Julien Blache: forked-daapd: v0.15
forked-daapd v0.15 is here! The database speedups did not make it into this release as they still need some more work.
Now let s talk about what did make it into this release: AppleTV metadata support. When streaming to an AppleTV, you ll now get the cover art, artist, album, title and playback position displayed on your TV.
This was made possible by a forked-daapd user who offered me one of the new AppleTVs, so thanks much to him!
Although we haven t got the database speedups this time around, we ve got some other speedups:
- the code generating the song list was slightly reworked;
- hash tables of static data were replaced with static hash tables generated by gperf;
- the artwork code can now send out both PNG and JPEG to clients.
If you're an admin or a mentor, you can produce a similar graph for your
own org(s) - just download this 
I've got a Debian GNU/Linux lenny installation (2.6.26-2-vserver-amd64 kernel) running on a Dell Poweredge 2950 with BIOS 2.0.1 (2007-10-27). It has two Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3.00GHz processors (according to /proc/cpuinfo, 8 1GiB 667MHz DDR2 ECC modules (part number HYMP512F72CP8N3-Y5), according to dmidecode, and an Intel Corporation 5000X Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 12) according to lspci. The machine has been running stably for many months. On the morning of March 31st, i started getting the following messages from the kernel, on the order of one pair of lines every 3 seconds: ![[Individual interrupts - by month]](http://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/i5000_edac/irqstats-month.png)
![[CPU Usage - by month]](http://dkg.fifthhorseman.net/blog/i5000_edac/cpu-month.png)
I also note that more rescheduling interrupts started happening, and fewer megasas interrupts at about the same time. I'm not sure what this means. A review of other logs and graphs on the system turns up no other evidence of interaction that might cause this kind of elevated activity. One thought was that the elevated activity was just due to writing out a bunch more logs. So i tried removing the i5000_edac module just to keep dmesg and /var/log/kern.log cleaner. Leaving that turned off doesn't lower the CPU utilization or change the interrupts, though. Any suggestions on what might be going on, or further diagnostics i should run? The machine is in production, and I'd really rather not take down the machine for an extended period of time to do a lengthy memory test. But i also don't want to see this kind of extra CPU usage (more than double the machine's baseline).Tags: 
On next Monday this cycle s 
); only a very small fraction of it (where I explain package names, etc.) will be specific to Debian/Ubuntu, but shouldn t be hard to apply to other distributions as well.
So please feel invited to join, and bombard us with questions!
Adam D. Barratt is a Debian developer since 2008, in just a few years he got heavily involved to the point of being now Release manager , a high responsibility role within the community. He worked hard with the other members of the release team to make Squeeze happen.
You could expect the release managers to have some rest after a big release, but it s not really the case. With the long freeze, loads of transitions have accumulated and they are now busy to get all those updated packages in the new testing (wheezy). Despite this Adam took some time to answer my questions.
He shares with us his impression on the Squeeze release, his opinion on time-based freezes (regular/predictable freeze) and much more. Read on. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Adam.
Who are you?
I m a 31 year old software developer and part-time sysadmin for a software and IT services company based in the south of England. I have no children, no pets and a long-suffering partner who puts up with me spending far too much time tinkering with things and people making fun of her Macbook during Debconf.
As well as being on the release team, I m a member of the maintainer teams for devscripts and lintian.
Can you describe your journey in Debian and in the release team?
I was introduced to Debian as part of an infrastructure upgrade at work, moving from a set of Red Hat and Solaris-based systems. As part of that, we submitted some bugs for issues we found during the upgrade and for small patches we included in some software to add extra functionality we wanted. From that starting point I became more interested in Debian in general and began following some of the mailing lists and IRC channels.
When Julian Gilbey asked for help with the maintenance of devscripts, I submitted some patches for some of the outstanding bug reports and was invited to join the team which was being created to handle maintenance for the package. One of the then Release Managers was also on the team and asked if I d be interested in working on a couple of updates they wanted to the scripts which generate the proposed-updates overview pages. I added the new functionality which was merged in to the live scripts and a little while later I was invited to join the team, shortly before Debconf 9.
As most readers will be aware, we unfortunately reached a point during last year where we didn t have anyone filling the Release Manager role. During that period, I became more active in handling transitions and requests for updates to stable and as time went on more people started to suggest that I should put myself forward for the position, or refer to me as already being RM. I procrastinated over the decision for some time but after discussions during Debconf 10 I came round to the idea that we should have the RM role filled again and agreed to take it on, together with Neil. The rest, as they say
How much time do you usually spend working for the release team ?
I ve been trying to work out how to usefully answer this question. My initial answer was approximately two hours each day , but the longer I thought about it the more I started debating exactly what I should include under the umbrella of release work; after some to-and-fro I ve decided to stick with my initial answer.
During periods when Debian is frozen and particularly in the lead up to the release that time commitment increases significantly, particularly over weekends. I m reliably informed that at that point the correct answer to the question is too much time . 
What s your own retrospective of the Squeeze release? What went well and what needs to be improved?
Overall, I believe the release went well and that we should all be proud of the Squeeze release. The parts of the release cycle which highlighted the need for improvement all share, imo, a single root cause communication, particularly around freeze-related plans. We worked hard during the freeze itself to improve our communication with the rest of the project and want to continue in that vein during the Wheezy cycle.
One thing that I personally found quite difficult at times before the freeze was keeping track of the transitions which were still waiting for a place in the queue; it s also something that we could improve on at this early stage of the Wheezy cycle. In order to help us keep a clear overview of requests for transitions, stable updates and binNMUs, it would be helpful if they could be filed as appropriately user-tagged bugs. This not only allows us to easily get an overview of the status of requests from the BTS but also aids transparency by allowing anyone else to do so; as a useful additional feature, it means that we can use the BTS s blocking functionality to indicate reasons why a request cannot be fulfilled right now.
Are you in favor of time based freeze?
I think there s merit in having a time frame that we can work towards in order to achieve the goals which we set ourselves for the release, as individual maintainers, maintenance teams and a project. I do have concerns that even with such a time frame in place there will still be uploads made very close to the proposed freeze point and transitions which may be unfinished, for example because of an unforeseen entanglement with or reliance on the transition of another package.
One thing I m interested in is how exact and specific that time frame should be and the balance between predictability and being able to achieve everything we want for a great release; this is something we can cover in the debate on this subject which I know many people have strong opinions about.
What are your plans for Debian Wheezy?
The Wheezy to-do list I started before the final Squeeze release begins multiarch, multiarch, multiarch . It looks like we re finally going to get that achieved during this release cycle, thanks to a great deal of hard work from various people. I m also interested in seeing the C.UTF-8 locale standardised throughout Debian and continuing to work on our tools and processes to make tracking of transitions and stable updates simpler (or at least appearing to be so 
I just received a strange call. Basically, someone phoned me up and tried to convince me to change my computer s settings. They called my direct line (not the co-op switchboard), so I think they might be calling other numbers in the Weston-super-Mare area. Watch out for this attack.
I d heard about these calls from 
A pure maintenance release of
The Background
If you weren't online last Friday you probably have missed the big news announcement on the 
Looking at current state of some 
I took part in a occupational-health-related thread recently, and wrote a bit of my experience which might be helpful for my readers, many of them avid keyboard users, with usually 8hr of typing per day.
( ) I suffered not from RSI but from painful back aches. I started using standard keyboards in a different fashion, not putting so much stress on my wrists (and on the muscles connecting them to the rest of the body, of course): I exclusively use US keymaps (with some modifications to allow for proper Spanish input and characters), but instead of making the middle row my fingers' home row, I type with the base position of my fingers in a V shape Fingers resting on (approx.) w-e-f-v-spacebar and spacebar-m-l-;-]; the fingers doing most of the travelling are the index and middle, and with no straining for the little fingers to reach or backspace. On the other side, the most straining keys become Control and Shift, which requires closing the hands a bit too much, but are not that bad. My way does induce some new kind of stress, as my arms also have to move to reach 6 and 7, but it... Works for me .
It looks weird and is somewhat strange to get used to, but I must say it has worked great for me. I work this way on regular and laptop keyboards, even on my netbook's noticeably smaller one.
Mandatory warning: What follows is for testing only, and
insecure (
So, the last countdown to