I’m often asked why I’m so obsessed with backward compatibility and, as a result, why I’ve made the issue such a central part of the LSB over the past year. Yes, it’s hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term “just” for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don’t break. Why is backward compatibility important? Here’s a great example, via Joel Spolsky (note: from 2004):

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He’s been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons. The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: “Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, ‘Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.’ Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)” I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1… A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work… To contrast, I’ve got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

I can almost feel the revulsion among my readership right about now. However, next time you’re in Best Buy or CompUSA, look at the shelf of Windows applications, then compare it to the shelf of Mac applications, and perhaps you’ll better understand why it’s important. Beyond the results speaking for themselves, I’ll argue that it takes a better engineer to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break. It’s pretty easy to wash your hands of something and declare it to be someone else’s problem.

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

Our top-10 female geek "helix" (congrats!) suggested (jokingly) we could do an Ajax interface for configuration files. Well, if you want, you can run a tomcat as root, and have it access your configuration files. If you're crazy enough. :-) No, there are actually secure ways of doing such things, if you want even with Ajax. Just have a secure web server for administration, which will then push the updated configuration file to the actual hosts e.g. via cfengine. Since people still tend do read "all configuration files should be XML", and "but I hate XML": please get down. We already have quite some XML-lookalike configuration files (e.g. apache). We have S-Expressions. We have some deeply nested INI files. We have true XML config files (e.g. /etc/fonts/fonts.conf). All I'm asking is that we should maybe use one single format for all applications that have similar requirements for their configuration. And no, not every application can be sanely configured with a linear, flat configuration file. Sometimes, a tree-based data model is much cleaner. You know, thats why we're using a tree directory structure, and not flat files. And face it, if you like it or not: XML is the most widely accepted choice for exchanging (tree structured) data. And if you manage systems, you want to be able to sanely exchange data between e.g. a configuration management tool and the service you're configuring.

I was asked how I found out about the proper DBus signals etc. - well, that was the difficult part. DBus is supposed to allow introspection (I guess the dbus-browser that used to exist was using that), but not all appications provide this information. So often you have to browse some applications source code to find the appropriate values. For NetworkManager, I read to source of the gnome applet to locate the "wake" and "sleep" calls. For Gaim, I was reading the gaim source code. If you are lucky, Introspection could do the trick for you. Just fire up Python and do e.g.:

import dbus, dbus.glib
sysbus = dbus.SystemBus()
nm_obj = sysbus.get_object('org.freedesktop.NetworkManager',
                        '/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager')
nm_obj.Introspect()

which result in something like this:

<!DOCTYPE node PUBLIC "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Object Introspection 1.0//EN"
"http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/introspect.dtd">
<node>
  <node name="Devices"/>
  <node name="VPNConnections"/>
</node>

... which unfortunately doesn't seem to be complete, but a hard coded pre-alpha reply to the Introspect() call. Maybe that's why the dbus browser has disappeared?

Just as I was blogging about my trip to Prozac Land and how I got my health back, after working for a week and a half I started feeling sick again. Very sick.

I was having these ups and downs, one day I felt I could fly and the next I felt I was down in a hole. I was throwing up every morning and I had stopped eating anything but fruit already quite some time ago. I was smoking like a truck driver (Spanish saying) and drinking coffee like a mad hatter would drink tea in every Unbirthday Party.





My psychiatrist then withdrew all my medication at once, which was sweet and sour. This crap fucks up your brain chemistry, and on one hand, you feel like yourself again, but on the other hand, the down is scary. I have been dizzy, clumsy and sleepy at all times since I am off the happiness pill.

My endless doctor trips have not finished yet, but I made an unexpected stop in ER last Thursday. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, delirious that I am going to loose my job because of my terrible health and, subsequently, lack of accountability, stressed as hell about it, and physically feeling like crap, I landed in ER Land, and stayed there for 6 hours. I felt frivolous taking this picture, my arm feeling numb and foreign from the Peripheral IV line, which is what I was first given upon arrival, it felt too tight, slightly painful, and I was terrified to move or bend my arm. It just lay there, beside me, as if it were no longer part of me, out of my control.

All kind of tests were performed on me, blood was taken to feed the lab vampires, I don't even want to think about the urine, x-rays documented my piercings locations, physical exploration, endless questions, talking to two different, unfriendly, tired and overworked, doctors, and nothing was found, all looked normal. All but me, I was despaired. If all is fine, and I am not dying from bladder cancer, why do I feel like this? I felt stupid, I was looked at as I was there wasting their scarce time. Nobody could tell me what is wrong with me.

It looks like Prozac played an important role in killing my health completely. My psychiatrist has been on the phone with me all weekend, calling me every couple of hours. Why is he so worried about me? Why doesn't he want me to sleep alone at my place and wants me to sleep at my parents? Is it because of people committing suicide closely related to Prozac? Why, if he is aware of this, which I do not know, did he give it to me? I am not suicidal, dear doctor. I am just feeling very sleepy, very clumsy, I can barely manage to press the right keys in Mutt, my email client of choice since 2000, which I know how to use by heart, my fingers just do their job, but not anymore. But how can I explain that to you?

My friends, again, are here, close to me, keeping an eye on me, calling me on the phone, feeding me, letting me take a nap in their couch.

Dear doctor, you have mentioned the latest groovy drug to replace Prozac with, I am sorry, it is not going to happen. I am going to deal with whatever is wrong with my brain, mind and body in a natural way, with therapy, and healthy living habits. I trust you and respect you, but I do not trust these drug makers, and they are already making enough money. If it is going to be painful, I want to feel it. Please do not numb me and then make feel it all at once like this. Let me deal with it the way I choose to.

I choose the hard way. Can we agree that I am strong enough?

Uphold, maintain, sustain: life in the trenches Now that I have a baseline filter, how do I continue to train it, without putting too much of an effort? There are two separate activities here, firstly selecting the mails to be used in training, and secondly, automating the training and saving to the mail corpus. On going training is essential; Spam mutates, and even ham changes over time, and well trained filters drift. However, if training disrupts normal work-flow, it won't happen; so a minimally intrusive set of tools is critical Selecting mail to train filters There are three broad categories of mails that fit the criteria: 1. Misclassified mail This is where human judgement comes in, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• misclassified Spam. I do nothing special for this category -- I assume that I would notice these mails, and when I do, I just save them in a junk folder, for latter processing. The volume of such messages has fallen to about one or two a month, and having them slip though is not a major problem in the first place
• misclassified ham is far more critical, and, unfortunately, somewhat harder to get right, since you do want to reject the worst of the Spam at the SMTP level. A mistake here is worse than a false negative: all that happens with a false negative is that you curse, save to the junk folder for later retraining, and mode on. With missed Ham, you never know what you might have missed -- and hope it is nothing important.
  • If one of the two filters did the right thing, then the mlg script can catch it -- more on it below. The only thing to remember to do is to look carefully at the grey.mbox folder that is produced. While this is not good to have misclassified ham, at least this sub-category is easy to detect.
  • If both filters misclassified it, this would then mean a human would have to catch the error. The good news is that I haven't had very many mails fall into this category (the last one I know about was in the late summer of 2005). How can one be sure that there are not ham messages falling through the cracks all the time? The idea is to accept mail with scores one would normally discard, and treat this as a canary in a mine: no ham should ever show up in these realspam messages. My schema for handling Spam is shown in the figure below.
  I try and keep all the mail that I have rejected in quarantine for about a month or so, and so can retrieve a mail if informed about a mistaken rejection. I also do spot checks once in a while, though as time has gone on with no known false positives, the frequency of my checks has dropped.

2. Partially misclassified mail This is mail correctly classified overall, but misclassified by either crm114, or spamassassin, but not both. This is an early warning sign, and is more common than mail that is misclassified, since usually the filter that is wrong is wrong weakly. But this is the point where training should occur, so that the filter does not drift to the point that mails are misclassified. Again, the mlg script catches this. 3. Mail that crm114 is unsure about This is Mail correctly classified, but something that mailreaver is unsure about -- and this category is why mailreaver learns faster than mailtrainer. Spam handling and disposition . At this point I should say something about how I generally handle mails scored as Spam by the filters. As you can see, the mail handling is simple; depending on the combined score given to the mail by the filters. The handling rules are:

• score <= 5.0: Accept unconditionally
• 5.0 < score <= 15: Grey list
• 15 < score: reject

So, any mail with score less than 15 is accepted, potentially after grey-listing. The disposition is done according to the following set of rules:

• score <= 0: Classify into folder based on origin
• 0 < score <= 10: file into Spam (some of this survived grey-listing)
• 10 < score: file into realspam (Must have survived grey-listing)

In the last 18+months, I have not seen a Ham mail in my realspam folder; chances of Ham being rejected are pretty low. My Spam folder gets a ham message every few months, but these are usually spamassassin misclassifying things; and mlg detects those. I have not seen one of these in the last 6 months. So my realspam canary has done wonders for my peace of mind. With ideally trained filters, spam and realspam folders would be empty. mail list grey I have created a script called mlg ("Mail List Grey") that I run periodically over my mail folder, that picks out mails that either (a) are classified differently by spamassassin and crm114, or (b) are marked as unsure by mailreaver. The script takes these mails and saves them into a grey.mbox folder. I tend to run them over Spam and non-Spam folders in different runs, so that the grey.mbox folder can be renamed to either ham or junk, in the vast majority of the cases. Only for misclassified mails do I have to individually pick the misplaced email and classify it separately from the rest of the emails in that batch. At this point, I should have mail mbox folders called ham and/or junk, which are now ready to be used for training either crm114 or spamassassin or both. Processing these folders is the subject of the next article in this series.

Gunnar doesn't like the idea of recommending XML for configuration files, why do you need to be able to edit a XML-file with a non-XML-aware editor if you don't like the raw syntax? If you don't like the raw syntax, use an editor that gives you a different representation. Or use some transformation. Write a tool that converts YAML to XML and back, if you like YAML better. (Btw, this is another reason to use a common library for configuration file handling - let people choose their configuration file formats!) Writing XML in the raw with a good schema-aware editor with syntax highlighting is actually quite nice. Have you ever edited an XML file with eclipse? You really should do that... I once opened my Openbox (a rather minimalistic window manager) configuration file in eclipse. Guess what, it was giving me useful syntax completion! It had loaded and used the referenced schema file. It's not as if I think XML is the ultimate thing; (nor is Eclipse an editor I'd use for configuration files; startup takes years and it frequently crashes for me. vim also has some XML support...) IMHO there is a lot in XML that should be stripped (such as attributes); I like JSON syntax better, except it's in turn lacking essential information such as character encoding, namespaces and schema information. I also don't thin JSON allows comments. But when handling information from multiple sources (and multiple schemes), XML is really useful. It removes most of the quessing needed for handling other formats. And that is what I'm precisely advocating: use standardized formats. Consider for example the apache configuration. Do you know of any tool that can parse the apache configuration files other than apache? Some parts look like SGML/XML, but they don't have much more in common than using < and >. When you are in need of automating something with apache, you'll be annoyed by this. If apache would be using something where you have a reliable parser ready for - that would be nice. Have a look at the xchat.conf configuration file. It uses "key = value", but they have these extra spaces there and don't use quoting, this means the file can't be loaded by many parsers, e.g. bash. Now lets use at buttons.conf - compeltely different syntax, "KEY value" blocks, separated by empty lines... Btw, note that configuration handling with XML to me means also keeping comments somehow... most applications will nuke any comments in their configuration files; which is funny since most configuration syntaxes do have a notion of comments, but did you ever come across an application using sh-style configuration (i.e. that you could source in bash/dash/zsh), that keeps comments? P.S. The YAML homepage is not YAML. It's valid XHTML. Only if you strip out all the tags and attributes and use only the text content within the /html/body/pre tag, then you have something which probably is YAML. This compatibility with HTML is probably why XML was at all successful.

I've been trying to see what really works with qemu.I have not been successful with ppc, I do not seem to be able to get the kernel booting.arm seems to work, but Debian does not distribute kernel for versatilepb.i386, x86_64 seem to be fine.mips and mipsel can't find the root file system for some reason.Hmmm.I followed aurelien's excellent procedures, but it doesn't seem to work.Looking at the logs, I have a bad feeling that this kernel may be ignoring my command-line options, or qemu may be failing to pass the command-line options to the kernel.Something tells me that powerpc kernel needs some preptool hacking, and thus needs modification for command-linehandling, and I have a weird feeling that it might be similar for mips. Shrug.Hmm... so Debian ppc kernel has CONFIG_CMDLINE="console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0", if I can change that, it would be more interesting.Debian mips qemu kernel has CONFIG_CMDLINE="" I wonder if anyone actually managed to use this kernel for qemu booting...

Ruby's thread more "functional" than OCaml's I'm relaxing some of mine initial bad impressions on Ruby. This is mainly due to the fact that the Ruby book I ordered on Amazon finally arrived (after a lost shipment, the first of my whole customer story with Amazon, happily they refunded me completely). In the book I managed to find a rigorous (though not formal as I would have liked) description of Ruby's semantics and even some snippets of the grammar of the language (Rant: how the heck is possible that a modern language like Ruby lacks a complete description of its grammar????). Anyhow, now I'm feeling more comfortable with the language and I'm starting to put in the right setting some of what I believed to be its rough edges. Today, playing with Ruby's threads, I discovered a function in Ruby's Thread API that I can't help noticing is "more functional" than corresponding features in the Thread API of my beloved OCaml. Using Thread#value indeed the value returned by the last statement executed in a given thread can be retrieved (note that in Ruby every statement returns a value: yet another functional pearl). It's like a Thread#join on steroids. In OCaml the only way (that comes into my mind) to do the same is establishing a (typed) channel among the thread creator and the created thread, sending a return value from the thread, and having the creator block on the matching receive. Or (please don't) ... you can use a global variable ... Neat Ruby threads. To balance this, according to my first read of Ruby's threading capability, it's my impression that not only at most one thread can execute Ruby code at a time (limitation shared by OCaml, due to the non-distributed nature of mark and sweep garbage collectors), but also a thread blocked on a syscall will block all other threads to run. Dumb Ruby threads (but I still hope I'm wrong ...)

Andreas Schuldei asked how to hook into gnome-power-manager. I'm assuming you want to do some user hooks, too; the solutions using the low level hooks in /etc won't help you then. Using a small user daemon that listens for DBus events is much nicer (though you won't be able to have the suspend process wait for you to finish...) - because every user can setup his own stuff. It would be cool to extend the following to a more general solution. I could imagine a combination of a dbus-monitor (logging incoming signals) and a general event handler. You could then either type in the signal you want to hook or choose one of the logged signals, setup some properties (e.g. the SSID you just connected to) and setup reactions (start VPN script etc.). I havn't hooked gnome power manager yet, but I've been doing this for NetworkManager. Here's a python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
import dbus, dbus.glib
 
def device_now_active(path, ssid=None):
  pass
 
def device_no_longer_active(path):
  pass
 
sysbus = dbus.SystemBus()
nm_obj = sysbus.get_object('org.freedesktop.NetworkManager', '/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager')
nm_if = dbus.Interface(nm_obj, 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager')
 
nm_if.connect_to_signal('DeviceNowActive', device_now_active)
nm_if.connect_to_signal('DeviceNoLongerActive', device_no_longer_active)
 
mainloop = gobject.MainLoop()
mainloop.run()

To hook to gnome-power-manager, use dbus-monitor to find out the appropriate signals to connect to. I've been using this to start a VPN client when connecting to some wireless networks, and to have gaim automatically logon when network is available:

sesbus = dbus.SessionBus()
gaim_obj = sesbus.get_object("net.sf.gaim.GaimService", "/net/sf/gaim/GaimObject")
gaim = dbus.Interface(gaim_obj, "net.sf.gaim.GaimInterface")
 
# then use
gaim.GaimConnectionsDisconnectAll()
# or
accounts = gaim.GaimAccountsGetAllActive()
for account in accounts:
  gaim.GaimAccountConnect(account)

Dynamic languages like python can be very sweet to use.

Steve Jobs: “You don t want your phone to be an open platform.” More Steve Jobs: “These are devices that need to work, and you can t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn t mean there s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.” It’s widely understood that Microsoft beat Apple in the PC game because Apple was a tightly integrated, closed platform, whereas Microsoft was an open ecosystem where anyone could play (albeit at their own peril). Clearly, the strategy has not adapted well to digital media players. Why? Because people are tired of products that don’t work. Anyone who has ever had to glue a PC back together for a family member knows what I mean. Does “open” have to mean “poorly integrated” though? Clearly, I don’t think so, given how much I’ve invested in Linux over the years and how much I’m investing in the LSB now. And the job the distributions do in the Linux world is nothing short of amazing, if you think about it—taking thousands of moving parts written by thousands of different people and crafting them into what appears, for the most part, to be an orchestrated whole. Personal experience bears this out too—it’s not that the entire Windows Media ecosystem produces bad products (iTunes pales in comparison to Rhapsody), it’s that the integration points are extremely fragile (e.g., I tried Rhapsody To Go with a Plays For Sure device, which was an awful experience). In other words, just like a chain, an open ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link, because it’s the links where things break. Sure, there are bad products. I’ve owned no less than two MP3 players in the last few years, and they were pretty terrible. It’s the very, very simple things too. For example, I listen to a lot of podcasts. There’s (gasp!) a Podcasts menu on the iPod, whereas on every other device I’ve owned, podcasts are interspersed with the music, making them difficult to find and, adding insult to injury, mixing gobbledygook into my otherwise well organized collection. Furthermore (gasp!), the iPod keeps track of which podcasts I listen to, and in concert with iTunes, automatically deletes the ones I’m done with. Them’s lasers! Ah, iTunes. Despite the fact that anyone in the world can write a podcatcher (it’s just RSS with enclosures, fer godsakes), the only one I’ve ever used that works worth a damn is iTunes. Everything else is just “integrated” with bailing wire—create a Windows Media playlist, drop it in this directory, etc. The situation on Linux is a bit better, but guess what—Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. didn’t work with either of the open media players I owned, even though the integration point for one of them was the file system. No, the players on Linux support the iPod best because that’s what everyone has, and if I’m going to pay extra for the iPod, aren’t I primarily buying the integrated experience? (On a related note, I’ve never understood why people pay top dollar for Macs and install Linux on them. But I digress..) Once you taste the fruit of the integrated experience, it’s easy to get sucked in all the way. I eventually tired of all the wasted time and money trying to use an open media player and broke down and bought an iPod. Not too long after, I canceled my Rhapsody subscription. Why? Because I couldn’t use it with my iPod. My overall music experience is diminished (I’m a big believer in the celestial jukebox), but I want one music platform, not two. And the iPod is the one with critical mass. Anything else is swimming upstream. Are open platforms doomed then? I think that’s, as they say, throwing the baby out with the bath water. The key is to have open interfaces, and the key to having open interfaces that work is cooperation between the vendors that implement them. Perhaps surprisingly, the iPod is a good example of how it can be done. The biggest reason for my iPod purchase: I can hook it directly into my car stereo instead of using an FM transmitter. Apple isn’t getting into the car business—it’s decided to cooperate with other companies to make this work. And you don’t hear too much about people calling their technophile relatives to come glue their cars back together. (And talk about the importance of not crashing..) The lesson here, it seems to me, is that an ecosystem is never the sum of its parts—it’s either a whole lot more or a whole lot less. Furthermore, it’s the responsibility of the vendors (and community) that make up that ecosystem to ensure the result comes up on the right side of the equation in the final analysis.

I had trouble with tomcat. It started fine, but shutdown took a very long time (enough for eclipse to suggest killing it, for example). Some people suggested I try the tarball from Apache, instead of using the Debian package, but that didn't help either. By not running tomcat from eclipse and waiting a long time for the shutdown, I finally managed to get some actual error messages: This was usually the last message I was seeing:

INFO: Pausing Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080

After some timeout, I now got these messages:

Protocol handler pause failed
java.net.NoRouteToHostException: No route to host

No route to localhost? WTF? I resolved it by putting all hostnames it might try (localhost.localdomain, although I use that nowhere, as well as the FQDN I'm using) into my /etc/hosts and forcing them to point to 127.0.0.1 - and voila, tomcat actually shuts down instead of pausing and then failing to notice it has successfully paused...

iPhone is cool in a lot of ways (except in the freedom side, but not too different than the current iPods). I wish to buy one until the xmas and replace my now obsolete looking LG model. I think if Apple is trying to promote this product as 'more an iPod than a phone' - as Steve Jobs said in an inteview. They give it the wrong name, it should be called: iPod Phone. Yes, same deal as they did with the iPod video thing until they 'merged' the feature on the iPod brand. Remember that it would save them from the current trouble with Cisco/Linksys too.

The multitouch screen on that thing looks promising. I'm sure that there are a lot of cooler screens in development out there right now, but if Apple (or the real manufacturer behind the screen) can manage to make larger ones, i can see some time in the next year the motto: "Do you remember where did the computer go?" "Where did the keyboard and mouse go now?". Ok, maybe a bit too optimistic (they could keep the keyboard and throw away the mouse), but i think the iMacs could be a interesting target for the multitouch thing. Considering they've iSight already in place, with a larger multitouch screen in a good position and shiny cool gestures software, there we've minority report ready desktops, some time after laptops. Can you hear chairs?

I am trying to figure out how to hook in a homegrown script into the gnome power management. I read the source to gnome-power-manager and it seems to make dbus calls to accomplish what it wants. This is where I get lost as i dont know the first thing about dbus. So: where can I add scripts for suspend or hibernate actions?

Clive, the Trolltech Greenphone certainly looks interesting, and has the key ingrediant that the iPhone and Neo1973 are both missing. Yes, you got it, it's actually got buttons! I don't know about the rest of the world, but I like the fact that pushing a button gives physical feedback, also, you can move your thumb around on a keypad and know what button is under your hand, and that you're not overlapping 2 different buttons at the same time - can you do that with a touchscreen? I'm thinking not. So, you have a shiny phone, it lets you do all sorts of crap that you don't really want to do, but when you're using it, that's *all* you're doing, seems a waste to me.

So, like everybody else in the world, I was intrigued by the announcement of the iPhone. But like most Open Source folks, I was unhappy with the OS and the general closed format of the dang thing. What options are there for people who believe in Freedom but still want a cool phone? I currently own a Treo 650, which is fine, and which runs the venerable Palm OS. However, the once-thriving Palm Open Source community has pretty much dried up, leaving me without much in the way of interesting apps for my phone device. Thanks to Mike Linksvayer's notes on the subject, I got a link to the OpenMoKo project -- an effort to make a standard, Linux-based phone OS that uses ipkg for application installation and update. The first phone supporting the platform will be the FIC Neo1973, which looks pretty awesome and fairly similar to the iPhone (see this review from Linux Devices for some photos). OpenMoKo isn't the only game in town. TrollTech has a Linux-based Greenphone running their funky Qtopia platform, although it apparently doesn't work with their Qtopia Open Source version. And Nokia has this weird Maemo platform, but it only seems to run on their Internet tablet thingies. Mike gave a good link to an article about Open phones on PC Magazine. But I'm going to be looking out for availability of the OpenMoKo-enabled phone. I guess I'll have to switch phone providers -- Telus, my provider, only has CDMA service, and the FIC phone uses GSM. So, I dunno. But it'd be cool to have a mobile device that was fun and interesting and that I could believe in and want to hack on. tags: openmoko iphone greenphone maemo

What Chris refuses to blog about So, talking to Chris last night at the yulblog First Wednesday, I found out he wants to quit blogging. "I don't really have anything I care about enough to blog," he said. "The only thing that's piqued my interest lately was the execution of Saddam Hussein. I just don't want to blog about the iPhone." I told him I thought it'd be a good idea to make a blog just listing the things he refuses to blog about. He wouldn't commit to the idea, so I guess now I've taken over that job. In other words: Chris won't blog about the iPhone. tags: iphone blogging chris