I've only taken a quick look at the quilt documentation but the
following thoughts occur to me:

1. emsource / emdebuild are similar to quilt and in some ways, I have
   reimplemented a subset of quilt in these scripts.


2. emsource handles 'quilt add' provided that changes are confined to
   files in debian/ (including new patches added to debian/patches).
   However, I was unable to find out how quilt handles unchanged files.
   e.g. emdebuild skips creating the patch if the diff is empty - does
   quilt do the same for files that have been added?


3. quilt is targetted at "upstream builds" and it will require various
   config settings to get quilt to both keep patches outside the package
   source directory AND handle situations where the package itself uses
   quilt with a different series of patches. emsource and emdebuild are
   completely separate from any existing patch method.


4. quilt does NOT make autobuilding emdebian packages easier. Conflicts
   are meant to be resolved by hand (e.g. emdebian-changelog.patch). A
   bespoke method can embed specific logic on handling such issues that a
   general method like quilt cannot.


5. quilt could be *almost* as transparent as the current method (which
   hides nearly all patch management within emsource and emdebuild) but
   would still require a wrapper to add support for keeping the patches in
   SVN.

Hmm. Think I'll stick for now. You can have too many nested tools.

I just sent this: Dear FSF, On the Radio New Internationalist show "Up in Smoke", during an interview with Peter Brown of FSF (about 43 minutes in), I was surprised to hear the following revelation that FSF uses Skype and the failure to challenge the claim that Skype is free software:

"Peter Brown: ... This interview today is being transmitted through Skype. We're talking through Skype. Now, that obviously is a direct threat to the entrenched telecoms and they would like to restrict that, to lower the quality of the voice connection and they want to do that with lots of other types of transmission. Rachel Maher: And can they do that? Because Skype of course is free and there's a really direct benefit for organisations like ours, which is a non-profit organisation using Skype technology. Will they be able to do that? Peter Brown: Yes, so what they can do is easily identify types of information being passed, so what they can typically do is downgrade the service that you're using, so that - for instance, voice communication - those packets of data can be slowed down, effectively making voice communciation more difficult. Now this can only really be achieved if they're able to manipulate legislation. Unfortunately, they have a long history of being very successful at this. I mentioned earlier on that Digital Restrictions Management are a threat to our freedoms because it's allowing them to erect gateways and to control what it is that we can view and do with our computers. ..."

I was disappointed not to find much on the FSF web site about the need for free VoIP software, building on GNU oSIP and other free software, instead of Skype's proprietary software, which has contained spyware and worms already. Will you be adding such information soon? What is the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems? Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality and the privacy problems of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short interview. Regards, MJR

For a while now, Iceweasel/Firefox comes with built-in phishing protection, which is undoubtedly a good thing given the number of idiots using the Web these days. But the implementation is crap. If you surf to a phishing site, such as this test site, the page loads as you would expect and then the first strange things happen:

• the mouse movement becomes sluggish as the browser increases its virtual memory needs from 466Mb to a measely 912Mb, while the RSS jumps from 134Mb to 423Mb. The entire computer hangs for 2-3 seconds whenever I drag the mouse pointer off the window. I am not saying that my window manager (fluxbox) or Xorg or anything else on this machine is flawless, but this problem only ever appears with Iceweasel/Firefox. Anyway, it's impossible to follow any links on the page, the mouse pointer does not even change.
• suddenly, an icon and a little triangle appear at the right side of the URL bar.
• about 7 seconds later, the rest of the balloon appears, alerting me to the dangers of phishing attacks. Did people think those things are so extraordinarily beautiful that they had to be copied from Windows (or Apple, or whatever)?
• another 5 seconds later, the webpage darkens.
• with an entirely unresponsive browser, I have no other choice but to try to leave the page, which is easier said than done: Hitting Ctrl-W to close the tab does not have any effect for almost 25 seconds; then the page was finally gone and the system restored itself to normal.

I get similar performance problems on the StaTravel website, and on map.search.ch, it almost always crashes. Thank you, Firefox developers, for bringing the joys of the Windows world to Linux! NP: Dream Theater: Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes from a Memory Update: several people have responded that they cannot reproduce the problem. I thus created a new profile, uninstalled all system-wide extensions, removed all plugins such that about:plugins was empty and tried again. The problems persist, although I think the lags are not quite as long as before and the memory consumption is obviously down. Maybe this is amd64-related? Update: It's not amd64-related, as several users have pointed out. Update: still no luck, but James Andrewart pointed me to this bug report, which might improve things a bit:

"The new protocol specifies a single lookup algorithm for all tables, rather than having per-table logic. This lookup logic was moved in to the db service from the javascript. URL canonicalization was moved completely into C++ too. The DB service can now handle a query from a raw URI, which will be needed for malware blocking."

Bloomberg: Tour de France TV Audiences Rise in Europe Even After Scandals (tip tdfblog ) reports audiences are up 6% in France, 11% in Spain and 40% in Denmark (to over 800,000). Italy's RAI reports 1.2million viewers, while ARD/ZDF averaged 1.4million until they pulled the plug over half a dope test. In the UK, the BARB Weekly Summaries show the tour's London-Canterbury Stage 1 charting with 178,000 viewers on itv4. That's up from 143,000 for 2006's stage 1 (up 24%). Last year's itv4 coverage seems to have peaked at 197,000, so it'll be interesting to see how later stages fare, as details are announced. Stage 1 was also shown on the more widely available (analogue+digital) itv1 channel. The itv1 coverage didn't chart, so it must have had less than 3.41 million viewers, but I can't see exactly how many. British Eurosport's reported audience for Stage 1 increased from 84,000 last year to 118,000 (up 40%). Their 2006 peak was 100,000 for the last Thursday highlights, so that's already broken. They've been advertising pretty widely, with really annoying Franglais adverts that mispronounce the race name ("Tardy France" eh?). There was also an overspill into other channels, which we don't usually see. Two of my favourites: Graham Jones: What do the Tour de France and a Victoria sponge have in common with your social networking web site? Channel 4: Tour de France's UK appeal (video feed) mms://a1167.v15478c.c15478.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1167/15478/v0004/origin.channel4.com/news/2007/07/05_bike.wmv

I’ve been thinking about what I’m able to write about TiVo without upsetting anyone, and so I’ve been doing a bit of research about what’s already been written. Surprisingly, a lot. So I decided that there really wasn’t a whole lot that I could say that isn’t already somewhere else on the web, and figured I’d just add in some technical explanations to questions that are likely to come up. For example, the remote that we will ship has the thumbs buttons, but the Comcast remote [pdf] doesn’t. If you compare the remotes closely (there’s a picture of the TiVo remote in the article linked above), you’ll see the Comcast remote has two buttons that the TiVo remote doesn’t: Page Up and Page Down. There you go. The TiVo UI uses Channel Up/Channel Down as Page Up/Page Down in lists, so we don’t need separate Page Up/Page Down buttons, and use them for Thumbs buttons instead. Also, to confirm what was written in that article linked to above, we really did rewrite our software in Java. Sort of. As the article states, we run on top of TVWorks’ TV Navigator middleware. It’s not a full OCAP implementation, but rather an implementation of OnRamp To OCAP, which is (from Informitv) not a precursor but “a subset of OCAP so that applications will be forward-compatible with the full OCAP specification.” In other words, we didn’t write the OCAP layer, nor the OS. And the Java-based software so far only runs on the Motorola hardware.

Ian, I am not sure that “good package management” is a real selling point for anyone but system administrators. Home users do not care, as there is not that much difference between double-clicking an executable (that pops up a window, asks a few questions and then installs the software) and selecting a check-box in a list and clicking “apply” (followed by window, questions, etc.). In a business setting the users usually do not have permission to install software anyway, so they could not care less how it was installed, the only thing important is that it is there. In my opinion, the single technology that has had the most impact would be COM, the “Component Object Model”, because this is what the ISVs want: an easy way to define a (binary) interface that will allow components from different vendors to work together, ideally in the same virtual address space for maximum efficiency. The registry provides the necessary lookup functionality, so that you can construct an object of a given type by giving its class name or GUID to CoCreateInstance, and you get something back that provides the interfaces that this class implements, which is either the object directly or an RPC proxy. The latter happens, for example, when a multithreaded application wants to call methods in an object that is not threadsafe (COM will then serialize the calls) or when the object is provided by a system service (where we have dbus). The fact that the only thing you can rely on is the defined interface (a set of methods and data objects that map to getter/setter methods) makes it necessary to define the interface first and invest lots of Interfaces become immutable as soon as they are published, incompatible changes need a new interface name (that's where all the interface names ending in …2 or …3 come from). Under Linux, the closest thing is GNOME and their use of CORBA. If you were to write an application that runs within the GNOME framework, and if you wanted third party vendors to be able to plug into it, then you would probably publish an IDL file for it. Lots of “if”s there. Licensing is also an issue here. One thing the GPL fails to address, even in version 3, is the integration of components without linking into the same address space (which ORBit never does IIRC). Technically, the component provider and the component user communicate via sockets using a well-known protocol, so the component user is not bound by the GPL; the only thing that could be argued is that the IDL file defining the interface would be GPLd (although most jurisdictions consider interfaces as not copyrightable and/or permit “reengineering” for interoperability purposes). Some people might consider this “cheating” around the GPL, as any GPL'd program or library providing components could be used freely by any closed source application as long as the source code to the GPL'd portions was made available. Last (but not least) it is a matter of developer motivation. Third party vendors are, for most of us, not our target audience, and properly supporting them is going to be quite a bit of work. I've written about mixing different C libraries in the same executable image before, as a “nice to have” item. For components that should share the same image, like COM does, it is an absolute must, and COM goes to great lengths to make sure this actually works. For example, allocating memory that is to be passed to a COM method must be allocated using midl_user_alloc() from the RTC DLL and freed using midl_user_free() from the same; as this is a system library and compiler vendors are forbidden from bringing their own, everyone uses the same allocator pair (that internally just calls malloc() and free() from the Microsoft C library, but that is an implementation detail you are not supposed to know). On the Linux side, people do not care much about matching allocator functions, because in essence it all ends up in glibc's malloc()/free() anyway. When glib introduced their own allocators and started using them for their own structures, a number of applications started crashing unless you set a certain environment variable that told glib to pass everything through to glibc. Personally, I've spent the last days compiling toolchains in order to provide compiler packages that work “out of the box” on at least Debian etch, lenny and sid, and Ubuntu dapper, edgy, feisty and gutsy. Right now, I feel a lot like shipping statically linked binaries. Where Windows has mostly gotten out of the “DLL hell”, Linux has built its own variant of it:

The Windows DLL hell

is a hot place. Everyone is bringing their own grill lighter they believe does not cause cancer, starts a small fire and begins to roast marshmallows. The problem there is that the floor is covered with a sticky mixture of lighter fluid and everything is burning.

The Linux DLL hell

on the contrary is freezing cold. It has small isolated fires where a few friends are sitting, and they suddenly decide to move on and pour water over the fire and your marshmallows without asking first. Getting into a group is difficult, and if you manage it, all it means is that you are told to pick up your marshmallows before they extinguish the fire.

At this point, I'm going to be comment- and trackback-whoring; instead of answering the obvious question, I'm going to leave it open: Would a COM-style componentization model work in the Linux world, and attract software vendors, provided we can put out stable APIs and support them properly, or is that a red herring?

It appears that some people actually want to see Katachi in action before they try it. I can't imagine why, it only requires two libraries to be installed from version management, both of which are slightly obscure. So, here is a screenshot. Also some other people don't know where to get GVFS and GtkImageView from. This is the git tree for GVFS, and GtkImageView is here. GtkImageView 1.1.0 should work fine if you fix the trivial compile warnings, so maybe I should ditch my local SVN checkout and use the release for now.

My brother Ted and his partner Nabil had a great commitment ceremony yesterday afternoon in Dolores Park in San Francisco. It was a beautiful day, and they had lots of friends who came out for them. I came up from Los Altos Hills with our parents, and my brothers Nate and Andy came with their friends and/or families, too. Ted and Nabil march to a different drummer, to put it mildly. Their ceremony was remarkably like a Quaker wedding, although I don't think they planned it that way. They had a nice picnic and tea party in the park for a few hours, let the guests get to know each other, and then called everyone together to listen to their promises to each other. (Very sweet, by the way). They then exchanged bejewelled carabiners -- those funky little mountain-climbing metal loops that people also use as keyrings. "We may lose necklaces or rings, but we're not going to lose our keys." The carabiners were decorated with the California state gem, benitoite (Benito-ite), which is rarer than diamonds. Brilliantly, their friends who designed the carabiners also managed to include a USB thumbdrive, on which they're going to copy all the pictures, stories, movies, and other digital paraphernalia from the ceremony itself. Ted and Nabil will be carrying around those pictures as long as they have the carabiners. Clever! After they'd exchanged the carabiners, they hooked them to their belts, and then hooked them together. "And now... we're HITCHED!" Thunderous applause. They then invited up anyone who wanted to make a toast. My brother Nate went first, and girt in a bastard sword (for unclear reasons), he made a great toast. A dozen other people, including my Dad, came up to speak. By then, Ted and Nabil were falling over with fatigue, so we had mercy on them and stopped coming up to say nice things about them. Everyone dug in to champagne and cake, and Amita June and her two cousins Elena and Tessa ran around on the huge playground in the park. Definitely a good, good wedding-like event. tags: ted nabil wedding carabiners commitment ceremony

Long day This morning we had a Skype conference call relatively early in the morning, and then a brunch with Nabil's family (who are visiting from Virginia and Philadelphia). It was really nice -- my folks decided to build a huge patio in their backyard, and it's great for having kids and family running around, as well as for outdoor brunches. (We haven't had a meal inside since we got here, actually.) This afternoon we drove up to Novato to visit Maj's grandmother Jeannette and her Uncle Kevin and Aunt Robin. Also present were Jeannette's lifelong friend Roseanne and Kevin's highschool pal Jim. Amita June loved running around their big backyard and playing with their sweet old dog Holly. She also got a lot of mileage out of their porch swing. Maj and Robin swapped cooking tips and renovation horror stories, and I got to listen to Jeannette and Roseanne tell gambling stories from various Southern California Indian casinos. Jim, meanwhile, was on his cell phone in another corner of the yard, negotiating with another gold prospector with a hand injury to work the friend's claim. Quite an evening. After a dinner of barbecued salmon, caprese salad, and corn-on-the-cob, Kevin and Robin's neighbors came over, and we talked more about statistical analysis, sheep-farming in Marin County and driving through Austria. A long drive back to my folks', but Amita slept the entire time, thankfully. Good for us all. tags: kevin robin novato jeannette indiancasinos porchswing amitajune

Voice jail I had to call Air Canada a few days ago to get our tickets to come out here to California, and I had a terribly frustrating time working my way through their automated systems to get to a human being that I needed to talk to. And I thought to myself, "Why do I hate these automated voice systems so?" I never call a 1-800 number or another voice system if my problem could in any way be handled automatically. I always go to the Web first, and only try to get on the phone if the particular special-purpose request I have hasn't been, or can't be, built into the Web interface. But the economics of call centres makes the company want to shunt me into one or another automated voice systems in hopes that I'll be satisfied and not bother a real human being. My only goal with a phone call is to talk to an intelligent human being who can handle my exceptional situation. But the interface is designed precisely to deny me that goal. Can that interface ever be anything but frustrating? tags: phones voicejail frustration interface

Least likely to succeed Ross Mayfield posted a nice pic of me offering to run his company in exchange for a hot meal. It's a good shot of me, actually. In other linking issues, my Technorati "Authority" value is now 101, putting me squarely into B-list Bloglebrity territory. Hooray for the second string! tags: b-list socialtext technorati rossmayfield bloglebrity

Over the last few months I've been hacking on (yet another) image viewer for GTK+, using the hot new GVFS library (go Alex!) for asynchronous file handling and GtkImageView because I'm lazy. It's got a pretty lean interface at the moment and is fairly fast in use. My goal is to use it on my Zaurus for reviewing images from a CF card in the field, so performance is quite important to me. As the primary users are photographers, filenames are not shown in the interface (just thumbnails). There is a lot of work left to do, but I've used 0.1 for some time now. The source is being developed in a Bazaar branch at http://burtonini.com/bzr/katachi. I've just tagged a 0.1 release, a tarball of which is here. You'll need to build GVFS from git, and GtkImageView from svn, sorry. :) NP: Closes Volume 1, Boards of Canada

Some prominent debian-legal posters frequently make use of disclaimers like IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), TINLA (This Is Not Legal Advice), IANADD (I Am Not A Debian Developer). While this helps to avoid misunderstanding about the value of their opinions, I propose that a new disclaimer is used where appropriate: IAAM (I Am A Moron).

In the past something-over-half-a-year (wow, time flies like crazy), i have shuffled my (virtual) toolbox fairly significantly. In the desktop department, I no longer use the full KDE desktop, only a few applications from KDE 3 (that is mostly konqueror, plus some of kdeedu). I still use amarok, although by now mostly just to manage my iPod, since it is outright laptop-hostile. Most of the time, it’s better (and much more power-efficient) to use iPod hooked into usb for power, at least as long as the music is there. For the rest, i now use the commandline players to play single albums (just music123 for most formats). For the window manager, i have opted for xmonad, after briefly using ion3 and a faint attempt at wmii (which didn’t quite work for me). Xmonad, however, works great and its simplicity is quite amazing. Despite its absolute minimalism, it is, after some getting used to, much more usable than the rest of WMs i have used. For terminal, i use urxvt, which is lighter and apparently also faster than konsole (i may reconsider that choice when KDE 4 konsole comes out). With xmonad, i don’t really need tabs anymore, i’m not sure why, but it may be related to more general change in my workflow. In the version control department, i am now using darcs for all the projects where i decide. I no longer use svk, since i no longer really know how to. Not working with it for a while, i lost the ability to use it efficiently (which possibly hints at the fact it is somewhat too complex). On the other hand, i am much happier with darcs, also since it is much more forgiving about mistakes and generally very deterministic. It requires some insight to be used efficiently i suppose, but this is mostly due to differences with more traditional systems (i believe). Today, i have finally moved my ikiwiki to darcs, which was the last thing using subversion/svk (well, i have only been able to use it through ssh and local svn for some months now, so i generally didn’t use it at all). This hopefully means that i will be able to add more content to this page and blog as well, since it is less effort now. I am still using emacs (GNU emacs 22, xemacs didn’t quite work for me when i have tried it — i have a somewhat nontrivial setup, too). I intend to try out vimpulse at some point, in addition to viper, to supersede my emacs-lisp hacks for visual line selection. I have also started working on replacing my internet-facing services, since they are running in an “emergency” (ie, not really working well) mode, after the xen system broke down completely (it was mostly un-upgradable due to fragility of xen packages and of the whole xen system — and since the setup relied on working xen for even basic internet connectivity, upgrades were extremely painful). I am migrating to a solution based on user-mode-linux, and moving all the services to a less power-hungry and less noisy machine (an oldish pentium 3 box). When this is complete, i should be able to read my private mail sanely again, since currently the spam filters don’t work and my inbox is mostly trash. This is unrelated to the xen breakdown, my mail used to be handled by a machine at a company i used to do admin work for. However, they removed my accounts (and therefore access to my mail) without a line of prior notice. I still have control over my domain at least (although there will be a problem when it gets to expire, i will have to arrange a transfer with the said company, i suppose). Morale of the story: never do that. (Yeah, and in the spirit of the post, i am still using mutt for reading mail).

What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled. It used to be that operating systems were big, monolithic products, and applications were big, monolithic products you put on top of them. If you wanted to deploy, say, a web application, you sourced the middleware stack (which itself was probably several big products too), you sourced the operating system, and you (often painfully) had to integrate the two yourself (or pay a big company lots of money to do it for you). These days, you increasingly just “apt-get install whatever“. In this world, where does the operating system end and the application begin? The line is increasingly blurred—for when applications are deployed using an OS facility, seamlessly integrated with the OS itself, is the result an application or a feature of the operating system? In fact, in a very real way, all software looks to become part of the operating system—or, at least, this has certainly been the trend in the Linux world. What does this shift mean to the industry? For one thing, those of us that build operating systems as monolithic products have to change—it’s what users expect, and with a componentized operating system rather than a wad of stuff, it becomes far easier to push new innovations out into the marketplace and generally evolve the OS over time. Indeed, refashioning Solaris as a “distro” is the essence of Project Indiana—and package management is the key technology that will hold it all together. So, the next time you read about how Project Indiana aims to make Solaris more “Linux-like”, keep in mind that what we’re actually “copying” is the distro model, not Linux itself—which, after all, is a kernel, and has nothing to do with the package management and so forth the distros (you know, like Debian) built above it. This, better than anything else, highlights the opportunity for Solaris: What people really know when they say they know “Linux” is the environment that exists around the Linux kernel—the distro—all of which Solaris can deliver, and more.

It's our second wedding anniversary on Monday, and because Sarah's not been to Napa Valley yet, and because this is probably the last opportunity to spend a bit of quality time away together before the pitter-patter of little feet, we've lashed out for a nice weekend away. We're staying two nights at the Gaia Napa Valley "hotel". It's really nice, but a lot more like a motel in most respects. I really like the environmentally-conscious initiatives they've taken though. I can highly recommend it, and the day spa attached is also excellent. Oh, and they have free wireless, which whilst surprising given how much they charge for things like in-house movies, is also a bonus. It was good enough to make laptop-based VoIP calls with. Today, we drove around aimlessly after our massages, in search of wine tastings (it was handy having a a ready-made designated driver). It seems the wineries here are all into charging for tastings, which in my opinion is a bit of a deterrent (in some cases) to purchasing. The charge varies between $5 and $15. Some wineries seem to refund the cost of the tasting if you make a purchase (which seems like the way to go in my opinion). We stopped for a late lunch at the Rutherford Grill, where I think I've had the most awesomely delicious rack of barbecue pork ribs I've ever had in this country. I cannot recommend that place enough. Apparently their rotisserie chicken is also to die for. We picked up thirteen bottles of wine in our travels this afternoon, so for the first time in ages, we'll actually have something in the wine rack at home. Tomorrow we're going on the Napa Valley Wine Train, which looks like it'll be fun. So now Sarah can say she's seen Napa.

So for the last week or so I have been manically trying not to lose Really Important Stuff like documents, passports, files etc as I have just moved from Canada to NYC and have made a brief stop in PR to visit my mom. Well the last thing I expected to lose—my laptop—is of course what is gone, vanished, entirely. There is a small chance that the TSA at the Newark airport has it but I won’t find out till Monday as their lost and found unit is closed during the weeked. I never thought that I would so want the TSA to help me out, although they, and the whole crazy security protocols, are part of the reason my laptop is gone. I made a backup of my computer right before leaving Canada, but I did it pretty quickly and did not check if it was really ok. All the really really important stuff is also backed up in email, or printed on paper, so Total F*cking Disaster is not imminent, just Total Disaster. So I won’t find out if I have my computer contents until Wed evening when I return to NYC. Since there is not much I can do here, I will cross my fingers and hope for the best. When I got home to PR, at 3:30 am to find no computer, I was pretty devastated. But instead of brooding over it, I switched into emergency mode, spending the next hour changing all sorts of passwords at 4 am, stealing the wireless from the hotel that is next door to my mom’s apartment (thankfully my SO was with me, donning a laptop). Although I did not store any on my computer, I did have my userid information in various places and I am pretty sure my computer was not off but only on sleep mode.. Yuck. After waking up after a few hours of sleep, I was pretty shocked that a good portion of my life is potentially gone, but then again, my mother’s alzheimers shocked me in other ways. Not too much has changed, though her memory loss, not surprisingly, is worse. In some ways, the fact that her data loss is permanent, that you can’t make a back up of the memories that are gone, that the data loss is so much more important than what you can have on a computer, has put things in some perspective, although I wish I only had the computer data loss to deal with instead.

Following Uwes blog entry about flashrom, I finally decided to upgrade my Desktop PCs BIOS. Was about time, it was still running on the original BIOS version from back when the Board got manufactured (2004), and Tyan managed to release 6 new versions since then, all adding a lot of nice features. The update went nice and without a single problem (yay) and now I have tons of new stuff. Like - working powernowd support, automagic fan speed control and some other gimmicks. The first thing got my CPUs, usually running at 45 - 60 C to now work with about 37 C, as they are now mostly idling at half the speed they did before. Thats up to 23 C less heat. The fan control now gets fan 1 (of 2) in my Desktop to run with a very low speed, around 100RPM, sometimes it even seems to turn itself off. (My system uses a big fat watercooling with a water tank that has something between 20 to 30l of water in, so the fans are only to get air moving a little bit). Also, with my recent upgrade to 2.6.22.1 on this machine its now also able to suspend and resume. Which wasnt possible earlier, for unknown reasons. Ok, I can only suspend-to-disk, not to ram, there it only supports “Standby” mode, but its already better than “either on or off”. Funny side note - my desktop, having a NVidia card, using the non-free nvidia driver can suspend/resume without problems. My laptop, also having a NVidia card, can only suspend/resume without problems if I do not use the binary driver. The binary driver is able to suspend, and even resumes, but then Xorg (latest sid) happily eats all CPU cycles. The free nv driver at least works in suspend-to-disk mode. But fails to turn on the display in suspend-to-ram mode. Of course nv also manages to lock the whole machine if I try to run an application that needs a little bit more video foo, like blobwars or supertux. Oh, and my Xorg still seems to turn on the monitor, not liking DPMS, as blogged some time ago. But it’s now not limited to acpi events, it must be something else. Weird, but I didnt have enough time and motivation to debug this (or googling, maybe others have the problem too). Its only a very small bit annoying. (Sometimes happens after seconds, sometimes takes a minute).

Today, I finally switched my home web site to Apache 2. Better late than never, right? :-) So, now, I just have to update the content and make it look less 1995 than it currently is..:-). Time to switch to a content management system, maybe?

Yesterday, a Spanish court decided to ban a sex cartoon of Spanish Royal Family. It was published by a satirical magazine, called El Jueves, which publishes every week cartoons of Spanish Royal Family, among political cartoons, or others talking about different issues. I am not going to argue here if this is censorship or not. I think that freedom has some limits, and if they have been surpassed, people doing that has to be judged. What I want to write about is more related to information and how it flows nowadays. As we have seen here, it is completely impossible to stop some document from spreading around the world in some hours, with hundreds of websites talking or showing it. Call it globalization or Internet. The effect is the same, information flows more quickly than what can be controlled. The measure taken by the court was the seizure of all copies of that magazine. Of course, reaction from other media was to publish the news including the banned cartoon. Also, tens of blogs show it, both in Spanish and in English, which has made that international media and news agencies also got the news, contributing to its spread even more. Soon, a local cartoon, that usually would be only knew by usual readers of El Jueves, has become a worldwide news item, with millions of people looking at it, commenting, republishing. And everything came from a bad choice: the court tried to set fences to information. This issue reminded me what also happened last two days, when waiting for the last Harry Potter's book to be published, it was known that it was yet available in every P2P netwok, and that some people had yet received it at home. Even, today, some newspapers published plot details of the book.

According to the latest news from the Ubuntu camp, Gutsy Gibbon will ship with our beloved eBox, and according to the last post in this thread in the Ubuntu forums, it’s going to be the official configuration tool for services. I went to aKademy with eBox lead developer and workmate, Javier Uruen, and we had the chance to attend to Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote, where he argued about the benefits of having a six-months release cycle for the most popular open source projects (i.e., KDE, Gnome and OpenOffice). I think this release cycle would suit eBox quite well too, and if synced with Ubuntu releases, would make life easier for both eBox developers and packagers, besides enlarging the free software “pulse”. In any case, we’ll continue to provide Debian-based installers where the base system won’t change that often, for those who are not willing to update their servers each six months. Anyway, this is a big leap towards world domination for eBox We are quite happy that eBox made into Ubuntu and we’ll be eager to work with the maintainers to integrate their changes back into eBox. disclaimer: I’m not an “official” eBox developer, so don’t take my opinions as authoritative, they come mostly from pub-talk with Javier