A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU, this was a significant development but I didn’t get around to blogging about it. Now I have just discovered that they have a special deal for $799AU for a laptop including delivery! This is an amazing deal and gives you an AMD Sempron 3500 CPU (not a really fast CPU and only 32bit, but it’s faster than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is currently satisfying all my requirements for portable computing), 512M of RAM, an 80G hard drive and a 1280×800 display. It’s far from a high-end laptop (having a lower screen resolution and less RAM than my 3yo Thinkpad) but it will suffice for most things you might want to do on the move apart from running Xen. The exciting thing about this is that as it’s so cheap that most people will probably choose it in preference to a desktop system - the cheapest desktop system that Dell currently offers as a package is $898. The cheap desktop has a dual-core Athlon64, 1G of RAM, and a 160G hard drive. But for most tasks other than games such things aren’t really required. Also a local PC company Suntrom has advertised a new Lenovo Thinkpad with a Celeron-M 1.5GHz, 256M of RAM, 1024×768 display, and a 40G hard drive for $799. The Thinkpad has considerably less compute power than the Dell laptop, but it is a bit cheaper. If Lenovo has maintained the Thinkpad quality (while IBM owned the brand Thinkpad was the Rolls-Royce of laptops) then it would probably be the better choice. On many occasions I have heard people say that they want a laptop computer to save space. When a desktop machine cost $1200 and a laptop cost $3500 that idea was ridiculous. But now that a laptop appears to be the cheapest system in the Dell range on sale in Australia that would be quite a reasonable criteria for purchases. Of course the extra sales of laptops will help fund further laptop technology developments (such as flash storage) that will be of use to those of us who are serious about computing and use laptops they way that they were intended.

A while ago I decided I wanted to make a couple of nice little apps for my Nokia 6600.

• Bluetooth AutoOff - disable Bluetooth and/or hide it after a configurable period of time
• PicGodfather - automatically change the template by which photos are named in the camera app, based on date (I can't think of another reasonable schema)

After my successful adventure with pys60 I decided/realized that the Python API does not contain appropriate functions for what I need in my apps, so I decided to setup the development environment for C++ with Carbide C/C++ (the recommended IDE for S60 development for Nokia).

Of course, the IDE is a Windows application and the reason for which Nokia doesn't provide an IDE for Linux (is expected since they are developing maemo and are so into OS) eludes me.
On top of that, I have an Debian Etch amd64 installation[1], so that's more fun.

Fortunately, thanks to Robert Millan and Ove Kaaven, wine is installable from unstable on amd64 and a chroot is not needed[2] anymore.


Now let's see the dependency tree:

• Carbide
  
• ActivePerl
• ScriptHost
• mfc42.dll
• correct mix of native and built-in dlls in wine configuration
  

Yes, that is all ... summarized. And you can imagine I went though leaps and bounds and wasted a night with this to find out the hard way.

If you don't care about the reasons/story, you can skip to the paragraph where I ran into license issues.

So, first Carbide needs Active Perl. Not any version, but ActivePerl-5.6.1.635. You will find out after you install Carbide c++.

Active Perl, by default, will refuse to install in wine. It relies on some Script Host support.
Good news: it is available on Microsoft's support pages. Bad news: the file is not provided until you go through some crazy scheme[3] to certify you have a genuine Windows installation.

Of course, the genuine stuff failed to work in wine, duh, but having a windows XP OS in qemu was really useful... to try to go further.

Now that I mentioned the Windows XP machine in qemu you might be wondering 'why didn't you installed Carbide c++ in there and start hacking in qemu?' . Well, I wish it was that simple! Believe it or not, the installation in the Windows virtual machine failed in a muuuuch earlier stage it initially did in Wine! It failed in the unpacking phase of the installation, while in Wine that part worked without problems (default config is for Windows XP emulation). Talk about irony!

After a while of trying, I took the risky path (maybe I should install an antivirus, as suggested by wine) and downloaded the kit for the script host stuff from some site on the net (shhh!). Good. I don't remember if I used cabextract or if it worked quite straight forward, but the special configuration entry in Wine Configurator suggests otherwise.

Back to Active-Perl. Now we can try again to install it.

wine msiexec ActivePerl-5.6.1.635-MSWin32-x86.msi

Guess what? The installation failed now, too. After some time of poking, I realised the bastard was looking for mfc42.dll in the installation. There was no word about that in the error message, only in the wine logs there were some hints. No wonder Windows users learn very early to ignore error messages (the error message was plain uninformative).

Where to get mfc42.dll from? The virtual machine! I tried to send them via email, but the link was too slow. Now I realised I could have used winscp, but I didn't thought of that at the time.

The rescue did come this time from M$, but with some effort. It appears that mfc42.dll is by default present on XP, so you only find it for download in some kit (vc6redistsetup_enu.exe) for Windows 9x. That works (lost some time to figure that out, too) since the kit contains a mix of 9x, NT and independent dlls. I think this installation didn't work and I had to cabextract the files by hand and copy them in system32. I registered the mfc42.dll module, after copying it in windows/system32.

wine msiexec /y mfc42.dll

Well, now I have everything installed Carbide should start... Well, no! License issues! I got a message about not having a license for the installation. Ain't that great? I just installed the thing and is the free/handicapped version. What gives? Well, in Carbide C++ 1.2, the Express part of the kit is broken and doesn't install the license file.

So, I installed the professional version since it had a longer trial period, hoping that now I'll be able to see the IDE and start working.

After this, I tried several times to start Carbide itself, but it failed at different points in time. I "just"[4] configured wine for this app to set the order to 'native,builtin' for msvcrt, ole32, oleacc and shdocw and got further.

Hopeless attempts follow....

At this point I got stuck. There was still some error from ole32.dll (apparently), but I couldn't go further.

I tried to install the 1.1 trial version. Got stuck. In any way I couldn't start Carbide c++ :-(( .

GRAND FINALE!

In the end, I also tried the deprecated CodeWarior. Guess what? It installed and ran immediately. Although I am not sure if any of the previous poking had anything to do with it.



[1] I have some packages from unstable
[2] although I had one, I wanted to get rid of it, since gnash started to perform better in the latest versions - still not satisfactory, but OK
[3] some browser plugin WPGInstall.exe, iirc and some app which should send your privat^W^W^Wanalise your system to generate some code that should identify your system as genuine
[4] this also took me some time... start, identify the dll, change the order, restart...

Better said, politicians. I am pretty sure most of you will know yet about a Belgian politic party called NEE in which the main candidat is a young girl that appear naked in promoting posters. But in a word joke, she promised 'blowjobs' for people who vote for her. Or perhaps she promised that for real...

Also, here in Spain we had our own naked politician. She is not at posters, but she was the girl on portrait of an important Spanish magazine.

It is interesting to see how politics is changing lately. It is becoming more and more insteresting... Do you trust your candidate? Undress him!

Scott complains on how Linux Format #93's articles comparing Ubuntu and other distributions often contradict each other, and blames it on the lack of any editorial direction or basic research.
I... Have to confirm this. But anyway, I can stand a bit on the different writers' side - Each article is written by a different person and, although the magazine must try to be coherent (of course, within certain limits - if the magazine suggests editor's picks in one article, they should not bash them to death in the next one).
I write the Linux column in the Spanish edition of PC Magazine. No, it's by far not a technical column, nor anything far like it. The magazine is end-user oriented, and clearly sponsorship-driven - In fact, my column was not part of the magazine for quite some time, as they gear it towards end-users, and sponsors (I cannot venture which sponsors, but your imagination will probably go to the same company as mine) do not like what I write about. All in all, I get the general topics which each month's edition will cover, and I just have to write an article about one of them. Of course, I don't know most of the other writers. There is no interaction at all.
And I guess that Linux Format is a typical magazine - If they run like PC Magazine, they just won't have the time to put all the articles together checking for inconsistencies. I think it is enough of a task to chase the contributors month after month (BTW, I'm a week late already :-/ But I cannot finish just today, as there's too much work to do, and I spend my time blogging... Hmh, time to finish this post, as coitus interruptus as it may seem).

Apparently they are planning a reality TV show that might be named “Kids Nation” where 40 children are allowed to develop their own society for 40 days. The claims are that there is “no parental supervision”, but of course with many TV cameras watching I’m sure that even the most stupid children can work out that there are reasons to behave relatively well. Also I’m sure that they will remove children from the show if it becomes necessary to avoid injury. It will be interesting to see how well this develops. Maybe it could evolve into a new form of schooling, just leave children alone in a school with lots of security cameras watching them and let them study or not as they wish. It would be cheaper than running a regular high-school, and as there is little scope for providing a worse education than many (most?) high-schools currently provide it should be worth a try. For a long time I have thought that the premise behind The Lord of the Flies was bogus. I believe that a major contributing factor towards much of the violence that is present in schools is the pointlessness of the entire system. There are very few students who are so stupid that they can’t realise that the education system is failing them. Whenever you put a large number of people in a confined space with nothing useful to do the results will be bad. If a group of students from a violent school were placed on an island without any supplies then I’m sure that they would soon realise that they need to cooperate to stay alive.

Apparently they are planning a reality TV show that might be named “Kids Nation” where 40 children are allowed to develop their own society for 40 days. The claims are that there is “no parental supervision”, but of course with many TV cameras watching I’m sure that even the most stupid children can work out that there are reasons to behave relatively well. Also I’m sure that they will remove children from the show if it becomes necessary to avoid injury. It will be interesting to see how well this develops. Maybe it could evolve into a new form of schooling, just leave children alone in a school with lots of security cameras watching them and let them study or not as they wish. It would be cheaper than running a regular high-school, and as there is little scope for providing a worse education than many (most?) high-schools currently provide it should be worth a try. For a long time I have thought that the premise behind The Lord of the Flies was bogus. I believe that a major contributing factor towards much of the violence that is present in schools is the pointlessness of the entire system. There are very few students who are so stupid that they can’t realise that the education system is failing them. Whenever you put a large number of people in a confined space with nothing useful to do the results will be bad. If a group of students from a violent school were placed on an island without any supplies then I’m sure that they would soon realise that they need to cooperate to stay alive. Update:
It seems that the Sudbury Valley school implements some ideas similar to mine. They also have a page of links to some other schools that do similar things.

Tomorrow is the beginning of RoCoCoCamp 2007, a three-day unconference held right here in Montr al. It starts at 9:30 on Friday at the SAT and runs until Sunday evening. It's for all who are interested in wikis, weblogs, and creators interested in collaborating in on-line spaces. RoCoCoCamp is organized with OpenSpace Technology, where we collectively decide on an agenda where everybody has a chance to speak. There's no artifical divide between speakers and audience, so you can lead your own session if you have something to say. Think of RoCoCoCamp as a real-life wiki, where anybody can contribute. A detailed explaination of what RoCoCoCamp is about can be found on this invitation. I'm inviting you because I'm flying out on Saturday and can't make the whole conference, but I really hope you come. There will be discussions on:

• What projects people are doing around the world
• Development of collaborative tools like wikis, free wifi networks, content management systems, etc.
• Techniques for building collaborative communities
• Best practises for inspiring self-managment and self-policing
• Starting up new projects
• Plans for future collaborations

So how can you attend? I thought you'd never ask! See you there!

Once upon a time I wrote a collection of shell scripts for managing virtual hosting. Combined these allow me to easily.

• Add/Remove/List Apache2 virtual hosts.
• Add/Remove/List virtual domains for use by Exim4.

These work well, but every now and again I think I want a web-based control panel . After mulling this over for a while and remembering how many of the existing control panels are tricky I m actually going to do it. There are two hard parts:

• The user-interface is key.
• The format I m using for domains isn t appropriate.

The last point is the part I m worrying about right now. So far I have a list of mail domains, and a list of web domains and the two are unrelated. This becomes obvious when they are listed:

Domain	Facilities
steve.org.uk	MAIL
bar.steve.org.uk	WEB
foo.steve.org.uk	WEB

See? No link I d expect to see the domains listed as just steve.org.uk with links to Mail showing the mail setup, and web showing the subdomains. Or maybe they really should be listed seperately I can t decide. (For reference here is my live listing of domains where the problem becomes obvious. Note that you ll not have permissions to see my server stats ) So I need to decide how to handle this I also need to be "inspired" by OSWD. I think the plan right now is to store all data in a database, then regenerate the plain text configuration files on demand. That should give me the best approach if I restrict myself to running HTTPS on a custom port and avoid the ability to modify the files by hand Feel free to tell me this is misguided, or inspired. Although I remember the last time I talked about control panels and I m still not seeing a good solution. I want to be able to:

• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable apache2 virtual hosting setups.
• Add/Remove/Enable/Disable exim4 virtual domains with optional mailing lists (ecartis)
• Have only server admin vs. nobody no resellors etc.
• Avoid PHP like the plague.
• Have it be utterly secure. (Ha!)

Modern processors have a variety of low power modes that can be entered while idle. These "C states" are numbered, currently ranging from C0 (a running CPU) to C4 (a deep runtime sleep state). The problem with these states is that the deeper the sleep, the longer it takes the CPU to wake up. In order to avoid excessive reductions in performance, the kernel must keep track of the processor usage pattern and avoid putting the CPU into a deep sleep mode when it's likely that it'll be needed for more work in the near future.

Traditionally, the kernel has had a fixed timer tick - that is, a fixed number of times a second, the timer will generate an interrupt, wake the kernel and allow processes to be rescheduled. This limits the maximum amount of time the CPU can remain idle, as this timer will fire even when the system is otherwise idle. A tick rate of 1000Hz is desirable for reducing latency, but will also result in the maximum sleep period being 1ms. This is less than ideal.

2.6.21 introduced dynamic tick functionality. Now, rather than having a fixed tick interval, if the system is idle the kernel looks at all outstanding timers and schedules a wakeup in time to answer the next timer. This allows much longer periods of sleep without compromising latency. However, for this to be useful it's desirable to have as few timer wakeup events as possible. The longer the CPU is going to be asleep, the deeper the sleep state that can be used.

Intel have recently released Powertop, an application that tracks the causes of wakeups. These wakeups can fall into two categories - kernel and userspace. Pure userspace timers will usually be due to an application having a timer to handle some sort of trivial activity, like blinking a cursor or polling for state. There are a couple of ways to improve this:

• Just remove the timer - does it actually need to exist at all?
• If you're polling for state, consider whether it would be possible to move to an event driven model. For example, right now screensavers poll the X server in order to obtain information about whether the session is idle. The X server has to keep track of this information anyway, so a simple extension could be added to notify applications when the user has been idle for a certain period of time.
• Make sure you're only waking up when you need to. For instance, you might want to periodically check whether any new email has appeared. If there's no route to the internet, don't bother.
• If you must use timers, try to schedule them to go off simultaneously. It's better to wake the kernel up once and do twice as much work than it is to wake it up twice. If you're a glib application, g_timeout_add_seconds() will round to the nearest second, so use it if possible.

Things in the kernel can be trickier. Kernel interrupts may be appearing because of some kernel code specifying a timer, but an alternative is that a userspace application is poking them. Many of the same considerations as userspace apply here:

• If you don't need especially high-precision timing, use round_jiffies(). It'll result in synchronisation of many wakeups, and reduce the overall number.
• If you're being woken up by userspace, figure out why. HAL polls storage devices every couple of seconds, generating several interrupts. This is necessary because most storage devices don't notify the system when media insertion occurs. Conversely, alsa sends notification events whenever the hardware state changes, and so it's not necessary for userspace to poll. If you can provide useful information to interested parties without them having to repeatedly ask, then do it.
• If your hardware is idle, then do what you can to quiesce it. The Appletouch pad can be put into a mode where it doesn't send packets until touched, but once touched will continue sending packets. Watch for a stream of contentless interrupts, and put the hardware back to sleep.
• If the hardware can generate interrupts when something happens, then use them - don't poll unnecessarily

Fixing these issues can range from the trivial (removing unnecessary timers) to the complicated (teaching gstreamer about alsa notifications, teaching the mixer applet to listen to signals from gstreamer). It's all helpful, though. Ideally you want your processor to be averaging at least 20ms in the deepest C state before it's woken up again. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and every fix improves battery life.

I maintain the HenPlus interface for databases. The tool is written in Java but it didn't work with non-Sun implementation of Java. The reason was sun.misc.Signal class. It is used for trapping Ctrl+C in application. I wonder why the GNU Classpath does not support this class. Does it mean the Sun Java is not really standarized? I've found the workaround. I unpacked some of sun/misc/*.java files from official Sun Java sources. Fortunatelly they was published under GPL license. The trick made possible to compile the HenPlus with GCJ+ECJ, so I could change the build-time dependency to java-gcj-compat-dev. It really worked! Even if the signal couldn't be handled with GCJ or SableVM, the application started with non-Sun Java runtime:

Hen*Plus> system-info
----------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
            System Property                                  Value                     
----------------------------------------+---------------------------------------------+
 Diff. of used memory (now-before) [KB]                                      1.932,00  
 Java VM                                     GNU libgcj 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu5)  
 Java Vendor                                           Free Software Foundation, Inc.  
 Java Home                                /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-gcj-4.1-1.4.2.0/jre  
[...]

I've found that the GCJ and Kaffe doesn't work with Oracle JDBC driver. I'm suprised that SableVM works without problems. It's good to see that there is a reasonable alternative for Sun's imlementation.

A few years ago we needed to introduce employement contracts for all staff at Catalyst. When we got the example contract back from our HR consultant, she had quite naturally biased it strongly in the employers favour, and as a consequence it had a very anal and lawyerly clause in it regarding the ownership of intellectual property. This clearly wasn't going to work well in our environment so I decided to take the opportunity to try and write a clause which was fair and reasonable, which considered the likely desires of both parties, and which expressed an understanding of the sort of environment which often happens with free open-source software. It seems that many people who are interested in working on open source software are also people who will work on (i.e. fiddle with :-) things in their spare time, but they will not necessarily consider the possible consequences of using conmpany resources to do so. I have heard of situations where employment contracts (or perhaps even government enacted legislation) will give ownership of an individual's work to their employer in such situations, so I also wanted the contract to make it clear where and how this might happen. I would like to hear people's comments on the contract clauses which we use here. Is this fair to both parties? Have I missed something? Is the meaning clear? Also, I need to make it clear that it is OK for people to use this text, so I hereby place the text of the following Intellectual Property clause in the public domain. Intellectual Property

1. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, relating to work carried out while in the employment of $ COMPANY , remains the property of $ COMPANY , subject to the exceptions outlined below.
2. All intellectual property, including source code, objects and documentation, owned prior to joining $ COMPANY remains your property. If you choose to use such intellectual property, including source and objects during your time at $ COMPANY , $ COMPANY will have the rights to their continued use in perpetuity, including access to the source code of all versions of such software in use at $ COMPANY .
3. If $ COMPANY asks you to do something, then we expect that while you work on that something, you will be being paid by us and we (or our clients) will own the IP. In some cases we may elect to open-source that, and may decide to jointly own the IP or make some other arrangement, but it would be at $ COMPANY s option.
4. If you work on something by your own choice, and on your own time, then you are welcome to own the IP, but if you use the premises or computers of $ COMPANY to do that work then you must license it under a free, open-source license agreed with $ COMPANY .
5. $ COMPANY may choose to fund some part of your time to work on OSS projects in a non-directed way. $ COMPANY will expect to own the IP for such work, and to participate in the choice of license for such code.
6. All of the above is subject to confidentiality of client information, and constraints which clients may specifically request in relation to specific project work from time to time.

Over To You I wrote that because I couldn't find examples around the place of similar things. I guess I still see people looking for that sort of thing so I'm publising it here with the idea of providing a seed which can perhaps grow into something else. A few specific questions I would like you to think about:

• Are there any loopholes in this?
• Does this seem like a fair agreement?
• Is there anything missing?
• Is there any part you would like to see changed?

Then, perhaps, if we can see some general agreement on what would, or would not, be a useful standard we can encourage people to use it in their future contracts. I am hoping that through your collective wisdom I will be changing this clause in Catalyst's standard employment contract.

I just started poking with my Nokia 6600 and python for S60. From the highlights of the evening (I just started, so I needed to set things up).

• 'obexpushd -B' is good for receiving all the images and videos stored on the phone and taking space
• 'obexftp -b "phonename" -p somefile' - is the way to send files to the phone (I installed pyS60 on the phone, whoohoo)
• nothing works unless you use hcitool dev and hciconfig reset before using any of the above
• it is really useful if you have tried a couple of days ago to make it easier for your father to receive via Bluetooth on the laptop files sent from the phone and realised the former (since gnome in Etch doesn't have any graphical means to start an obexpushd server)

Now I would really like to know how to start a serial terminal server that listens on Bluetooth to be able to start the bluetooth console in a manner similar to the Windows or Mac method.

Update: After digging and trying different things I got to a message which put me on the right track. After a while I got the magic formula:

bounty:/home/eddy/usr/lib/linux_and_other_oses/series 60/devel/python# rfcomm listen 0 3
Waiting for connection on channel 3
Connection from 00:60:57:BB:B6:C5 to /dev/rfcomm0
Press CTRL-C for hangup


The 1 means to create a /dev/rfcomm1 device; the 3 is the channel on which the Bluetooth console tries to connect (try once and you will see it).

After that, the hint in the Mac tutorial, so I typed:

bounty:/home/eddy$ screen /dev/rfcomm0
help
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
NameError: name 'help' is not defined
>>>

Victory! Now I can actually start to program.

Update2:
Oh, yes, I remembered I should write something like "How to connect PyS60 Bluetooth console and Linux" so is easier to spot. I tried to add myself a link to the proper page, but I couldn't make an account because of the broken capthca.

While I didn't exactly expect it, it doesn't surprise me to see this ad. It fits the way our society is working or, depending on who you ask, not working. (sorry for the quality of the image. Dicicam picture from a newspaper...) And for those who might be wondering: no, this has nothing to do with my personal situation. Still married and planning to stay so.

I'm a happy NSLU2 user since a few months now, and I'm using it for all kinds of things, e.g. as a 24/7 remote ssh server at home (using DynDNS and the ddclient Debian package), as IRC logger (screen + irssi), etc. etc. I was considering multiple options as to where/how to install the slug (USB thumb drive, Compact Flash, disk drive, ...) but I settled with a full Debian install on an 1 GB USB thumb drive for now. I implemented some measures to maximize the life time of the USB thumb drive, maybe I'll post some info on that later... One new thing I've been trying lately is to use the slug as an audio player. As it doesn't come with an integrated sound card, you have to use an external USB audio device. I've got mine (see photo) from eBay for ca. 5 Euro (+ shipping) and it works out of the box with Linux 2.6.18 using the snd_usb_audio kernel module. You simply attach it via USB (the module is automatically loaded) and then attach external speakers to it. Here's an lsusb of the device:

Bus 001 Device 011: ID 1130:f211 Tenx Technology, Inc.

One problem with playing audio on the slug is the slow CPU. At 266 MHz (and without FPU!) playing audio with "normal" audio players such as mplayer or mpg321 is not possible. But there are several ways to make the slug play your favorite music. Here's a list of players I tested and a status report of whether they work at all. If yes, I listed a rough percentage of CPU load resulting from playing the music.

• MP3:
  • mplayer, mpg321, aplay, playsound, and splay don't work.
  • $ madplay foo.mp3: 17% CPU load
    

Ogg vorbis:

• mplayer, aplay, playsound, and ogg123 don't work.

• $ apt-get install libvorbisidec-dev
  $ cd /usr/share/doc/libvorbisidec-dev/examples
  $ make
  $ cat foo.ogg   ./ivorbisfile_example   aplay -f cd
  

  Result: 40% CPU load

MOD, XM, S3M, IT, etc.:

• $ mikmod foo.mod: 10% CPU load (even with compressed MOD files)

WAV:

• $ mplayer foo.wav: 10% CPU load
• $ aplay foo.wav: 10% CPU load
• $ playsound foo.wav: 10% CPU load

FLAC:

• $ flac123 foo.flac: 17% CPU load

SPEEX:

• $ speexdec foo.spx: doesn't work, 100% CPU load. Any known alternatives?

AU:

• $ cat foo.au > /dev/dsp: 3% CPU load (but sounds crappy)
• $ cat foo.au > /dev/audio: 3% CPU load (sounds better)
• $ mplayer foo.au: 5% CPU load
• $ aplay foo.au: 5% CPU load
• $ playsound foo.au: 5% CPU load

AIFF:

• $ sox foo.aiff -t wav - aplay: 50% CPU load (a bit stupid, but it works)

Streaming MP3:

• $ mplayer http://www.example.com/foo.mp3: doesn't work, 100% CPU load.
• $ wget http://www.example.com/foo.mp3 -O - madplay - : 17% CPU load

Streaming Ogg Vorbis:

• $ cd /usr/share/doc/libvorbisidec-dev/examples
$ wget http://www.example.com/foo.ogg -O - ./ivorbisfile_example aplay -f cd: 40% CPU load

The SlugAsAudioPlayer page in the NSLU2-Linux wiki might have further information on this topic. Feel free to add comments if you know of other audio types which can be played on an NSLU2.

I finaly got some time to do development. I decided to use this for extending cdebootstrap. And it got several new features and cleanups. Most notable change is the support to check Release files against the pgp-signature. This feature is enabled by default and uses the keyring supplied by debian-archive-keyring. It now also includes definitions for newer Ubuntu releases and it works in my testcases. The keyring needs to be supplied manualy. The rest are usual cleanups on the codebase and deprecation of some not longer used features.

Turbogears i18n quirks Collecting strings from .kid files tg-admin i18n collect won't collect strings from your .kid files: you need the toolbox web interface for that. Indentation problems in .kid files The toolbox web interface chokes on intentation errors on your .kid files. To see the name of the .kid file that causes the error, look at the tg-admin toolbox output in the terminal for lines like Working on app/Foo/templates/bar.kid. What happens is that the .kid files are converted to python files, and if there are indentation glitches they end up in the python files, and python will complain. Once you see from the tg-admin toolbox standard error what is the .kid file with the problem, edit it and try to make sure that all closing tags are at the exact indentation level as their coresponding opening tags. Even a single space would matter. Bad i18n bug in TurboKid versions earlier than 1.0.1 faide on #turbogears also says:

It is of outmost importance that you use TurboKid 1.0.1 because it is the first version that corrects a BIG bug regarding i18n filters ... The version below had a bug where the filters kept being added at each page load in such a way that after a few hundreds of pages you could have page loading times as long as 5 minutes!

If one has a previous version of TurboKid, one (and only one) of these is needed:

• Patch Kid with the patch at http://www.kid-templating.org/trac/ticket/203
• Patch TurboKid with the patch at http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301
• Upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2, which also works like a charm with python 2.5, which is a performance boost.

So, in short, all i18n users should upgrade to TurboGears 1.0.2.2 or patch TurboKid using http://trac.turbogears.org/ticket/1301.

It's voting time in the lunacy that is the Eurovision Song Contest. Here is a summary, including some strange bits of Euronglish:

1. Bosnia+Herzegovina - nice but no chance;
2. Spain - 4 guys in tight white and pink lights - creepy;
3. Belarus - Medallion man with a rock ballad to bukkake - "when you cast your loving potion over me";
4. Ireland - Folksie, charming, dark yet jolly;
5. Finland - more noisy dark rock with drums;
6. Republic of Macedonia - up/down ballad with drums;
7. Slovenia - Opera in black with drums;
8. Hungary - Bluesy rock angst. No drums. Phew;
9. Lithuania - Guitarry song with "lonely shades walking";
10. Greece - an odd disco/dance at the "heart of attention";
11. Georgia - a nice slice of trance;
12. Sweden - revenge of 70s glam! Maybe "with my head in the can" was deliberate;
13. France - Franglais pop. How did monoglots follow this?
14. Latvia - a singalong. In Italian. But it looks like Italy aren't here this year. So how's that help?;
15. Russia - another fun girl band, singing different (ruder) lyrics to the official song sheet;
16. Germany - sexism swings;
17. Serbia - a red up/down song;
18. Ukraine - dance nonsense - the first song I walked out on this year;
19. UK - an example of Britishness and why I call myself English, not British;
20. Romania - a fun little polyglot guitar song;
21. Bulgaria - drums, dance, squeaking;
22. Turkey - "How much I crave for you" - a dancey whirly song;
23. Armenia - the tearful stalker's song;
24. Moldova - gothest song of the night - "each people will gnaw our wishes no more"???

I can't pick a winner from that. I only voted to try to stop Ukraine.

Assume I'm using mutt for my mailclient and that I have all my mail stored beneath ~/Maildir. Is there a simple way of limiting an index to only those folders containing New messages? I know that I can use the index_format to display something like "N" next to folders containing new messages - but I cannot seem to limit the display to just those ones. (At any given time I'll have something like 30+ mailboxes with unread messages, if not more.) My current mutt looks something like this, which shows that I have 24 folders with unread messages - but it doesnt make it easy to tell which they are:

..
269       4096 May 11 22:49   ~/Maildir/.spam/
270       4096 May 11 23:36   ~/Maildir/.spam.bayes/
271       4096 May 11 22:49 N ~/Maildir/.spam.image/
272       4096 May 11 22:49   ~/Maildir/.spam.pyzor/
273       4096 May 11 22:49   ~/Maildir/.spam.razor/
274       4096 May 11 22:49   ~/Maildir/.spam.request/
275       4096 May 11 23:27   ~/Maildir/.spam.unsure/
276       4096 May 11 22:54   ~/Maildir/.steve_org_uk/
277       4096 May 11 22:49   ~/Maildir/.syswear_com/
..
-- Mutt: Mailboxes [24]

As Moray blogged last week, there are spare beds in the hostel block booking. If you haven’t already written in ask for one, and you would like to stay with the sponsored DebConf attendees, please write to accommodation@debconf.org now. The plan is to close this option in about 24 hours, so please be prompt. The spare beds will be allocated to people in the order emails are received; the price per night will be 12 (currently 17.60), which is a special reduced rate due to our large bookings.