking about simply posting it here, on my line journal, but having recently started reading The Wisdom of Crowds, I decided to have a little fun with it, and created a "prediction market" on the Inkling Markets (a YCombinator startup) web site: http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/6481 Of course, if you just want to comment on your answer, that's ok too. My thoughts on the current possibilities:

• Java ME. Widely available right now, but Sun has made a few false steps. For instance, the difficulty of writing something that runs everywhere is a high barrier for hobbyists or small companies.
• JavaFX. Apparently, this exists because Java is seen as being not quite scripty enough to compete with dynamic languages, something that I think is a legitimate concern. However, it currently is not deployed, so it's hard to say what its future will be.
• Web/Javascript. If mobile phones get better/cheaper connections, it would be easy to see them going the way of the rest of the world - rather than native applications, they'd simply be html/javascript apps. Doesn't work for games and some other things, but makes deployment very easy. The big if is the network operators and what they want to do about traffic costs. Apple, for the moment, seems to be taking this route.
• Python. Currently available for Symbian. I don't see it as a big possibility, but who knows.
• Qt. Troll tech is currently shipping a development device, the "green phone". Since it's proprietary, this one seems like a long shot too, but you never know.
• Other. GTK on Linux, Tcl/Tk... maybe even Hecl! In this field, things can be tilted upside down surprisingly quickly, although that's not quite so true for anything involving physical devices.
• None. Java ME becomes less popular, but nothing concrete supplants it, and we end up with a hodge podge of technologies, with no clear leader.

In any case, I think it's a space that's bound to be very interesting, and loaded with interesting possibilities. Update YC.news user jsjenkins points out a silly oversight on my part: Flash Lite. It slipped my mind completely, but is certainly an important player in this market. The Java folks have to be hoping that history will not repeat itself.

So, progress has been moving on nicely on a tool for generating gobject-introspection xml. Development’s getting pushed forward now by two veritable geniuses, J rg Billeter and Mathias Hasselmann. We’ve got sparse able to handle extended attributes, so headers can be marked up with details like ownership of returned data. There’s also a git branch of gobject-introspection where we’ve been delveloping some python code that takes the headers, runs sparse over and generates some basic introspection XML, using ctypes to call into gobject for getting interfaces, signals and properties. Very Nice! BUT, we’ve hit a big problem. Sparse is licensed under the Open Software License 1.1. Debian considers this non free, and it certiainly looks to have some overly onerous clauses. Linus did try to relicense it a few years ago, but hit a brick wall with Transmeta, who own some of the copyright from when Linus worked there. We might end up having to drop the use of sparse and maybe have our own bison-based parser. We really don’t want to have to go there though. So, here’s my lazyweb request - Does anyone out there know anyone at Transmeta that we could talk to about relicensing this work? It might be worth pointing out to that it might be in their interests, given the patent termination clauses.

Eurosport coverage of Vuelta a Espa a at 19 east continues with commentary in English (analogue only) and German. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day, but MTB coverage at 08:45)

Wed 12.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Thu 13.09.2007

01:00-01:30 (recap?) and 15:45-17:30 CET

Fri 14.09.2007 and Sat 15.09.2007

16:00-17:30 CET

Sun 16.09.2007

18:00-19:00 CET (recorded?)

TVEi are broadcasting in Spanish at 13 and 19 east. You can also see the race on TVEI America, but I don’t know the reception details. Scheduled times:-

Mon 10.09.2007

16:30-18:00 CET

Tue 11.09.2007

no show (rest day)

Wed 12.09.2007 to Sun 16.09.2007

16:40-18:00 CET

I’ll post more times next week. It was good to see a strong Caisse d’Epargne showing, as I predicted, even if it didn’t last long…

I have just read an interesting post about Gear Acquisition Syndrome [1] as applied to the guitar industry. Apparently it’s common for people to spend a lot of time and money buying guitar equipment instead of actually playing a guitar. I think that this problem extends way beyond guitars and to most aspects of human endeavour, and that actively trying to avoid the problem is a key to getting things done. I believe that the author however makes a strategic error by then going on to advise people on how to buy gear that won’t become obsolete. Sure it’s good to have gear that will suit your future needs and not require replacement, but if you are repeatedly buying new gear then your problem usually is not that the gear doesn’t do the job but that you want to buy more. I used to suffer from this problem to a degree with my computer work, and still have problems controlling myself when I see tasty kit going cheap on auction. Here is a quick list of things to do to avoid GAS:

• Recognise the problems with getting new gear. It costs money (thus requiring you to do more paid work or skip something else that you enjoy). It needs to have the OS installed and configured which takes time away from other things (unless your job is related to installing software on new machines). Finally it might be flawed. Every time you buy a new computer you risk having a failure, if it’s a failure that happens some time after deploying the machine then it can cause data loss and down-time which is really annoying.


• Keep in mind what you do. I primarily do software work (programming and sys-admin). While some knowledge of hardware design is required for sys-admin work and the ability to make my own hardware work is required for my own software development I don’t need to be an expert on this. I don’t need to have the latest hardware with new features, the old stuff worked well when I bought it and still works well now. My main machine (which I am using to write this post) is a Thinkpad T41p, it’s a few years old and a little slow by today’s standards but for everything that really matters to me it performs flawlessly. If your job really requires you to have experience with all the latest hardware then you probably work in a computer store and get access to it for free!


• When you have a problem think about whether new gear is the correct solution. There are a couple of areas in which performance on my Thinkpad is lower than I desire, but they are due to flaws in software that I am using. As I am primarily a programmer and the software in question is free it’s better for me (and the world) if I spend my time fixing the software rather than buying new hardware.


• Buy decent (not hugely expensive) gear so that you don’t need to continually buy new stuff. EG if a machine is going to store a moderate amount of data then make sure it has space for multiple hard drives so you can easily add new drives.


• Don’t buy the biggest and baddest machine out there. New hardware is developed so quickly that the fastest gear available now will be slow by next-year’s standards. Buy the second-fastest machine and it’ll be a lot cheaper and often more reliable.


• Determine your REAL requirements that match what you do. As I do software it makes sense for me to have the most reliable hardware possible so I can avoid stuffing around with things that don’t interest me so much (and which I’m not so good at). So I need reliable machines, I will continue buying Thinkpads (I plan to keep my current one until it’s 5 years old and then buy another), I believe that the Thinkpad is the Rolls-Royce of laptops (see the Lenovo Blogs site for some interesting technical information [2]) and that continuing to use such hardware will keep me effectively using my time on software development rather than fooling with hardware. For desktop machines I have recently wasted unreasonable amounts of time due to memory errors which inspired me to write a post about what a company like Dell could do to address what I consider the real needs of myself and other small business owners [3] (note that Dell is actually producing more suitable hardware in this regard than most companies - they just don’t market it as such).


• Keep in mind the fact that most things you want to do don’t require special hardware. In fact for most tasks related to computers people were doing similar things 10 years ago with much less hardware. If you believe that it’s just the lack of hardware that prevents you from doing great work then your problem is self-confidence not hardware availability.

It’s interesting that a sports-shoe company has a slogan “Just Do It” while trying to convince people that having special shoes is required for sporting success. Most professional athletes started training with minimal equipment. Get some basic gear and Just Do It!. References:

1. http://www.harmony-central.com/Guitar/Articles/Avoiding_GAS/


2. http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox - feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lenovoblogs/insidethebox


3. http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/25/designing-computers-for-small-business/

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