After writing previous post I have realized that I haven't written any entry in my blog since 24th July. Heh! I hadn't even had holidays then! I have been quite busy enyoing a nice summer, going to Lanzarote some days and resting after the hard last months of work. Now I am working a bit far from home, which means that I don't have a very decent Internet access during the week, so I am not able to blog enough, and I am only trying to keep reading email and having my packages ready, as well as reading different interesting stuff I found out there. Anyway, I hope to keep my blog more updated than these months. For now I am going to update the read books list. I have been reading action novels and so... with summer hot those are the best readings!

After writing previous post I have realized that I haven't written any entry in my blog since 24th July. Heh! I hadn't even had holidays then! I have been quite busy enyoing a nice summer, going to Lanzarote some days and resting after the hard last months of work. Now I am working a bit far from home, which means that I don't have a very decent Internet access during the week, so I am not able to blog enough, and I am only trying to keep reading email and having my packages ready, as well as reading different interesting stuff I found out there. Anyway, I hope to keep my blog more updated than these months. For now I am going to update the read books list.

The following phrase jumped out at me from a post Rafe Needleman made earlier today about Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

Google is going to “take a shot” at a disconnected version, for users who want to access files when they are offline.

While I was digging around trying to figure out where he got this, Garett Rogers posted his own discovery:

As you probably know, I really like to dig through source code and sometimes I find things. […] I will start with the most interesting piece of code I found. Google is working on a solution that will allow you to install Writely on your local machine:

    if (location.host.indexOf("localhost") > -1)
     
      if (location.host.indexOf("Prefactor") > -1)
        return "http://localhost:8180/Prefactor/" + page + paramString;
      else
        return "http://localhost:8180/Docster/" + page + paramString;
      else
      return "http://" + location.host + "/" + page + paramString;

This is absolutely huge news. Regular readers of my blog know that I view Google’s lack of an offline story (in all but a few areas anyway) as its biggest hole, particularly when stacked against Microsoft, where that’s arguably its greatest strength. So, the fact that Google is working on this is big news is itself. I’m also intrigued by the method they’re apparently using, namely a localhost web server, rather than a thick client or persistent storage via a browser extension. I’ve been thinking for a long time about the offline problem, and I’ve come to the conclusion that localhost web servers (which I first saw used to great effect in Radio Userland—credit where credit is due) are the ideal solution. Thick clients play to Microsoft’s strength (not to mention the OS issue), so that’s not the best approach. And the notion of adding persistent storage to the browser opens up a host of cross browser compatibility problems. And while it may be possible to come up with a standard API that works across Firefox, IE, and other browsers, such a standard is likely years away, particularly given that we haven’t even begun the “competing implementations battle it out” phase yet.

There's been an amazing amount of press and blogging about the whole Firefox trademark issue. Some of it very positive and with a good grasp of the crux of the problem. Some of it not so positive. I hope you can forgive me using my blog to ask a question but: Ian, where did I go wrong? What could I have done to salvage the situation? I'm certainly not pleased with having to do this but I didn't really see a whole lot of other options.

It was also nice to see Linux.com do a more in depth analysis of the issue. I'm glad to see Larry Rosen seemingly agreeing with me that they could have a free copyright license and a more restrictive trademark license, as I had proposed many times. They did manage to misquote me a little though. "annoyingly bureaucratic and is completely unprecedented in the Free Software community" was said in reference to Mozilla's requirement for patches to be vetted, not the discussion about the trademark.

Last weekend, I went to Zurich for the second leg of my own personal BSP marathon. Martin Krafft organised the BSP at the AI Lab in Zurich, arranging sponsorship and encouraging local DDs and users to turn up. Martin and I started early on Saturday morning, opening up the lab shortly before 9am and making a start on the RC bug list. Over the course of the next few hours, more people turned up and started work too - local DDs and a couple of Debian users from ETH. We worked our way through a fair number of bugs that day; personally I closed #389318 (a grotty FTBFS bug caused by IMHO a design mistake upstream - parsing header files using a simple awk script to create an m4 script to then generate C source) and spent quite some time digging into some other bugs. For our late dinner on Saturday, we headed to a local American-style bar/restaurant in Oerlikon called Cheyenne. Their speciality, it seems, is the "Big Mama", the largest burger I've ever seen! It comes on a huge serving plate, and is enough to feed up to 4 people...

I took the chance over dinner to chat with the small group of locals, especially Axel Beckert who had some interesting stories about Fedora, Opera and other groups. On Sunday, we started slightly later but probably had a more productive day in terms of the number of bugs closed. I fixed some silly FTBFS issues in ser: #384772 and #390008 were both caused by the build system assuming i386/amd64 compiler options. I adapted patches suggested by Julien Blache from his own work on openser (thanks!) and tested on my sparc and hppa systems at home. Job done... For the rest of the day, I used the time to work on remaining bugs in my own packages. Both CVS and debian-cd needed new uploads to be ready for the Etch freeze. CVS had a bucket-load of new translations following Christian Perrier's call, and debian-cd had a large number of bugs that had already been fixed in svn for a long time. Between those 2 uploads (and some other old bugs in debian-cd that needed reviewing) that made another 17 bugs fixed, although none of them were RC. Once those uploads were done, I continued on with my debian-cd multi-arch development work. On Sunday evening, we went into the middle of the old city centre in Zurich to a more traditional Swiss restaurant. Several of Martin's colleagues from the lab joined us, and we had some widely varying conversation, ranging from Debian (of course! *grin*) to gossip in the lab via lots of other topics. Due to my ridiculously early flight home on Monday morning we couldn't stay out too late nattering, but nonetheless all the people seemed to enjoy themselves. The Swiss group were a fair bit quieter then the Dutch the previous weekend, but seemed just as committed to getting work done and getting Etch out on time. It was lovely to meet and spend time with them, and I've promised to go back and visit again soon. Until then, I've put my small selection of photos online.

So it's been pointed out that since I'm no longer terribly involved in Debian, I possibly shouldn't be on Planet Debian nowadays. So unless there's any violent objections I'll ask to be removed at the end of the week - my RSS gunk is at http://mjg59.livejournal.com/data/rss for those who want to read my delightful prose in any case.

Anyway. Some token Debian-related content. Mozilla corp are unhappy with Debian providing a package called "firefox" unless every patch provided has been approved by Mozilla in advance (there's also some stuff about the logo, but that's basically a bizarre corner aspect of the same problem). I'm not going to argue against this on philosophical grounds - it's clear that that isn't going to change anybody's mind. Instead, let's compare this to some other major applications:

• Linux. Pretty much every vendor patches Linux. Part of this is for hardware support (adding out of tree drivers, and so on), but a great deal of it is feature development. A lot of patches that appear on LKML have already shipped in vendor kernels.
  
• X. Arguably one of the most forked applications shipped by any distribution - almost every X server shipped by any vendor ever is based on the reference X11 code. Without the right to fork X and maintain its name, we wouldn't have the X.org implementation[1]. No composite, no accelerated indirect 3D rendering, no input or monitor hotplugging.
  
• Gnome. Vendor patches to Gnome have largely been concentrated on branding and defaults, but in some cases we've seen major functionality changes. The new menu applet in SLED 10 is an example of this, and depending on how it's received it's likely to influence upstream development.
  

On the Mozilla side of things, the closest I can really come up with is cdrecord. There's some pretty strong parallels (upstream being unhappy about various patches, requiring a sufficiently different work to have a different name), but the end result in the cdrecord case was that we ended up with an application that was poorly integrated with the rest of the Linux environment for the sake of remaining consistent across different operating systems.

I'm not saying that that's going to happen to Mozilla. But we've seen numerous cases where allowing vendors to distribute derived versions has encouraged development and testing of new ideas, and I think in most cases that's resulted in benefits to the upstream project. The fundamental problem with refusing to allow patches that cause significant deviations from upstream behaviour is that it makes it impossible for anyone to actually get things like UI experiments into the hands of users. With Gnome, if upstream don't like your idea you have the opportunity to prove them wrong and possibly change their mind. With Mozilla, if upstream don't like your idea you're pretty much screwed. Most distributions are going to be unhappy about losing the magic Firefox branding, so you're unlikely to sell them on it. And you're not even allowed to provide binaries or source on your website unless you've renamed it away from Firefox.

I think the Mozilla corporation are missing something here. We shouldn't be prizing cross-platform consistency over integration and innovation, and we certainly shouldn't be doing our utmost to make it difficult for people to experiment with code. There's a reason that cd writing under Linux has been sucky for years, and it's not because people lacked the technical ability to make it better.

[1] Ok, the X.org case is slightly confused by the fact that they are upstream now. But without the ability to fork under the same name, they wouldn't have been.

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

And I still want to know what was going on yesterday. An entire colo facility with 7,000 machines was out of power, and it took three hours to fix it.

Using my preferred email environment lately has been really painful.

• Losing connection to my courier IMAP server at dreamhost (perhaps blame the wireless) and having to restart mutt
• vim hanging after a save (see the screenshot)

Does this affect other people? Any tips? My configs can be found in my $HOME Otherwise I have to use freakin’ gmail and cope with its problems.

On #debian.de, someone looked for an application to record the screen. So I tried finding the appropriate applications. On first try I found istanbul, but I remembered there was another one. I looked at the description of istanbul and tried searching some more. I remembered it was a city name, too, so I googled and finally found byzanz, too. Thus I filed a wishlist bug (#391860) on byzanz and istanbul to unify their descriptions, and maybe both use the terms "desktop session record" and "screencast". The bug on "byzanz" was immedeately closed, with no discussion taking place. Pretty much a "I like my description, closing the bug". This is not ok. It's just a wishlist bug. There is no harm in keeping it open anyway. And the package description is something you can always improve. Maybe tag it wontfix (however the next maintainer might want to fix it, after all). But just closing it twice (I reopened it once, stating that it is not fixed and thus shouldn't just be closed; I don't play bug ping-pong) without any discussion is not okay IMHO. To me this is just arrogant: "I don't want any wishlist bugs on my packages, and I don't care for your opinion." We've now been talking a bit on IRC; and it'll eventually be fixed on the next upload. But still I'm pretty annoyed by this reply I got back to the bug report... I think what helped is that the official description says "Record your desktop session to a GIF file", which contains exactly the word combination I was missing... "session record", because I'm not recording audio. Maybe the description should also contain the word "application", because after all that is what I'm very likely to want "record" an "application" (and not my full desktop). [Update: he didn't close the bug a second time. This was to a delayed email processing on bugs.debian.org, which processed the -done message after my reopen command. Sorry about this inaccurancy.]

Recently there's been some awe in the Free Software and general Linux world from several people over the fact that Debian is dropping Firefox from its distribution, and planning to replace it with GNU IceWeasel. Personally, I don't see what else the Firefox maintainers should do. While I can understand the Mozilla people's concern over modified (read: possibly trojaned) versions of Firefox and that they need to protect their trademark against abuse, I can't believe that there can't be a better way to handle this than to require review of every patch in the Debian package. After all, packaging a browser requires more than just writing a script that gets it compiled and that gets the compiled stuff in the .deb archive. There is also branding to be done—the Debian firefox package contains a search engine for Debian packages. I doubt this is part of the original firefox source, and there are more things. Additionally, sometimes you may have to change stuff so that it works with the specific quirks of the Debian distribution, or other things. Finally, in accordance with its published policy on the matter, the Debian distribution also wants to be able to distribute security-patched versions of Firefox after Debian Stable releases; and we want to do that not just by throwing in the new version of Firefox, but by using the older version, patching it so that the security bug (and only the security bug) gets fixed, and releasing that. We can't use the official mozilla.org/mozilla.com source for that, since they cease security support after half a year or so (which is, by far, not enough for Debian); and the discussion in the bug report on the matter does not inspire confidence that we would be allowed to release a security-fixed version of firefox and still call it firefox. The alternative would be to forget about our own security releases and ceding to the braindead mozilla.org/mozilla.com security policy, but I have a pretty public opinion on that one. So that leaves us with not adhering to their braindead trademark policy, which requires us to choose another name. And as it happens, there already appears to be a piece of software that not only is a forked Firefox, it also drops non-free software from the release, something which Debian has to do anyway. So why not use that instead? BTW, yes, I did call their trademark policy braindead. No, IANAL. But you don't have to be a lawyer to see that doing something like the way Debian manages its trademark—you're not allowed to call it "official" unless your product is bit-by-bit the same thing as what Debian produces—is sane enough without being a nuisance like the firefox trademark policy.

Trust is on the top on my list of topics of inquiry and I have made it one of my main themes in my writings on Debian. Forbes recently published a small piece on the The Economics of Trust, using trust as an example to explain why Somalias economy barely exists while many in the west, notably the US, are thriving. A little reductive but he has something there because indeed, the level of trust that consumers, investors, and everyone else in the chain has to have to make “it” happen is enormous. However, I am surprised he never mentiones the law in name, and contract law to be specific. He sort of subsumes things under formal mechanisms of trust, but it seems like without the law, there would be no trust… in which case, do we still call it trust? or trust in the law that is the condition of possibility for other mechanisms, which do exist. This topic of trust and accountability in capitalism is something that Weber actually spent a fair bit of time in General Economic History for those interested in such topics.

I have my email inbox finally under control. I started with 3000-odd messages in my Inbox a few weeks ago, and decided that I wanted to get my Inbox truly down to messages I hadn't replied to but intended to. I had a few still from when we moved a year ago, and I got to the last of those today - and found out that she's on LJ as well (Hi, Peggy!)

After this, the only one that's not from sometime in the last past week is a message about HPPA ELF ABI documents and LSB.

With some luck I'll be able to keep it this way!

I have had, ever since I got my current desktop, been frustrated with ALSA support for it. The machine is an Shuttle SN25P (with ice1724 onboard 7.1 sound card); it's otherwise very nice. I've had it for a bit over a year. When I got it, I lost several long weekends to hacking on ALSA and peering through asoundrc files, gstreamer and gnome-control-center source code, and other such things. There were two basic problems. One was that no matter what I did, I couldn't get the back speakers to play independent channels. Generally they mirrored the front speakers. The other was they adjusted volume based on the headphone mixer, rather than the master mixer - especially aggravating because muting the master mixer left my music still pouring out of the rear speakers! I filed a bug in the ALSA tracker, but didn't get much feedback, and eventually gave up. Last week, someone else seconded the bug. A helpful fellow responded and pointed us to a couple of basics, like the ALSA datasheet archive (very handy, since as far as I can tell a lot of them aren't available elsewhere, at least without NDAs). We spent some time poring over those. One of the interesting things I learned this weekend: there's a bunch of independent chips involved in onboard sound, in my case three. One seems to do communication between the computer and the analog-digital convertor, another handles the actual conversion (AC97 compatible in this case), and a third (I think...) handles the remaining two channels for 7.1 support since the second one only seems to do six. Digression time. Unfortunately one of the things he asked us to check was physical connections between the chips, and whether there was an onboard EEPROM... and somehow, in lightly applying enough compressed air to dislodge the dust, I got something wedged into the fan of my video card. Which began making a horrible rattling noise. And then when I attempted to clean it, I made it even worse. So at this point in my Saturday afternoon I had to go out and buy another one. The new one is marginally crappier than the old one, which was also pretty cheap, but the new one has the advantage of not needing a fan at all. Digression part two. While I was at the store, I picked up a Slug. I haven't unboxed it yet or gotten a drive for it, but I think I will in a week or two, and see if I can pick up some of Martin's excellent work in running Debian on one. I see that the IXP ethernet driver isn't working at the moment, maybe I can give Lennert a hand... At this point it was clear ALSA had eaten my weekend. So I came back to finish the job. The other reporter of the bug noticed a very interesting bit in the manual for the VT1617A (Via-manufactured AC97 codec) - which affected volume control and routing for the rear surround channels. I poked around in the kernel driver for a while, and discovered that the similar VT1616 chip exposed that bit as an ALSA mixer control (boolean switch)! So, wiring the two together was the next logical step. And suddenly I'd made a world of progress. I could hear things out the back speakers. Apparently - as far as I can tell anyway - no one has good solutions to this problem. I fumbled around with it for a while, wrote two more ALSA patches, and got manual configuration to use a software volume control (the "softvol" plugin) and mute switch which govern all channels. But I'm taking a break from that while I fish around for how this works on other chipsets. It's so immensely awkward that I can't believe there's no standard solution. I mean, is wanting your volume control to affect all your speakers such a rare thing? Anyway, this paragraph summarizes about six hours of beating my head on the wall. Most of this was at the asoundrc format, which is immensely picky, underdocumented, and seems like it really oughtn't to be needed at all. But apparently it is. During the course of this I got to learn how different applications decide which volume control to use, which was exciting in an exasperating and insanity inducing sort of way. You see, ALSA exports basically everything on the card as a "mixer control". There's some things which recognize volume controls by name, and some basic sorting by usefulness. xmms allows you to select any one control to use for its volume slider, which is nice. The GNOME mixer applet allows you to select any arbitrary _set_ of volume controls for the panel applet, which is even nicer. But it's at this point that, both last time and this time, I gave up in general rage. You see, the mixer applet is completely disconnected from the other and more useful way I deal with volume - the hotkeys on my keyboard, which GNOME also handles. But those go to gnome-settings-daemon, and a bunch of code labelled "acme". And this just adjusts the volume on the track which gstreamer (the GNOME audio management libraries) have marked as "MASTER", and that's done based on the order ALSA supplies the controls, which is done by a name-based sorting deep within the bowels of the ALSA library (it's in mixer/simple_none.c). And if you have two with similar enough names, it slaves them together. And nothing has a higher priority than the hardware supplied "Master Playback" controls. The best I could manage was to get the software volume control listed right after the master (in which case it wouldn't get adjusted at all), or adjusted in lockstep with the real master channel (which causes the front speakers to drop at a different rate from the rear speakers, messing up depth). Like last time, this was the point at which I gave up for the weekend. But this time I've learned a lot more and made a whole lot more progress! And written more of it down, so hopefully I have to rediscover less of it next time. I really was going to do a bunch of other things this weekend... but it just didn't happen.

I promised last week that I would be telling more on October 1st, about the mysterious Project X that I had been sporadically blogging about over the last few months. Better late than never, so here's the story: Casablanca I met Morocco-based French entrepreneur Laurent Bervas via his blog in January 2006, while looking for countries nearby EU with a promising ICT market, because of growing obstacles in getting work in my field, due to my not being an EU national. By the time the situation had reached the ridiculous extreme that friends were continuously loosing juicy recruitment bonuses, simply because their employer's HR department had issues with hiring non-EU nationals despite EU policies that clearly favor foreigners married to an EU national I figured that I ought to do something creative and see which of the countries bordering with EU might offer interesting opportunities. Laurent was blogging about all the exciting opportunities he kept on seeing, since he relocated to Morocco to conquer the high-end Real Estate market. One day, he wrote about Morocco becoming a rising figure in the outsourcing business for the Francophone market, which prompted me to contact him. After a couple of weeks of discussion, he cautiously dropped his idea for a niche market he had spotted: a simple Linux-based set top box to surf the Internet. He then asked if I would be interested in developing it and in launching a startup with him to promote it. I gladly accepted. Startup That's when Laurent decided to introduce me to an old friend of his, Fr d ric Baille, who spent several years at Compaq, culminating with a role in the team that launched the iPaq. Fred's help was instrumental in defining the market positioning of our product. Laurent and I discussed the product features at length over IM and immediately agreed that the OS would be based on Free Software. That left the hardware part unresolved... or so did Laurent think. Years ago, I briefly worked in the management team of an Estonian data security startup. This gave me the opportunity to network with several movers and shakers of the Estonian ICT. Among them was a promising ASIC and industrial design startup that produced really cool Thin Client hardware. The answer to our hardware needs, I figured, could easily be fulfilled by them. My idea of contracting the hardware to Estonia was initially received with skepticism, so I made a simple proposal: why don't we hold the inception meeting in Tallinn and meet with the potential hardware supplier at the same time? Fred and Laurent accepted, so we spent part of April 2006 there, with me acting both as their friendly tourist guide and as the middleman for the introductions. Fred and Laurent immediately fell in love with Tallinn's designer bars, omnipresent WiFi network and blond-a-plenty. Most of all, their visit at our potential hardware supplier gave them the answers they needed: Estonia is IT. Overview The hardware we selected is built around the AMD Geode LX, a nifty Pentium-compatible single-chip computer. It comes equipped with VGA output and four USB 2.0 ports, along with high-quality audio via 1/8" input and output jacks, plus a built-in encryption engine. We added 100baseT Ethernet connectivity (with provision for other networking options) to that, to complete the platform. For the software part, we used ingredients from Debian's Etch release, focusing on a configuration that would enable easy access to the most popular applications for home and small business use: Instant Messenger (Gaim), Multimedia player (Totem), PDF reader (Evince), Web browser (Firefox), word processor (AbiWord). The result is this: Press Coverage The editorial team at IT-Neeger (an A-level Estonian ICT blog) immediately scooped the story [in Estonian] and it produced such a strong response that the traditional Estonian media contacted the IT-Neeger team to write a feature article (stay tuned for details). The local Slashdot, Minut.EE, also reported [in Estonian] on the IT-Neeger article. Thus, myself and Laurent Bervas spent the better part of this week being blogged, interviewed and podcasted by a variety of Estonian and French publications, which is how I only got around blogging this bit tonight. Marketing Contrary to our competitors, we fully intend on keeping this platform open, so our initial market will actually be Free Software developers with a penchant for innovation. As such, our first 50 units are exclusively intended for interested developers who want to improve upon our initial idea and participate in defining the final product. Inquiries are welcome!

I’m visiting my parents’ house in Vermont, where they finally got cable after the provider agreed to dig up the ground and run a mile or so of cable to their house in return for a two year subscription agreement. (I think after two years the cable company will almost have broken even on the cost of the installation). Having been absent myself from the cable world for some time, I am impressed by the variety of interactive and “on demand” options. My parents’ low-end package includes dozens of free on-demand movies and music videos, as well as built-in easy-to-use tivo-like functionality. The on-demand music videos show one brief ad before the video — it seems the tradeoff is that if you are really going to watch the ad, they can get more money and show you fewer ads. (Or, maybe I’m wrong — if it’s one ad per video, I suppose that would be more ads, but it feels like fewer because of the “on demand” nature. I guess it’s a perceptual trick.) Anyway, getting to the title of this entry. Anybody in the field of intellectual property these days has got to find Weird Al Yankovic’s music video for Don’t Download This Song (warning, myspace page, authorized by Weird Al!) (or, here) (warning, YouTube page, also authorized by Weird Al!) at least a little amusing. If you haven’t watched it, see it now. The opening verse goes like this:

Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster, or Limeware or Kazaa
But deep in your heart you know the guilt would drive you mad
And the shame would leave a perminant scar
Cuz you’d start out stealing songs, then you’re robbing liquor stores
And selling crack and running over school kids with your car

On the cable video-on-demand channel, however, the names of all the filesharing services (Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, and Kazaa), are all replaced with beeps, as if they were vulgarities unfit for broadcast. Or cable. If you had never seen the video online, you’d actually be likely to think this was another Weird Al joke — that he can’t even sing the names of (the mostly now defunct) filesharing services publicly. But I’m pretty sure the video was censored by the cable provider or distributor and the irony is wholly unintended. There are a couple of possibilities here. One is that the distributor was trying to avoid inducement liability under the Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster. Could a funny song about filesharing actually meet the inducement standard? I sure hope not. The other possibility is that the distributor just found the references too abhorrent to leave in — basically the equivalent of the seven dirty words banned from broadcast TV and radio. Either way, if Weird Al were dead, I’m sure he’d be spinning in his grave. We’re lucky he’s still kicking. (“case” is kind of a misnomer for the title here, but is included for consistency).

It make be a small thing, but barriers to entry are .. barriers to entry. Erlang has a make-life file built into the system. If you see something like 'Emakefile', you might be tempted to google 'emake'. Dont. Instead, run 'erl -make'. And this is my point : that should be made much more obvious. Simply saying in the README for an app that uses this, 'build with erl -make' would remove all the mystery.

Yesterday I was catching up with my magazine reading at Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of Border) when I came across an ad for a drug ad for bipolar disorder that struck me as slightly different less euphoric, more cautious to be exact compared with the ads that have been bandied loosely in all sorts of magazines in the last decade in the US. The ad was for a drug called Abilify which must be some verbal riff on Ability (no?) and there was a very clear pronouncement on that ad that admitted they had no idea how the drug even worked. It went like this: ABILIFY may work by adjusting dopmamine activity instead of completely blocking it and by adjusting serotonin activity. However, the exact way any medicine for bipolar disorder works is unknown. I find this interesting because its tone seems to depart from other ads that seem somewhat more confident (or if they were less so, it was probably kept in the fine print). But when I went to the webpage, this caveat was a little harder to find, as it was a few clicks away within a page entitlted The Brain, Bipolar I Disorder, and ABILIFY . It provides a “handy” pictoral representation of what may be going on with your brain with bipolar disorder/treatment. I found the series somewhat odd and amusing, especially the one that used a magnifying glass to see” all the neurons and nerves or whatever they are in your brain. update: so you know, the US and New Zealand are the only 2 countries that allow drug direct to consumer advertising so I am not sure what the ad was doing in this magazine. It was American magazine but in Canada. I would think they would make them get rid of ads like that. Anyone know why it can slip through the border like that?

I have been using powersave until recently, but I have gone from unhappy to fed up. I also have acpi-support and laptop-mode-tools and hell knows how they all interact. To add insult to the injury, powersave loves to crash or get stuck at times and dbus screws up at times too, which in turn screws powersave. Oh dear. So i have ditched powersave, left laptop-mode-tools and acpi-support around. And i wrote a perl script, i have called it "pm" to handle things i used powersave for. Primarily dpm (device power management) in linux, suspend to ram/disk, battery monitoring and friends. Right now it's ~250 LOC with comments, and more importantly, i know how it works. And it can do things powersave can't. So i am basically happy. It can suspend and resume pci devices (using id<->function mapping) and report their status. It has a very slim suspend wrapper, that just locks screen, syncs drives, remembers power states of pci devices and asks kernel to suspend. After resuming, it restores power states, does chvt voodoo to wake up my intel graphics and sets drive spindown timeout (something, somewhere screws this one up). I also added a "summary" output, that i run using watch on one of terminals in my screen session, that reports cpu frequency and scaling policy, system temperature, battery state (including charge/discharge rate in watts and remaining capacity in mAh), harddrive state (when spinning, also temperature and number of spinups in the drive's lifetime... if you know how to get those two without spinning up the drive, tell me). Then power states of devices (usb, ethernet, wlan, sound, modem, pcmcia, smartcard controller and isa bridge). And as a cherry on top, a list of processes and pids that have recently caused block reads from the drive (needs vm/block_dump enabled in kernel), so you can find out what caused drive spinup. That is about it, now for the catch. It works for me, it probably won't for you, at least not out of the box, unless you have same laptop as me. The pci ids of devices are hardcoded (although not hard to change near the top of the script), so is the screen lock function and probably a bunch of other things. It shouldn't be hard to make a similar script for your system using mine as a starting point though. Another thing that is missing is a nice reporter for KDE to be put on the panel or somesuch. Also, since the script is simplistic in its design, it assumes lots of things about both kernel (tested on 2.6.16 stock debian) and userspace utilities (acpi, hdparm, smartctl) and (oh, coarse-grained evilness), that you have sudo (needed for hdparm at least). Another assumption is that you have single battery and single cpu. But for all the limitations, it goes that if you are going to use a script like that, you probably know enough to extend it to multi-battery and/or multi-core situations. The script definitely needs a hacker-nature :-). So for the brave, the script is to be found on the pm page.