Search Results: "spa"

5 July 2007

Eddy Petrișor: I've seen it from a Debian PoV

I have seen my life in the company of my GF, and is not bright, looking from my Debian work PoV.

Some early conclusions:
  1. do whatever you can to have two computers in the house, otherwise yours will be arrested
  2. using any spare moment will not gain your GF's simpathy
  3. if there is slacking, it should happen with your GF, you can't affort slacking on your own
  4. if you are, by nature, less needy for sleep, you should use those extra minutes you can get for free
  5. it would be sooooo cool to get her hooked into "FLOSS" ;-)

4 July 2007

Jeff Bailey: Leif's Dedication


img_8432.jpg
Originally uploaded by jbailey
Photo taken by Alice Robinette
We celebrated Leif's dedication a couple weekends ago on June 17th at the Unitarian Church of Montr al. I got permission from Diane Rollert, our minister, to post the text of it.

(LJ-cut used to keep it from being too long)


Dedication of Leif Alexander Bailey, June 17, 2007

To the Child:
Leif Alexander Bailey, you have come with stardust in your hair, with the rush of planets in your blood, your heart beating out the seasons of eternity, with a shining in your eyes like the sunlight.

Your parents have brought you here to be dedicated, to celebrate the joy they have and to count themselves blessed that you are a part of their family.

As you grow, may you come to love what it is that your parents and this community of Unitarian Universalists value. May you learn to count the number of your days, to weigh their meaning, to gather into your mind the wisdom of your ancestors, to know why we call one thing right and another wrong, and to treasure beauty, mercy and justice in the deepest places of your being.

To the Congregation:
A dedication in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is one of the few sacred rituals we share together as a community. It is a covenant, a promise of love and care, that the entire community bestows upon a child.
Although Leif and his parents are leaving us to pursue new lives in San Francisco, they have chosen to dedicate Leif here in this church that has meant so much to them. Their travels may take them far away, but in this act of dedication today, we will covenant to continue to hold a place of care and concern in our hearts for Leif as he grows. Do you, as this religious community called the Unitarian Church of Montreal, take upon yourselves the privilege and the responsibility of helping to nurture the character and spirit of this child even at a distance?

Congregational Response:
We who are members of this congregation rejoice with this family in the promise of this child. We pledge him now the love and care of this community.

To the Parents:
Angie and Jeff, parents of Leif, please repeat after me this pledge. Leif, we pledge to help you to realize the best that is in you. We will seek, to the best of our ability, to instruct you by our teaching and by our example. We promise to love you with an unselfish love.

To the Child:
Leif, I dedicate you to the service of goodness, beauty and truth. I touch you with this water, which is a symbol of purity, and with this rose which is a symbol of your unfolding life, on your brow, your eyes, your lips, your heart and your hands, that your thoughts, your vision, your speech, your love and your generosity may be dedicated to the care of the earth and its people. We dedicate you that the transcending power of all that is divine may be present in you all your life long.


Closing Prayer:
Spirit of Life and Transcending Source of Love that connects us all, bless this beautiful child Leif this day and all the days of his life. As we rejoice in the promise of Leif s life that stretches out before him, let us remember those no longer with us, especially Leif s grandmother Glennis Bailey who left this earth too soon to meet her grandson, but whose memory and spirit will continue on through him. May Leif continue to serve with strength as his life unfolds so that the richness and wonder of life may be abundantly his. May peace dwell in his heart,and understanding in his mind. May courage strengthen his will and may the love of truth forever guide him.

Bernd Zeimetz: gimp-plugin-registry updated

gimp-plugin-registry updated During the last days I've upgraded the gimp-plugin-registry package. Version 0.2-1 does not only fix a few smaller bugs, but also contains the following new plugins/scripts: Please note that not all plugins will work with gimp 2.3 from experimental, therefore my next plan is to create a branch for experimental, which will not only include the proper changes for 2.3, but also include plugins which need the new gimp version to build/work. For example: As usual, I'm searching for good plugins which should be added to the package - suggestions are welcome!
,

MJ Ray: ASK 3D - New but not good enough

ASK 3D has launched. It looks pretty, but I don't see much improvement on the actual searching. If I search for something in the UK, it switches back to World without asking (I suspect some undisclosed cookie-fu). If I search for certain company names, it auto-corrects the spelling and returns a page of irrelevant results. The results pages seem to have too much space occupied by adverts. And the list goes on. I'm ready to switch search engines, but it won't be to this version of Ask 3D.

3 July 2007

Kai Hendry: Slug

NAS installing with Debian 4.0 Bought a NSLU2 from Ebuyer. Was about ~50GBP hence qualifying for free delivery with 5 working days. I don’t know why, but according to the packaging it was sent “next day” on the 4th day(!?). The device came direct from the usual suspects Computer2000, one of the oldest and biggest computer part distributors in the UK. Sidenote: I wonder if Ebuyer can claim to have stock, when it’s actually their distributors stock? tbm’s slug install page aided my Debian etch install. This slug has a 80G external USB hard drive attached with 10G ext3 for Debian and the rest for my legacy pr0n collection on fat32. I’ve already configured nfs and it seems to work well. 539M Debian install for that… bloat. I am worried I might have not have given it enough swap, so now I am thinking of how to ramp up the memory. I’ve reassuringly discovered my slug is already operating at full 266 speeds. It would be good if this device can handle btdownloadcurses. Other ideas is to setup a logging server on it. Also I’d like to familiarise myself better with the architecture. I think I’ve seen these Xscale’s in at least one mobile phone. :) Other hardware purchases I am thinking of: I wish this slug had a USB-style power supply. As for backups, I want to switch everything I have over to LVM2 eventually and use its snapshot features. Any tips or suggestions, let me know. I am not a fan of RAID solutions btw.

Paul van Tilburg: Ruby D-Bus 0.2.0

Arnaud and I finally managed to release Ruby D-Bus “Almost live from DebConf 7” 0.2.0. The release was planned for DebConf 7. However, I didn’t manage to get it ready in between all the talks, meetings, and other social stuff. Ruby D-Bus is an implementation of the D-Bus protocol in pure Ruby. After starting the development in February, it soon became apparent that several other projects were out there with about the same goal, such as Pure Ruby DBUS and R-Bus. Our approach is to have an API that is close to the old Ruby D-Bus bindings. While the other, similar projects seem to have a slightly different goal, we still invite them to come to some sort of merging so that no duplicate effort is put into three or four separate projects with almost the same result. The 0.2.0 release is our first real public release. We have a large subset of the features working and documented. The main focus of this release was to improve the API documentation and the tutorial. The 0.2.0 release is a release for exploratory purposes. We invite everyone interested to have a look at the API and inner works and provide us with feedback and/or patches. This means that the API can still change a bit over time based on feedback and tweaks performed by ourselves. So don’t built a big application on it just yet if you’re not willing to make some changes later on. For more information, see our project (Trac) page.

2 July 2007

Randall Donald: Requirements Engineering for Web Applications

This past week I've been looking at various methodologies for the requirements phase of web application development. I've looked at UWE, NDT, WebML, Design-driven requirements elicitation and OOHDM. My interest in these has been sparked by an opportunity to readdress and better the process at work. My post here is to basically elicit some feedback from others who build web applications for clients in a professional environment and tell me what works for them.

Adeodato Sim : The right place for staging areas?

During DebConf7 in Edinburgh, a dak BOF was held. Several topics were covered, one of them being staging areas. It was an interesting discussion, during which I had a recurring thought: that staging areas should be between testing and unstable, and not behind unstable (like experimental is), like everybody suggested. By the time I decided to share this aloud, though, the discussion was already over.

Christoph Berg: Looking for a Window Manager

I had been using fvwm2 for some 10 years when around the beginning of this year, I thought it might be time for a change. My config was originally copied from some SuSE templates and then heavily tweaked over the years, but recently broke more and more in subtle way with new fvwm upstream versions, e.g. moving windows suddenly required a different mouse button. Probably the config was just slightly out of spec and fvwm got "fixed", but it was annoying. The "tiled" window managers I had seen on others' desktops made me curious, so I gave ion3 a try some months ago. The overall appearance was all cool, but it tried a bit too hard to squeeze all windows into tiled windows - of course there's the floating workspace, but creating one was weird, and moving windows even weirder. And if only the (default) key bindings were more vi-like... I admit I never really bothered to read the documentation - probably everything would have been much nicer otherwise. Then there was the big license "wtf" with ion, at which point I started looking around further. dwm looks clearly too l33t to be serious, so wmii was the next choice, 3.1 to be exact. vi key bindings, a nicely configurable status bar, easy workspace switching and window moving. wmii doesn't have horizontally split windows (windows are always in columns), and no "tabbed" windows, though. It didn't warp the pointer to the currently active window (something I got used to with fvwm), but some config tweaks mostly fixed that. This time, I read the documentation, but there's only a 10 page pdf beginners document, but there's not much to configure anyway. Then came lenny. Testing and unstable currently feature version 3.6 which is a big disappointment. It is broken (the default config is unusable), and even after fixing that, it looks like they removed all the little details that I liked. The status bar is still there (though with a new location in the virtual filesystem), the color cannot be changed anymore (unless changing some other color as well). The windows used to have slim 1-pixel (configurable) borders. Now they still have, but the border will be expanded if the window chooses a different size - xterm always rounds down to the next character size, so all my terminals have fat surroundings now. The last-active window in a inactive column still had some markup so I knew which window Alt-Left/Right wound return to, now I have to guess. I wouldn't mind fixing my 3.1 config for 3.6, but I don't think I will, given these issues look unfixable. The 3.1 wmiirc file looked like a sh script, the 3.6 uses eval and a bunch of functions that frighten me. On a positive note, it is now possible to create new workspaces by just selecting them, which is much handier than start-program, wait, move-window-over, move-workspace. I guess I will give ion (2, 3?) another try...

Alastair McKinstry: Plan ahead.

Bollards being built in Dublin
Some workmen in Dublin, adding bollards to the Irish Financial Services Centre. Thanks to John Murphy for this photo. (P.S. For the confused, the Bollards are fixed, not removable. Their job appears to be to prevent people from parking where the van is ...) Tags

Russell Coker: New Storage Developments

Eweek has an article on a new 1TB Seagate drive. Most home users don’t have a need for 1TB of storage (the only way I’ve ever filled a 300G drive is by using it for multiple backups) and enterprise customers generally want small fast drives (with 100G drives still being sold for servers). One interesting thing to note about this is the fact that the new drive is described as being able to sustain 105MB/s (although I suspect that is only for the first few zones of the disk - see my ZCAV results page for graphs of the performance of some typical disks). The previous disks that I have seen have topped out at about 90MB/s. However even if the drive could deliver 105MB/s over it’s entire capacity it would take almost 3 hours to perform a backup - increases in IO speeds have not been keeping up with capacity increases. Another interesting thing is the potential for using the same technology in low power 2.5 inch disks. While a 1TB disk isn’t going to be much use to me a 300G 2.5inch disk that uses less power will be very useful - and it might be possible to perform a backup of such a disk in a reasonable amount of time! The latest trend in PCs seems to be small form factor (SFF) and low power machines that don’t have space for two drives. If you want RAID-1 on your home machines for reliability then that isn’t very convenient. But two 2.5 inch disks can fit in less space than a single 3.5 inch disk and therefore all the SATA based SFF machines that are currently being shipped with a single 3.5 inch disk can be upgraded to a pair of 2.5 inch disks - this will be convenient for me when those machines start going cheap at auction next year! Even for servers the trend seems to be towards 2.5 inch disks. I recently bought a 2U HP server that supports up to 8 hot-swap SFF disks, I wonder how the performance of 8*SFF disks would compare to 4 of the bigger and faster disks. The next thing we need is a method of backing up large volumes of data. The 650M data CD came out when a 150M disk was considered big. The 4.7G data DVD started to become popular when 45G disks were considered big. Now almost everyone has 300G disks and 1TB disks are becoming available yet the best commonly available backup method is a double-layer DVD at 9.4G - it seems that the vast majority of home users that make backups are using cheap IDE disks to do so. Fortunately there are some new technology developments that may improve the situation. Call/Recall has developed technology that may permit multiple terabytes of storage on an optical disk. It’s yet to be seen whether their technology lives up to the claims made about it, but we have to hope. The current storage situation is getting unmanagable.

Share This

1 July 2007

Russell Coker: Committing Data to Disk

I’ve just watched the video of Stewart Smith’s LCA talk Eat My Data about writing applications to store data reliably and not lose it. The reason I watched it was not to learn about how to correctly write such programs, but so that I could recommend it to other people. Recently I have had problems with a system (that I won’t name) which used fwrite() to write data to disk and then used fflush() to commit it! Below is a section from the fflush(3) man page:
NOTES

       Note that fflush() only flushes the user space buffers provided by  the

       C  library.   To  ensure that the data is physically stored on disk the

       kernel buffers must be flushed too, e.g. with sync(2) or fsync(2).
Does no-one read the man pages for library calls that they use? Then recently I discovered (after losing some data) that both dpkg and rpm do not call fsync() after writing package files to disk. The vast majority of Linux systems use either dpkg or rpm to manage their packages. All those systems are vulnerable to data loss if the power fails, a cluster STONITH event occurs, or any other unexpected reboot happens shortly after a package is installed. This means that you can use the distribution defined interface for installing a package, be told that the package was successfully installed, have a crash or power failure, and then find that only some parts of the package were installed. So far I have agreement from Jeff Johnson that RPM 5 will use fsync(), no agreement from Debian people that this would be a good idea, and I have not yet reported it as a bug in SUSE and Red Hat (I’d rather get it fixed upstream first). During his talk Stewart says sarcastically “everyone uses the same filesystem because it’s the one true way“. Unfortunately I’m getting this reaction from many people when reporting data consistency issues that arise on XFS. The fact that Ext3 by default will delay writes by up to 5 seconds for performance (which can be changed by a mount option) and that XFS will default to delaying up to 30 seconds means that some race conditions will be more likely to occur on XFS than in the default configuration of Ext3. This doesn’t mean that they won’t occur on Ext3, and certainly doesn’t mean that you can rely on such programs working on Ext3. Ext3 does however have the data=ordered mount option (which seems to be the default configuration on Debian and on Red Hat systems), this means that meta-data is committed to disk after the data blocks that it referrs to. This means that an operation of writing to a temporary file and then renaming it should give the desired result. Of course it’s bad luck for dpkg and rpm users who use Ext3 but decided to use data=writeback as they get better performance but significantly less reliability. Also we have to consider the range of filesystems that may be used. Debian supports Linux and HURD kernels as main projects and there are less supported sub-projects for the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD kernels as well as Solaris. Each of these kernels has different implementations of the filesystems that are in common and some have native filesystems that are not supported on Linux at all. It is not reasonable to assume that all of these filesystems have the same caching algorithms as Ext3 or that they are unlike XFS. The RPM tool is mainly known for being used on Red Hat distributions (Fedora and RHEL) and on SuSE - these distributions include support for Ext2/3, ReiserFS, and XFS as root filesystems. RPM is also used on BSD Unix and on other platforms that have different filesystems and different caching algorithms. One objection that was made to using fsync() was the fact that cheap and nasty hard drives have write-back caches that are volatile (their contents dissappear on power loss). As with such drives reliable operation will be impossible so why not just give up! Pity about the people with good hard drives that don’t do such foolishness, maybe they are expected to lose data as an expression of solidarity with people who buy the cheap and nasty hardware. Package installation would be expected to be slower if all files are sync’d. One method of mitigating this is to write a large number of files (EG up to a maximum of 900) and then call fsync() on each of them in a loop. After the last file has been written the first file may have been entirely committed to disk, and calling fsync() on one file may result in other files being synchronised too. Another issue is that the only time package installation speed really matters is during an initial OS install. It should not be difficult to provide an option to not call fsync() for use during the OS install (where any error would result in aborting the install anyway).

Share This

Bastian Venthur: Python, os.fork(), webbrowser and debbugs

Gustavo writes about python, it’s webbrowser module, os.fork and parsing bugreports from our BTS via html. This all sound very familiar, so here are some hints from me:

29 June 2007

Enrico Zini: tg-linktoself

Linking to self in turbogears I want to put in my master.kid some icons that allow to change the current language for the session. First, all user-accessible methods need to handle a 'language' parameter: 
@expose(template="myapp.templates.foobar")
def index(self, someparam, **kw):
    if 'language' in kw: turbogears.i18n.set_session_locale(kw['language'])
Then, we need a way to edit the current URL so that we can generate modified links to self that preserve the existing path_info and query parameters. In your main controller, add: 
def linkself(**kw):
    params =  
    params.update(cherrypy.request.params)
    params.update(kw)
    url = cherrypy.request.browser_url.split('?', 1)[0]
    return url + '?' + '&'.join(['='.join(x) for x in params.iteritems()])
def add_custom_stdvars(vars):
    return vars.update( "linkself": linkself )
turbogears.view.variable_providers.append(add_custom_stdvars)
(see the turbogears stdvars documentation and the cherrypy request documentation (cherrypy 2 documentation at the bottom of the page)) And finally, in master.kid: 
<div id="footer">
  <div id="langselector">
    <span class="language">
      <a href="$ tg.linkself(language='it_IT') ">
        <img src="$ tg.url('/static/images/it.png') "/>
      </a>
    </span>
    <span class="language">
      <a href="$ tg.linkself(language='C') ">
        <img src="$ tg.url('/static/images/en.png') "/>
      </a>
    </span>
  </div><!-- langselector -->
</div><!-- footer -->

Martin F. Krafft: DebConf7

I am sitting at Frankfurt airport in between flights home from Edinburgh (not anymore, but that's where this post was born). It's been an intense 2.5 weeks of DebConf7, which has been unlike other DebConfs for me in two respects: this was the first time I actually went to DebCamp, the week leading up to the conference, which is designated to teams and individuals with development goals to achieve during the week. And I was also actively involved in the organisation of the conference, which was unexpected, but a very good experience I am not going to miss next year. Well, it wasn't unexpected. When I booked my flights in January, I had decided to arrive a day early and leave a day late to be able to lend a hand. In between then and the conference, my life turned somewhat upside-down and I had forgotten everything about these noble goals of mine. So when I arrived at the conference venue on Saturday morning with thoughts of netconf circling my head, I was surprised to find everyone buzzing about (how na ve of me) and somewhat clueless as to how I should merge in: my wrists didn't really hold up to heavy lifting, and my knee certainly didn't enjoy stairs, of which there were plenty on the way up to the top floor, where DebCamp was taking place. After trying and being mostly ridiculed by the other organisers ("friends"... ha!), I set out to accomplish some other tasks more suited to my bodily condition, such as wiring the hack lab to accomodate 40 geeks for the first week. That took me most of the day, but at least the space was ready for Sunday morning and the official start of the camp. My goal for the week was netconf and I made good progress until I ran into a wall on Tuesday and had to back off and rethink my design. Reinhart Tartler and Enrico Zini dedicated their time to listen to my design and the problems and helped me clear the mess up and helped me reduce complexity and converge on a straight-forward, event-based design. As the newly appointed DebConf press officer and one of the organisation volunteers, I did not get any further for a few days, as I was manning the front desk or preparing and releasing my first press release (with the help of several others), which lead to a lovely story on The Register and doubled the number of attendees that preregistered for DebianDay (which marks the end of DebCamp and the start of DebConf). I blame the geeks in skirts, actually. Silly bunch, but not quite as silly as those attendants who could get a laugh out of the underwear question for two weeks in a row. Up to this point, I had managed to keep a perfect balance between netconf, orga-team, and sleep. So good, apparently, that when the orga-team t-shirts arrived, Uncle Steve made it quite clear that I should be getting one, even though I had spent considerable time on netconf, am sure some of the others must have worked twice the amount, and I was still quite well rested then. But they gave me a shirt and thus I became part of the orga-team. And even though it was rough at times, running around during the day, filling spare minutes with netconf brain-work, and enjoying nights that got longer with every day of the conference, I am glad and proud to be a member of this team now. It took me until after the official start of the conference to return to the netconf code, but with the new design, I got most of the framework to a point where it could obtain static and dynamic addresses from configuration files as well as DHCP servers in time for my presentation on Tuesday (the recording of which shall be linked from the netconf homepage as soon as it's available). Of course, nothing worked on screen in front of the audience, but noone really expected that anyway. and then I took it all apart for further simplification, so by the time night fell, the slides from the talk had already become outdated as I moved to yet another design, which is even simpler and which allowed me to sketch complex scenarios, such as DHCP after WPA. For two days, I made good progress, but the time available for hacking decreased noticeably, as I kept volunteering for more tasks that needed doing, and more and more people turned up. Somewhere in between, Keith Packard took hostage of (and fixed parts of) my broken X40 laptop, but that's the meat of another story. And on some other night, our leader Sam, in his official capacity as DPL, presented me with the instantiation of my innermost desires as consolation for my hosital stay: a pony. Just look at that smile! With 400 attendants, this year's DebConf continued the trend of immense growth of the event, and while it's great to witness this increase in popularity among attendees and sponsors, who make it possible each year to fly more people to the destination, I am also rather sceptical. The problem is less the additional load on the organising team the next 100 people are going to be easier to accomodate than the previous 100 were. It is more that the conference is losing focus. More people make you spend less time with the same folks, and as the number of non-contributors increases, the social element starts to outweigh the technical element. I am not condemning the social element, but to paraphrase the words of my favourite Debian developer, it's painful to come to DebConf or even IRC with a project and questions just to find that the people are generally more interested in being social, even to the point of preventing technical discussions. I realise that this is a sensitive subject as the issue of various cabals keeps coming up frequently and it does not seem right to start limiting the audience to this conference, but unless we consider the matter, DebConf might deteriorate similarly to other conferences, which have enjoyed enormous growth as well before it was too late. I think we must make sure that people understand that we are, after all, a technical project and must not lose touch with out roots. Of course, I may also be overreacting, after a week of intense coding and many other stress factors I continued working hard on netconf and helping with the organisation throughout Friday, briefly taking time off to prepare a presentation on my Ph.D. research, which was very well received, as well as a workshop on Debian packaging with modern (distributed) version control systems, which yielded around a dozen new subscribers to the vcs-pkg mailing list. But now, back to netconf. All things considered, I was making good progress, but not getting netconf into a releasable state just yet. I can parse /etc/network/interfaces files and get data from DHCP servers, even configure interfaces with those, but it's all still work in progress as I have not yet bothered to implement such basics as default gateways or DNS servers. But the framework is in place, and I am very happy with it as everything I keep adding falls into place beautifully. To mark the end of my netconf development sprint at DebConf7, I scheduled a code introduction session on Friday, where around 15 people turned out to get a walkthrough of the code and explanation of some of my design decisions. The session was recorded and will be available on video shortly. I think it turned out to be a very good idea; I found myself intrigued by someone else's code before until that someone took the time to explain what was going on. I sincerely hope that this introduction helps bootstrap a few people's experiences with the code and yields more contributors! Even though we ended almost every single evening of the two weeks in one of the surrounding pubs, the last few nights were definitely the most enjoyable. On Thursday, the local team had organised a Ceilidh with a band teaching us geeks how to dance the Scottish way, and the venue stayed open for two hours longer than before, causing most people to come out for beer or bouncing about. On Friday and Saturday, the folks of InfoSeed let us use their comfy couches (in the basement of the conference night venue) and we chilled to music and massages, while on Sunday, after a very tiresome day of cleaning up, the noticably lesser number of survivors hung out at the Forest Cafe for some so-so live music, few beers, and an early journey to bed, where a Dutch Muppet kept us entertained for at least another hour. The best about Monday, my day of return, must have been that the airline lost my backpack, which saved me from having to lug it around in Zurich, and made for a great moment on the phone with the baggage tracing service, who announced that my bags would be delivered in about 6 hours between 20:00 and 22:00 just as the door bell rang and the courier dropped off my bag. I'll be back in Argentina, unless something goes seriously wrong. And I'll be on the orga-team again. If you guys stop holding your meetings on Monday night. Thanks to everyone who made DebConf7 possible. I am proud to have been able to contribute, but the real work was done by a few others. You know who you are. NP: Solar Project: Five

Evan Prodromou: 9 Messidor CCXV

Last-minute note to Montreal BarCampers, hackers, entrepreneurs, designers, coworkingers, designers and other troublemakers: Tara Hunt is coming into town and I invited her to have lunch with local folks in the scene. We'll meet at 1PM, at La ka, since half of us will be there anyways. I've reserved space for twelve, but that can expand pretty easily. For those who don't spend 60% of their time there, La ka is at 4040 blvd St. Laurent near the corner of Duluth. URL: http://www.laikamontreal.com/ Please feel free to come and to invite others you think would like to meet Tara and vice versa. And feel free to Contact me if you've got questions or comments. I'd especially like to hear if a lot of people are coming, since I might need to expand the reservation. tags:

GPLv3 iPhone So, I'm as excited as everyone else to hear that the new Apple iPhone will be available today with a new GPLv3 Free Software license. A bold partnership between Apple and the FSF! tags:

New Oceans OK, so, that's a big lie. But wouldn't it be cool if it were the truth, and you could get a cool and good-looking Open Source phone? That way, you wouldn't only get Web 2.0 applications, without an API for the local machine. You could write local apps for the phone itself, and you could even re-write the phone OS if you want. Looks like pretty soon we'll have these Open phones. According to the http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/announce/2007-June/000013.html announcement on the openmoko-announce list, FIC will start taking orders on the first generation Neo 1973 on July 9. So, given that we've got an Open Source alternative to the iPhone coming down the pike in just a week or so, why is anyone working on iPhoneDevCamp? tags:

Joey Hess: google notebook

There's a photo of me going around the interwebs with a strange caption that misses what was going on. The real story is, after my notebook's power supply died, I tried out this other weird notebook that Google had obtained, apparently from some alternate universe, and was giving away at the conference. It was very nice and small, and had impressive touch-screen data-entry technology (though I kept losing the stylus), and amazing battery power. Seems the data I put it in might stick around for a good hundred years, without any recharging. I was happy to not have to hook a clunky British power adapter up to it. It was also impressively easy to enter arbitrary unicode character such as BOPOMOFO LETTER EH, RUNIC TVIMADUR SYMBOL, and THING I SCRIBBLED DURING BORING PRESENTATION WITH CEDILLA BELOW. Downsides: No wifi or other network (didn't check GSM), very limited storage space (only a few dozen Kibobytes I think), an atrocious text editor that made moving text around way too hard, and had a really bad font, difficulty deleting things (the obvious way to delete something often accidentially removed nearby files as well -- and didn't actually regain any storage space), and very limited encryption (best I could get out it was rot-13). On the network front, there is apparently some "Postal Mail" app that can be used to send mail, but it can take like, weeks, and charges per message. And yeah, no solitare at all, though there was this hangman app. All in all, I was happy to get my Fujitsu back, though I might hold onto this Google notebook thing for emergencies. Won't be porting d-i to it anytime soon though.

28 June 2007

Jacobo Tarr&#237;o Barreiro: A little bit of everything

July 5th, 2007 will be the 10th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract. Also, on July 5th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday. Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;) Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake 1/10 of them ;-) If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find. As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)

Jan Wagner: performancing.com and privacy

Today I was crawling through my mail logs for various reasons.
I was really surprised, that I saw a mail to a dedicated mailaddress which I’m using for communication with performancing.com. I was short checking, if this mailaddress is anywhere published at performancing.com, but couldn’t find anything. A one liner over the last week of mail logs:

# zgrep performancing /var/log/mail.info* grep clam wc -l
26 For a address only used for communicating with one organisation (used as contact mail address) this seems a bit too much traffic and this are only the mails, which was accepted by the MTA. So the questions comes to my mind …. what happens with the addresses at performancing.com? Maybe I missed something? , ,

Alastair McKinstry: Fun Filenames

Ok, some interesting output from a build script of a nameless code I'm working on: 
...
scanning lib[10].a ...
scanning lib[11].a ...
scanning lib[12].a ...
scanning lib[13].a ...
scanning lib[14].a ...
scanning lib[15].a ...
pgf90 -Wl,--start-group ./master.o -L. -l[1] -l[2] -l[3] -l[4] -l[5] -l[6] -l[7] -l[8] -l[9] -l[10] -l[11] -l[12] -l[13] -l[14] -l[15] -Wl,--end-group -llapack -lblas
./lib[2].a(cprep1.o)(.text+0x181d): In function  cprep1':
...
Next time, think of someone trying to find these interesting files. People using regexps, ok ? What do these 'libraries' contain, anyway ? Tags , ,

Next.

Previous.