Since Debian is in GNOME3 transition period, after last dist-upgrade I lived on bare minimum of GNOME DE and its apps. basically all I had working right was Chromium and Terminal, instead of Rhythmbox I used mpg321, instead of Gedit it was Vim and so on, which is all fine except the fact it had me living in 2000 again. It was all due to python-gtk2 version that was missing in Sid repositories. Furthermore, as I was unable to restart X and had my notebook on suspend after every login I had to retype my wifi passphrase due to a bug in gnome-keyring. I believe I did my part, reported the bugs and waited maintainers responsible for those packages to do something. But this situation went on for 8 days. I remember the times when you couldn t fire up X for weeks, but after those days Unstable has gained reputation that it s not like that anymore, but after having a situation like this one, it makes me wonder. Please, don t take this the wrong way, I mean no harm but the ultimate question that is brought up here is is this the price of bleeding edge? *Update As many of you came down on me with anger, let me say couple of things. First of all, when I first wrote this post I was kind of using it for venting. Second of all original title was Price of freedom as it sounds too confrontational and for some misleading I had it changed to Price of bleeding edge . What happened above could ve been avoided if I used safe-upgrade instead of dist-upgrade, as at the time I was just too tired and wasn t paying enough attention to the list of all the packages that are going to be removed. I use Sid for few years now, and am of a opinion if used with attention it is the the best bleeding edge/devel distro out there. I wasn t ranting and am still of opinion that things like this need to be discussed among us, of course we can just stick to the line debian is the best and we re not going anywhere. Maybe I did go over the line with this attempt of positive criticism, but I really don t see nothing wrong with what I did here, as one of items from Debian Social Contract is We Won t Hide Problems thus let s talk about it. Again, I apologize if I offended anyone, as point of this whole post wasn t of such nature.

Alphabetical order's not nice
But use it if no others suffice.
Can you think of a way to
Do better?
Each manual page option sorted, not by its
First letter, but
Grouped in a sequence, by sense.
Highly structured, to be scanned at a glance!
I think that is better, and "So Say We All".
Just think of the savings, in time for us all.
Kaleidoscopic knowledge, swirled around, then
Left to sit, on the page alone,
Makes me wish that in kindergarten,
No ABCs graced the top of the classroom.
Only... it's true, in printed
Pages of text,
Queries are satisfied best by
Running ones finger along, in order,
Stopping at the word one desires.
Truth. But...
Until these days of glittering screens and even e-ink pass,
Vacently staring at text all in order, or smudging the screen, is not best.
Wikipedia alphabetical? Surely you jest!
Xenophobia is best hyperlinked; not followed by xylophonists.
Years from now, will we care about
Zany alphabets? (Unicode could take this to a higher plane, but I'll stop here.)

---

Inspired by: Debian bug #499487 Debian bug #551741 Debian bug #561017 Debian bug #623890 and many more.

Yesterday I received another report for a game, which wasn't working with the wine-unstable packages built by me. The reason why the reporter wrote to me and suspected a bug in my builds was, that the same game worked on the system of a friend (using a different distribution). After some exchanged e-mails it became apparent that this was yet another installment of S3TC-compressed textures. And as this wasn't the first time I got such reports, I thought I blog about the solution today. As S3TC is one of those patent-encumbered texture compression formats (don't ask me why one can get a patent for such things, it's, IMHO, a very bad thing and we'd be better off, with a lot less patents), Mesa doesn't support it out of the box. You need to install an additional library or the proprietary driver for your graphics card. Before installing the library, make sure, that it is legal in your jurisdiction (i.e. check whether the patent is valid in your jurisdiction). If that is the case, you can install libtxc-dxtn0 from the Debian Multimedia repository or compile it yourself from source. If the patent is valid in your jurisdiction, you're most likely required to get a license from the rights holder for using the library, but I'm no lawyer so you might want to consult one prior to making your decision. For amd64 users, there is an additional caveat: Wine needs the 32 bit variant installed. At the moment, this means downloading the i386 package from debian-multimedia.org and extracting the library to /usr/lib32. For users with the r600c/g driver it gets (currently) really tricky, as there is no fully working support for loading libtxc_dxtn.so (current status is WIP). Here the only solution I know, would be to use the proprietary driver or writing patches for r600g (last option preferred *g*).

A recent email from a user of one of my small software tools prompted me to write this entry If you read Wikipedia's page on Second system effect, it doesn't say much and it's hard to internalise what it means. Some other resources describe it better, but actually learning it first-hand is, shall we say, enlightening. Fortunately, I learned this in my spare time, and not at work. Back in 2002, I started working on a small tool (bakonf) to basically backup /etc and generate a tar archive out of it. It had some other features of course that made it a bit more useful than tar c /etc, but not many. It worked well and I was using it to make incremental dumps of server configuration ready to write to a CD on a few servers. A while later (around a year or so), I came to the conclusion that just having a tar archive is not enough, and rather one would want to be able to check differences between the filesystem and the archive, and ideally between multiple servers configurations (note, this was before DVCSs) online. I started working on cfvers in my free time and initially made reasonable progress. However, I didn't know to hold back from changing the scope and features, so actual progress in the form of a beta release was always postponed. Then came changes to the transport protocol, to the structure of the app, etc., all the fun. Note that this was in my free time, done in bursts of work in a month, then a few months with no work at all, so not too much work overall. Still, I slowly realised that this will go nowhere, so at the end of 2006 I finally gave up on developing it and marked the project as obsolete. However, bakonf is still doing its job, and I've done a few small commits to it in order to add compatibility with Python 3.x as recent as last year. I got an email about it from a user at the start of this year, so it definitely outlived its supposed replacement. Hah! Overall, it was a great lesson. Maybe it wasn't just second system effect, but also not enough effort invested by me, or bad planning, so on. But for me it drove the point home that writing the second version of something is filled with dangerous decisions

While preparing my slides for the Rcpp workshop this Thursday, I had wondered about more nice examples motivating Rcpp. So I posed a quick question on the rcpp-devel list. And I received a few friendly answers. My favourite, so far, was a suggestion by Lance Bachmeier who sent me a short script which used both R and C++ (via Rcpp) to simulate a first-order vector autoregressive process (and he ensured me that it worked well enough on his graduate students). It is indeed a great example as it involves (simple) matrix multiplication in an iterative fashion. Which makes it a great example not only for Rcpp but also for our RcppArmadillo package (which wraps Conrad Sanderson's wonderful Armadillo C++ templated library for linear algebra and more). And at the same time, we can also add another look at the new and shiny R compiler I also blogged about recently. So Lance and I iterated over this a little more over email, and I now added this as a new (and initial) example file in the RcppArmadillo SVN repo. (As an aside: The newest version 0.2.19 of RcppArmadillo has been sitting in incoming at CRAN since earlier in the week while the archive maintainer takes a well-deserved vacation. It should hit the public archive within a few days, and is otherwise available too from my site.) So let's walk through the example:

R> ## parameter and error terms used throughout
R> a <- matrix(c(0.5,0.1,0.1,0.5),nrow=2)
R> e <- matrix(rnorm(10000),ncol=2)
R> ## Let's start with the R version
R> rSim <- function(coeff, errors)  
+   simdata <- matrix(0, nrow(errors), ncol(errors))
+   for (row in 2:nrow(errors))  
+     simdata[row,] = coeff %*% simdata[(row-1),] + errors[row,]
+    
+   return(simdata)
+  
R> rData <- rSim(a, e)                     # generated by R

This starts with a simple enough loop. After skipping the first row, each iteration multiplies the previous row with the parameters and adds error terms. We can then turn to the R compiler:

R> ## Now let's load the R compiler (requires R 2.13 or later)
R> suppressMessages(require(compiler))
R> compRsim <- cmpfun(rSim)
R> compRData <- compRsim(a,e)              # generated by R 'compiled'
R> stopifnot(all.equal(rData, compRData))  # checking results

Nice and easy: We load the compiler package, create a compiled function and use it. We check the results and surely enough find them to be identical. With that, time to turn to C++ using Armadillo via RcppArmadillo:

R> ## Now load 'inline' to compile C++ code on the fly
R> suppressMessages(require(inline))
R> code <- '
+   arma::mat coeff = Rcpp::as<arma::mat>(a);
+   arma::mat errors = Rcpp::as<arma::mat>(e);
+   int m = errors.n_rows; int n = errors.n_cols;
+   arma::mat simdata(m,n);
+   simdata.row(0) = arma::zeros<arma::mat>(1,n);
+   for (int row=1; row<m; row++)  
+     simdata.row(row) = simdata.row(row-1)*trans(coeff)+errors.row(row);
+    
+   return Rcpp::wrap(simdata);
+ '
R> ## create the compiled function
R> rcppSim <- cxxfunction(signature(a="numeric",e="numeric"),
+                        code,plugin="RcppArmadillo")
R> rcppData <- rcppSim(a,e)                # generated by C++ code
R> stopifnot(all.equal(rData, rcppData))   # checking results

Here we load the inline package to compile, link and load C++ snippets. We define a short C++ function in the code variable, declare a signature taking a and e as before and ask cxxfunction() to deploy the plugin for RcppArmadillo so that it and Rcpp are found during build. With that, we have a compiled function to generate data, and we once again check the result. The C++ code is pretty straightforward as well. We can instatiate Armadillo matrices directly from the R objects we pass down; we then run a similar loop building the result row by row. Now, with all the build-up, here is the final timing comparison, using the rbenchmark package:

R> ## now load the rbenchmark package and compare all three
R> suppressMessages(library(rbenchmark))
R> res <- benchmark(rcppSim(a,e),
+                  rSim(a,e),
+                  compRsim(a,e),
+                  columns=c("test", "replications", "elapsed",
+                            "relative", "user.self", "sys.self"),
+                  order="relative")
R> print(res)
            test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self
1  rcppSim(a, e)          100   0.038   1.0000      0.04        0
3 compRsim(a, e)          100   2.011  52.9211      2.01        0
2     rSim(a, e)          100   4.148 109.1579      4.14        0

So in a real-world example involving looping and some algebra (which is of course already done by BLAS and LAPACK libraries), the new R compiler improves by more than a factor of two, cutting time from 4.14 seconds down to about 2 seconds. Yet, this still leaves the C++ solution, clocking in at a mere 38 milliseconds, ahead by a factor of over fifty relative to the new R compiler And compared to just R itself, the simple solution involving Rcpp and RcppArmadillo is almost 110 times faster. As I mentioned, I quite like this example ;-).

A newly founded Logic Group in Mumbai, which seems to be a private thing but some professors from the IIT Bombay are taking part, has approached me and asked if I can give a talk about Church s lambda calculus and how he used it to show that Hilbert s Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable. They are starting a series of talk on logic on the occasion of Turing s 100th birth year and because I am finally leaving the IIT campus in two days, my talk turned out to be the opening talk for the series. Roughly guessed about fifty people attended, some professors but most of them students from fields other than mathematics and computer science I hope that they were not too confused by distinguishing truth and provability, expressability and computability, of which I did not give a proper explanation.
I started with a historical exposition of the state of logic in the beginning 20th century, then gave an introduction to lambda calculus, encoding of natural numbers in then, G del encoding. Finally I sketched the proof of the unsolvability of the question whether a lambda term has a normal form and then concluded by showing how this implies that the Entscheidungsproblem is not solvable.
I have before hand written out the talk in full, and again I ended up saying completely different things or at least said things completely different. Nevertheless, I am sharing the (planned) text of my talk, including the timeline that I draw on the whiteboard.

Last week a developer meeting of the FAI project took place in Cologne/Germany. Four core developers (project lead Thomas Lange and 3x Michael ) met for two days to discuss and work on the FAI project. The first day (2011-04-14) started at 11:45 and lasted until around 21:15, the second day (2011-04-15) started at 11:00 and lasted until 22:00. We made 134 svn commits in those two days. The developer meeting was great, we got tons of stuff done:

• New release candidate version for stable release 3.4.8
• Implemented support for CentOS 5
• Website improvements:
  • Put website into svn
  • Deployed FAQ and Team webpage
• Setup-storage improvements:
  • Backport from trunk/experimental of setup-storage into 3.4.8
  • Cleanup of setup-storage patches
  • Minor bugfixes
  • setup-storage in 3.4 got align-at and default to cylinder alignment if preserve is used
• Worked on autotesting using Kantan:
  • new kantan release with new features and better performane
  • prepared initial test-suite scenarios for usage inside Kantan
• Discussed Release management:
  • 3.4.x considered as long term stable release (includes tested bugfixes and tested features that have been backported from developer versions (4.x and experimental))
  • 4.x considered as developer version (inclusion of fast bugfixes, inclusion of big features which might break stable version, )
• Documentation:
  • Officially documented release management notes for stable release
  • Officially documented developer policy (WIP)
• Unsorted other stuff:
  • Removed obsolete branches in svn
  • Grub now being installed from inside the target instead of nfsroot
  • Changelog in trunk got entries from 3.4.X with fixed git commit ids; entries were merged to find exact diff of trunk to 3.4.X
  • Defined what needs to be done after the developer meeting.

Meike Reichle is a Debian developer since 2008 but has been involved for longer than that, in particular in Debian Women. She s a great speaker and shared her experience in a Debconf talk. She s also part of the Debian publicity team and managed the live coverage of the last release on identi.ca. Enough introduction, learn more about her by reading the interview. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Meike. Who are you? My name is Meike Reichle, I am a studied information scientist and work as a project manager at Pengutronix, an embedded Linux company probably best known for their ARM kernel work. I live in Germany, more exactly in Lower Saxony, but I was originally born and raised in Swabia. Although I moved here ten years ago I still have a rather strong Swabian cultural identity. (Among other things I pride myself on having introduced a number of fellow DDs to the true promise that are real hand-made Sp tzle ) I am married to Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, we ll have our third wedding anniversary this summer. Apart from Debian most of my spare time is used for all kinds of crafts and DIY activities. Making things with my hands always gives me a great sense of accomplishment. My Free software history is summed up pretty quickly. Like most women of my age I wasn t introduced to computers until well into my teens. I didn t have a computer of my own until I started studying at the university in 2001. From there on things developed rather quickly: Working on the University s Unix terminals got me hooked on *nixes, so I got me one of those Linuxes everyone talked about. I tried a couple of different distributions, ended up with Debian around 2004, started contributing in 2005, and finally became a full DD what a nice coincidence! exactly this day (Apr 18th) three years ago. You re part of Debian Women. How is the project going? I have the feeling that the number of women involved in Debian has not significantly increased. The amount of women active within Debian is a tricky thing to judge. Here s a quick example why: When the DPL was elected in 2004 there were 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, 4 of them were female. Shortly after, during DebConf4, debian-women was founded. When the current DPL was reelected last month, there were again 911 Debian Developers eligible to vote, but this time 13 of them were women. You can look at these numbers and say The number of female DDs has more than tripled, what a success! Or you can pull out your calculator and it will tell you that in terms of ratio this puts us from a measly 0.4% to an only slightly less measly 1.4% ratio of female DDs. This still is pardon my language a bloody shame, but sadly also pretty close to the average ratio of women in Free Software. So, while I do think that the debian-women project did already have a significant impact on the Debian project as a whole, I don t think it has achieved its goals yet. Not for a long time. There s still a lot to be done but unfortunately the debian-women project has somewhat run out of steam at the moment. The seven years of its existence divide quite equally into the first half, which was very active and saw great results, and the second half, which was very slow and much more passive. In my impression debian-women is currently undergoing a rather bumpy generational change. On the one hand a lot of the original members, including myself, have reduced their involvement. Speaking for myself this is caused by shift of interests as much as general weariness. On the other hand there are only very few women following up. This development is also reflected quite harshly in DD numbers: If I don t misjudge any first names (and I desperately hope I do!) for the last three years not a single woman has joined Debian as a developer! After the great start debian-women has had, this is a very painful thing to see! That said, things don t look all bad. There is a number of women maintaining packages without being DDs and there s also at least one woman currently in NM, so there s hope this standstill won t last very much longer. But still, the fact remains that debian-women is suffering from a rather serious recruitment problem and I hope that this interview might actually help to spur some new or not yet active members into action. The aim of debian-women is far from achieved and now that its initial members are receding its time for new members to step up and take initiative. What should Debian do to be more attractive to women ? I think the general atmosphere has improved, we re less tolerant with rude behaviour, the usual tone on mailing lists has improved. Yet it doesn t seem to be enough. If there was a female DD for every time I answered that question First of all, I agree, Debian as a community has improved tremendously! Our general tone is much more friendly and cooperative and there is now a much better awareness of the impression we give to outsiders and newcomers. Now on to the difficult part: The question what should be done to get more women into Free Software has been around almost as long as Free Software exists, and it has been answered very well by a lot of people: Twenty years ago Ellen Spertus wrote Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? and most of it still holds true. Almost ten years ago Val Henson (now Aurora) wrote HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux and that also is still pretty accurate. In 2006 Floss Pols undertook extensive research to find out why there were so few women in Open Source and Free Software and how that could be changed. They also came up with a very good set of recommendations. All of these texts highlight different aspects of that question and all of them have very good points. I personally have, over the years, arrived at a rather sociological, not to say holistic point of view. In fact I answered the exact same question a few days ago, and the answer I gave then was this: After ~10 years of women in tech advocacy I d say the ultimate and final measure to get more women into Free Software is by finally achieving a truly equal society and at the same time dramatically improving child care support in almost any country. I ve come to the conclusion that what really holds women back in practice is not so much a lack of skill or interest but a simple lack of opportunity. For most of us Free Software is what we do in our spare time and that s something that women, even today, have considerably less of than men. Even in couples where both partners work full-time it is still mostly the woman who does the majority of the housework and child care duties. In most cultures men have a perceived right to their leisure time that does not to the same degree exist for women. That is one major reason, the other is instilled modesty, which has kind of become my personal arch-enemy by now. I ve talked to so many girls and women at all sorts of events about why they won t take up Computer Science studies or join a Free Software project and the answer I hear most often is that they do not consider themselves good enough in one or another aspect. Sometimes they will doubt their technical skills, sometimes their language skills, sometimes their stamina. Needless to say these girls and women were not any less qualified than the people already active in Free Software. So, yes, in the short and medium term making Debian a more welcoming and friendly place is the way to go. As many others pointed out already this will not only benefit prospective contributors but the community as a whole: those new to it as well as those who ve been in it for a long time. In the long term however what we need is empowerment! Women who are just as confident about their skills as men and are not discouraged by uncooperative environments. This is of course something that is culturally deep-rooted and can only happen in a very large time frame. So, for the moment the way to go in my view is accessibility: a cooperative atmosphere, a code of conduct, comprehensive documentation not only of technical aspects but also of structures and processes. The other thing we need to do is to have as many already active women as possible attend as many Linux/Debian/Free Software/Whatever events as possible. In my experience it happens quite often that other women see these women, feel very inspired by them, get to talk to them and then a few days later show up on some mailing list or IRC channel. From what I ve seen personal contact still beats any other kind of recruiting measures. You re a Debian developer but you re also married with a Debian developer (Alexander Reichle-Schmehl). Did you meet because of Debian? If not, who introduced Debian to the other one? We did in fact meet because of Debian. More specifically during our booth shift at the Debian booth at LinuxTag 2005, where I did a talk on the debian-women project and Alex organised the DebianDay. After that our relationship developed pretty much along our Debian activities: After our initial meeting we talked a lot on #debian.de, when Alex went to DebConf5 and I didn t we noticed that we kind of missed each other. The first gift he ever gave me was a Debconf5 shirt and a box Finnish chocolates (I still have one of them today. ) Our first secret kiss was at ApacheCon 2005, where we were both staffing the Debian booth (kudos to abe for pretending not to notice). We then became an official couple at Berlinux 2005 where we were both staffing the Debian booth and giving talks on packaging and user motivation. Our first real relationship stress test was when we both joined the DebConf6 orga team. It was a stressful time, but we passed it with flying colours! About a year later we announced our engagement via planet.debian.org. Our wedding was a veritable MiniDebConf, one of the best gifts we got was a Debian cookbook including the favourite recipes of DDs from around the world. By now we ve both finished university and work full-time jobs, so we don t do as many talks and attend as many Debian events as we used to. Instead we now mainly focus on press and publicity work, which is quite practical to work on as a pair. It s actually rather funny that way, Alex and I get confused with each other quite often, since we have almost the same name, often pick up on each other s E-Mail conversations and are most often quoted by our function rather than by name. Because of we have kind of merged into this virtual Debian Press Person in the perception of many of our contacts. You also have another hat : Debian Press Officer. What is this about? What would you suggest to people who would like get involved in that domain? Debian press work is mainly about providing an official and coordinated point of contact to anyone wanting information from or about Debian. The press team answers all sorts of inquiries (the most popular one is is of course always the next release date) and makes sure all important events and developments within Debian receive the attention and recognition they deserve. Debian is a diverse project where every sort of contributor is free to voice his or her opinion in any way. We don t have NDAs or prescribed terminology. That s one of the things I love about Debian but also something that makes us difficult to handle for conventional media. They want official statements, in generally understandable terms, at appointed times. That s what the press team takes care of. Almost all of the press work is done in the publicity team, which coordinates using IRC, Mail and SVN. The publicity team also publishes the Debian Project News, which are very popular among our users and developers. Press work is also an area of work that offers lots of possibilities for non-technical contribution. http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Publicity lists a number of possibilities for contribution and, like most Debian Teams, we d be more than grateful to get some more helping hands and happy to introduce interested newcomers to our work. What s the biggest problem of Debian? In my view: Overwork. Debian has thousands of contributors but still a lot of the main work rests on very few shoulders. We need more contributors, especially, but not only in the key teams. In order to get more people we need to do some marketing which is very hard for us, since we are very proud of our independence and have a strong focus on purely technical aspects rather than aiming for popularity. However, with the current amount of Open Source and Free Software projects to join we find ourselves not only in a contest on technical excellence but also a sort of popularity contest that is about perception rather than hard facts. This popularity contest is difficult for Debian and currently costs us quite a bunch of very capable people. Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? My answer to that is a non-technical one: I think Debian is currently very under-appreciated, we do a lot of great work and maybe even more importantly we do a lot of important work for Software Freedom, sometimes even at the cost of our above-mentioned popularity. I hope people will appreciate that more again in the future. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Over the years I have made a lot of friends within the Debian community, some have even become family. That makes it somewhat hard to single out individual people. I think what I admire most is continuous commitment. I am very impressed by those among us who have kept up a high level of commitment over many years and at the same time managed to bring that in line with a fulfilled personal/family life. That s something that I hope I ll also be able to achieve in the years to come.

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Thank you to Meike for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her 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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While we are waiting for Lintian 2.5.0~rc3, here is a little update on what you can look forward to. About a week ago I had the pleasure of merging my branch into the Lintian master branch. While the IRC bot DOS ed the #debian-qa channel[SRY], cross-package checks became part of the official Lintian. Beyond the reduced amount of binary-without-manpage false-positives, circular-dependency checking and a partial broken symlink detector, the 2.5.0~rc3 release will also feature java and multiarch checks (kudos to Vincent Fourmond and Steve R. Langasek, respectively). The new java checks are based on the Java Policy and currently mostly covers checking for possibly build misconfigurations (jars without class files etc.), weird classpaths and missing Main-Class/depends on jarwrapper for executable jars. Note that #539315 has not been fixed, so executable jars will still trigger a warning. For people wanting to upgrade their libraries to multiarch, Lintian will have a check to see if you remember the Pre-Depends on multiarch-support. Personally I have not followed the progress of multiarch too closely, but last I checked multiarch-support was not in unstable. I guess we are ahead on this one. Other highlights include dont install stuff in /run , armhf support, less false positive on missing B-D on dh_python 2,3 and recognition of 3.9.2 as the latest version of the Policy Manual. I am also planning on starting a new branch and this time I intend to work on Vendor-based customization of Lintian. If you have any ideas/suggestions, by all means follow up on the thread on the Lintian list. [SRY] Sorry to anyone present in the channel!

Generally speaking it is a really bad idea to hold passwords in cleartext. I am actually amazed people still do this! The standard way of holding passwords that has been around for years is to encrypt or hash the password and store the result, called a ciphertext. There have been many ways of hashing the password, starting off with plain old crypt with no salt (a random pair of characters) then crypt with salt through to MD5 and SHA. The thing is, each one of these hashing techniques results in a ciphertext in a different length. Now with most languages, this doesn t matter because you know what hash you are using; its simply the name of the function or some flag you set. PHP is different, because all of these methods use the one function called crypt which is a little confusing because it is more than plain old crypt. Around the PHP version 5.3 the developers started putting in the more complex hash algorithms which is good, but the ciphertext has been growing. A lot of applications store this hashed password in a database and the decision needs to be made; how big should this field be? For a long while, 50 characters would be enough and this is what programs like jffnms use. Unfortunately the SHA-512 algorithm needs 98 characters so what you get is half a hash stored. When the user enters their password, the program compares the full hash from that password to the half hash in the database and it always fails. I ve adjusted JFFNMS to use 200 character long fields which is fine for now. The problem is who knows what the future will bring?

Related articles

• France to require cleartext password storage (boingboing.net)
• Are You Sure SHA-1+Salt Is Enough For Passwords? (it.slashdot.org)
• What All This MD5 Hash Stuff Actually Means [Technology Explained] (makeuseof.com)
• Serious Security Flaw in Amazon.com Passwords (techie-buzz.com)

python-apt 0.8.0~exp2 bug fix release On Tuesday, I uploaded python-apt 0.8.0~exp2 to experimental, fixing about 10 bugs reported in Ubuntu and Debian bug trackers. It should know even convert integers correctly on all architectures, previously we could have passed long via varargs where int was expected. Bugs Until Thursday, I went through the bug list in Launchpad and closed/fixed/reassigned/merged about 100 bugs in APT and python-apt. APT & python-apt updates for squeeze Today, I uploaded updates of apt and python-apt to stable. They include support for xz and parsing multi-arch dependencies, as wanted by ftpmasters. APT 0.8.14 and wildcards/regular expression pinning Today, I uploaded apt 0.8.14 to Debian unstable, introducing support for pinning using glob() like Syntax and POSIX extended regular expressions. Let s say we want to pin all packages starting with gnome or kde to 990. The following example does this, using glob-like patterns for gnome, and a regular expression enclosed in / for kde:

Package: gnome* /^kde/
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 990
This closes 10-year-old Bug#121132 in Debian. Have fun with this feature, but please note that it may not be the fastest thing on earth, as it checks every package in the cache on initialization of such queries, which may take a few 10 ms. Since some time already, it s also possible to use such expressions for the Pin field. Thus users of Ubuntu releases could use the following piece of preferences to pin all packages in archives starting with lucid (e.g. lucid, lucid-updates) to 990:

Package: *
Pin: release a=lucid*
Pin-Priority: 990
Those types of pins do not have the negative performance impact of complex expressions in the Package header, as they are only checked against a smaller set of packages, or if Package: * , simply checked against the package files in the cache.
Filed under: Debian

For marathon freaks, Boston marathon is a mythical one. Probably more than New York marathon, because this is the world's oldest annual marathon. Also because is is quite difficult to register for it (this year, the 20,000 seats reserved for qualifiers were distributed in....8 hours). In order to qualify, runners must have a previous mark that depends on their age and gender. For instance, in my age category (50-54), the required mark for men is 3h30, something I never achieved yet. This is what's required for the 2013 race. For 2012, it will be still 3h35, but a rolling process will be held to give best runners priority. So, in short, it will probably stay among my dream marathons forever..:-) The 2011 race happened yesterday and was a great event. Kenyan runners Geoffrey Mutai and Moses Mosop even broke Haile Gebresselassie's world record, set in Berlin, back in 2008. The ran in 2h03'02" while Gebresselassie's mark is 2h03'59". However, this record will not become official because Boston's race is one-way (thus with a possibility of consistent tailwind) and has a too big altitude difference between start and finish. However, many consider that hills on the race compensate this quite strongly, so this year's time is a really great time. And, really, from all reports I read and all images I saw, the level of support you get from the crowd is incredible there, with world famous moments like Wellesley College "scream tunnel", or Kenmore Square where, traditionnaly, the Red Sox have a game prior to marathon and the crowd then goes from Fenway Park to Kenmore Square to cheer the runners for their final mile (I have no idea how they can manage the unpredictable length of a base-ball game). And I can't even mention the final mile on Commonwealth Av., then Bolston St. Everybody who ran this once says this is something you have to do once in your life. So, well, I'm still crossing fingers..:-)...Maybe, one day a miracle happens, I can qualify *and* I get a seat and I fly to Boston...

My brother did invite me to the concert of the Wise Guys, a German acapella group. They are one of those special groups who are able to give a cheering live show and have this special cheek-in-tongue humour in a fair amount of their songs. This is the selection that helps me keeping my mood up though, you are invited to dig further.

• Jetzt ist Sommer: This was the first song I heard from them and got me interested to dig further into this band. And yes, it's true, summer is an inner feeling, not something governed by the outer world.
• Lass die Sonne scheinen: I have the feeling that this is a sequel to the former song. And it definitely helps too.
• Am Ende des Tages: No matter how your day went, what matters most are the people you think of at the end of the day.

Hope you are able to appreciate them as much as I am. At least they are able to cheer me up a fair bit.

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One of the more exciting upcoming features of Farsight is the ability to change the amount of required bandwidth depending on network conditions. Which means Telepathy based VoIP clients will be able to use higher resolutions and better audio/video quality if the network connectivity allows. And ofcourse, when the available bandwidth is low, the bandwidth usage can be lowered such that calls are still possible with lower but hopefully still acceptable quality. One side of the full story is measuring the available bandwidth, which hopefully Olivier will tell at some point. The other part is actually using less bandwidth. In case technical details are not that interesting to you, probably best to stop reading at this point.. An important way to control the bandwidth we're using in a call is setting the target bitrate on the encoding GStreamer element. While previously it was enough for us to set the bitrate before encoding started, we now need to be able to change it at runtime. And not only that, the codec implementation should ideally respond within a few frames and have a reasonable constant per-frame size. All in all, a lot of requirements on codecs we didn't really have before. Which usually means we need to retest the various codecs we often use and make sure we configure them correctly for the behaviour we'd like to see (and fix them if necessary). To do this I've written a small test program, which simply changes the target bitrate over time and outputs some numbers suitable to feed into gnuplot to turn into graphs. For example, when using x264enc with the current default farsight settings a part of the resulting graph looks something like this (full graph here): The blue impulses is the per-frame size (scaled), the green line the bitrate average over 10 frames and the red line the target bitrate. Clearly this isn't an ideal picture, we will need to do some more tweaks to our default settings to make x264 behave the way we want. The same will be true for all other codecs and codec elements, at the moment the GStreamer VP8 element doesn't handle run-time bitrate changes at all and the Theora element acts it its very own interesting way (graph here)

Yesterday Google announced the WebM Project, giving the world a new open and royalty-free video codec called VP8. Thanks to Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave support for it landed in gstreamer git shortly after the announcement. In Telepathy we quite like video conferencing, so as a logical next step i quickly put together some proof of concept RTP payloading elements for Gstreamer with the obvious result: The screenshot isn't very exciting, which is exactly how it should be. In the world i would like to live in people don't have to care about video codecs, whether it is for video calls, playing online media or whatever else they want to do with video. Looking at the list of supporters for the WebM project this may actually happen and that in my opinion is much is actually the most important aspect of it all. The most important aspect that is missing at this point to bring VP8 as the video calling codec to the world is the lack of a standard RTP specification. Which is something we will hopefully start working on with various other parties in the WebM project reasonably soon. For now if you want to feel cutting edge get Empathy from git master and my rtp elements. To give things a first try A Belorussian translation of this article is available here

Last week s post generated a lot of interest so I will make a small update to keep you posted on the status of GNOME 3 in Debian experimental. Experimental is not for everybody But first let me reiterate this: GNOME 3 is in Debian experimental because it s a work in progress. You should not install it if you can t live with problems and glitches. Beware: once you upgraded to GNOME 3 it will be next to impossible to go back to GNOME 2.32 (you can try it, but it s not officially supported by Debian). Even with the fallback mode, you won t get the same experience than what you had with GNOME 2.32. Many applets are not yet ported to the newest gnome-panel API. So do not upgrade to it if you re not ready to deal with the consequences. It will come to Debian unstable and to Debian testing over time and it should be in a better shape at this point. Good progress made Most of the important modules have been updated to 3.0. You can see the progress here. The exception is gdm, it still needs to be updated, the login screen looks quite ugly right now when using GNOME 3. Frequently Asked Questions and Common Problems Why do links always open in epiphany instead of iceweasel? You need to upgrade to the latest version on libglib2.0-0, gvfs and gnome-control-center in experimental. Then you can customize the default application used in the control center (under System Information > Default applications ). You might need to switch to iceweasel 4.0 in experimental to have iceweasel appear in the list of browsers. Or you can edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list and put x-scheme-handler/http=iceweasel.desktop;epiphany.desktop; in the Added Associations section (replace the corresponding line if it already exists and lists epiphany only). The theme looks ugly, and various icons are missing. Ensure that you have installed the latest version of gnome-themes-standard, gnome-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme-symbolic. The network icon in the Shell does not work. Ensure you have upgraded both network-manager-gnome and network-manager to the experimental version. Some applications do not start at all. If an application loads GTK2 and GTK3, it exits immediately with a clear message on the standard error output (Gtk-ERROR **: GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.). It usually means that one of the library used by that application uses a different version of GTK+ than the application itself. You should report those problems to the Debian bug tracking system if you find any. Some people also reported failures of all GTK+ applications while using the Oxygen themes. Switching to another theme should help. BTW, the default theme in GNOME 3 is called Adwaita. Where are my icons on the desktop? They are gone, it s by design. But you can reenable them with gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons true and starting nautilus (if it s not already running). (Thanks to bronte for the information) Why do I see all applications twice in the shell? The package menu-xdg generates a desktop file from the Debian menu information, those are in a menu entry that is hidden by default in the old GNOME menu. Gnome Shell doesn t respect those settings and displays all .desktop files. Remove menu-xdg and you will get a cleaner list of applications. APT pinning file for the brave Since last week, we got APT 0.8.14 in unstable and it supports pattern matching for package name in pinning files. So I can give you a shorter and more complete pinning file thanks to this:

Package: *gnome* libglib2.0* *vte* *pulse* *peas* libgtk* *gjs* *gconf* *gstreamer* alacarte *brasero* cheese ekiga empathy* gdm3 gcalctool baobab *gucharmap* gvfs* hamster-applet *nautilus* seahorse* sound-juicer *totem* remmina vino gksu xdg-user-dirs-gtk dmz-cursor-theme eog epiphany* evince* evolution* file-roller gedit* metacity *mutter* yelp* rhythmbox* banshee* system-config-printer transmission-* tomboy network-manager* libnm-* update-notifier shotwell liferea *software-properties* libunique-3.0-0 libseed-gtk3-0 libnotify* libpanel-applet-4-0 libgdata11 libcamel* libcanberra* libchamplain* libebackend* libebook* libecal* libedata* libegroupwise* libevent* gir1.2-*
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 500
Package: *
Pin: release experimental
Pin-Priority: 150

Putting the file above in /etc/apt/preferences.d/gnome and having experimental enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list should be enough to enable apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade to GNOME 3 in experimental. But if you have packages depending on libimobiledevice1, you might have to wait until #620065 is properly fixed so that libimobiledevice2 is co-installable with libimobiledevice1. Update: integrated the explanation to reenable the desktop icons thanks to bronte s comment.

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Virgin Mobile Excessive BillingIn my previous post about the Xperia X10 I mentioned being billed excessively for bandwidth use [1].On Friday when I phoned Virgin I was repeatedly told that there was nothing that could be done about the bill. I demanded to be transferred to someone with authority to change my bill, I was told that wasn t possible so I demanded to be transferred to a supervisor. As no supervisors were available at the time I had to be called back.The Supervisor Tonight I received a call from someone who s employed to deal with disputed bills, after explaining the situation I was offered a discount of $150, that s a 64% discount on the $234. I rejected that offer and explained that I only used 7% more data than was permitted in the month and only did so because of a previous phone call with a Virgin representative telling me that the billing period ended at the month end (which I couldn t verify at the time because the Virgin CRM system was down [2]). Thus it doesn t seem reasonable to charge me 7* the regular billing amount for the entire month.I was asked what I thought would be a reasonable extra charge, I suggested 7.4% more than the $39 contract, IE an extra $3 that wasn t well received. Then I suggested that as the $49 Smart Cap plan would have covered the extra data use it could be reasonable for me to pay $49 for the month. The Virgin representative then offered me a $200 discount on the bill and I accepted that. So I got a 85.5% discount on the disputed amount, that s not too bad, it s enough to make this scam less profitable to Virgin (particularly when I publish information about it) and enough to make it not worth the effort of a TIO complaint.That makes it a bill of $102.36 instead of the original $302.36. That is $29 for one month of the Big Cap $29 for my wife, $39 for one month of the Smart Cap $39 for me, $33.99 for Virgin excessive bandwidth charges (down from $233.99), and $0.37 Account Charges which is described as a Payment Processing Fee presumably a fee for paying by credit card.The Ethical IssueTo make it clear, I think that only a minority of mobile phone customers have an ability to track their bandwidth and understand their bill which equals mine. I also think that only a minority of customers are as willing as I am to argue with random people about such things. I am sure that employees of Virgin Mobile know this and they devised a billing plan to trap customers. I think that this doesn t comply with the ethical standards that Richard Branson has advocated in several TV interviews that I have watched.The Next IssueNow the only remaining issue is that I signed up for an offer 3 Months Free ^ access fee on Topless, Smart & Easy caps with this phone. Save up to $267, just by buying online which continued Promo code: reggae Use this promo code & we ll automatically credit your first 3 months access fees , but so far they have not credited it. It s a pity I didn t realise this before and get it done in the same call.ConclusionI m starting to regret not keeping my LG U990 Viewty with a pre-paid SIM from Lebara [3] or Amaysim [4]. Amaysim has a minimum pre-paid value of $10 which lasts for 90 days, and the SIM will then receive calls for 180 days after the credit has run out this means $10 per 260 days (an average of $7.11 per year) if you just want to receive calls. Lebara has a period of 120 days before the number expires, so that means it costs $10 per 210 days or an average of $5.75 per year to receive calls only.Telstra charges $150 for one year of mobile net access which allows 10G of data transfer [5]. So it seems that a good option would be an old phone and a new Android tablet. $150 per year ($12.50 per month) for mobile net access and something between $5.75 and $40 per year for phone access (depending on whether you want to make calls) gives enough savings over the cost of a post-paid plan to buy a decent tablet.I think that the Android phone is definitely the best deal for my wife because she really only wants to carry one device, also she likes having longer conversations on the phone so the plan where she gets up to 450 minutes for $29 per month is a reasonable deal particularly as calls to me are free and calls to her relatives will be free if they get Virgin phones (something that now seems doubtful given their over-billing).I m happy to carry multiple devices (my past record is having four mobile phones and getting a tailor-made coat to fit all the geek stuff I carried) so a phone and a tablet is a reasonable option for me. But the Xperia X10 will do the job for the next two years and I ve got no great regrets.On the up-side, Virgin did send me a couple of free movie tickets after their CRM stuff-up.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/04/17/more-about-xperia-x10/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/23/virgin-mobile-crm-upgrade-failure/
• [3] http://www.lebara-mobile.com.au/
• [4] http://www.amaysim.com.au/
• [5] http://www.telstra.com.au/bigpond-internet/mobile-broadband/prepaid/rates/index.htm

I ve now had a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 for almost two months (here is a link for my first review) [1]. This is a phone that people seem to really dislike because the battery life is poor and Sony doesn t allow replacing the kernel. I m happy with mine, happy enough that after buying one for my wife and trying it out I bought one for myself. I knew about it s problems in advance and wanted a relatively cheap phone with a large high resolution screen, and the Xperia X10 was the best match for my criteria.ChargingThere has been a recent trend towards using USB for charging devices. Sony provides a tiny wall-wart PSU which has a USB socket and a short (1m) USB cable that can be used to charge the phone from it s PSU or from a PC. The size is really convenient, as the phone has a short battery life I ll probably want to take the PSU to more places than I would for other phones I ve owned.The short USB cable saves weight and tangle when travelling, but can be inconvenient. I m currently working on the phone while it s plugged into my laptop, that works well and I can make calls while it s connected. If the phone was connected to a USB port on a tower computer that was on the ground then the cable could be too short to make a call, if it was charging on a power point near the floor then I wouldn t even be able to use the computer functionality let alone make calls without kneeling. My Viewty has a 175cm charging cable which alleviates these problems. I ve got a 50cm USB extension cable that I use for charging my phone while I m in bed that is just long enough to allow me to check my email without getting out of bed!The socket for connecting the USB cable is protected by a plastic lid that is connected by a strip of rubber. For a socket that will be used at least twice a day this isn t a good mechanical design. The plastic slide on the LG U990 Viewty seems like a much better design.As an aside it s a pity that they aren t designing cars with USB charging sockets built in. Some new cars have a socket for one USB flash drive to be attached to the radio, but really they need at least one USB charging port per seat. It would also be nice if they made power points with USB charging sockets built in, I d buy a few of those if they made them.Preserving the BatteryI ve been running Juice Defender to reduce the battery use, at the moment it is claiming to have extended battery life by 69%. That combined with turning off things that aren t needed (such as WiFi) has made the phone reasonably usable. I can survive more than 12 hours during which I use the phone a lot without charging it.XperiaX10.net has an interesting review of replacement batteries [5]. I m not going to buy them because the largest battery requires a replacement back case which prevents using an external case to prevent damage and the smaller one doesn t provide enough of a benefit and the design of the phone makes it difficult to change batteries so carrying a spare battery isn t a good option.Cursor Control KeysThe HP/Compaq iPaQs that I own from ~10 years ago have a single button that can be moved up/down/left/right to act as a cursor, it can also be pressed inwards to act as an ENTER key (or whatever the application might want for a fifth function). Having some sort of hardware cursor control is really handy, I often end up deleting several characters when I want to replace one because getting the cursor onto the desired character is too difficult.Adding more hardware keys would require making the phone bigger, but that would be fine by me. As described in my previous post about phone cameras I d like to have a phone that s thicker to have a better camera with a greater focal distance for a larger lens [2].Core Phone FunctionalityI really miss having separate green and red buttons for making/answering calls and for rejecting/ending calls.A really common operation is to call back the last person who called. To do this on my LG U990 Viewty I press the green button twice on my home screen which took less than a second. On the Xperia this involves selecting the phone icon from the home screen, then the call log icon, then the call that is desired, then the Call user line. That is four presses in different parts of the screen compared to pressing the same hardware button twice. I m investigating dialer applets right now, the Dialler One applet has a good interface for calling people who have called or been called recently but it still requires two presses on different parts of the screen. With my old Viewty I could call back the last person by feel without even looking at the phone!In the last 6 years the standard functionality of phones has been to include multiple profiles for noises. My Viewty has profiles named Normal , Silent , Vibrate only , Outdoor , Headset (automatically selected when a headset is connected), and three customised ones. The Xperia has only one setting, and that is three icon presses away from the home screen. It does allow changing the volume by hardware switches on the side which includes going to vibrate-only and silent mode. While this is useful, it s not the best way that two precious hardware keys could be used. It also doesn t allow control over all the different notifications, I d like to be able to activate a noise profile and have every application respond to it in an appropriate manner. This is a deficiency in Android 2.1 not in the phone itself.In many ways this phone has the worst phone functionality of any mobile phone I ve ever owned, I think that this is more the fault of the Android designers than Sony Ericsson.Android UpdatesSony had previously claimed that they wouldn t support Android later than 2.1. Now Sony has announced that they will support Gingerbread Android 2.3 [3]. So one of the major complaints about the Xperia will soon be addressed.TetheringThe build of Android that the Xperia runs at the moment doesn t support Wifi tethering. I m currently using with Easy Tether for USB tethering [4]. It s not free software and requires it s own code to run as root on your Linux system that is being tethered (which is easily locked down with SE Linux), but it basically works. The down-side with Easy Tether is that it proxies all the connections so you can t run traceroute etc and in the free version you can t use UDP.K9 MailK9 Mail fixes some of the problems in the default Android email program that I described in my previous post. It allows selection of SSL with a default port of 993 for IMAPs. It uses mail.example.com as the mail server address for an email address of user@example.com (so I ll add a mail CNAME to the domains I run). When I connected initially it told me that the SSL key was not signed by a CA and asked if I wanted to save it or reject it this is the correct and desired functionality. It also correctly parses URLs from the email (or at least has fixed the bug that I discovered in the default email app).One problem I ve found with K9 is that it seems to timeout on large folders. This is probably partly the fault of Virgin Mobile being slow for IP access, but I wonder whether K9 doesn t pipeline IMAP commands as Virgin can do bulk transfer at reasonable speeds (80KB/s) and it mainly fails on latency (900ms being typical). The result is that a folder with more than 500 messages that need to be copied to the phone will never get synchronised. When I started reading mail on my phone I had to move mail from some of the bigger folders into other folders to avoid timeouts. As an aside the amount of time I ve saved by reading email on the go has already paid for the phone.MediascapeThe Sony Mediascape software is used for categorising photos. One function of this is to assign names to photos, the names come from the contact list so if you photograph someone who you can t phone then you need to add a contact list entry for them. This also means that you couldn t conveniently add names to non-humans, I guess I could have added a contact list entry Mr Crash Dump for photos of system crash logs. But a bigger problem is that it decides what is a picture of a person, a picture of someone who is not centered in the photo or a profile picture can be regarded as not a photo of a person and therefore not subject to being associated with a contact list. Finally when selecting a name for a picture it displays the entire contacts list in a small font instead of displaying favorites, I have the phone numbers of many clients in my contacts list who I will never photograph Mediascape just isn t much good. If I feel the need to do something serious in this regard I ll search the app store for something free that s better.ProtectionFor $15 each I bought one grey and one clear Gel Case from J2K. This case covers the sides and back of the phone with a firm rubber layer that will hopefully allow it to bounce rather than break. It also extends slightly higher than the screen which should stop the screen being scratched if the phone is left face-down on a hard surface on the vibrate setting.One problem with the Gel Case is that by it s design it has to cover the buttons on the sides, due to a design or manufacturing problem the clear case that my wife uses can press slightly on the shutter button which disables the three main buttons on the front. So when the menu or back button stops working she has to slightly move the Gel Case out from the side. I m thinking of just cutting out a section of the Gel Case there, that will make it difficult to press the shutter button, but you can use the touch screen to take photos and there doesn t seem to be any other use for the shutter button so this shouldn t be a problem. The clear and grey cases have different designs, the grey one has a hole over the raised Sony logo which makes it fit a little better as well as not having the shutter problem, so it seems to be a later design I don t know whether all clear cases have the same problem but I recommend that someone who only has one Xperia X10 get the grey case just in case.Web BrowsingI m experimenting with using my own web proxy to compress the data sent to the phone. Unfortunately the Android settings for a web proxy only apply to the main web browser, not to all the other applications that use web services. Also the built-in web browser requires pressing the settings hardware button followed by at least two touch-screen presses to change between windows or close a window and it doesn t seem to support making the short-press action be to open a link in a new window. So I will have to find another web browser to use.Bandwidth UseThe 3G Watchdog applet is really good for tracking the data transfer and optionally cutting off 3G access before the quota is exceeded. Unfortunately Virgin has already sent me a bill with $234 in extra charges for bandwidth use because I used 1.6G instead of my 1.5G quota. A Virgin representative had told me over the phone that the billing period would be based on the end of the month, so while every calendar month has had less than 1.5G used because I used more than average in the end of March and the start of April that counts as excess data in the 14th March to 13th April period.I m going to appeal this to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, I don t think that it s reasonable that I should be billed almost 7* the normal bill for exceeding the quota by 7.4% based on following the instructions of a Virgin employee. While I could have read the previous bill that they sent me to discover the end of billing period dates, I don t think that I should be expected to distrust everything that a Virgin employee says. If they billed me an extra $20 then I d just pay it, but $234 is unreasonable.ConclusionSince using the phone I ve found significant benefits in web browsing and reading email with the major limitation being the small screen (relative to a Netbook or Laptop). So if I was to buy another phone I would probably consider a Dell Streak which seems to be the largest Android phone on the market at the moment.Given the amount of use that I ve got I would be happy to spend more money and therefore consider a more expensive phone. But I don t regret the decision to save money by getting an Xperia X10.Finally when a telco tries to stick me with a $234 excess charge it really detracts from the value of having a phone contract. If I end up having to pay that then it s half the value of a smart-phone lost in one telco scam. This is enough to make a contract with Virgin a bad option, after this contract expires I may use VOIP and a pre-paid SIM from Telstra NextG if their network is still the best. Another possibility is to just use a small tablet and skip having a mobile phone, email and Jabber plus SMS from the people who lack net access will probably do.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/02/18/xperia-x10i-first-experience/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/11/26/quality-of-cameras-in-phones/
• [3] http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/products/2011/03/25/update-on-xperia%E2%84%A2-x10/
• [4] http://www.mobile-stream.com/easytether/android.html
• [5] http://www.xperiax10.net/2010/08/02/mugen-power-xperia-x10-battery-review-%E2%80%93-part-1/

(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?) This is probably a non-obvious reason to run Linux to most people. One of the complaints I've heard in the past is the lack of support for Linux. It's not really relevant to running it on a work desktop (where support is presumably from some central IT organisation), but I believe it's a red herring. Support in the Free software world can exceed that in the proprietary by an impressive margin. And that can turn out to be useful at work, even if you do suppose the existence of central IT. The support I've received for Linux and applications under it has been, on numerous occasions, excellent in a way I feel I could never expect from the commercial software world. And when it isn't, I have the choice of whomever I want to try and fix my problems, rather than being stuck with no options. I have found that if I am polite, and provide useful information, and patient, I can talk directly to the developers who make the software I use. If I have a patch they will often take it from me, or use it as a basis for the final fix. If they are no longer available, or too busy, then because I have the source I can find someone else to look at the problem, or do so myself. The chances of most large proprietary software companies giving me the time of day is low. I don't understand why small businesses think that Windows is a safer choice due to being able to get support from Microsoft. Again using experience gained at Black Cat, at one point we had a problem with IPv6 routes being updated. Signs pointed to Quagga, Simon collected relevant information and got in contact with the Quagga devs. They investigated, realised it wasn't a problem with their code, and then proceeded to find the issue in the Linux kernel, produce the fix and pass it upstream. Within hours of us reporting the problem. I'll accept that's an exceptional response that can be matched within the proprietary software world, but not without a hefty support contract and I doubt you would have got a response other than "Not our fault, talk to the other supplier", or maybe a workaround at best. More recently, I had a conversation about Linux and discard support, with one of the people who'd worked on it. Very interesting from my PoV, useful to my work (I ended up fixing something in our code base that led to the Linux support Just Working with our product) and I believe was useful to that developer too, in terms of providing some insight to the other side of the problem. I don't get that kind of access to proprietary software developers - while it could be argued that I know a lot of Free software people, I also know a lot of other programmers and they're just not able to be so open about things, so both sides lose out. Or my new laptop's ethernet wasn't supported by the kernel in squeeze. I filed a bug requesting the driver be added (and pointing to the patch). The week I wrote the first draft of this article I saw confirmation that this had been done, and will be part of the final squeeze release. I think that's pretty impressive. (Thanks, Ben.)

(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?) This is probably a non-obvious reason to run Linux to most people. One of the complaints I've heard in the past is the lack of support for Linux. It's not really relevant to running it on a work desktop (where support is presumably from some central IT organisation), but I believe it's a red herring. Support in the Free software world can exceed that in the proprietary by an impressive margin. And that can turn out to be useful at work, even if you do suppose the existence of central IT. The support I've received for Linux and applications under it has been, on numerous occasions, excellent in a way I feel I could never expect from the commercial software world. And when it isn't, I have the choice of whomever I want to try and fix my problems, rather than being stuck with no options. I have found that if I am polite, and provide useful information, and patient, I can talk directly to the developers who make the software I use. If I have a patch they will often take it from me, or use it as a basis for the final fix. If they are no longer available, or too busy, then because I have the source I can find someone else to look at the problem, or do so myself. The chances of most large proprietary software companies giving me the time of day is low. I don't understand why small businesses think that Windows is a safer choice due to being able to get support from Microsoft. Again using experience gained at Black Cat, at one point we had a problem with IPv6 routes being updated. Signs pointed to Quagga, Simon collected relevant information and got in contact with the Quagga devs. They investigated, realised it wasn't a problem with their code, and then proceeded to find the issue in the Linux kernel, produce the fix and pass it upstream. Within hours of us reporting the problem. I'll accept that's an exceptional response that can be matched within the proprietary software world, but not without a hefty support contract and I doubt you would have got a response other than "Not our fault, talk to the other supplier", or maybe a workaround at best. More recently, I had a conversation about Linux and discard support, with one of the people who'd worked on it. Very interesting from my PoV, useful to my work (I ended up fixing something in our code base that led to the Linux support Just Working with our product) and I believe was useful to that developer too, in terms of providing some insight to the other side of the problem. I don't get that kind of access to proprietary software developers - while it could be argued that I know a lot of Free software people, I also know a lot of other programmers and they're just not able to be so open about things, so both sides lose out. Or my new laptop's ethernet wasn't supported by the kernel in squeeze. I filed a bug requesting the driver be added (and pointing to the patch). The week I wrote the first draft of this article I saw confirmation that this had been done, and will be part of the final squeeze release. I think that's pretty impressive. (Thanks, Ben.)