Looking Back The past year has very much changed my life. A long time ago (around the beginning of this year) I have written that I have met Lucy. That happened over a year ago. In fact, it is just few weeks since it was a year. Lucy wrote me a beautiful letter at that time, picturing some of the moments in our life. I am very grateful for that letter. I am also much happier ever since I met her. Of course, there were problems (and there are problems)… None the less, life is fairly easy, and I am staggering on the path to becoming a better person. Lucy is a great help in that respect. Many things have straightened out over that year. A few got a little more wrinkled, but often due to smiles and seldom due to frowns. I have also mostly fixed the long-standing issue of a place to sleep and live in Brno, having recently moved in. I now live near the school (~15 minute walk, maybe less when in a little hurry), more or less in the city centre, with great connectivity to most of the places I need to visit. The previous place is just too remote for me. The new one is also a better building, or so I think, not a concrete-and-iron from-a-single-template building so typical of the socialist era, but solid brick building with high ceilings and thick walls. And it gives a much homelier feeling too. And what am I doing lately? Well, day job and school (both study and TA and research) take a fair amount of time, the rest I divide among Lucy, friends, learning to play the recorder, reading, writing and the many other things I (try to) do. I have even started to practice embouchure and breathing with an oboe (double) reed (and also with Lucy’s instrument). The idea is that i have the intention to get a bassoon (which is a double-reed as well) and start to learn and practice. And I also hope, that the practice from oboe will give me a head start to that. Maybe even that I could play both. I know that I won’t ever become a very good player, but I want to at least try. And I want to have some fun with it, too (it is great to be able to play an instrument, however impractical the woodwinds are, e.g. compared to guitar, which is probably much more social… one day, I may learn that too, though; wink). I still believe that with enough determination, i could become a semi-decent amateur. Call me foolish if you like, that is how I am. I have also considered blogging technicalities, and I probably will, if i find the time for that. It may also help me sorting things out. Probably need to consult the various people I work with, what they think about that, though.

In the past I have spent about 18 months living in hotels with a couple of months of breaks in between. I have previously written about it in terms of living in London hotels [1], but I have been asked for more generic advice. Firstly the amount of possessions that you may have when living in hotels is seriously limited. For ease of travel you want to restrict yourself to one suitcase for checked luggage and one for carry-on luggage. Hotels often have short-term storage space for possessions of guests, so having a second suitcase of items that are not worth stealing (clothes and books) may be an option. But consumer electronics devices other than a single laptop computer are not an option. I read an interesting blog post on ZenHabits.net titled Minimalist Fun: The 100 Things Challenge [2] which advocates counting and limiting the number of possessions you own. When living in hotels if I considered my books as one collection and my clothes as another (having never been interested in trendy clothes they count as utilitarian items for work or leisure not objects that I seek to own) and as my mobile phone was a tool for work and my computer gear was strictly limited to items that were needed for work (and thus “tools”) my only possessions were a digital camera and some bottles of liquor! The lack of ability to accumulate possessions may be considered as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on what your aims are. If you are moving to another country for work there are three ways of doing it. The easiest is to be a permanent employee of a company that assigns you to work there - in which case they will probably pay to transport your stuff when you buy or rent a house. If you are a looking for new employment (either contract or permanent) in another country then you can either find the work before moving or after arriving there. Finding work before arriving in the country is difficult and generally only works for short-term contracts. So it’s most likely that you will either be looking for work immediately after arriving or after a short contract. In either case having better mobility increases your employment options - why restrict yourself to one city or region when you can choose from all jobs in an entire country or (in the case of the EU) half of a continent! The career benefits of being able to accept any job anywhere in the world at short notice are significant! There are situations where an employer will pay hotel bills. One example was when I was working for a London based company and they assigned us to work at the other side of London. My colleagues complained and the company paid for hotel bills for everyone Sunday night to Thursday night inclusive as well as an extra hour of pay per day as compensation for the inconvenience. For me of course one hotel was as good as another so it just meant that my employer was covering 5/7 of my living expenses. Then I had a meeting with the hotel manager and pointed out that having me check out every Friday would be bad for them as the hotel was mostly empty on the weekend and suggested that they make me a deal for the other two days - I ended up paying something like one night of hotel fees per week! If I had rented an apartment I would have still been paying the full rent (which while less than 30 days hotel fees per month would have been considerably more than 4 or 5 days of hotel fees per month). If you live in a hotel then there is always some sort of deal that can be arranged. Apart from certain busy days (such as around the Christmas and new-year time) they always want long-term guests and will be willing to reduce the price, give free dinner or drinks from the bar, etc. The cost of living in a hotel at times such as Christmas may be as much as five times the regular rate. That is a further incentive to visit friends or relatives at Christmas. If you can’t visit your family (which may be difficult if they live on the other side of the world) then finding a friend who has a spare room might be an option.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/05/living-in-hotels/


• [2] http://zenhabits.net/2007/09/minimalist-fun-the-100-things-challenge/

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Some of you might notice that I've been somewhat inactive as a Debian developer or hacker in general for a while. There were several reasons, but at least one of my free-time-suckers these days has been MIAU (Movements for the Internet Active Users). I'm one of the founders, and recently we held the kick-off press conference and are steadily gaining supporters. Oh yeah, we know this acronym is quite awkward...we simply love that sound (in case you don't get, see our symbol mark). Our organization is intended to be a Japanese counterpart of EFF or ORG, and possibly includes some elements of what Prof. Lessig & Co. are doing in the U.S. We would like to defend our freedom and build/preserve the nurturing environment for innovation, especially in the Net. We would also like to be a political voice for Japanese Internet users. Currently we are focusing to fight with (IMHO) ill-conceived Japanese copyright "reform"s, such as extending the copyright term to 70 years or making downloading (in a sense) questionably-uploaded materials (like BitTorrent downloads) illegal. In case you want to know what's going on in the Japanese copyright war front now, I recommend this recently-published Techdirt article: Japan Is The Latest Country To Explore Copyright Term Extension. Unfortunately, for the time being, most of the MIAU Web contents are available only in Japanese. Yes, *I* got to translate the MIAU articles into English but need some more time...and I should admit MIAU as an organization is still tottering in many aspects. I'm not sure how we can gain greater momentum. If you have some experience to run this kind of initiative in your countries, please share your experience with us.

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I've been procrastinating writing about my Boston trip, for no particular reason. A bunch of us went to the Boston Ubuntu Developer Summit (in Cambridge, actually) for work purposes. We currently derive from the Long Term Support releases, and Hardy Heron is going to be an LTS, so I wanted us to get more involved directly, particularly at this stage of the game, rather than after it's already a done thing. Anyway, the reason I'm writing this in the "Debian" category is I found the whole thing to be totally awesome. Debian should do something similar. Rather than being a conference, this was essentially a week of 1-2 hour small-group meetings to discuss various features for Hardy. I thought it worked pretty well. I'd never seen gobby used before, and it's basically a poor-man's Google Docs (although one could argue it handles real-time collaborative editing better). They had VoIP up the wazoo. You could dial into a conference bridge to just listen in, or you could dial a different bridge to participate. Every room had a Polycom conference phone in it. That seemed to work pretty well. I think the main reason I think Debian could take a leaf out of Ubuntu's book on this was it helps resolve potentially controversial technical decisions very quickly. Rather than having a two week protracted flame war on a mailing list, you can have a 30 minute rational debate in person and move on. So I've no idea how this UDS stacked up to previous ones, but I was very impressed by the whole thing. I'm in total awe of Scott James Remnant and Colin Watson for not having burned out by now. Doing a release every 6 months, with all the associated stuff that goes around it (i.e. running a UDS) has got to take it out of you.

After a really crazy weekend in which it looked like I wasn't able to set up NAT[1], I went to work with the gear and tested the exact same thing I did at home and it worked without a glitch.

So, now I suspect that there might be something wrong with my ISP or the DSL modem, while ritter (my NSLU2) is fine. As a bonus I just installed Debian armel on it (installation report to arrive soon).


When I got home, after the laptop came back from hibernate[2] I saw these messages on all my terminals:

Message from syslogd@bounty at Mon Nov 12 23:57:04 2007 ...
bounty kernel: Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason b0.

Message from syslogd@bounty at Mon Nov 12 23:57:04 2007 ...
bounty kernel: You have some hardware problem, likely on the PCI bus.

Message from syslogd@bounty at Mon Nov 12 23:57:04 2007 ...
bounty kernel: Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

Is this a good time to panic?
I guess I'll have to dig into this, too.


In other news, svn-buildpackage 0.6.23 has been uploaded to unstable and it fixes yet another 7 bugs, which brings svn-bp's bug count down to 19 open valid bugs (2 more if you count wontfix bugs, too). This is the lowest bug count of svn-buildpackage since at least the end of April, according to the bug count graph.

Also, oolite 1.65-6 was also uploaded to unstable and fixes the breakage due to the gnustep build tools changes. Unfortunately, on arm is dep-waiting for libgnustep-base-dev which is broken on this arch.


Thanks to my sponsors, you know who you are ;-) .

[1] I have been trying to set up a simple NAT machine for more than 6 hours and, although everything seemed to be OK, checked and double checked it didn't work
[2] which works now only if I don't use fglrx which is broken from this PoV (bug 449095)

I just released version 0.24 of Wammu. This release brings improvements in device searching, support for notification on incoming call (you need python-dbus for this) and various minor GUI improvements. Full list of changes:

• Notifies user about incoming calls using D-Bus.
• Remember default type of created entry (eg. phone/SIM memory).
• Newly created entries contain some reasonable fields by default.
• Fixed validation of editor fields.
• Improvements in guided wizard to make it easier to use.
• Clever searching over Bluetooth based on manufacturer.
• Searching can be really limited to some connection types.

There is still no binary for Windows. I don't have time and environment for maintaining them. Volunteers are welcome!

Disclaimer: splashscreens should be avoided and programs should start faster. Some programs are just too slow so a splash screen is needed. Wouldn’t it be cool if all programs that showed splashscreens actually showed a splash matching the same theme as your desktop environment and your display manager? This might going to happen. Besides OOo, amarok and the gimp, which other programs uses splash screens? And where do they store their splash screens? Artists: This is also your clue to consider it. I don’t have much artist skills, but I have some ideas for the implementation. To show off something, I can start here: The plan is of course to make it as easy as apt-get install debianized-splashscreens to get debianized splash screens - and apt-get remove to get the original splash screens back. Oh - and of course easily to change for derivatives who wants some other styling.

Processing a NEW package (etckeeper) of our debconf system and what do I find there?

lintian output:
 W: etckeeper: debconf-is-not-a-registry ./etc/etckeeper/pre-apt.d/50uncommitted-changes

HA! :) (Besides that its using the wrong VCS, but thats a different topic :) )

I’m currently evaluating Olivier Sessinks jailkit to maintain a small cvsd CHROOT with an included SSH server. The cvsd-buildroot command e.g. doesn’t handle the libpam-modules dependency in the CHROOT. So I tried to update the Debian packaging files included in the jailkit source. During this work I found some issues with the build environment - e.g. no DESTDIR support and some other stuff (another user already complained, that there might be problems with the SUID installation part for jk_chrootsh, jk_uchroot and jk_procmailwrapper of the Makefiles). So I began to check and “fix” the Makefiles and the configure script and then sent everything to Olivier. I did not only add the DESTDIR variables. I also made use of built-in rules, common variables (also for implicit rules), … and such stuff to make the Makefiles shorter and easier to maintain. My fault: I tested everything with GNU make. Now Olivier complained, that BSDs make doesn’t work anymore. So we began a short hack session to check for the problems. My first issue: I had to find some BSD make to test it myself. I found it in the freebsd5-buildutils, that contains the freebsd-make command. Then we began to check for incompatibilities and that’s the result:

1. ifdef statements differ in syntax
   • GNU make uses ifdef VAR
   • BSD make uses .ifdef VAR
   solution: We replaced the statement with a construct similar to AM_CONDITIONAL. But we do not use this macro, because it would need to be shipped in aclocal.m4, which is currently not necessary. The code simply sets a variable foo_TRUE to ‘# ‘, if the condition is wrong, or the variable is left empty, if the condition is true:

   if test "x$my_condition" != "xno" ; then
       AC_SUBST([foo_TRUE], [])
   else
       AC_SUBST([foo_TRUE], [# ])
   fi

   FILES = bar
   @foo_TRUE@FILES += foo

2. prerequisite variables differ in syntax
   • GNU make uses $<, $^, $@, …
   • BSD make uses $ .IMPSRC , $ .ALLSRC , $ .TARGET , … (note, that both *SRC variables hold a list of source files)
   Unfortunately both make implementations doesn’t seem to share a variable for the list of prerequisites. So the only solution is to list all prerequisites in the rule again. A variable would be much more comfortable. Maybe one could write a function, that first tests $ .IMPSRC and falls back to $^. Maybe that’s an alternative, but it’s IMHO not a very good solution. We’ve chosen to write down all prerequisites in a rule instead of using a variable. This is a little bit “harder” to maintain, but it works.
3. built-in rules are not shared and do not use the same variables
   • GNU make ships built-in rules to build objects from sources and link them; rules consider CPPFLAGS
   • BSD make ships built-in rules to build objects from sources, but there are no rules to link them; rules do not consider CPPFLAGS
   In the case of GNU make, one can simply write:

   myprog: foo.o bar.o

   and GNU make will automatically create foo.o from foo.c (.c.o:, ditto for bar.o) and at least link myprog (.o:). But BSD make will only create the object files. There is no final link-step. So we had to include the rule to link the program in the Makefile.

Finally we got it and it looks good now. I/We learned a lot of new things (I learnd a lot about BSD make) ;), but it took us 1-2 hours to understand and fix the problems. Here a list of URLs, that might give some more information about the programs, their syntax and limitations:

• GNU make’ manual
• FreeBSDs make
• Autoconf: Limitations of make

I'll be in New York State for the second half of this coming week. On Thursday, I'll be in New York City giving a talk as part of a interdisciplinary colloquium discussing free software and structured around Decoding Liberation, the recent book by Brooklyn College professors Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter. The talk will be Thursday, November 15, 2007 between 10:50 and 13:30 in the Glenwood Lounge in the Brooklyn College student center. See this flier for details. I'll be heading straight to Ithaca where I'll give a talk the next day at Cornell for the Code Review student group. My talk will try to introduce and discuss free software issues in the context of the OLPC project. The talk will be on Friday November 16th at 17:00 in Rockefeller 115. There's some more details on the Code Review website. Folks should feel free to attend either event. I'll be leaving soon after on a bit of a Balkan tour being organized by some of my friends from mi2 and will be spending a couple weeks in or based out of Zagreb. The details are still being ironed out but I'll be sure to post them here once I know dates, places, and times.

This is another case of a udev rule that took over an hour to figure out, and now seems very clear and obvious. Which probably means it won't next time I need it. I have a bunch of USB to serial adapters, all using pl2303, all so cheap that there's no product ID or any way to tell them apart. This is cheaper than buying actual console server hardware nowadays. So how to know which ttyUSB* device is hooked up to what? The solution is to use the USB bus ID, which corresponds to the usb port the device is plugged into. My /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent_usb_serial.rules:

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ID=="3-2", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB_front_upper"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ID=="2-2", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB_front_lower"

The ID numbers can be found in dmesg.

Yesterday I bought a laptop for a friend, who also asked me to install Linux on it. Since she's not computer-savvy at all, I opted for an Ubuntu. I provide here a short description of the hardware and what to expect regarding compatibility for anyone about to buy one of these. Hardware description

Model	HP 530
Part No.	GU322AA
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz (stepping 12) - 2 MiB cache
CPU flags	fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor est tm2 xtpr
Screen	330 mm x 250 mm viewable area, "glossy" wide-screen. 1280x800 pixels.
Video	Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller
Audio	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) HDA
USB	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller
Ethernet	Intel 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ - PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller Mobile
WiFi	Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
Optical media	Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560A
Hard disk	Fujitsu MHY2120BH, 112GiB, max UDMA/100

Problems The only problems I had with the hardware were related to the sound card and the lid. The sound card had exactly the same problem as my Dell Inspiron 6400: it won't turn off the internal speakers when you plug something in the audio output jack. This is easily solved adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options: options snd-hda-intel enable=yes model=laptop The problem with the lid is that the screen didn't turn off when the lid closed. Just one time it did work, and stopped doing so after a reboot. Looking with acpi_listen, it seems that the acpi event isn't even generated. I don't know if this is a hardware or software problem. Also, some not very nice things should be noted about it: it has no independent media buttons for volume, suspend, etc.; only the WiFi transmitter kill and the power button, the rest needed a key chord. It has only two USB ports, which nowadays is incredibly few. No LEDs for hard dist, scroll lock or num lock. The audio jacks are on the front, which makes them very unsuitable for any straight plug. Although seldom used, it is nice to have the ability to turn the screen 180 , but this one can't do it. Finally, the battery is tiny: only four cells amounting 2 Ah of capacity. The power consumption seems a little better than my Dell: running on batteries, with low brightness, an idle GNOME desktop gave a reading of 820mA. Watching a movie from optical media in full screen ranged from 1 A to 1.3 A depending on the spinning of the media and the codec. Burning a DVD at 2x took 1.15 A The good After installing a Ubuntu 7.10, almost everything Just Worked . Of course it warned me about the non-free ipw3945 driver, but in seconds network-manager had connected to my home WLAN. Network manager could be a little more smart and turn off the WiFi transmitter when it's disabled by the user, but I guess that's not only an Ubuntu problem :). Most media keys worked out of the box, the WiFi kill switch worked OK, as did suspend to ram and to disk. Video acceleration and obligatory eye candy worked automatically. No problems either with burning a DVD, listening to music, watching a movie or connecting to my home network. The external aspect is not bad, the screen looks good, and the touch pad is very nice: just a matrix of dots over a surface that doesn't show any other sign of being an input method. In conclusion, it shows that it is a very cheap machine, but the drawbacks seem very few comparing to the good price. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Tecnolog a

Dear Lazyweb, After several years without regular physical activity, I resumed it last summer by running 3 or 4 times a week. I still have to write down how good this can be, and how good it has been for my health (from 82kg down to 75kg is already a good result, imho).. Anyway, I'm currently trying to find some software to log my running activity, to keep track of at least the distance I run (which can range from 4km during the week up to 16km, my current record, during week-ends), the time I spent running and the path I followed (I'm lucky enough to live close to forests, country and have numerous choices for my running loops....anough to nearly never reproduce the very same path). In fact, this activity is now enough a challenge for me (how long can I run? After all, I'm now not that far from the semi-marathon.....but the last kilometers may be hard) and I feel some need to track it down. So, is there something around for doing this? "apt-cache search" was silent about this but I may have used the wrong keywords.

Best wishes to everyone in the Free Software community for the new year Vikari (VS 2064) Diwali/new year this time was kind of anticlimatic compared to last year when we were actually in India. It is cold and gloomy in NJ, and fireworks are hard to come by. (Though I did manage to scrounge up some so not a total loss in that department.) And we arrived late at the mandir for Annakut Darshan today so they were out of thor which sucks. The presents front has been the usual maddeningly practical things. The kids of course got better stuff. Shailu, for instance, got Hungry Hungry Hippos and we've been having fun playing that. So I shouldn't complain. Ma Lakshmi has blessed me tremendously over the past year and I just know this year will be even better.

I have just come back from a half week stay at the Hilton Indian Lakes resort (which is the second time in a month that I have stayed at a golf resort and club and proceeded to spend 9 hours a day in a windowless conference room). On Thursday night, an ex Chicago native wanted to show us the traditional Chicago pizza (which can be delivered, half cooked, and frozen, via Fed-Ex, anywhere in the lower 48). Google Maps to the rescue! One of the attendees had a car, and we piled in and drove to the nearest pizzeria. It was take out only. We headed to the next on the list, again to be met with disappointment; since making the pizza takes the best part of an hour, and we did not want to be standing out in a chilly parking lot while they made out pizza. So, I strongly advocated going to Tapas Valencia instead, since I have never had tapas before. Somewhat to our disappointment, they served tapas only as an appetizer, and had a limited selection; so we ended up ordering one tapas dish (I had beef kabobs with a garlic horseradish sauce and caramelized onions), and my very first paella (paella valencia), with shrimp, mussels, clams, chicken, and veggies. We ate well, and headed back to the hotel. As we parked, and started for the gate, I realized I no longer had my wallet with me so back to the restaurant we went. The waiter had not found the wallet. Nor had the busboy. The owner/hostess suggested perhaps it was in the parking lot? So we all went and combed the parking lot once, twice. At this point I am beginning to think about the consequences I can t get home, because I can t get into the airport, since I have no ID. I have no money, but Judy can t wire the money to me via western union because I have no ID. I need money to buy greyhound tickets to get home on a bus and then there is the cancelling credit cards, etc. Panic city. While I was on my fourth circuit of the parking lot, the owner went back and checked the laundry chute. I had apparently carelessly draped the napkin over my wallet when paying the tab, and walked away and the busboy just grabbed all the napkins, wallet and all, and dumped it down the chute. Judy suggests I carry an alternate form of ID and at least one credit card in a different location than my wallet for future trips. If that was not excitement enough, yesterday, I got on the plane home, uneventfully enough. We took off, and I was dozing comfortably, when there were two loud bags, and the plane juddered and lister to the port. There was a smell of burning rubber, and we stopped gaining altitude. After making a rough about turn with the left wing down, the pilot came on the intercom to say We just lost our left engine, and we are returning to O Hare. We should be in the ground in two minutes . Hearing the in , a guy up front started hyperventilating, and his wife was rubbing his back. My feelings were mostly of exasperation, I had just managed to get myself situated comfortably, and now lord only knows when we would get another aircraft. When we landed, the nervous dude reached over and kissed his wife like he had just escaped the jaws of death. And he asked if any of us knew statistics, and if we were fine now. (I was tempted to state that statistics are not really predictive, but hey). It was all very pretty, with six fire engines rushing over and spraying us with foam and all. When we got off the plane the nervous dude headed straight to some chairs in the terminal, and said his legs would not carry him further. He did make it to the replacement plane later, though. Turns out it was a bird flying into the engine that caused the flameout. Well, at least I have a story to tell, though it delayed getting home by about three hours.

Ian Lance Tailor started a discussion that has in the meantime reached Planet Debian via Miry and Giacomo. The single-threaded memory model is the only sane choice for languages that are as close to the "metal" as C and C++ are. For a multi-threaded model to work, the compiler needs to have intrinsic knowledge of "locking", and it needs to emit the appropriate code around all accesses to variables that cannot be accessed atomically (which also means that signal handling does not work — the signal might arrive in a critical section). Java uses such a model. In the language, there is the "synchronized" keyword, which can be used either as a modifier on a method definition (locking the object the method is called on), or before a block (locking an explicitly specified object). The lock is recursive, so calling another "synchronized" method on the same object works fine, leaving the last one finally unlocks the object. Memory consistency is achieved by flushing the object before unlocking (so accessing an object that another thread may use without locking it is still undefined behaviour — but class authors can avoid that by allowing access only through "synchronized" methods). I doubt we want the same in C/C++. For one, it adds a recursive lock to each instance of a class or struct, whether needed or not, since the compiler cannot rule out that some code might want to use this object as a lock. Also, the object inclusion and inheritance rules are quite different, as Java does not have inclusion, and only allows simple inheritance. Basically, if I were to emulate Java's rules, I'd need a "virtual" base class to provide the lock, which is a lot of extra overhead since every derived class now needs to keep the offset to the most derived class. The other two big show stoppers are the "intrinsic" knowledge of locking that the compiler must have (it needs to know how to embed a recursive lock into an object, which is an operating-system dependent structure as it stores some thread identifier for the current holder of the lock) and that it becomes a lot more difficult to write signal handlers, as you need to avoid any code that might implicitly lock some object (which is true already, but there is no implicit locking). Java can do that, as they have a virtual machine that provides locking primitives and object lookup (so they can keep the lock separate). There is a change to the memory model I'd like to see though: the concept of an I/O buffer that behaves like regular memory (so load/store coalescing/reordering is allowed), but will be flushed before volatile accesses and re-read afterwards (optionally, with finer grained control). This would work for both hardware accesses (where the volatile access triggers some hardware) and for "hosted" environments (where the compiler assumes that system calls perform volatile accesses), and still allow most optimisations like writing in the hardware's natural bus width. If you want to write reliable multi-threaded code with current compilers, there are two simple rules:

1. any data structure shared by multiple threads needs to be marked volatile
2. any access to a shared data structure needs to be guarded by a lock

The accesses to the shared data structure are ordered with regard to the locking functions and cannot be optimized out, which is exactly what you want. The appropriate mental model is that anything that is not declared volatile (or handled by a platform locking primitive) cannot be seen by the other threads.

Finally, the first university admission test is tomorrow, or in numbers: in 14 hours.

---

So, here I am, sitting in front of my computer thinking about tomorrow.
It's exciting to think about it: in 14 hours I'll do an exam which could change the rest of my life! :).

I'll do my best and hope to get the best from it :D

The search for the ideal mobile text editing device is over. While the price was well over my original budget, we’ve since gone ahead and splurged on two new Eee PCs: one for me, one for my wife. In the end, I think it will be worth it because these systems are capable of far more than just editing text. Now comes the challenging part. Xandros is the default OS and we want Debian on it instead. I have started supplementing the system with packages from Etch and Etch-backports using apt pinning, but already I have noticed some cracks beginning to develop: with pure Xandros, an SD card was automounted when it was inserted. Now it fails. Also, the Network utility no longer launches. I can work around these glitches for now, but it is plain that in the long term this Xandros/Etch hybrid is going to be more grief than it is worth. To that end, enter Debian-eeepc. Building on the work started by timbobsteve and drawing from the collective experience of the Eeeuser.com community we will make a debian-live cd + debian-installer to install Debian (as pure as possible—obviously the kernel is going to be our most contentious issue) on the device. So stay tuned for more articles on that work-in-progress. And how does my new toy shape up for mobile text editing so far? I’m delighted! For starters, this article was drafted on the bus home from work. The keyboard, while small, is still quite usable for touch-typing, the display is crisp and bright, and the size is just perfect for the cramped quarters of a public transit bus seat. But beyond just editing text, I have loaded up the system with all of the tools that go around it: subversion, git, ruby, gcc, meld, etc. I’ll be able to manage a fair amount of development on the bus, with the exception being really large builds that will continue to be done on remote build systems.

The plan for tomorrow includes possibly breaking my computer by soldering the JTAG connector onto the CPU board. Then there will be much debugging of mISDN drivers, and hopefully some rejoicing when I find out what makes the kernel hang on loading the layer 1 driver. This will also be an excellent opportunity to clean up my desk to make space for the soldering iron, and to build another Internet router in case anything goes wrong.

Christian Perrier blogs about how he uses public transportation to go to work, how that works well, and how that has positively affected his Debian productivity. Personally, I couldn't agree more. I've graduated from school in 2001; and the only time when I commuted to work by car was when I worked at template, where I had a company car because I had to make customer visits. Today, as an entrepreneur, I do everything by public transportation. It is my intention to, eventually, make sure I have a car because doing customer visits by public transportation isn't easy; but it's not impossible, either; you just need to make sure you're prepared. If I have an appointment at a customer, what I usually do is to go to the de lijn website, of the flemish public transportation company that handles buses and trams; they have a schedule online, and a route planner that allows me to do much of what Google Maps does for cars, but then for public transportation—including trains. If I do that on time (that is, earlier than half an hour or so before the appointment), I hardly ever have problems reaching my destination in time. Of course there are days when the system fails, and I'm stuck in a train station for longer than I'd like; but these are the exception, not the rule, especially outside rush hour. And like Christian mentions, the absense of having to pay attention to the road while commuting is a real bonus, in that it allows you to actually get some work done. Or sleep, if it's been a short night. Or look outside the window, if you have nothing better to do. Or hack. In fact, at DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I had a little discussion with Ian Jackson about how the train provides the perfect environment for hacking: nobody around to disturb you (except, occasionally, people to check your tickets, but you can just put your ticket in plain view all the time and they'll be happy without you getting out of deep hack mode), and the view out the window is just perfect to stay concentrated: no still image to get distracted by, but nothing boring either. We theorized that it'd be nice if you could just go to the train station and state "I need a ticket. The destination isn't important, but I want to be waiting as little as possible and end up here again in about 2 hours". The only problem with that, of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...