So far, DBus has two types of busses: the session and the system bus. The session bus is used by most of your desktop applications. The system bus is used e.g. by Hal signalling that new hardware was added, or by NetworkManager for network connectivity changes. The system bus is protected via a security policy. Problems arise now when you need to locate your session DBus from a different session. For example, from a cron job. There is a DBus application called "notification daemon" which can display popup baloons. This is useful for signaling yourself e.g. the completion of a long-running computation or just about anything you want. But it's using the session bus, so you can't reach it from outside of your current session. A year ago, I wrote a hack for this, which will locate your current Gnome session, read the environment variable to find the session bus and then send a message to the sessions notification-daemon. This is an ugly hack, however yesterday and today people asked on #dbus precisely how to do this. It seems to be a common question. Maybe DBus should be extended by a "user" DBus, and applications such as music players or the notification daemon should actually listen on that bus (as well). Maybe it could also be made possible to (securely) locate your session DBus via the system bus, I don't know how detailed the security policies of the system DBus are.

Or: Collateral Damage by the Cult of Celebrity. Or: The Hidden Costs of Downloading Porn. (No, I've not seen the film filked in the post title.) I got a work call from the advertising manager of one of my customers. They are just starting out with pay-per-click adverts. I understand that it's been working OK for the last few months, increasing their number of sales and general interest by enough to cover the cost. In general, each time they refined their campaigns or spent a little more, they saw a positive result. I got a call because since the start of February, they were suddenly spending a lot more money, without any corresponding results. Was there foul play? Had a competitor noticed their adverts and kept clicking them from different browsers? In short, was someone running a click-fraud attack on them? This is the sort of question I enjoy. (I did a statistics degree, but I don't use it directly in most of my work.) I massaged the logs and computed some general-purpose statistics. First, I looked for obvious attacks: were any particular machines or domains responsible for most of the clicks? Most non-IT people use the same ISP at home and at work, in my experience, so if it was a particular competitor, I'd expect to see lots of clicks from one domain. Nothing really stood out. The next thing I looked at was the geographic locations, very roughly. The pay-per-click adverts are targetted at European users on European sites. If it was some sort of distributed denial-of-service attack, I'd expect to see some increase in American and Asian traffic. Where were visitors coming from? I looked up locations by the first part of the IP address, which is crude, but good enough for this. You could even do something similar with the the xkcd ipv4 map - it looked like most of the addresses were in Europe, which is what I'd expect. There was one interesting US grouping, but that turned out to be one of the ad networks checking their ad links were still valid. So, I compared the time distributions of clicks now with clicks a month ago (when the ads were working fine). There were increased numbers of clicks just before 9, just after 17 and midnight-4 local time. I could dismiss the clicks just outside 9-17 common work hours as people looking to buy for their hobbies, but midnight-4 is a bit strange. Looking in more detail, the midnight-4 clicks were coming mostly from ad placements on one site. Looking at that site, it seems they specialise in 'sexy videos' of celebrities. Needless to say, that was not my customer's intended target market! I used that information to look at the whole dataset and see how much of the increase was due to that one site. Almost all of it was from there. Scores per night. Did any of those visitors stay long? Nope. It even looked like some of them were just private web spiders, downloading a page and all links from it, which I guess people might use to bulk-download videos overnight. So those results were sent to the advertising manager and they've updated their campaigns to exclude that site and any others related to sexy videos. It reminds me of the John Wanamaker quote

"Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half."

Maybe by working out statistics from the logs, we can reduce it from half for web ads - or at least limit it to half?

We have a couple of low-cost airlines in England and Ireland, Easyjet and Ryanair. They are interesting because they optimise for low turn-around time and general cheapness. Optimisations include making the passengers walk to the aeroplane then up both sets of on-board steps to halve loading time, and putting quite a steep charge on all checked luggage. This all makes sense. However, today, I came across a measure that makes very little sense indeed. Ryanair have added a surcharge for checking in online. So rather than go through their computerised process that (I should expect) costs virtually nothing to administer, I will be pestering the check-in staff in person today. No matter. At least I’m going home today to see my family.

I had a full day yesterday. I'm not sure how this happened, but for some reason both Montreal Wiki Wednesday and Yulblog First Wednesdays fall on (ta-da!) the same day of each month. So we get a whole lot of Internet social-software craziness all in one intense burst during the day. Wiki Wednesday last night was a good time. We had it up at La bande passante, the informal meeting space that Robin Millette, Marco and roommates have up near Metro Cr mazie. It's a really nice space for a meeting of <20 people in an informal setting. They have lots of space, equipment for presentations, WiFi, a big table and comfy chairs. Hugh McGuire, Anne Goldenberg and Antoine Beaupr , Marc LaPorte, Seb Paquet and Robin Millette were all there (with various bande-passistes passing in and out as needed). I talked about experiences with RecentChangesCamp 2007, especially the "what we should have done" session at the end of the event. It really informs what we're going to do with RoCoCo in May of this year. In particular, we've made a commitment to try to get invitations and sponsorship requests out in February -- about 3 months before the event proper. We hope this is close enough to the event itself that people won't put it off or forget about it, but far enough away that people have time to make plans. Hugh talked about his new project Visible Politics. It's kind of a Wikipedia-meets-They Work for You. It's a wiki project for sharing objective information about the voting records, positions, and affiliations of Canadian federal politicians. It's still in its infancy, but I think the project can lend a really great hand to making public information about civic activities possible. On top of that, Robin demoed a really cool project for measuring activity on parts of a wiki site, Hot Off the Wiki. His demo versions use the BarCamp wiki, but I think the plan is to expand the tool to work for other wiki engines and sites. It's a good idea. I also demoed the MediaWiki OpenID extension, which I think was pretty interesting. I didn't say it at the time, but I mostly did the demo for Marc, who I think could benefit from one of the US$5000 Open Source OpenID bounty. I believe that TikiWiki meets the popularity requirements and the OpenIDEnabled.com libraries should make it easy to implement. Anyways, good Wiki Wednesday all around. I'm looking forward to the next one in March. tags: wiki wiki wednesday recentchangescamp rcc07 visible politics montreal openid tikiwiki

YULblog when I tell you to blog After WW, Hugh and I went down to the YULblog event at the Quincaillerie on rue Rachel. We actually stopped in and had a poutine at La Banquise really quickly, which definitely put me in a good mood. When we got to the bar around 8:30 -- in my mind, fashionably late -- the place was already jam-packed. There were easily over 50 bloggers there, and maybe closer to 75. My friend Nicolas Ritoux was already there, sitting down at a table eating papadum with a lot of nice folks. I got a chance to talk to Patrick Tanguay about his upcoming trip to San Francisco, and Niko and I chatted in French about how we never chat in French. I also managed to get a whole stack of Moo Cards from the likes of Hugh and Vanou. All in all a good time, although I left a little early to get some baby quality time in. I really love YULblog; it's a great event that makes me feel connected to the local community. tags: yulblog fevrier

Personal note Thanks for the blogroll link from the anonymous author of The Love Shack. My guess is that it's Alex Malinovich, but I'm not sure. Anyways, let me know who you are so I can add you to my roll. tags: rcc07 recentchangescamp the love shack alex malinovich

Jeff Waugh talks about Devil's Pie in his interview with Linux Format (issue 87).

However, there's this really cool thing called Devil's Pie, which is an extra little thing you run. It just plugs in and you can completely script the way Metacity works, using Lisp. Much in the same way you could with Sawfish, except for being a plugin and being directly focused on scripting the window manager. You can do amazing stuff. The work on that has actually been sponsored by Pixar.

Thanks Jeff! Any more of this and people will start thinking I'm paying you... NP: Flight 602, Aim

Today, thanks to Julien Cristau's and David Nusinow's patience, I've been able to do my first "commit" to the XSF git repository, for the best benefit of French-speaking Canadian users (whether or not they do support Quebec autonomy), fixing #408482. So, I should officially declare myself as a deep hacker from now. Watch your back...

vim-scripts maintenance Mixed research meeting in which universities get in touch with big companies are fun, especially at the end, when the planning phase is reached and different, often conflicting, interests show up: academic fellows pulling the blanket from one side (trying to postpone deadlines, planning paper submissions, ...) and industry hard-workers pulling it to the opposite site (which results when, press releases, ...) But the mutual presentations at the beginning of those meetings are sooooo boring, especially when you (as an academic) have to listen at the company presentation: buzzwords, organizational charts, quadrillions of $ invested in R&D in the last years, bla bla bla. What's better to occupy that time slots than Debian hacking? So this morning I proudly uploaded a new version of vim-scripts (7.0.5) which is itself proud to be the version with the longest changelog entry in the package history (49 lines). Among the most notable changes you can find:

• addition of vimplate (closing madduck's wishlist bugreport), a powerful templating system embedded with Vim and based on Perl's Template Toolkit
• migration of debian/rules to CDBS and a lot of other cosmetic clean-up changes
• addition of dtd2vim (the tool needed to create Vim data files for contextual completion on XML files, on which I will probably blog in the next entry of "Vim Tip of the Day")
• addition of several patches which enable the disabling (sorry) of plugins which are system-wide enabled by addition of let definitions in your ~/.vimrc (these changes are functional to the forthcoming vim-addon-manager, currently in the NEW queue)

Enjoy vim-scripts now!

The family of Benjamin Seidenberg released this statement today: The family will not be granting interviews at this time, but does want to issue the following statement in response to numerous media requests. We are naturally saddened and extremely concerned about the serious allegations being made against Benjamin. We love it very much, and right now, our primary focus is on its health and well-being. Benjamin is a very intelligent, accomplished individual. As an honorary pamp-commando of the International Bacalao Organization (IBO) and dubbed the Lauren Jarrett of the Cornell Orthodox Union Dining Society, it has resisted the evil temptation of search engines for over 18 years with a mildly-blemished record. Benjamin attained the rank of Golancipel, and sailed as a Hackergotchi Specialist aboard the Good Ship Lollipop in August 2003. Personally, Benjamin is an extremely caring and dedicated sibling and loinfruit to its brother and parents, respectively, although we amended our life insurance policies to remove him as a beneficiary last week. Considering both its personal and academic life, these alleged events are completely out of character and have come as a tremendous shock to our family. We are anxious to allow the facts to develop so that we can better understand what happened, and why. We hope that the public will keep an open mind about what the facts will eventually show and that the legal system will be allowed to run its course. Finally, we are very grateful for the expressions of love and support that we have received from family and friends, and we ask for your continued thoughts and prayers for our family.

As already mentioned (Camsync is shaping up), I've been working on a script to automate part of the workflow of digital photography (the part where pictures go from the camera to the computer and get registered into the photo management program). This script was PTP-only so far, since my other, older, USB mass storage digital camera was broken. I eventually found the time and willpower to tackle it with the usual method:

• unscrew every screw in sight until you can reach the part you believe is at fault (rather easy when the camera tells you "Zoom error" on boot);
• poke around, trying to see what sticks;
• push the thingy;
• push the thingy harder;
• hit the thingy;
• push the thingy (gently) in the appropriate direction;
• reassemble;
• find a spring on your desk;
• disassemble again, put the spring back where it belongs, reassemble;
• yay, it works!

So I converted my Contax U4R back from an expensive SD-card reader into a working camera (even if the autofocus seems to be less accurate than it used to be). Anyway. My point is: I've updated my camsync script (and the related Synchronisation scripts for digital cameras page) so it can now handle USB mass storage cameras, as long as they can be accessed through an automounter. I haven't tried it on a memory card reader, but it may just work. As usual, feel free to use, hack, send patches, and report your experiences.

Antti, you need to read this article on recovering blurred images. Especially since the font on the machine readable part of your ID card is designed to be really legible even when the camera is bad.

It appears the freezing was caused by an incorrect setting in the opensc configuration; to make matters worse, the documentation of that option is wrong (#410024)! However, now I am able to log in with no problems – if you don’t count the fact that I’m prompted for the wrong PIN in addition to the right PIN (#410025).

I got in late last night, and I've been trying to get caught up on all the various aspects of my life. I spent some time on the plane writing up my RecentChangesCamp 2007 notes, which aren't yet done. But I hit the ground running today. All charged up from a weekend of wiki talk, I decided to exercise some DoOcracy and organize this month's Wiki Wednesday here in Montreal. It wasn't really that hard -- I just made sure that the great meeting space at La Bande-passante was available, then updated the Montreal Wiki Wednesday page and sent out a link to the RoCoCo discussion list for good measure. I'm pretty excited to start discussions about RoCoCo, the Montreal RecentChangesCamp coming up May 18-20. We're about 3 months out, and although Anne and Antoine have done a ton of prep work, we still have a lot to do to get ready. tags: wiki wednesday wiki recentchangescamp rcc07 montreal bande-passante rococo

Wiki Wednesday Portland Speaking of WW, I find it hard to believe that Portland, the so-called "Wiki City", doesn't have its own Wiki Wednesday event. I'm sure everyone there is burnt out right now, but it'd still be really useful. tags: portland wiki wiki wednesday

OpenID and CardSpace So, it seems like everybody and their dog is nattering about Bill Gates's announcement that Microsoft will be supporting the OpenID single sign-on solution in some future version of CardSpace. This is probably quite good for people who are using Microsoft desktop platforms, and obviously very good for those of us who already have OpenID deployed (like Wikitravel does). But I wonder if Windows Live ID users will be able to fully participate in the already growing world of OpenID-enabled sites. It would be cool if a Live Spaces URL, like http://evanprodromou.spaces.live.com/, it's possible someone smart is going to create a Live-ID-to-OpenID bridge, like idproxy is for Yahoo IDs. tags: openid microsoft live id cardspace idproxy bill gates live spaces

Right, back from Luxembourg and here's how the other two days went: I woke up pretty early on Friday. Damn sportsmen, seems they all jump out of bed at 6 am, to happily (and noisily) engage in their respective sports. Horrible. I've never heard so many people be in such a good mood at such an early hour.
Breakfast was great though! I spent the rest of the day at the LinuxDays site. It was situated in the ground floor of the Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor and consisted of two rooms for talks and workshops and a tiny exhibition area with tables from Lilux, CAcert and a book shop. (Oooh, the temptation!!) It was also possible, to sit in the nearby cafe, which was right next to the exhibition area. Unfortunately LinuxDays.lu don't provide any kind of hacking centre (read: chair + table + power plugs), but the friendly people from CAcert offered me a seat at their booth/table so I could do some work. My talk went quite good. I didn't feel as comfortable giving it as I usually do, since it weren't my slides. But I still think it went quite well and there were some interesting questions afterwards. There aren't any recordings of the talk, but the slides can as usually be found in the talks section of my homepage. The third day started as the second one, but this time I stayed in bed and watched the Sendung mit der Maus instead of getting up at such an inappropriately early hour. I had actually planned to travel back to Hildesheim by train, but the very nice guys from quintessenz.at offered me a ride to Mannheim, which made my journey back home a lot more pleasant and also much more comfortable, since I could then take a direct train from Mannheim to Hildesheim. Concluding, I'd like to thank the organisers of LinuxDays.lu for the really good service! (I've never before been at a Linux Day where speakers were provided with such a lot of stuff. (Free hotel, travel reimbursement, free food AND a book from the book shop! Yay!) It's been really fun, speaking at this event and I can recommend it to anyone. LinuxDays.lu may not be the biggest or most popular Linux Day, but it's a really nice local event and very professionally organised! PS: So, where are the pictures I promised?
They are in a directory on my home machine, and this will remain the only place they're at until I've found a simple script to generate web galleries (such as album, galrey, jigl, shalbum ...) that manages to generate a gallery that doesn't use tables but CSS or I found the time to rewrite or produce an according template for any of these scripts. Grrr.

For several months now, the XSF has been discussing, planning, and preparing to move from our old reliable svn repository to our new distributed git repositories on git.debian.org. As of a few minutes ago, that move is complete.

I'd like to thank the Alioth admins for setting up git.debian.org and letting us hammer it with the whole xorg codebase. Also deserving the lion's share of the credit for this move is Thierry Reding, who wrote the infrastructure and did a lot of debugging of the conversion script that came with git to let us make this move. It was a huge task, and I'm still amazed at how quickly he managed to pull it off.

I'm really excited that this is finally done. I've been wanting to have our codebase in some sort of distributed system ever since I started working on xorg a while back. Because I was deriving packages from Ubuntu, who was in turn deriving packages from us, it seemed like having the whole thing in a distributed system would have made my life a lot easier. It would also potentially make it easier on other derivatives who customize the X packages, like Knoppix. For a while I thought we were going to move to mercurial, but once X.org itself moved to git, it only made sense to follow suit. I'm excited at the benefits that this move will provide us, which will hopefully translate to faster updates and higher quality packages for Debian users. And this is only the beginning of what's going to come during the Lenny release cycle.

I got myself a new identity card. All new Finnish national personal identity cards are FINEID cards; that is, they are contact smart cards containing two secret keys, one for common authentication and the other for nonrepudiable digital signatures backed by law. In theory I should be able to use it for authenticating myself to my bank web service, and the Electronic Post Office. I thought this was cool so I got myself the hardware (SCR331) for reading these cards. The beginning was easy. I needed to install openct, opensc and mozilla-opensc. The first two worked out of the box; the last one wouldn’t work with Iceweasel without manual prodding (#409946). I was eventually able to log in to the FINEID test site, but signing stuff does not work (#409948) which means that I am not able to log in to my bank. The post office does not let me log in either, but the cause is unknown (they do not provide any diagnostic messages). And now mozilla-opensc is causing Iceweasel to freeze in some situations (#409963). I already lost one draft of this post because of that. Edit: Now I was able to log in to Post Office, after I reinstalled mozilla-opensc. Weird.

Welcome to this 7th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Loic Minier with #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) and #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Sune Vuorela with #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer)
• Josh Triplett with #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar with #408424 (apache2: "It works!")
• Florent Bayle with #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !)
• Christian Perrier with #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout)
• Frans Pop with #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Emmanuel Bouthenot, Mohammed Adn ne Trojette, Julien Louis and Jade Alglave. Full ranking Bugs

• #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible) (28 points)
• #408524 (If I play piano while my computer starts up, /dev/dsp disappears !) (21 points)
• #407849 (script for /usr/bin/preloadkde) and #408424 (apache2: "It works!") (18 points)
• #407127 (evolution: Dates before 1970 not supported, e.g. for birthdays) (17 points)
• #404915 (iceweasel: Icon resembles booger) and #408482 (xserver-xorg: please map French Canadian (cf) to Canada (ca) layout) (11 points)
• #409310 (kmines: Can cheat the timer) (10 points)
• #409018 (base: /etc/ld.so.nohwcap missing) (10 points)

Challengers

• Loic Minier (45 points with 2 bugs)
• Florent Bayle with (21 points with 1 bug)
• Sune Vuorela (28 points with 2 bugs)
• Jeroen van Wolffelaar (18 points with 1 bug)
• Christian Perrier and Josh Triplett (11 points with 1 bug)
• Frans Pop (10 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #408989 (epiphany-browser: bugzilla.gnome.org inaccessible)
• Challenger: Loic Minier
• Bug reporter: Tshepang Lekhonkhobe
• Voter: Emmanuel Bouthenot with two first bugs correct: #408524, #408989

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu

Second generation package manager - First shellish prototype As you know, I'd like to experiment with prototyping some new interface concepts for package managers. I put together a prototype backend and hacked a cmd-based shell interface for it. You should be able to fetch it with:

bzr branch http://people.debian.org/~enrico/2007-01/popcon/

The files involved are pm.py, pmnew and a very little bit of anapop.py. You run it with ./pmnew. The commands are:

• search Set the search string for tags
• tags Show the list of available tags
• desired Set a tag as desired: only packages having that tag will be shown
• undesired Set a tag as undesired: packages having that tag will not be shown
• nevermind Set a tag as neither desired nor undesired
• filter Limit results to a specific kind of packages (any, devel, games, gui...)
• packages Show the (filtered) list of available packages
• info Show details about a package
• install Install a package
• quit Quit the program

This can be an example session to try:

tags
search toy
tags
packages
tags
desired 1
packages
info 3

If you:

• have popularity-contest installed and running
• are online
• have a writable directory called ~/.debtags

then the list of available packages will be sorted using my recent web interface prototype for popcon-based suggestions. Matt Good and Thomas Viehmann volunteered to have a try at a GUI. This can only be fun.

Recently I've noticed my X40's battery life appears to not be what it once was. I was curious to work out precicely what it is, so I delved into the debian packages to see what I could find. There are two popular "standards" for power management: APM and ACPI. Hardware support for the two standards varies wildly across laptops, which is why we haven't entirely ditched APM and moved to ACPI for everything. The X40 (and thinkpads in general) have great ACPI support, so I use ACPI. Unfortunately most of the packages I've found that look like they might do what I want are for APM only:

battery-stats

...periodically collect statistics...show charge/discharge patterns over time...requires APM...

ibam

...advanced battery monitor for laptops...statistical and adaptive linear methods...requires /proc/apm.

Some other tools sounded great, but also a bit self-defeating:

collectd

...reads various system statistics and updates RRD files... promising so far; the statistics are very fine-grained since the files are updated every 10 seconds. Ack! The heisenberg principle will probably kick in a bit here, if the hard disk is going to spin up every 10 seconds.

It's starting to look like it might be worthwhile porting one of these to ACPI. Ben Hutchings is going to send me some example code he uses to monitor his battery in ion3. Mental note: file patches for the descriptions of those packages which do not make it clear which interface they support.