Search Results: "tach"

25 February 2011

Evgeni Golov: Desktop in a shell: mutt

Continuing my series about a desktop in a shell, today I will present you my mutt setup. I use mutt because it has no bugs and is a really good MUA for people loving consoles ;)First of all you have to know, that all my mail is forwarded to my server and sorted into Maildirs via maildrop, so I do not care about sorting on my desktop , which just fetches the mail via IMAP from the server ;)I m running mutt-patched from Debian Squeeze, so not all options may be available for you if you do not have the same patchset as I do.First, tell mutt to fetch mail from imap.die-welt.net via IMAP:
set imap_user=username
set imap_pass=password
set folder="imaps://imap.die-welt.net/INBOX"
set spoolfile="imaps://imap.die-welt.net/INBOX"
Now, enable IMAP-IDLE, list subscribed folders, reconnect to the server if needed and mark mail as read when you open it:
set imap_idle
set imap_check_subscribed
unset imap_passive
unset imap_peek
Let mutt save sent mail to the Sent directory on the IMAP server, and postponed mail to Drafts:
set record=+Sent
set postponed=+Drafts
Read mail should stay where it is:
set mbox="!"
We use IMAP-IDLE, thus check for new mail manually only every 90 seconds:
set mail_check=90
Instead timeout after 15 seconds if no user input is given:
set timeout=15
Set default mail from address to my default mail address:
set from=evgeni@golov.de
And send mail via mstmp (see below for mstmp configuration):
set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"
Tell mutt which addresses I recieve mail to (danger, ugly regex!):
alternates (evgeni@(debian.org golov.(de eu)) sargentd@(die-welt sargentd).net evgeni.golov@uni-duesseldorf.de)
As mutt knows where I receive mail, let it set From accordingly:
set reverse_name
Let mutt cache some stuff and find its certificates:
set header_cache="~/.mutt/cache/headers"
set message_cachedir="~/.mutt/cache/bodies"
set certificate_file=~/.mutt/certificates
set ssl_ca_certificates_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
Show only interesting headers in an useful order:
ignore headers *
unignore headers from to subject date cc
hdr_order from to cc subject date
Fix stupid MUAs behaviour (e.g. filenames like =?iso-8859-1?Q?file=5F=E4=5F991116=2Ezip?=):
set rfc2047_parameters
Beep on new mail, will generate a ! in the window name in screen:
set beep_new
mutt-patched has the great sidebar patch, assign ctrl-n, ctrl-p to select next, prev folder, ctrl-o to open selected folder:
bind index \Cp sidebar-prev
bind index \Cn sidebar-next
bind index \Co sidebar-open
And toggle sidebar visibility with ctrl-b:
macro index \Cb '<enter-command>toggle sidebar_visible<enter><refresh>'
macro pager \Cb '<enter-command>toggle sidebar_visible<enter><redraw-screen>'
Since 1.5.20-2, mutt patched contains my sidebar-dotted and sidebar-sorted patches.
Let mutt shorten the displayed path (e.g. debian-devel instead of INBOX.ml.debian-devel) and sort the folders (the are returned in random order when using imap_check_subscribed):
set sidebar_shortpath
set sidebar_sort
Now let s set some colors (that match the rest of my desktop ):
color sidebar_new yellow default
color normal white default
color hdrdefault brightcyan default
color signature green default
color attachment brightyellow default
color quoted green default
color quoted1 white default
color tilde blue default
And add some useful macros for marking new and old messages as read:
macro index .n "<tag-pattern>~N<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>N<clear-flag>*" "Catchup all new messages"
macro index .o "<tag-pattern>~O<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>O<clear-flag>*" "Catchup all old messages"
When forwarding mail, I like it to be forwarded as an attachment (YMMV):
set mime_forward=yes
I m using goobook in mutt to fetch my addressbook from Google. As there is no Debian package for goobook (yet), you have to install it yourself (via easy_install):
apt-get install python-argparse python-gdata python-simplejson python-keyring python-nose
easy_install goobook
Configuration is easy via ~/.goobookrc:
[DEFAULT]
# If not given here, email and password is taken from .netrc using
# machine google.com
email: me@gmail.com
password: password
And then add the following to your .muttrc:
set query_command="goobook query '%s'"
bind editor  complete-query
macro index,pager a "<pipe-message>goobook add<return>" "add the sender address to Google contacts"
That s all for mutt, but We are running mutt in a screen, so let s add the following to .screenrc to fix transparency and cut&paste (see http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Appearance):
 defbce on
 term screen-bce
And as mutt uses mstmp (yes, I know, mutt can handle SMTP itself ), this is my .msmtprc:
defaults
domain dorei.kerker.die-welt.net
tls on
account die-welt.net
host smtp.die-welt.net
from sargentd@die-welt.net
auth on
user username
password password
tls_starttls on
tls_certcheck off
# Set a default account
account default : die-welt.net
C est tout! That is my personal mutt configuration, you can download it as one file here: my .muttrc. And as everyone loves screenshots, here is one:the default view of my muttOh, the next chapter will be about irssi, but not before next Sunday (March 6th) as I ll be offline for a week, skiing in Austria :)

20 February 2011

Evgeni Golov: Desktop in a shell

People are using computers, everywhere, really! ;)
As you might guess correctly, so do I.Basically, I am using three computers: my laptop (ThinkPad X201s, awesome machine, but pabs told me not to post any more adverts for ThinkPads on Planet Debian *g*), my smartphone (Motorola Milestone, yes, that counts as a computer) and random_pc (for random as in my girlfriends or some other trusted (!!!) friends computer).
My laptop is running Debian GNU/Linux unstable with Xfce4.6, my smartphone is running Android 2.2.1 Froyo, my girlfriend has Ubuntu with GNOME, a friend runs Debian unstable with GNOME, another one Arch Linux with KDE4 and so on. And on all these machines I want be able to work, which means I have to read mail and rss, chat via IRC, JabberXMPP and ICQ, have a look at my to-do list, ssh into different machines, write some code, tweet and dent etc.In the following series of posts I will describe how I can handle about 90% of my work on every (trusted) computer out there, using ssh, screen, mutt, irssi, BitlBee, newsbeuter etc.As I am describing the setup as a Desktop in a shell , let s start with a login- and desktop/window-manager: ssh+screen.sshObviously, you need a machine to ssh into it, where the Desktop will live on. For me, that s my home router/fileserver/vm-server dorei, running Debian GNU/Linux LennySqueeze with OpenSSH as a kind of login manager ;)Yes, my user is allowed to login with a password instead of a public key. And well, that s all for the login-manager, no extra configuration needed.screenAfter logging in, I start my window-manager with screen -rd, -r for reattach a running screen session, -d for detach it if it is already attached somewhere else. Or I can start a new session by just typing screen. Inside the screen I have multiple windows (one can create new ones with ^A c) with all the needed software running. I can switch windows by pressing ^A N, N being the number of the window, ^A n for the next window, ^A p for the previous one or ^A ^a for the last one. Or I can get a window-list with ^A w. If needed, I can rename windows with ^A A, followed by the new name. That should be enough for almost everyone. Let s just add a window-list to the bottom (as you might have seen on GNOME, Xfce, KDE and even Windows ;) by adding the following to the ~/.screenrc:
caption always " "                    # clear line before hardstatus
hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B  %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"
You get the current host- and username, the machine load and the date for free ;)Even if it is possible, I do not have any autostart like stuff in my .screenrc as the machine is running stable and I start the screen and the apps inside maybe once a year after a reboot.screenrcMy .screenrc looks like this:
# detach on hangup
  autodetach on
# don't display the copyright page
  startup_message off
# set scrollback to 2000 lines, default 100
  defscrollback 2000
# set silencewait to 15 seconds, default 30
  silencewait 15
# new shells should be started as login-shells
  shell -$SHELL
# make a fancy statusline
  caption always " "                    # clear line before hardstatus
  hardstatus alwayslastline "% = kb [ % B %H:$USER % b ][ %=% w %?%-Lw%?% b (% W %n*%f %t%?(%u)%?% b )% w %?%+Lw%?%?%= % b ][% B  %l % B % W %d.%0m % b ]"
# make higlighting bold, black on blue background
  sorendition +b bk
# some fixes, no I do not know where they come from :)
  termcap  xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%d;%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
  terminfo xterm hs@:cs=\E[%i%p1%d;%p2%dr:im=\E[4h:ei=\E[4l
  termcapinfo  xterm Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:is=\E[r\E[m\E[2J\E[H\E[?7h\E[?1;4;6l
  termcapinfo xterm* OL=100
  termcapinfo xterm 'VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l'
  termcapinfo xterm 'k1=\E[11~:k2=\E[12~:k3=\E[13~:k4=\E[14~'
  termcapinfo xterm 'kh=\EOH:kI=\E[2~:kD=\E[3~:kH=\EOF:kP=\E[5~:kN=\E[6~'
  termcapinfo xterm 'hs:ts=\E]2;:fs=\007:ds=\E]2;screen\007'
  termcapinfo xterm 'vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[34h\E[?25h:vs=\E[34l'
  termcapinfo xterm 'XC=K%,%\E(B,[\304,\\\\\326,]\334, \344, \366, \374,~\337'
  termcapinfo xterm* be
  termcapinfo xterm xterms xs ti@:te=\E[2J
  termcapinfo wy75-42 xo:hs@
  termcapinfo wy* CS=\E[?1h:CE=\E[?1l:vi=\E[?25l:ve=\E[?25h:VR=\E[?5h:VN=\E[?5l:cb=\E[1K:CD=\E[1J
  termcapinfo  hp700 'Z0=\E[?3h:Z1=\E[?3l:hs:ts=\E[62"p\E[0$~\E[2$~\E[1$ :fs=\E[0 \E[61"p:ds=\E[62"p\E[1$~\E[61"p:ic@'
  termcap  vt100* ms:AL=\E[%dL:DL=\E[%dM:UP=\E[%dA:DO=\E[%dB:LE=\E[%dD:RI=\E[%dC
  terminfo vt100* ms:AL=\E[%p1%dL:DL=\E[%p1%dM:UP=\E[%p1%dA:DO=\E[%p1%dB:LE=\E[%p1%dD:RI=\E[%p1%dC
  termcapinfo linux C8
# some bindings
  bind k
  bind ^k
  bind .
  bind ^\
  bind \\
  bind ^h
  bind h
  bind 'w' windowlist -b
  bind 'W' windows
  bind 'K' kill
  bind 'I' login on
  bind 'O' login off
  bind ' ' history
  bind = resize =
  bind + resize +3
  bind - resize -3
# Mutt demands this
# http://wiki.mutt.org/?MuttFaq/Appearance
 defbce on
 term screen-bce
That s all for my screen setup. The obvious, boring screenshot follows:See you next time, when I will present my mutt setup here.

19 February 2011

Kees Cook: ptracing siblings

In Ubuntu, the use of ptrace is restricted. The default allowed relationship between the debugger and the debuggee is that parents are allowed to ptrace their descendants. This means that running gdb /some/program and strace /some/program Just Works. Using gdb s attach and strace s -p options need CAP_SYS_PTRACE, care of sudo. The next most common use-case was that of crash handlers needing to do a live ptrace of a crashing program (in the rare case of Apport being insufficient). For example, KDE applications have a segfault handler that calls out to kdeinit and requests that the crash handling process be started on it, and then sits in a loop waiting to be attached to. While kdeinit is the parent of both the crashing program (debuggee) and the crash handling program (debugger), the debugger cannot attach to the debugee since they are siblings, not parent/descendant. To solve this, a prctl() call was added so that the debugee could declare who s descendants were going to attach to it. KDE patched their segfault handler to make the prctl() and everything Just Works again. Breakpad, the crash handler for Firefox and Chromium, was updated to do effectively the same thing, though they had to add code to pass the process id back to the debuggee since they didn t have it handy like KDE. Another use-case was Wine, where for emulation to work correctly, they needed to allow all Wine processes to ptrace each other to correctly emulate Windows. For this, they just declared that all descendants of the wine-server could debug a given Wine process, there-by confining their ptrace festival to just Wine programs. One of the remaining use-cases is that of a debugging IDE that doesn t directly use ptrace itself. For example, qtcreator will launch a program and then later attach to it by launching gdb and using the attach command. This looks a lot like the crash handler use-case, except that the debuggee doesn t have any idea that it is running under an IDE. A simple solution for this is to have the IDE run its programs with the LD_PRELOAD environment variable aimed at a short library that just calls prctl() with the parent process id, and suddenly the IDE and its descendants (i.e. gdb) can debug the program all day long. I ve got an example of this preloadable library written. If it turns out this is generally useful for IDEs, I could package it up like fakeroot and faketime.

18 February 2011

Russell Coker: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i First Experience

I have just got a new Xperia X10i for my wife. It s with Virgin who use the Optus network. Optus apparently have better coverage than Three (who we have been using for 6.5 years) and Virgin offers the best deals they have good phones on low monthly rates and do nice things like selling most phones unlocked (the Xperia is one that comes unlocked).I chose the phone for use in system administration work. A large screen should be good for reading email and running a ssh client. Hopefully I will be able to use the phone s Wifi to provide mobile net access to a laptop for any problem that can t be solved on a tiny screen. My wife doesn t do much sysadmin work nowadays, but it ll save some effort if we can both use the same model of phone. Also according to Amobil.no the Xperia X10 is the second best phone for camera-phone functionality [1], and my wife would really like to take some good pictures with her phone (she loves the LG U990 Viewty that she has right now).ScreenOne major reason for choosing this phone is that it has the biggest and highest resolution of any phone that doesn t cost a huge amount of money. It does well in this regard, the screen is very good to look at. However it is apparently not particularly sensitive and we still have the protective cover on the screen which makes the swipe to unlock operation quite difficult. My wife generally likes to keep the protective plastic on such screens for a while to prevent damage, but she may take this off sooner than on other devices.Sony FoolishnessOne reason that this phone is cheaper than any other phone with similar specs is that it s made by Sony. Sony won t provide updates to Android 2.2 or better and they have their own stupid applications installed in an intrusive manner. The main screen of the phone has a large icon for the Sony Timescape program. If you choose a background image of a person s face then the Timescape logo is in the ideal location to obscure the person s eyes. Generally it s not desired to have the person in your phone background look like Zorro. Fortunately you can delete icons from the home screen, you just have to press and hold the icon until a trash-can appears at the bottom of the screen and then drag it to the trash.Phone BookThe core phone functionality is fairly important for a mobile phone. But it seems that every modern phone has some serious failings in this regard. The Xperia comes with a phone book that is reasonably good for managing contacts and partially coalesces multiple entries with the same name which is convenient as I somehow managed to import 3 copies of each entry in my wife s phone book. The down-side is that the multiple entries are still stored, so when it comes time to update someone s phone number my wife will have to separate the entries and then delete all but one of them, adding probably a minute of effort for each one. With 60 phone book entries that s probably an hour of wasted time during the course of her phone use.They really should do a time based analysis of phone use and optimise the UI for efficiently performing common tasks. I think that an ideal design would start off by asking the user to rate the importance of phone functionality, camera, facebook, twitter, etc and then give a UI that matches the important tasks. A device that has 384M of RAM, 1G of built-in Flash storage, and an 8G micro-SD card (which Virgin provided with the phone) should be able to offer a selection of UIs.CameraThe configuration for the camera allows some settings to be changed easily and others have to be changed through the advanced settings which requires one more button press and a few extra taps on the screen. One real stupidity is to have the phone light be in the advanced settings, so if the room happens to be a little darker than expected you suddenly need to go to a lot of extra effort to turn on the light.Finally it would be really good to be able to take a quick picture. I would like to be able to be able to press a combination of buttons and have it immediately take a picture regardless of what had been running before. Not press the main menu button, the camera icon (which I made a link from the home screen), wait a second for it to load, and then press the shutter button. Ideally I would like to press a combination of hardware buttons to have it immediately take a picture even when the screen is locked. I don t want to wait for the screen unlock process, sometimes the perfect shot is only available for a second.WifiIt doesn t support ad-hoc networks. This is really annoying for me as I don t own an access point and I don t plan to buy one just for a phone. My laptop (Thinkpad T61 with Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan]) doesn t seem to support running as an access point, and my EeePC 701 with an Atheros AR5001 has the same problem, here is the error message:# iwconfig wlan0 mode master essid x
Error for wireless request Set Mode (8B06) :
SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.I have a cheap Realtec USB Wifi device that claims to support being an access point but just fails when I try it. So presumably it doesn t really support it but the driver is buggy.It seems that I may need to put a custom Android installation on it to get ad-hoc working.Also it s apparently necessary to root the Xperia to get Wifi tethering to work for providing net access to a laptop. So I guess I ll hacking it soon.Internet AccessThe Virgin web site couldn t help me set up the Internet access because I ported a phone number from another Telco. I had to use the phone number supplied by Virgin to login to their web site and the site then wanted to sent (probably SMS) the settings to my phone, but of course it couldn t SMS to that number as I ve got the Three number active. Presumably they were expecting that customers would setup Internet access before porting their old number.I phoned the Virgin tech support and used the settings they suggested, but it didn t work. Then I took the phone to a Virgin store and it started working after they rebooted it with no changes to settings. Just like Windows used to be. :(Email Access Default AppThe email setup defaults to port 143 IMAP access, so even when a mail server provides access on port 993 for IMAPS and on port 995 for POP3S probably most users will not use any encryption because their phone doesn t default to it. Also one annoying feature is that when I gave it the email address test@coker.com.au it decided to use test as the user-name for IMAP by default. It seems that a very large portion of the active email accounts nowadays are on systems that handle multiple domains and thus require the domain name in authentication, and a large portion of the remainder accept domain names even when they aren t required. Besides it s a lot easier to delete a domain name when it s not needed than to type it in when it is.The default hostname for sending and receiving mail is the domain name, if the MUA configuration program had checked the MX record it would have known that smtp.sws.net.au is a better default choice for the mail server. I ve now started the practice of creating a CNAME entry named m in every domain I run, so when someone is setting up a mobile phone they just have to add m. to the start of the default hostname to use for sending and receiving mail. By doing this I can probably save an average user at least 30 seconds of typing, which is particularly important if I happen to be talking them through the process!The MUA uses IMAP commands to load the text of the message without attachments and then loads attachments on demand, this will be handy for when people attach unreasonably large files. With IMAP caching and partial loads the core functionality seems OK, and some quick tests of standard but not commonly used IMAP functions such as noticing that mail has been deleted by another client seemed to work well. The performance of loading a new mailbox with 369 message was quite poor, I m not sure how much of this is due to the network connection and how much is due to the client implementation. This is a real concern for me as I typically have about 7,000 messages in my IMAP account and 3,000 unread messages most of which are in two folders.Another problem is the fact that there seems to be no way of searching in the list of messages, sorting/grouping by subject or sender, or showing unread messages. This makes the Xperia unsuitable for the task of reading mailing lists when on public transport. I would really like to be able to sort through a folder of mailing-list mail, delete messages that I don t need to keep and flag ones that need attention when I have the resources of a desktop system when I m on a tram or in other situations where a laptop can be inconvenient.One undeniable bug I discovered (as opposed to the missing features I listed) is that when a message has a line with a URL followed by many spaces it won t load correctly in the web browser, the spaces will be treated as part of the URL. I ve changed the default signature in my email to have a description followed by a URL to avoid triggering this bug. Presumably other Android phones are bug for bug compatible. :(Moxier MailThere is a complete set of email and calendaring applications preloaded from Moxier.com. The Moxier mail client uses company.com as an example domain name (they should use example.com does no-one read the RFCs?). It s nice that they verify the SSL certificate and display the details when it s not signed.Unfortunately Moxier doesn t support anything other than Exchange, and I can t delete it either as it s part of the base set of applications from Sony.SMSThe SMS application is supposedly conversation based. This doesn t seem like a benefit to me, it s a pity that there is no option to make it act more like every other SMS implementation I ve used over the last 12 years.BatteryThe battery is described as having a capacity of 1500mAh, for comparison a AA rechargeable batteries have capacities ranging from 1800mAh to 2800mAh. My first mobile phone had a rechargeable battery that took the same space as 4*AA batteries and the phone was designed to run on AA batteries if the main battery wasn t charged. I would like to have an Android phone that had a battery pack of similar size to at least 2*AA batteries, and 4*AA would be OK too.The Xperia battery was reported as being half discharged after playing with the phone for less than an hour. Basically when doing anything with the phone that is remotely intensive I need to have it plugged in. Unless of course I m using one of the star-chart applications LightsThere are two white leds in the gaps between the keys for Settings, Main-Menu, and Back on the front. They are quite bright and annoying to look into at night.SSHSSH was one of the reasons for getting an Android phone, but it was one of the last things I worked on because everything else was so much fun. I m currently using ConnectBot, it supports storing ssh host keys, generating a key-pair from random screen touches, locking and unlocking the key-pair (with a pass-phrase) and pasting the public key to an open window. All the basic functions just work although it s rather inconvenient to enter the CTRL keys.The next thing to investigate is a small and light Bluetooth keyboard. Using an external hardware keyboard will save me from the pain of entering CTRL keys (which is even worse than the pain of entering passwords that contain digits and mixed case). It will also allow me to type a lot faster and use the entire screen for the ssh session.Current Bug SummaryWifi doesn t do ad-hoc mode or tethering.MUA doesn t correctly handle URLs in messages if many spaces follow the URL and is also unsuitable for mailing list mail.Sometimes requires a reboot to make Internet access settings take affect.Camera light can t be easily turned on and off.This isn t too bad.ConclusionMost things do what I want. Once I get a MUA working with all my email, Wifi doing what I want, and a Bluetooth keyboard it ll be a fairly ideal mobile sysadmin terminal. I ll probably order one for myself this weekend.

17 February 2011

Jan Hauke Rahm: Gnome calendar

Dear lazyweb, I m using Gnome for quite some time now and I m always satisfied with the interfaces I have to whatever I need. There is one thing, though, that I miss: a calendar. I don t like evolution, I don t need another mail client. What I want is a simple, yet sophisticated application that I can put appointments in and which reminds me of them (recurring issues should be possible, too). It may but doesn t have to be somehow attached to the Gnome clock or whatever. Though I expect it to look Gnome-like and be accessible from the panel. Do you know such? And is there even a Debian package for it? Thanks.
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13 February 2011

Evgeni Golov: Mustek PoweMust 1000 USB on Debian Squeeze

Some (long) time ago, I wrote an article how to setup a Mustek PowerMust 1000 USB on Debian Sarge. Since then Etch, Lenny and now Squeeze were released and the machine the UPS was attached to was replaced.Yesterday I have upgraded this machine from Lenny to Squeeze and of course nut has kicked me in the nuts, telling me it can t connect to the UPS.When I replaced the old machine, I had to connect the UPS via USB instead of serial, as the new machine has only one serial port and that one is needed for the serial console to my Sun Netra T1. On Lenny, I was using the megatec_usb driver which seems borked on Squeeze and is superseeded by the blazer_usb one. So here is my nut setup on Squeeze:nut.conf:
MODE=standalone
UPSD_OPTIONS=""
UPSMON_OPTIONS=""
ups.conf:
[powermust]
    driver = blazer_usb
    port = schrank
    vendorid = 0665
    productid = 5161
    desc = "Mustek PowerMust 1000"
Yes, port has to be set, but can be any random string.upsd.conf:
ACL all 0.0.0.0/0
ACL localhost 127.0.0.1/32
ACCEPT localhost
REJECT all
upsmon.conf:
RUN_AS_USER nut
MONITOR powermust@localhost 1 nut nut master
MINSUPPLIES 1
SHUTDOWNCMD "/sbin/shutdown -h +0"
POLLFREQ 5
POLLFREQALERT 5
HOSTSYNC 15
DEADTIME 15
POWERDOWNFLAG /etc/killpower
RBWARNTIME 43200
NOCOMMWARNTIME 300
FINALDELAY 5
upssched.conf:
CMDSCRIPT /upssched-cmd
I hope this helps someone ;)

11 February 2011

Julien Viard de Galbert: Triage X Bugs of the Week (TXBW12)

This report is 2 week late It was delayed by an important event, not the release of squeeze, but the birth of my first child: C lestine is born Monday the 31th of January. My wife and C lestine are both fine now but the firsts days were not that easy. I m starting to recover from the lack of sleep, but I m still very late on my debian tasks ;) So I guess I just drop Triaging for week 13, 14 and maybe 15 Now the bugs I triaged just before : The X Strike Force (still) needs you ! You can have a look at the X Strike Force Bug Closing Procedure and check XSF unstable bugs sorted by date.

6 February 2011

Kees Cook: fun with game memory

So, I was testing a (closed source) single-player offline game recently and thought this exercise might be fun to document. I didn t want to spend any time actually earning in-game money since I d played it before and I wanted to just skip ahead to other aspects of the game. I was curious how straight-forward adjusting my cash might be. So, noting the in-game bank account number of 219393 and account balance of 3000, I dived right in. First up, what s the memory layout of the heap look like? I looked at the brk and the mmap regions without a mapped library or file, marked with w in the permissions column, from /proc/PID/maps:
0827e000-08282000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
0a22e000-0b08a000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0 [heap]
efa59000-efd00000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
efd00000-efd21000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
Knowing these, I could use gdb s find command, after attaching to the process:
$ gdb /some/cool/game

(gdb) attach PID

(gdb) find /w 0 0827e000, 0 08282000, 219393
(gdb) find /w 0 0a22e000, 0 0b08a000, 219393
0xaf03d08
0xaf06ca8
No hits in the first region, but I see two hits for the account number value in the second region. Let s start there and see what s near them
(gdb) x/8x 0xaf03d08
0xaf03d08: 0 00035901 0 00000000 0 00000000 0 0af06ce0
0xaf03d18: 0 0af06be0 0 00000059 0 0af03d98 0 0af041e8
(gdb) x/8x 0xaf06ca8
0xaf06ca8: 0 00035901 0 00000bb8 0 00000bb8 0 0820b148
0xaf06cb8: 0 00000001 0 00000000 0 00000000 0 00000000
In that second hit, I see the value 0xBB8, which is 3000, and matches our account balance. Let s see what happens if we just change both of those to add a bit a few orders of magnitude above the current value
(gdb) set var *0xaf06cac = 0 00100bb8
(gdb) set var *0xaf06cb0 = 0 00100bb8
(gdb) x/32x 0xaf06cac
0xaf06cac: 0 00100bb8 0 00100bb8 0 0820b148 0 00000001
(gdb) continue
And presto, clicking on the bank account details in-game shows a huge account balance of 1051576 now. No need to reverse-engineer any saved games, whew.

5 February 2011

Craig Small: Syntax Highlighting with Mid-Century themes

As a site that discusses a variety of programming languages, I thought it would be good to have syntax highlighting for the code snippets. This blog runs Movable Type so it had to fit in with the setup I have already. So I found the Syntax Highlighter module ok and the initial installation went fine, it was simply:
  1. Download the .zip archive
  2. Unzip the archive into a temporary directory
  3. Copy the plugins/SyntaxHighlighter directory to my plugins directory
  4. Copy the mt-static/plugins/SyntaxHighlighter directory to static/plugins
You then need to edit the HTML Head template and add to the bottom of it the following line: 
<$MTSyntaxHighlighterInclude$>
Next, I like to use Markdown as my markup language. But you can only have one type text filter. Another plugin called FormatStack solves this. Create a new stack and put Syntax Highlighter before Markdown. You can then create documents with both sorts of tags and it works quite nicely, well almost. Mid Century Problems This is probably not a Mid-Century specific problem but the modern templates or styles may cause a problem. You ll find you switch styles and suddenly, no more syntax highlighting. The problem is the onLoad functions get overloaded. Some styles have an onload property on their body. You ll see lines similiar to 
 <body id="blogbase" class="whatever" onload="mtEntryOnLoad">
This onload event stops other onload events, which means Syntax Highlighter cannot do its thing. The fix is rather simple, you just adjust the templates so they look like the following: 
<body id="blogbase" class="mt-entry-archive layout-wtt">
<script type="text/javascript">
 mtAttachEvent("load", mtEntryOnLoad);
</script>
After doing this and publishing it all worked! You may also see this sort of problem with other plugins that use the mtAttachEvent() Javascript call. Reducing Includes By default, the script includes all syntaxes it knows. If you want to only include some, you do this by specifying what brushes you want. For example if you only will highlight perl and python scripts then you can change the line to: 
<$MTSyntaxHighlighterInclude brush="perl,python"$>
Syntax Themes The other attribute the Include line will take is theme. There are several themes but default is alternating white on grey with the rest being variations on light text on a dark background.

3 February 2011

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Mike Hommey, Firefox/Iceweasel maintainer

Mike Hommey, our Iceweasel maintainer

For as long as I have known Mike, he s been maintaining one of the largest (and most widely used) package: Iceweasel, Debian s default web browser. It s effectively Mozilla s Firefox although it has been renamed to avoid some rules enforced by Mozilla s trademark policy. But we might see Firefox back in Debian read on to know Mike s plans. His story is also very interesting in that he went from simple user to Iceweasel maintainer, and now he s working for Mozilla Corporation. But you already knew that contributing to free software is a good way to grow skills and gain experience that are valuable on the job market, right? ;-) My questions are in bold, the rest is by Mike. Who are you? I am Mike Hommey. I am French, even if my name doesn t sound so. I have been a GNU/Linux user since 1995, using Debian since 1999, and started packaging in 2003. After a long time in the NM queue, I became a DD in 2005. The main reason I started being actively involved is quite selfish: I wanted some things done, and I just did them. My first packages were extensions for the Mozilla Suite, the old one that directly inherited from Netscape Communicator. Later on, I wanted some of these extensions to work with the new kid on the block: Phoenix; or maybe it was already Firebird. By then, integrating extensions was a hassle, and the mozilla-browser maintainer had come up with a script that would make it easier for extension packages. So I ported that script for use with Phoenix/Firebird and sent it to the BTS. Then Phoenix/Firebird became Firefox, and it grew a real extension manager. Except that is was entirely not suited for extensions installed by the packaging system. So I made it work better. And made a few more changes to make Firefox work better. All through patches or NMUs. Then I became co-maintainer, then Firefox couldn t keep its name and became Iceweasel, and, fast-forward until today, I m now taking care of Iceweasel/Xulrunner and Iceape in stable, unstable, experimental and an external repository. This 8 years-long story (wow, I hadn t even realized it had been that long until I wrote it) tells you something: newcomers shouldn t be afraid to stick their hands anywhere, even in big packages. I was only a Mozilla and Phoenix end-user when I started. Apart from Mozilla-related packaging, I also happen to (co-)maintain some other packages in Debian, most notably webkit, though I haven t been very active in the pkg-webkit team recently. There are several reasons for that, the main one being that there are other team members getting the job done. And I can t say that much about the pkg-mozilla team, since there are effectively no other team members. What s your biggest achievement within Debian? I am quite proud that Squeeze will be the first Debian release where Iceweasel works on all supported architectures. Previously, we only knew the package compiled on all these architectures. Starting with Squeeze, we know it passes several of the test suites coming with the source code. This ensures most of the browser is functional. It was actually far from being the case before, as it appeared when the test suites were first enabled. I think it is very important to have properly working packages on all our supported architectures. The current evolution of hardware shows how important it still is. Who would have thought a few years back that we would see ARM or MIPS based netbooks today ? What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? For Debian Wheezy, I would like to improve Iceweasel/Icedove/Iceape integration with the packaging system. Something that would allow to use the apt database to find extensions or plugins, on top of the current behaviour. I also want to improve desktop integration, most notably for KDE. Another thing I d like to see happen is to package google breakpad independently (its source code is currently embedded in chromium and iceweasel, though not built, as far as I know), and have our Mozilla products builds be able to send their crash reports upstream. It is very important that upstream gets direct visibility over what crashes on GNU/Linux systems. It helps making them aware of issues that would otherwise probably remain unnoticed, as there are much more users using distributions packages than upstream tarballs. And not all Debian users report crashes to the BTS. I know at least Fedora and SuSE are already doing it. More importantly, I want to avoid the sad situation we got with Squeeze, where we re going to release a 18 months old Iceweasel. We got there for a combination of reasons, one being that I was preparing for a freeze in December 2009 and focusing on getting 3.5 in shape instead of the then upcoming 3.6. The result was that we didn t get 3.6 packages before upstream released 3.6.3 in April 2010. By then it was too late, considering the uncertainty of the release schedule, to update reverse dependencies and get 3.6 ready for Squeeze. Things are different for 4.0. I m already getting ahead of things, and while reverse dependencies haven t been taken care of, all beta releases have been made available through http://mozilla.debian.net/, usually within hours after upstream release (sometimes even a few hours before official announcement, but always after availability on ftp.mozilla.org). A great share of our patches were also pushed upstream. Several things made that possible: There will be a couple major upstream releases until Wheezy comes along, and I want to make them available early in unstable, even if that means breaking reverse dependencies until they are fixed. Finally, I would like to get other people involved, starting with the Icedove maintainer. Volunteers are very much welcome, for any kind of involvement: bug triaging, documentation (which we are deeply lacking), testing, code People interested can contact the pkg-mozilla team list. As the Debian packaging gets less time consuming, I should be able to spend more time mentoring, which should help. If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? I actually have been working almost full time on Debian for a few months during a more-or-less purposeful unemployment period. That s when I attempted to add an alert popup when Iceweasel or extensions are upgraded (which was eventually removed because not working very effectively). That s when I worked on Iceweasel 3.6 and the first 4.0 betas. That s when I pushed more than 70 patches upstream, and got upstream commit access. I know for a fact that keeping up with upstream and answering bug reports is already time consuming, and time comes in finite quantity. Working full time on Debian allows to do more than that, as I ve been able to experience first hand. Unfortunately, that doesn t help pay the bills, so it would be best if time could be shared with other persons. Like, actual members in the pkg-mozilla team. ;) Anyways, if I were to work full time on Debian again, I d like to do more than packaging, and help improve some of our infrastructure, most notably the buildd network, to grow some automated way to get packages built on all or some of our architectures. Call that PPA if you want, though I don t think we need something exactly like PPA. We sure do have porter boxes, but there is a huge overhead to get packages built there: you need to first try, then see you lack build dependencies, then wait for admins to install them, then come back and launch your build, and finally come back again much later to see how it went. And that s when it goes smoothly. Repeat for each architecture. It s already cumbersome when it s a small package, so imagine when it s Iceweasel. I d like to be able to push a (signed) .dsc somewhere, say I want it built on that and that architecture, and get binary packages and logs back. It could then be up to developers to distribute them, or not. Sometimes, you re just interested in test suite results. Another related wish would be a way to access build trees of failed builds, possibly on the buildd where it failed. What s the biggest problem of Debian? Lack of contributors, lack of contributors, and lack of contributors. It can sound weird to say that in a community of 1000+ people. But the sad reality is that we ve seen, repeatedly, calls for help in various places from various understaffed teams (most often of effectively one member) for years. So there is obviously a problem getting people to invest time in these teams either on the long term, or at all. I know this is not a very significant metric, but it already should say a lot: I wouldn t be surprised if more than 2/3 of the number of source lines of code in Debian come from less than 5% of the number of packages in the archive, and see less than 5% of the DD/DM population involved. If someone feels like doing the actual math, I m curious to know how far I m from reality, and in what direction. We also lack manpower to be able to make our release development smoother. In a perfect world where manpower is not a scarce resource, we should work on $release+1 when $release is being frozen. Said otherwise, we should have been able to start working on Wheezy in August 2010, or even earlier. You ve been working for Mozilla Corporation for a few months. How does the work look like and what are you working on? I am actually not working full time for MoCo; I am only contracting for 4 days a week. That was a request I made to keep having enough spare time for Debian or other activities. I am working from home, and am pretty much free about when I work, as long as I work long enough. I take advantage of this freedom and the saved commuting time to live a healthier life by doing some sports in the daytime (which also happens to be cheaper). I mostly work with Taras Glek and other people on various aspects of Firefox startup performance. This involves pretty interesting low-level stuff, in which I actually got involved before being contracted. This work has nothing to do with packaging Iceweasel, though I can have a few opportunities to do things somehow related. You told in your blog that you were discussing with Mozilla how Debian could use the Firefox trademark. Can you tell us a bit about the progress you made? I have got an informal approval of the patches we are applying to the Iceweasel 4.0 beta packages. There are a few concerns about using the system cairo library, and the embedded copy of libpng needs to be used to have support for the animated PNGs that are used in the user interface and that are required in Firefox feature-set. Other than that, there are pretty much no objection on the technical side. We managed to get to some common ground as to how to manage stable updates and more generally, changes to our packages, but I m still waiting for an actual agreement draft. While I, as the maintainer, am fine with the way it should look according to my discussions with the people involved at Mozilla, I ll seek review from my fellow Debian Developers when I ll have something to show. I haven t decided yet how this will reflect on the Debian packages, though. For example, would Iceweasel stay? But I do hope Wheezy will get Firefox back. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Not someone, but all past, present and future release team members. This is a team that receives a lot of critics (and I indirectly gave one a few paragraphs ago), yet manages to keep doing an amazing job and its members are very committed to their task. I admire their dedication.
Thank you to Mike for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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31 January 2011

Stefano Zacchiroli: who the bloody hell cares about Debian

A down-under talk on the role of Debian, A.D. 2011 I'm back from LCA 2011, which I've attended to share some thoughts about the role that Debian plays in the Free Software ecosystem, 18 years after its inception (yes, we are that old^Welder). The talk title---Who the bloody hell cares about Debian? [1]---was meant to be rather provocative. The idea was indeed to challenge the meme that, in the era of distributions that release every 6 months, a distribution with a release cycle of circa 2 years (like Debian, considering the past 5 years) is not a project that deserves your attention anymore. Is it really the case? In the talk I (obviously) claim it is not, using two main arguments. The first argument is based on the observation that Debian offers a set of pretty rare, if not unique, features among mainstream FOSS distributions. Those features consist of a mix of technical and "political" aspects: (1) a focus on package quality, with no distinction among first and second class packages; (2) a strong culture of software freedom, which refuses to offer non-free software (or firmware) by default to users and distribution developers (as parts of the infrastructure used to make Debian); (3) independence from commercial interests, with no single company or entity that could claim to babysit Debian; and (4) a decision making model based on a weighted sum of do-ocracy and democracy, which implies that by doing (rather than talking) everyone has a chance to have an impact on Debian. Considering all that and looking at the most popular FOSS distributions, one can easily identify Debian as one of the few remaining players who both care about Free Software and can be trusted in making choices not driven by profit. Mind you, I've nothing against companies in general and I'm very well aware that many FOSS companies carry a good deal of the burden of developing and promoting Free Software. Nonetheless, in days in which it is striking how quickly FOSS-friendly companies can become very much FOSS-unfriendly, I can't help putting my trust and efforts into community-driven projects, better if with no attached company label whatsoever. Furthermore, having distributions like Debian around can encourage other company-backed distributions to demand more and more independence and clarifications about the relationships between the community and the backing company. The second argument about the relevance of Debian is more pragmatic and rather straightforward: Debian is the root of a huge tree of derived-distribution (AKA "derivatives"), more than 120 according to popular distribution indexing sites. Each Debian derivative focuses its attention on, and directs its people power to, customizing Debian for a specific target and build entierly upon Debian work for all parts that do not need customization. That possibility is one key advantage of Free Software, after all. A well-known derivative example is Ubuntu, which is probably the most popular Debian derivative, enjoying a user base way larger than that of Debian itself. Ubuntu is heavily customized with respect to Debian and still had only about (at the time of Natty) 25% of packages which either differed from their Debian counterparts or that did not exist in Debian at all. Other Debian derivatives tend to be way less customized than that. Either way, if you are running a Debian derivative, chances are that you heavily depend on Debian and on its well-being. (Yes, it is so also if you didn't know about that, sorry.) Let's now fast-forward to the end of the talk, skipping my usual comments on how to keep the whole tree of Debian derivatives sustainable and beneficial for Free Software as a whole (i.e. by reducing as much as possible the viscosity of patch flow along the derivatives tree). Feedback People's reaction to such a provocative talk has been positive and we have enjoyed a fairly long Q&A session discussing the topics mentioned above as well as other Debian-related topics. A (commented) summary of the obtained feedback is reported below. Judging from the recurrent questions and suggestions I've received doing Debian talks in the past 8 months, I dare to say that LCA feedback is fairly representative of the feelings of many Debian users. Slides of the talk are available, while a video will eventually be posted at http://linuxconfau.blip.tv.
[1] Kudos to Francois Marier for suggesting the title. If the title doesn't ring a bell for you (it didn't for me in the beginning), you might want to check out the story of this ad. Update: minor rephrasing in the 4th paragraph

29 January 2011

Wouter Verhelst: Two belgian women playing the singles finals of the Australian Open

... yet it is not a Belgian final. How is this possible? Answer: An-Sophie Mestach just won the juniors singles title, while Kim Clijsters will compete for the singles titles in the main event in about half an hour. While not as impressive as winning the main event, it's certainly great! Especially since she also won the Doubles title, together with the Dutch Demi Schuurs Congratulations, An-Sophie!

26 January 2011

Martin Pitt: Na zdrav PyGI!

(Update: Link to Tomeu s blog post, repost for planet.gnome.org) Last week I was in Prague to attend the GNOME/Python 2011 Hackfest for gobject-introspection, to which Tomeu Vizoso kindly invited me after I started working with PyGI some months ago. It happened at a place called brmlab which was quite the right environment for a bunch of 9 hackers: Some comfy couches and chairs, soldering irons, lots of old TV tubes, chips, and other electronics, a big Pirate flag, really good Wifi, plenty of Club Mate and Coke supplies, and not putting unnecessary effort into mundane things like wallpapers. It was really nice to get to know the upstream experts John (J5) Palmieri and Tomeu Vizoso (check out Tomeu s blog post for his summary and some really nice photos). When sitting together in a room, fully focussing on this area for a full week, it s so much easier to just ask them about something and getting things done and into upstream than on IRC or bugzilla, where you don t know each other personally. I certainly learned a lot this week (and not only how great Czech beer tastes :-) )! So what did I do? Application porting After already having ported four Ubuntu PyGTK applications to GI before (apport, jockey, aptdaemon, and language-selector),
my main goal and occupation during this week was to start porting a bigger PyGTK application. I picked system-config-printer, as it s two magnitudes bigger than the previous projects, exercises quite a lot more of the GTK GI bindings, and thus also exposes a lot more GTK annotation and pygobject bugs. This resulted in a new pygi s-c-p branch which has the first 100 rounds of test, break, fix iterations. It now at least starts, and you can do a number of things with it, but a lot of functionality is still broken. As a kind of finger exercise and also to check for how well pygi-convert works for small projects now, I also ported computer-janitor. This went really well (I had it working after about 30 minutes), and also led me to finally fixing the unicode vs. str mess for GtkTreeView that you got so far with Python 2.x. pygobject and GTK fixes Porting system-config-printer and computer-janitor uncovered a lot of opportunities to improve pygi-convert.sh, a big perl -e kind of script to do the mechanical grunt work of the porting process. It doesn t fix up changed signatures (such as adding missing arguments which were default arguments in PyGTK, or the ubiquitous user_data argument for signal handlers), but at least it gets a lot of namespaces, method, and constant names right. I also fixed three annotation fixes in GTK+. We also collaboratively reviewed and tested Pavel s annotation branch which helped to fix tons of problems, especially after Steve Fr cinaux s excellent reference leak fix, so if you play around with current pygobject git head, you really also have to use the current GTK+ git head. Speaking of which, if you want to port applications and always stay on top of the pygobject/GTK development without having to clutter your package system with make install s of those, it works very well to have this in your ~/.bashrc: 
export GI_TYPELIB_PATH=$HOME/projects/gtk/gtk:$HOME/projects/gtk/gdk
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/projects/pygobject
Better GVariant/GDBus support The GNOME world is moving from the old dbus-glib python bindings to GDBus, which is integrated into GLib. However, dbus-python exposed a really nice and convenient way of doing D-Bus calls, while using GDBus from Python was hideously complicated, especially for nontrivial arguments with empty or nested arrays: 
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
from gi._gi import variant_type_from_string
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
    '/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
vb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
vb.init(variant_type_from_string('r'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'test'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('u', 1))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'gtk-ok'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'Hello World!'))
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('s', 'Subtext'))
# add an empty array
eavb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
eavb.init(variant_type_from_string('as'))
vb.add_value(eavb.end())
# add an empty dict
eavb = GLib.VariantBuilder()
eavb.init(variant_type_from_string('a sv '))
vb.add_value(eavb.end())
vb.add_value(GLib.Variant('i', 10000))
args = vb.end()
result = notify.call_sync('Notify', args, 0, -1, None)
id = result.get_child_value(0).get_uint32()
print id
So I went to making the GLib.Variant constructor work properly with nested types and boxed variants, adding Pythonic GVariant iterators and indexing (so that you can treat GVariant dictionaries/arrays/tuples just like their Python equivalents), and finally a Variant.unpack() method for converting the return value of a D-Bus call back into a native Python data type. This looks a lot friendlier now: 
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
    '/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
args = GLib.Variant('(susssasa sv i)', ('test', 1, 'gtk-ok', 'Hello World!',
    'Subtext', [],  , 10000))
result = notify.call_sync('Notify', args, 0, -1, None)
id = result.unpack()[0]
print id
I also prepared another patch in GNOME#640181 which will provide the icing on the cake, i. e. handle the variant building/unpacking transparently and make the explicit call_sync() unnecessary: 
from gi.repository import Gio, GLib
d = Gio.bus_get_sync(Gio.BusType.SESSION, None)
notify = Gio.DBusProxy.new_sync(d, 0, None, 'org.freedesktop.Notifications',
    '/org/freedesktop/Notifications', 'org.freedesktop.Notifications', None)
result = notify.Notify('(susssasa sv i)', 'test', 1, 'gtk-ok', 'Hello World!',
            'Subtext', [],  , 10000)
print result[0]
I hope that I can get this reviewed and land this soon. Thanks to our sponsors! Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation and Collabora for sponsoring this event!

25 January 2011

Christoph Berg: HP 2605dn not recognizing new cartridge

When my wife bought her HP 2605dn color laser, she had also ordered a set of replacement cartridges because the originals would supposedly not last very long. It turned out that they would last over two years, though. Now, the black cartridge was empty. The replacements are original HP components, but recycled/refilled second hand from a different source. I put in the black one, and the trouble started with the new drum having a big scratch that would appear in every print. After two years, returning the cartridge was not an option. As the old drum was still good, the idea was to put the new toner into the old cartridge. A bit of googling (and visual inspection) quickly revealed that you are not supposed to do this, the device doesn't have any facilities to access anything. Some post did indicate though that the cartridge actually consists of two parts that are only held together by two pivot pins and two small springs. If you pull the two parts apart a bit, you can feel the axis the parts are moving around. So, I would try to use the old drum part with the new toner container part. Removing the springs is easy (also removing the flap covering the drum, along with a tiny third spring). The two pivot pins are pretty inaccessible, but I managed to pull out both using a pointy tong. One pin is made of metal, if you need more space you can drill a small hole right next to it. The other pin is made of plastic with a small hole in it, in one case I succeeded by screwing in a little screw and pulling at it. Reassembling the parts is not so hard. I put the "new" cartridge into the printer, waited for the initialization to finish, only to find out the printer would still think the cartridge was empty and should be replaced. Duh. I then discovered a small chip attached to one corner of the drum unit, probably carrying product ID and some serial number. Luckily, it was easy to be removed and exchanged with the other drum unit. Still, the printer thought the cartridge was empty. Some (windows) driver re-installations later it was clear that there is no "ignore fill level and print anyway" option. (Cups didn't print either.) The HP Support Forum has a long Ink cartridge empty but it's not thread with lots of complaints but few answers. (Their problem is mostly with new HP cartridges becoming "empty" after a few days.) Someone suggests trying to cold reset the printer. For the 2605dn, that's holding the left and right buttons while powering on. I removed the cartridges for doing so. When I had put them back in, the printer asked me to confirm that non-HP material was installed, and subsequently didn't display any fill level for the black cartridge anymore, just " ? " in the display. Printing works now. Yay. (Lesson learned: I still hate dealing with printers.)

22 January 2011

Matthew Palmer: Debugging Debian Installer

I've been doing a bit of work recently on the netcfg portion of Debian Installer, with the largest work so far being adding IPv6 support. Unlike most of the rest of d-i, netcfg is written in C, and as such suffers from some difficulties in the realm of debugging. Worse, the whole d-i environment is rather bereft of the usual debugging tools (strace, lsof, etc) -- but most importantly, in this case, gdb. Thanks to some hints from Julien Cristau, I was reminded of the existence of gdbserver, a small part of gdb that allows you to debug a program running on a remote machine, using a copy of gdb running on your local machine. It's designed for debugging embedded systems, I think, because all of the heavy lifting (symbol lookups, etc) happens on your local machine, not where gdbserver is running. Here are the steps I took to get a useful gdbserver session inside d-i:
  1. Get the gdb sources (apt-get source gdb) and drop into the gdbserver tree (cd gdb-x.y.z/gdb/gdbserver)
  2. Configure gdbserver to build a static binary (LDFLAGS=-static ./configure). This is necessary because you don't want to have to faff around with library dependencies inside the d-i environment. Then build gdbserver (make).
  3. Copy gdbserver over to your d-i machine/VM (I like using netcat; nc -l -p 31310 >/bin/gdbserver on the d-i machine, and nc IPADDR 31310 <gdbserver where you built gdbserver), then make it executable (chmod /bin/gdbserver)
  4. Fire up gdbserver in d-i, attaching it to the process you wish to debug: gdbserver host:31337 --attach PID
  5. Now things get a little trickier... on your local machine, you need to have an unstripped copy of the binary you're debugging. For me, this is easy, because I'm building netcfg myself (to keep the symbols, I just run DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=noopt dpkg-buildpackage -b -rfakeroot) but I'm not sure what you'd do if you were just tracing around for fun.
  6. Once you've got your binary, just run gdb BINARY on your host machine to start gdb running.
  7. For the "even trickier" part of the show, your local machine also needs copies of all the libraries your binary is linked against. If you don't have this, when you try to debug you'll get all sorts of "wrong library or version mismatch?" errors, and your backtraces will likely break (amongst other things). Again, for me, this is easy, because I'm only running the d-i initrd, but if you're debugging something later in the installation process you might need to unpack some udebs somewhere. All I have to do is keep the initrd build tree around (which lives in the installer tree, under build/tmp/netboot/tree). Once you've got your tree of libraries, you can continue.
  8. You need to tell gdb about that tree of libraries, by running the following in gdb: set solib-absolute-prefix /path/to/library/tree
  9. Now, tell gdb to connect to your gdbserver: target remote IPADDR:31337 -- gdb should tell you "Remote debugging using IPADDR:31337", and the gdbserver should say "Remote debugging from host LOCALIP:31337".
  10. Now, you should be able to interact with the program being debugged just like any other. Enjoy!

21 January 2011

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: People behind Debian: Michael Vogt, synaptic and APT developer

Michael and his daughter Marie

Michael has been around for more than 10 years and has always contributed to the APT software family. He s the author of the first real graphical interface to APT synaptic. Since then he created software-center as part of his work for Ubuntu. Being the most experienced APT developer, he s naturally the coordinator of the APT team. Check out what he has to say about APT s possible evolutions. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Michael. Who are you? My name is Michael Vogt, I m married and have two little daughters. We live in Germany (near to Trier) and I work for Canonical as a software developer. I joined Debian as a developer in early 2000 and started to contribute to Ubuntu in 2004. What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? I can not decide on a single one so I will just be a bit verbose. From the very beginning I was interested in improving the package manager experience and the UI on top for our users. I m proud of the work I did with synaptic. It was one of the earliest UIs on top of apt. Because of my work on synaptic I got into apt development as well and fixed bugs there and added new features. I still do most of the uploads here, but nowadays David Kalnischkies is the most active developer. I also wrote a bunch of tools like gdebi, update-notifier, update-manager, unattended-upgrade and software-properties to make the update/install situation for the user easier to deal with. Most of the tools are written in python so I added a lot of improvements to python-apt along the way, including the initial high level apt interface and a bunch of missing low-level apt_pkg features. Julian Andres Klode made a big push in this area recently and thanks to his effort the bindings are fully complete now and have good documentation. My most recent project is software-center. Its aim is to provide a UI strongly targeted for end-users. The goal of this project is to make finding and installing software easy and beautiful. We have a fantastic collection of software to offer and software-center tries to present it well (including screenshots, instant search results and soon ratings&reviews). This builds on great foundations like aptdaemon by Sebastian Heinlein, screenshots.debian.net by Christoph Haas, ddtp.debian.org by Michael Bramer, apt-xapian-index by Enrico Zini and many others (this is what I love about free software, it usually adds , rarely takes away ). What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? For apt I would love to see a more plugable architecture for the acquire system. It would be nice to be able to make apt-get update (and the frontends that use this from libapt) be able to download additional data (like debtags or additional index file that contains more end-user targeted information). I also want to add some scripts so that apt (optionally) creates btrfs snapshots on upgrade and provide some easy way to rollback in case of problems. There is also some interesting work going on around making the apt problem resolver a more plugable part. This way we should be able to do much faster development. software-center will get ratings&reviews in the upstream branch, I really hope we can get that into Wheezy. If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? In that case I would start with a refactor of apt to make it more robust about ABI breaks. It would be possible to move much faster once this problem is solved (its not even hard, it just need to be done). Then I would add a more complete testsuite. Another important problem to tackle is to make maintainer scripts more declarative. I triaged a lot of upgrade bug reports (mostly in ubuntu though) and a lot of them are caused by maintainer script failures. Worse is that depending on the error its really hard for the user to solve the problem. There is also a lot of code duplication. Having a central place that contains well tested code to do these jobs would be more robust. Triggers help us a lot here already, but I think there is still more room for improvement. What s the biggest problem of Debian? That s a hard question :) I mostly like Debian the way it is. What frustrated me in the past were flamewars that could have been avoided. To me being respectful to each other is important, I don t like flames and insults because I like solving problems and fighting like this rarely helps that. The other attitude I don t like is to blame people and complain instead of trying to help and be positive (the difference between it sucks because it does not support $foo instead of it would be so helpful if we had $foo because it enables me to let me do $bar ). For a long time, I had the feeling you were mostly alone working on APT and were just ensuring that it keeps working. Did you also had this feeling and are things better nowadays ? I felt a bit alone sometimes :) That being said, there were great people like Eugene V. Lyubimkin and Otavio Salvador during my time who did do a lot of good work (especially at release crunch times) and helped me with the maintenance (but got interested in other area than apt later). And now we have the unstoppable David Kalnischkies and Julian Andres Klode. Apt is too big for a single person, so I m very happy that especially David is doing superb work on the day-to-day tasks and fixes (plus big project like multiarch and the important but not very thankful testsuite work). We talk about apt stuff almost daily, doing code reviews and discuss bugs. This makes the development process much more fun and healthy. Julian Andres Klode is doing interesting work around making the resolver more plugable and Christian Perrier is as tireless as always when it comes to the translations merging. I did a quick grep over the bzr log output (including all branch merges) and count around ~4300 total commits (including all revisions of branches merged). Of that there ~950 commits from me plus an additional ~500 merges. It was more than just ensuring that it keeps working but I can see where this feeling comes from as I was never very verbose. Apt also was never my only project, I am involved in other upstream work like synaptic or update-manager or python-apt etc). This naturally reduced the time available to hack on apt and spend time doing the important day-to-day bug triage, response to mailing list messages etc. One the python-apt side Julian Andres Klode did great work to improve the code and the documentation. It s a really nice interface and if you need to do anything related to packages and love python I encourage you to try it. Its as simple as: 
import apt
cache = apt.Cache()
cache["update-manager"].mark_install()
cache.commit()
Of course you can do much more with it (update-manager, software-center and lots of more tools use it). With pydoc apt you can get a good overview. The apt team always welcomes contributors. We have a mailing list and a irc channel and it s a great opportunity to solve real world problems. It does not matter if you want to help triage bugs or write documentation or write code, we welcome all contributors. You re also an Ubuntu developer employed by Canonical. Are you satisfied with the level of cooperation between both projects? What can we do to get Ubuntu to package new applications developed by Canonical directly in Debian? Again a tricky question :) When it comes to cooperation there is always room for improvement. I think (with my Canonical hat on) we do a lot better than we did in the past. And it s great to see the current DPL coming to Ubuntu events and talking about ways to improve the collaboration. One area that I feel that Debian would benefit is to be more positive about NMUs and shared source repositories (collab-maint and LowThresholdNmu are good steps here). The lower the cost is to push a patch/fix (e.g. via direct commit or upload) the more there will be. When it comes to getting packages into Debian I think the best solution is to have a person in Debian as a point of contact to help with that. Usually the amount of work is pretty small as the software will have a debian/* dir already with useful stuff in it. But it helps me a lot to have someone doing the Debian uploads, responding to the bugmail etc (even if the bugmail is just forwarded as upstream bugreports :) IMO it is a great opportunity especially for new packagers as they will not have to do a lot of packaging work to get those apps into Debian. This model works very well for me for e.g. gdebi (where Luca Falavigna is really helpful on the Debian side). Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions? There are many people I admire. Probably too many to mention them all. I always find it hard to single out individual people because the project as a whole can be so proud of their achievements. The first name that comes to my mind is Jason Gunthorpe (the original apt author) who I ve never met. The next is Daniel Burrows who I met and was inspired by. David Kalnischkies is doing great work on apt. From contributing his first (small) patch to being able to virtually fix any problem and adding big features like multiarch support in about a year. Sebastian Heinlein for aptdaemon. Christian Perrier has always be one of my heroes because he cares so much about i18n. Christoph Haas for screenshots.debian.net, Michael Bramer for his work on debian translated package descriptions.
Thank you to Michael for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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19 January 2011

Evgeni Golov: funny spam

yes, I do collect funny spam ;)Today I will present you some spammy funny comments I got on my (wordpress-powered) blog in the last months.
  1. 2010/09/24 at 03:08
    I cant believe, Facebook is currently down with a DNS failure. I guess Facebook having some issues. Businesses are reporting a near impossible 480% increase in productivity
  2. 2010/10/25 at 11:07
    Not quite on topic BUT really important: Please guys, donate something for Haiti! I just came back from a trip down there and I have to say the situation is really terrible! It s soon christmas time, so please be so kind and do something good! Thanks
  3. 2010/10/27 at 11:07
    Hey, I can t view your site properly within Opera, I actually hope you look into fixing this.
  4. 2010/11/18 at 12:26
    Are you watch Sarah Palin s TV show? I saw the trailer & wtf? -__- She s like, This is so much better than being in politics. It s like she s doing this just because she is losser. o.O What do you think? Do you believe she can be the next american presiden? ..
  5. 2010/11/30 at 15:40
    Wende im Proze gegen J rg Kachelmann. Die des Publikumslieblings haben ihr Mandat niederlegt. Der Proze in Mannheim soll dennoch planm ig fortgesetzt werden. Es werde keinen Antrag auf Aussetzung des Prozesses geben, f gte Rechtsanwalt Ralf Hoecker hinzu. Der neue Strafverteidiger Johann Schwenn (Hamburg) und die seit Verfahrensbeginn anwesende Pflichtverteidigerin Andrea Comb werden top vorbereitet sein, sagte er weiter.
  6. 2010/12/09 at 17:31
    How I can download documents from WikiLeaks?
    Thanks
  7. 2010/12/10 at 10:09
    Hi, you should check out http://www.voteonwikileaks.com. It s sort of like a crowdsourced collection of arguments against Wikileaks. Considering you re a blogger, i think you d find it to be an interesting read
  8. 2010/12/16 at 18:38
    It appears as though Julian Assange will at least be out on bail any minute but what about Bradley Manning? Solitary confinement for seven months so far without being convicted of anything, without a trial, even. That s bad!
  9. 2010/12/24 at 09:03
    Gibt es ein Jailbreakme f r Nerdomaten? Gen gend Bugs sollte es im IE6 geben :D
  10. 2010/12/29 at 13:22
    Der hammer bei den dingern ist aber eigentlich, dass sie nicht mit win7 laufen sondern mit: XP!!!!!!! Das ist doch der Hammer oder? hab auch ein Beweisvideo vom Hochfahren des Teils
  11. 2010/12/30 at 05:03
    Widespread criticism of RealVNC vulnerability is fixed
    A security report claimed that RealVNC software virtual network a high-risk vulnerability could allow a malicious attacker does not need a password to login to a remote system
  12. 2011/01/05 at 18:10
    is it true that it is not possible to use that sky thing with verizon?
Sorry, some are in German ;)What s so funny about them you ask? Well, the do contain actual content (even if not always matching to the posts they were attached to), they look relevant to the time they were posted and still are spam: the links in the homepage field of the comment led to spamsites. Numbers 9 and 10 even funnier: they are exact copies of already present comments to the same post.And oh, I think WikiLeaks should leak a cable about downloading stuff from WikiLeaks ;)

18 January 2011

Russell Coker: Conferences and People on the Autism Spectrum

There have been some recent discussions about issues related to the treatment of women at Free Software conferences, I ve written posts about Aspie Social Skills and Free Software [1] and Empathy, Autism, and Geeks [2] about this. But of course discussion continued on how Aspies supposedly cause problems that no-one seems to be noticing.Lisa of Chaotic Idealism wrote an interesting post about the NT social bias [3]. In summary NTs seem to think that Autism Spectrum Disorders are only about socialisation, not realising that for many people on the Spectrum it s sensory issues that are their main problem. Social problems are exacerbated by sensory issues and other causes of stress, so I think it s worth considering ways in which conferences can be planned to be less stressful for people on the Autism Spectrum, people who have SPD [4] that isn t associated with an ASD, and NTs who just get annoyed by loud noises etc.What Autism Conferences DoAutscape is one of only two conferences for people on the Autism Spectrum and the only one which clearly documents how they plan their conference [5]. The first noteworthy thing that they do is have badge colors to indicate what level of social interaction is desired by each delegate, I don t think that this is relevant to Free Software conferences as people who don t have sufficient social skills to suit at least a green badge probably won t be attending. But I think that when attending a conference about Free Software or any other equally geeky topic (if there is an equally geeky topic) it s worth keeping in mind the fact that there are probably a lot of people who would like to talk to you but lack the social skills to start a conversation.
No initiationRedPlease do not initiate any interaction with me.
Prior PermissionYellowPlease do not initiate unless I have already given you permission to approach me on a yellow badge.
Please initiateGreenI would like to socialise, but I have difficulty initiating. Please initiate with me.
NeutralWhite (or no badge)I am able to regulate my own interaction.
The next thing that they document is a black circle badge which indicates that the wearer shouldn t be photographed. Prior to reading that web site I wasn t aware of this being an Autistic issue, I was only aware of it being an issue for women who don t want zoomed-in pictures of themselves appearing on guys web sites (even pictures that aren t up-skirt or down-blouse can be unwelcome). A conference policy that prohibited photographs that zoom in on one person without that person s consent (or parental consent in the case of minors) would probably be a good idea.Another thing about badges is that it s a really good idea to have the delegate s name on both sides of the badge if the badge is attached in a way that permits it to turn. People on the Autism Spectrum tend to have some difficulty in recognising people and in remembering names. I find it inconvenient when someone expects me to recognise them but has their badge turned around so I can t see their name. Some people get really unhappy if they think that someone doesn t recognise them.Autscape has long breaks between activities and a leisure session each afternoon to allow delegates to recover from the stress of dealing with people. It seems to me that computer conferences in some cases could do with longer breaks between sessions. I find that a lot of the benefit of a conference is in what happens outside sessions and the standard practice of publishing videos of presentations makes personal meetings a more important part of the conference.Autscape has designated quiet spaces. I think that for computer conferences which have hack-labs (which seems to be most Free Software conferences nowadays even if they aren t labelled as such) it would be good to have some lab areas designated as quiet zones. I think that it is a really good thing to meet people you ve only known by email and then play some LAN based games against them and that this should be encouraged as part of a conference, but having that sort of thing separated from people who want to do some quiet coding is a really good idea. Whether people want to do quiet coding, read email, or just escape from the stress of a conference a quiet hack-lab would be a good place for it.An issue that s related to quiet spaces is the ability to escape from social situations. One of my pet hates is corporate meetings on boats, when the boat is in motion there is no escape. Corporate meetings that are only accessible by coach are also bad. Fortunately most conferences aren t like that.The Autscape web site states that they prohibit people from wearing perfume or aftershave to help people who are sensitive to smell. My observation of Free Software conferences is that encouraging everyone to have a shower every morning would be a good idea as there are stronger smells from unwashed people than from perfume.One thing that s interesting about the Autscape web site is that they have different color schemes available and have tested it in multiple web browsers including Safari and Konqueror (which apparently don t work so well). It s interesting to note that they test with such a variety of browsers including free software ones most corporations don t do that.Sensory Processing IssuesThe main SPD issues related to conferences seem to be noise and light related.For social events one difficulty that most people on the Spectrum seem to face is in listening to one person in a noisy crowded room. As well as that sudden noises and loud background noises can be very stressful. While it s sometimes impossible to avoid crowds (which can be another problem) it is often possible to select venues that have less noise problems. A venue with carpet on the floor and soft walls (anything other than brick or concrete) will be a lot quieter than one with hard surfaces that reflect noise. It seems that a quiet venue will benefit NTs as well, there seems to be a strong correlation between the price of food at restaurants and the amount of sound absorbing material on the floor and walls people who can afford a good dining experience seem to want it quiet.In terms of visual issues the relevant problems seem to be related to sudden transitions and lecture halls that are extremely dark. The only thing that can be done by conference organisers is to seek to have the lights in the lecture halls as bright as possible without preventing the viewing of the projector screen, this is usually done anyway.For social events the whole binge drinking at crowded bars thing doesn t work too well due to noise, poor lighting, crowds, and the smell of vomit. But there s no shortage of reasons to discourage binge drinking at conferences.FoodPsychology Today has a good article about preferences for food and picky eaters [6]. Lots of people on the Autism Spectrum have similar issues. The thing to do when arranging a conference meal is to have things neat and without needless combinations. Think about making food look more like what you would expect to see in a Japanese restaurant and less like Paella. Also having some very plain food on offer is a good thing, I think that bread-rolls for dinner and ice-cream for desert makes a viable meal. But any dish with a word like hash or mixed in it s name isn t a good option. Finally some combinations are really bad, I always find rare steak and potatoes on the same plate to be rather disgusting potato that s blood-stained doesn t appeal. The majority of conference meals satisfy these criteria.Autscape provides options of eating outside the main dining hall for people who can t tolerate the noise. For a Free Software conference it might be a better idea to provide seating outside the main area for people who are going to make noise. I don t mind people who want to get really drunk at the conference dinner, but I would prefer them to be in a separate room. Also when assisting a drunk friend to leave the venue before they cause more problems it would be convenient if there was a good place to take them to. The one occasion when I had to strongly encourage a friend to leave a conference dinner to reduce his embarrassment the next day (and reduce the annoyance for everyone else) there was no good place to take him so he just came back!ConclusionI don t expect that anyone will make any significant changes to conference plans after reading this post. I have tried to focus on things that would benefit NTs as well, but there are practical issues that get in the way such as the cost and availability of venues that are large enough. But there are some smaller ideas that can be implemented with relative ease.I hope that the people who are making claims about Autism and conference behavior will refer to this in future. If you think that there is a problem with the way people on the Spectrum act at conferences then the solution will more likely involve the suggestions I make here than anything else.

17 January 2011

Julien Viard de Galbert: Triaging bugs is not that hard !

There is a big thread on -devel that started about Forwarding bugs upstream, the idea is that it should be the maintainer s job. While it s true in general, some understaffed teams are so flooded by bugs that they just can t do it.
I ve seen more than once the X Strike Force asking a user to report upstream (pointing to the relevant BTS) and come back with the tracking URL to be attached to the bug. This was mostly for driver issue if I remember well.
And most users did it, so thanks! Then the thread evolved in lots of directions, I m not following all of it, but there was the question of the bug triaging and as I m doing it for the X packages, I want to share about my experience here. The available triaging docs The debian wiki already have a general Bug Triage page.
The thread pointed to the KDE Bug triaging page.
The X Strike Force has some pages, one on the wiki and a new one more specific to bug triaging on the alioth project s doc.
And when it comes to closing bugs with version information, there is a good read on the wiki: Bugs Version Tracking.
Finally don t hesitate to reopen the BTS documentation whenever you need to write to control@b.d.o ! Now if all those docs don t help you, then try to improve the docs as a first step ! ;) Talk with the maintainer(s) Well I did met Julien Cristau and Cyril Brulebois in person during mini-DebConf Paris/2010 that certainly helped. But we exchanged several mails, or met on IRC channel #debian-x.
But the triaging rules of the X Strike Force (linked above) were pretty clear anyway. My current process This process has evolved over time with the response of several contributors either to help or to fix to my mistakes, thanks!
  1. List bug from UDD: XSF unstable bugs sorted by date.
  2. Pick an old bug (once you answer and UDD runs, the bug moves down the list, so there are always old bugs on the top).
  3. Read the report, don t be afraid by the subject, it might be unrelated, the bug might be merged with other bugs, then reading the other bugs can help.
  4. If relevant try to reproduce it. (most bugs in X are hardware related or specific to one setup, so it s not that often that I have something to test).
  5. Decide what to do, most of the time, I will ping the submitter.
  6. I m a mutt user, and to my help the bts command as a way to open the bug mbox in mutt, that makes it really easy to answer the bug.
    So I launch bts -m show $n where $n is the bug number, and I can then answer the bug from mutt.
    The triaging procedure suggest to ping -submitter, but using mutt it s easier to just reply and add a -quiet to the bug number (this avoid spamming the debian-x with all my pings).
  7. In the message, always try to be kind and helpful, most of the time ask to test newer versions.
  8. Keep track of the pinged bugs, well I do it for my blog but it will be useful anyway, see below.
  9. When the submitter answers, just react accordingly, if the bug can be closed, then close it ! ;)
  10. If after some time, the bug are still not answered, consider closing them (I haven t started that yet, but this will probably get the bug number down faster:) ).
Note: Sometime I don t send the bug to -quiet so that other debian-x subscriber can have a look at the bug. They then can give me advices, or close the bug directly with a stronger reason than any I could have found. ;) To submitters, please keep the bug CCed when you answer, thanks. For the skeptics Yes as a newbie I did some mistakes, but I was always corrected in a nice way, with explanations. Also I try to have a conservative approach, I don t close bugs if I m not sure, I ask if I can close them, so it might take longer, but in the end the effect is the same for the bug, but not the same to the submitter ! ;) Also this work might look boring, but it s actually rewarding, most of the answers I received included a cheerful message thanking me for following up on the bug. Not to mention all I ve learned on Xorg. Conclusion As long as I have time for it, I ll continue to triage bugs and I d love to see others coming to help me on X or probably better go and help some other teams that also need help, and flood the planet with bug triaging reports ! ;) Get involved !

David Welton: The Kindle and Book Sharing

I'm very pleased with the Kindle; all of a sudden, I can quickly, easily, and fairly cheaply buy lots of English language books that otherwise I would have had to order (not cheap, not quick). Furthermore, they're not cluttering up my house, either! Not that I view books as clutter, but sooner or later we're going to have to move out of the apartment we're in, and the less I have to haul around, the better. However, the fact that it's not easy to share the books with my wife is starting to annoy me. I could always give her the Kindle itself to read something, but that would deprive me of not only that book, but all the others I have as well. Indeed, the difficulty of the problem lies in the difference between digital goods and physical goods. Real books are: Ebooks are: Setting aside the costs and benefits to society of DRM, intellectual property, and so on, let's take the point of view of Amazon, book publishers and authors, who all want to maximize their income, and of readers, who want as much freedom as possible, and also, for the sake of argument, believe that paying for books leads to more money for authors, which leads to more books. I think the trick is to try and make the ebook market as similar as possible to that for real books. For instance, if you had the freedom to resell an ebook quickly and easily, the price would likely start dropping quickly, as people started selling their "used" copies of books they didn't want to keep. This would be good for the consumer, but potentially quite bad for authors, as fewer new copies would be sold. Sure, we have used book stores, but the practical limitations involved, and the fact that real books show some wear and tear, mean that there's still an incentive to buy new books. On the other hand, an ebook ought to be a bit cheaper than a real book if it's something you'd consider reading and then selling, because you no longer have that option, so the lack of freedom should be priced in to the original price. The other problem they seem to be having is with the lending of books. If you lend a real book, you can only lend it to someone who you see with some frequency, so there's already a big geographical limitation. Also, while they're reading it, you obviously can't. You have to have some trust in them, that they'll give it back to you sooner or later, so you won't just loan it to anyone: if you wanted a transaction with more finality, you'd simply sell it. Currently, Kindle books can only be lent for two weeks, and you can't access it while the other person has it. I think the latter part of that is fair, but two weeks seems like an arbitrary number. Remember though, that they don't want you to be able to just give someone a book, with no strings attached and no return-by date, because then you could also sell it, undercutting their store prices, and so on, as above. So to make lending work, they have to have some "strings attached". I think "two weeks" is a fairly arbitrary string though. What would work better? Perhaps a way that permanently differentiates the original purchaser from anyone borrowing it. For instance, a "recall now" button? This button would, when the original purchaser pressed it, disable it on the borrower's device and reenable it on the buyer's device. This would prevent secondary markets, or at least limit them, because the 'borrowed' books would be inferior to the originals. And yet it might still work well for lending; I could lend books to people who trust me without problems. Interestingly, I became aware of this site the other day: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/ so it looks like whatever Amazon does, there are going to be tradeoffs involved. And of course, there is the point of view that all of the costs involved by DRM are too high, but that's a fairly involved discussion in its own right. What do you think?

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