I am slowly recovering from a very hectic New Year Eve celebration in Edinburgh. I was surrounded by a several visiting schoolfriends of my girlfriend, and we even managed to meet up with a couple of visiting Canadians - the ex-girlfriend of an online friend and her cousin (both freshly arrived only a day or two ago). Edinburgh weather was appalling, to the extent that the outdoor street party was cancelled - and several large trees were blown over in Leith. The girls and myself spent the night walking around far too much before settling into a local pub and hearing the bells. Now that I’m recovered I’ve just released a new version of xen-shell which allows you to control a number of xen instances rather than just the one. I’m still not a nice person though.

I've been using Rails for about a year, and I am, in general, quite satisfied. It really is a big step forward in terms of web programming, and I've found the whole experience very enjoyable. In a year I've managed to crank out a number of sites in my spare time (in between various other activities such as the occasional bike ride and Hecl hacking):

• linuxsi.com - a site in Italian helping people to locate Linux-friendly computer retailers.
• builder.hecl.org - lets you create Hecl mobile phone applications from your web browser.
• libreriaminerva.it - a small bookstore in the center of Padova, specializing in rare and antique books and prints.
• stufftodo.dedasys.com - my own vision of an ajaxy todo list that plays nicely in a business environment, where it's important to be able to share tasks.

As promised, one of my goals is to shift a bit towards producing open source software as a side effect of revenue generating work. The first small result of that is the on_idle plugin I packaged up for Rails. It's the code that Stuff To Do uses to tell whether people are active or not. Installing it should be as simple as:

./script/plugin install http://svn.dedasys.com/public/on_idle

It's just a few lines of Javascript code that are wrapped up in a way that makes it trivial to use from Rails views:

def on_idle(timeout, options, wakeoptions)
<%= on_idle(600,  :url =>   :action => 'notify_idle'  ,
                  :url =>   :action => 'notify_wake'  ) %>

• timeout: the number of seconds before the user is considered 'timed out'.
• options: the action to perform when the user goes idle.
• wakeoptions: what to do when the user 'wakes up'.

Let me know if there is anything I should fix/change/improve. If this plugin works out, I will post, in short order, a plugin that improves the default Rails drag and drop functionality.

Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we ve got people coming round for dinner (it s been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried.

If you have a little patience, you can cut their nails either with a cat nail trimmer (5 euros I paid, and that s the best money I ever spent on these cats, aside from neutering) or plain normal human nail clippers.

I have been doing it for Vi and Emacs since they were kittens, and then for Jazz when he replaced Emacs and who had never had his nails trimmed. I even do it for Lola, who is declawed and a very alpha female cat, on her back paw's nails.

Sure, it takes patience, it is best not to do it by force, so wait until they are happily asleep and pet them, then cut one. Get them used to you touching their nails, by making them go out of their claw when you pet them. Do one nail at a time, until they are all used to it and will just let you go through the whole 4 paws at once.

You can google around for techniques, but start reading this. The whole about.com site is filled with great advice for cat owners.

My furniture is still in good shape after two years of cats at home, yes, they love to bite the curtains, they scratch my favourite chair, they drop stuff on the floor and break it, they help me in whatever I am doing (painting, sawing, making the bed...), and they steal cat toys away from me and hide them in secret cat hiding places.

But things are just things, stuff is just stuff, curtains are replaceable, so is furniture. Start trimming their nails the sooner the better, and do not regret these three furry friends found you.

In my previous work as a sys-admin I have worked for a number of companies that depend heavily on free software. If you use a commercially supported distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux then you get high quality technical support (much higher than you expect from closed-source companies), but this still doesn't provide as much as you might desire as it is reactive support (once you notice a problem you report it). Red Hat has a Technical Account Manager offering that provides a higher level of support and there is also a Professional Services organization that can provide customised versions of the software. But the TAM and GPS offerings are mostly aimed at the larger customers (they are quite expensive).

It seems to me that a viable option for companies with smaller budgets is to have an employee dedicated to enhancing free software and getting changes accepted upstream. For a company that has a team of 5+ sys-admins the cost of a developer dedicated to such software development tasks should be saved many times over by the greater productivity of the sys-admins and the greater reliability of the servers.

This is not to criticise commercial offerings such as Red Hat's TAM and GPS services, a dedicated free software developer could work with the Red Hat TAM and GPS people thus allowing the company to get the most value for money from the Red Hat consultants.

If using a free distribution such as Debian the case for a dedicated liason with the free software community is even stronger, as there is no formal support organization that compares to the Red Hat support (there are a variety of small companies that provide commercial support, but I am not aware of a 24*7 help desk or anything similar). If you have someone employed full-time as a free software developer then they can provide most of your support. It would probably make sense for a company that has mission critical servers running Debian to employ a Debian developer, a large number of Debian developers already work as sys-admins and finding one who is looking for a new job should not be difficult. There are more companies that would benefit from having DDs as employees than there are DDs, this isn't an obstacle to hiring them as most hiring managers don't realise the technical issues involved.

This is not to say that a company which can't hire a DD should use a different distribution, merely that their operations will not be as efficient as they might be.

This year I have a weird new year celebration before me. My girlfriend is hosting a party, but I just left it (with her permission :-) ) because today is also the last night the Pulverturm is open. In the old days, before I had to think about things like getting up the next morning, I managed to be there every Tuesday, Friday and some of the Sundays, I met a number of people who are now my friends there, so it was an important bit of my life. Well, I better hurry up to get there before midnight.

At home, I have had a setup with a wireless router for quite a while. It's more or less a stock OpenWRT setup, but I have split the joined all the wired ports into one virtual interface (actually, I think they're just on one VLAN) and split off the wireless. The wireless is open to the world, but I have a fair amount of packet filters there so it doesn't get too annoying. Some people have no shame and run bittorrent and other file sharing utilities on other people's open wireless. Anyway, my setup is no longer so simple. I bought a WRT54GL to provide better reception in other parts of the flat and wanted to join those two. After a little bit of reading, I found what I wanted: WDS. Due to a previous misconfiguration of the WRT54GS, the WDS connection was joined onto the br0/LAN segment and not the wireless segment. That was easily enough fixed, but it's always a bit scary to change network settings on headless devices. (I did manage to lock myself out, but I could ssh through in from the wireless network, so I just used the WRT54GL to bounce through.) Once that bit was up, I could set up WDS, I did as the documentation told me and did it with lazywds (anyone can do WDS with you) enabled. It worked, so I turned it off and rebooted both routers (again..), and it still worked. Yay!

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier's blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.

SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity and the confidentiality of their data. Some of the SE Linux users (military users) use all the available features, but most people only use the targeted policy which provides a sub-set of the system integrity and data confidentiality protections that are available to give a greater ease of use.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with the SE Linux targeted policy enabled by default. This policy is not something that most users notice. The main program that is commonly used which might have an issue with the default SE Linux policy is Apache. Fedora and RHEL systems that do not run Apache (which is most of them) can run SE Linux with almost no costs.

setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 1
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

It seems clear to me that there is no good reason for disabling SE Linux by default. There are reasons for running a particular daemon in the unconfined_t domain via the FOO_disable_trans boolean. EG to run Apache without restrictions you would type the above commands.

In spite of the SE Linux targeted policy being so easy to use, the fact that it prevents certain daemon compromises from allowing immediate control of the system, and also prevents some kernel exploits from working, there are still some people who turn it off when installing Fedora and RHEL systems and advise others to do so.

Given this great fear of some people to use a technology that is specifically designed for their own benefit I find it difficult to imagine that any users will be inclined to accept the MS DRM technology that is specifically designed to go against their interests.

ESR claims that the 64bit transition is the critical period for Linux to move on the desktop. While he makes many interesting observations I don't find his argument convincing. Firstly current P4 CPUs with PAE can handle significantly more than 4G of RAM (64G is possible now). Secondly it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit applications, this means that you can use a 64bit kernel to access >64G of RAM with each 32bit application getting direct access to something slightly less than 4G of virtual memory. As ESR's point seems based on total system memory the 4G per application doesn't seem to be an issue. As an aside the only applications I've used which could benefit from >4G are database servers (in the broadest interpretation - consider an LDAP server as a database) and JVM environments. Again it would not be difficult to ship an OS with mostly 32bit code that has a 64bit kernel, JVM, and database servers.

I hope that Vista will be a good opportunity for mass transition to Linux. Vista offers little that users desire, many things that will hurt them, and is expensive too!

With Vista you pay more for the OS and more for the hardware (Vista has the usual excessive Windows hardware requirements plus the extra hardware for TPM encryption) without providing anything substantial in return.

What I want to see next is support for Security Enhanced X to protect desktop environments against hostile X clients. This will make a significant difference to the security of Linux desktop environments and provide another significant benefit for choosing Linux over Windows. While MS is spending their effort in making their OS act against the best interests of the users we will keep making Linux enforce the access controls that users need to protect their systems. Hopefully Linux users will choose to use SE-X, but if they don't they are given the freedom to make that choice - unlike the poor sods who use Windows.

Since I have been having a digital camera since a few weeks now, I've had a need for an application to manage my pictures. The two applications that people have pointed me to are f-spot and digiKam, which also seem to be the most popular applications in this category for Linux. Since I use neither KDE nor GNOME as my user interface, it doesn't matter much to me which I install; so I've tried them both. Their feature set is quite different; unfortunately, though, they both have some features which the other doesn't, which makes choosing for one or the other rather hard. Since their on-disk format is rather different, it's impossible to use them both at the same time—at least not if I don't want to enter commentary and tags each and every time; so I'll have to choose one or the other based on their features. Since that requires me to actually compare them, I thought I might as well make a blog post out of that. Note, though, that this comparison is in no way intended to be complete; it only compares those features which I really care about. Features digiKam

• Stores pictures in albums; these albums can be created hierarchically, and are created on disk as the directory lay-out in which to store pictures. One picture can be chosen as an example picture per album.
• Pictures can have tags, comments, and a score (on a scale of one to five stars) applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tagset is empty. Tags can be made to have icons that are otherwise available to KDE attached to them, to make them more immediately visually recognizable, but selecting pictures to fulfill that function seems impossible.
• Has an interface to manage pictures in gallery and gallery 2; it can view, add, and remove pictures in that gallery.
• The selector dialog which is used to upload pictures is rather spartanic; it allows one to select pictures by filename and by album; pictures aren't even shown before upload (bug filed).
• Pictures can be filtered by tag, album, or date; I haven't been able to find an interface to filter pictures by score (it is possible to sort them by score in any view, though).
• A KDE application, so written in C++, which is a compiled language; i.e., rather fast.

F-spot

• Does not know the concept of albums
• Pictures can have tags and comments applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tag set contains (amongst others) People, Places, and Events, suggesting that f-spot encourages the use of tags where Albums would be used in the case of digiKam. Tags can have icons which are otherwise available to gnome selected as their icon, or one can select a picture to fulfill that function (in fact, it selects the first picture which receives a tag to do that by default)
• Does not know the concept of scoring; instead, the default tagset contains a tag Favourites, suggesting a scoring system with a binary scale.
• Uploading pictures can be done by selecting them, and choosing the right option in the menu system. As a result, all filtering options otherwise available can be used to select which pictures to export (just filter the view, then select all pictures in the view).
• Uploading pictures will optionally also export comments that were applied to it.
• Since it does not know the concept of albums, pictures cannot be stored in a one-directory-per-album lay-out. Instead, pictures are stored in a one-directory-per-day layout, using a yyyy/mm/dd format. Unfortunately, this also means that no picture metadata (tags, comments) is easily available to command-line applications.
• Apart from the ability to upload pictures to gallery or gallery 2, does not interface with it in any way; gallery is a write-only storage medium to f-spot.
• Written for mono, a system that requires a runtime environment to translate instructions at runtime from some sort of virtual machine code, and which uses garbage collection all over; i.e., rather slow, especially after you've been using it for a while.

My opinion After having used f-spot for a few weeks before I tried digiKam, I have to be honest and say that I don't like the concept of albums. They do not add value; everything they allow you to express can equally well be expressed with tags. Additionally, one can categorize a picture in only one album, whereas it's possible to categorize pictures in as many tags as you would want. Just creating one album which contains all my pictures, with tagging used for categorizing, doesn't help either; that way, digiKam would store all my pictures in a single flat directory, which would become problematic when the number in the picture filenames wraps around. I do love the scoring thing in digiKam. A favourites tag just doesn't cut it; and creating five tags for scoring would make things like find all pictures that have a score of three or above rather cumbersome, and sort by score outright impossible. However, the fact that it's not possible to filter by score makes it all rather useless. The export to gallery function in digiKam is horrible. I have to select my pictures blindly; none of the metadata which I tack on them can be used to help select which pictures I want. Workaround: use whatever filtering is available to select the right pictures and add them to a temporary album from which I then upload all pictures, but that's silly (and requires disk space for no good reason). Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the interface, which means that I have to babysit an upload (with no workaround). And I can't even view my pictures to spend the time waiting. Bah. F-spot isn't without problems of its own. Due to a bug in mono, it crashes rather often on my PowerPC laptop. When that happens, it can't be restarted until the X server is restarted. Workaround: use Xnest, but that makes it impossible to view pictures in full-screen mode. Also, since f-spot is a GNOME application, its options dialog is as helpful as a pair of soccer shoes when you're out swimming. No surprises there. Conclusion Which one do I prefer? I'm not sure. The digiKam upload interface is positively annoying, especially the bug which requires me to click continue after every picture. For that alone, I might ditch it. On the other hand, it has a slew of interesting features (the scoring, to name one) that f-spot lacks, and that pull me more towards digiKam. I guess I'll have to give it a few days of thought. But hey, at least I know where I stand now.

Regarding my previous posting, the first thing that I wanted to release is called "Stuff To Do", and is a simple, elegant priority queue for getting things done. It lets you reprioritize, track time spent on tasks, generate reports on time spent, and most importantly, share with other users. You can create groups of people who can view one another's tasks, and give tasks to other users, all via a very intuitive interface (javascript is, however, required). It's all meant to stay out of your way as much as possible, even the time tracking requires only that you visit the browser window every so often to let it know you're there, rather than fiddling with (and sooner or later forgetting about) start and stop buttons. Perhaps it's not accurate down to the second, but the idea is to give you a general idea of what you've been up to, rather than something you have to slavishly click on all the time. The group interface is also meant to be easy to use to get a quick idea of what other people are working on, or share tasks with other people. For instance, if you're a project manager, you could create a bunch of tasks, and then just drag and drop them to other people in the system. You can't change other people's priorities (yet), because I think it's better if you simply ask them yourself - technology isn't a substitute for communication! While I work on the paypal interface (I looked into Google Checkout, but it's still got some limitations), I'm going to let people sign up for the group-enabled version with six months for free. It won't cost too much per user when I roll it out in any case, probably somewhere south of $20. The basic version is likely to remain free as long as I can cover hosting costs. I've been using it myself at work and home for the past month or so, along with a few of my colleagues, and it seems to fill a nice niche in between more heavyweight issue tracking tools like JIRA, and the index cards/bulletin board we'd been using. Check it out - I hope you like it! In any case, let me know what you think.

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area

What is Debian Desktop?
Debian Desktop is a Debian's subproject created to be a joint effort of
all groups involved or related with the desktop to give our users a
better environment to use and easier to install experience.

Actually we've members from: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde, pkg-xfce, pkg-galago,
tasksel and utnubu. We count with help from d-i and debian-cd members too.
The initiative merged the former Debian Desktop development page, debian-desktop
mailing list for the discussions and debian-desktop alioth project - its svn actually
hosts the desktop-base source package.

We did our best to deliver for our users a interesting desktop experience (including
laptop users) and it includes GNOME, KDE or Xfce (that's your choice) in our upcoming release: 4.0 (Etch).

What will be into Debian Etch Desktop ?
The desktop (task: desktop, installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• X Window System: Xorg 7.1
• Office suite: OpenOffice 2.0.4
• Graphics suite: GIMP 2.2.13

It also includes a simple window manager (twm), zeroconf (avahi), printing (cups) and scanning (sane) support

GNOME desktop (task: gnome-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• GNOME core: 2.14 with some 2.16 modules, eg.: totem (xine backend as default)
• Web Browser: Firefox 1.5 and Epiphany 2.14.3
• Feeds Manager: Liferea 1.0.26 (Liferea is Epiphany friendly)
  
• Mail/Calendar app: Evolution 2.6.3
• Instant Messaging Tool: GAIM 2.0.0beta5
• Multimedia Player: Rhythmbox 0.9.6
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: Network Manager 0.6.4
• Graphical Package Manager: Synaptic 0.57.11 with update-notifier
  
• Graphical Partition Manager: GParted 0.2.5
• CD/DVD Creation: GNOMEBaker 0.6.0
  
• Power Management Tool: GNOME Power Manager 2.14.3

It also includes bluetooth (bluez-gnome) support, multimedia in the browser support (totem mozilla plugin), bittorrent support (gnome-btdownload)

KDE desktop (task: kde-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• KDE: KDE 3.5.5 (base, pim, multimedia, graphics, artwork, network, utils and admin)
  
• Network (wired/wifi) manager: KNetworkManager 0.1
• CD/DVD Creation: k3b

We tried to add all the gnome task features into kde task too. KDE itself already contains a lot of them, if you find something missing please tell us at debian-desktop@lists.debian.org for a better next release, and wait your contribution enter Lenny.

Xfce desktop (task: xfce-desktop, also installable through aptitude or tasksel):

• Xfce: Xfce 4.3.99
• Calendar tool: orage 4.3.99
• Text editor: Mousepad 0.2.8

It also includes multimedia support and xfce goodies.

What if i've Debian testing or sid installed using GNOME or KDE or Xfce?
Open a terminal, check your /etc/apt/sources.list and run as root:
aptitude update
aptitude install desktop $foo-desktop

Please replace $foo with GNOME, KDE, Xfce - e.g: aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop

Note that desktop and $foo-desktop aren't metapackages - packages that usually contains just a few files (the required) to be installed in the system and its main feature is depend, conflict, recommend or suggest other packages. desktop and $foo-desktop are tasks and are in the tasksel source package, maintained by the tasksel team. The debian-installer uses tasksel to install a set of packages, and you should too.

How can i download Debian Desktop for tests?
The easier way to install is downloading a CD or DVD image from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer . Please download
Debian Etch RC1 images or later for GNOME and something newer
(eg: weekly builds) for KDE or Xfce. Please note that DVD usage
is preferred, if you're going to use a CD broadband is recommended.

There are special first CDs images containing not GNOME key packages
but KDE or Xfce, look for debian-testing-i386-$foo-CD-1.iso (don't worry,
we've at least amd64 and powerpc images too) at:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/weekly-builds/i386/iso-cd/

How can i install Debian Desktop GNOME?
The first DVD image contains the entire GNOME set of packages, just
follow the installer and after the base system install select "default
desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for you and
proceed - no network is required during installation.

The first CD image doesn't contains the entire GNOME set of packages,
just follow the installer and after the base system install select
"default desktop environment", if the system doesn't suggests it for
you and proceed - broadband connection is recommended.

How can i install Debian Desktop KDE?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=kde-desktop

* The first DVD image contains the entire KDE set of packages - no
network is required during installation.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire KDE set of packages -
broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

How can i install Debian Desktop Xfce?
Before the installer boots, please type:
install tasks=xfce-desktop

* The first DVD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

* The first CD image doesn't contains the entire Xfce set of packages
- broadband connection is recommended.

Note: Alternative first CD is available (see above).

Katherine's father bought her mother a laptop for Christmas. I am ashamed to admit that although I was responsible for the specification it was purchased from PC World. There is a lack of shops in Northern Ireland where you can walk in and purchase a reasonably cheap laptop unfortunately. The model we ended up with was an Advent 8111 (Dixons link as it's saner than the PC World one). It's not actually a bad spec; Core Duo 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, wireless/ethernet/modem, 15.4" 1280x800 widescreen TFT. I think it claims up to 3 hours battery life and I certainly had 2+ out of it though not under heavy use. I decided that it was getting Linux; Katherine's mum isn't used to any form of computer so there are no preconceptions about Windows to get over. While I'm a Debian person myself I felt it was time to give Ubuntu a chance; mjg59 (and others I'm sure) has spent a lot of time trying to get it happy on laptops and make sure things Just Work. I didn't have a lot of time to sit fiddling with the setup, so a shiny out-of-the-box distro seemed ideal. I downloaded ubuntu-6.10-desktop-i386.iso and burnt myself a CD. Dropped it in the drive and it booted into the live CD installer fine. The install process was simple and it managed to resize the Windows partition without problems (I would have deleted it but I couldn't convince the Windows rescue CD creator to work and I don't want to burn my bridges until I'm sure Linux works out ok for the owner). Rebooting into the freshly installed system I was surprised at the time the boot process took. It certainly felt a lot longer than it takes my (lower speced) laptop to boot to a GDM prompt under Debian. Also the display looked a bit fuzzy. Further investigation led to the discovery that although X correctly detected a panel size of 1280x800 it was only using 1024x768. Much searching found me i915resolution which did some magic that made things work. However this doesn't appear to be part of Ubuntu proper so I'm not sure if was the correct solution or if I should have done something else? Getting to the point where I could download i915resolution was interesting too. My parents have a WEP encrypted wireless network (to prevent casual use rather than because it's secure). I was expecting Ubuntu (which detected the Intel wireless card fine) to pop up some sort of dialog saying it had found a network and would I like to connect (if I provided the key). Something network-managery. But no. Even when I went to the network control panel and added all the details the connection didn't seem to come up. I gave up and did it manually with iwconfig and dhclient (I needed it to work quickly and at present it won't need wireless usually). Once I had the display working happily my other task was to tame the modem. It's an Intel HDA thing and I'd hoped sl-modem-daemon would drive it. Of course it didn't. Although it's an Intel chipset it has a bloody Conexant codec on it. Which of course there are no free or Free drivers for. I ended up trying the trial Linuxant driver, which did work fine at 14.4k, but that's really painful so I gave up and paid for the full version. I'd really rather have voted with my feet and ended up with some proper modem hardware, but it would have been an extra set of wires and cost more. I hate Conexant. Anyway, the drivers work (though seem to break sound; I haven't had enough time to prod this and the modem is much more important to have working). Hopefully in time I'll convince them they really want ADSL, but at present I think it would be quite hard as they don't have a high expected use. Once the modem was working I needed an easy way to dial up. I started playing with modem monitor, which had been installed by default. However I just couldn't figure out how to get it to allow me to dialup and dial down - the activate/disable options stayed greyed out. So I installed GNOME PPP which seems to work fine and be easy enough to drive - put a nice link to it on the desktop and stored all the details so it's a double click to launch and then a click of the "Connect" button. My final issue was that once I actually took the laptop to Katherine's house to show her mum how to use it it started hanging on boot. Booting into recovery mode showed a soft lockup error message around the point where it was setting up the network interfaces. I think this might have had something to do with me hitting the wireless kill switch (no point having it on when there's no wireless in the house), as disabling the device in the BIOS made the problem go away. I didn't have enough time to do a fully exhaustive check, but will look at it in the future. I wait with interest to see how use of the laptop goes. Expected usage to being with is mainly web and email (provided by the Ubuntu defaults of Firefox and Evolution) so hopefully it shouldn't be too problematic now I've fought the install process. I was really quite surprised at the problems I encountered (well, aside from the modem drivers); I'd expected a much smoother install that would leave me with everything working fine out of the box. I haven't yet filed any bugs or done more investigation - I only had about a day to setup the machine so couldn't prod it more just yet. I will of course try to do so when I get a free moment, but if I missed some obvious stuff please do point it out to me! (As if you wouldn't...) Oh, and here's some lspci output for anyone interested in some more details about the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) (prog-if 00 [VGA])
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [Normal decode])
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) (prog-if 01 [Subtractive decode])
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02) (prog-if 80 [Master])
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8055 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)
05:01.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
05:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
05:01.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
05:01.3 Class 0805: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803c (prog-if 01)

As of this writing, the DNS/infrastructure hasn't quite caught up, but ofbiz.apache.org ought to be live soon. "Apache Open For Business", aka OFBiz, has been promoted out of the incubator (the term the ASF uses for projects hoping to become full-fledged ASF projects) to its own top level project. As J Aaron Farr mentions, they managed most everything on their own, and were a project that wouldn't have looked out of place as part of the ASF even from the beginning of the incubation period, which made my job as a "mentor" pretty easy. What will be interesting is to track the project going forward. It has tremendous potential, because it focuses very much on providing not only the low level tools (which is still where most open source is), but also on creating good business models and processes, which is relatively newer terrain in the open source world. I think they face a couple of important challenges. First and foremost, a way to lower the barrier to entry. OFBiz is a big collection of code that in some ways tends to stand alone compared to the "mainstream" in that it uses its own tools in terms of the framework. Also, since it encompasses so much, it's a lot to come to terms with when you get started. This means that the initial step of the "learning curve" is pretty high, and I imagine that a lot of people stumble. Clearly, it's not a simple application, but I think efforts to make it more approachable will pay off in terms of attracting more users (and eventually, developers). The broader challenge is simply the fact that in some ways, this is uncharted territory for free software, so it remains to be seen what sort of "ecosystem" (if you'll pardon the buzzword) grows up around it. For instance, at this point in time, no one, least of all the core developers, sees it as a program that you simply download and run, but rather as a place to start from for integrators and developers who mould the code to fit the needs of the particular firm adopting it. That's working right now, but perhaps at some point it will be more of an out of the box system. Or maybe not - attempting to make it work well for a vague 'everyone' might just be chasing taillights and prove ultimately fruitless. Unfortunately, I still haven't had the opportunity to use it "in anger", as they say, so I don't have much to say about it technically, but from a business point of view, I really like their data model, and the system of processes they've put together, which allows you to capture a great deal of use cases in a very flexible way, which is no mean feat. In any case, a big round of congratulations to the core developers, and best wishes for the future!

Now either I'm really astonished or somebody has seriously strange metrics. I suspect it's the second. According to Aleksandar Vasovic (working at the university of K ln (Cologne) in Germany):

[...] we analysed the debian mailing list archives, especially the debian-devel mailing list, as it is a good representation of the whole network. [...] we identified the 100 main actors and therefor came across your email address.

So, somebody who talks quite a bit on the mailing lists, but really only maintains one package is already one of the top 100 "actors" in Debian? I seriously doubt it. (And yes, receiving the mail I quoted and seeing that the questionnaire is not online yet(?) does not improve my impression either.) Now (more talk) of course the right thing to do would be to define as many metrics as possible and see how often I am in the top 100. Anyway, when I feel I have to say something I will continue to do so, and otherwise just thank the (at most 99 ;-) people who do more for Debian than I for creating and maintaining all the cool stuff I can use for free. And, obviously, I also have to mention the upstream authors who make Debian possible in the first place. Still, metrics got me thinking. One metric I'd be really interested in is a weighted "I respect person X" one: everybody submits rankings of people who (s)he thinks do a very good job in Debian and who tend to do the "right" things, both in technical matters but also regarding community or organisation stuff. Then, from these rankings, a overall ranking is calculated, but with a twist: have the opinions of people high in the overall ranking count more than those with lower rankings - after all, the latter are inclined to trust the former people's judgement. Now, the obvious thing to do would be to elect the DPL with this ranking. But it could go further: maintain the ranking continuously (i.e. let people adjust their ranking at any time) instead of only polling once a year, publish the ranking (or perhaps just the top 20 or top 50?), let the top 5 be a leadership team instead of having a single DPL, adjust the leadership team as often as necessary as the top 5 of the ranking change (minimum terms of 3 months and only change the team when somebody falls out of the top 5 for at least a month or so to keep things from boiling over too quickly). Obviously, rankings have their problems, and this approach wouldn't suddenly solve all of the project's problems and would probably also introduce new ones, but I feel the continuous monitoring by the project's members might make those leaders more realistic when stating their goals by eliminating the campaign frenzy. #include stuff about people not actually wanting to be part of the leadership team and stuff about requiring some regular confirmation from the electorate to weed out people who just recorded a ranking at some time but don't follow events anymore. Ok, now this was absolutely in the Talk Is Cheap™ category.

Adrian von Bidder notes that he got a message from a random survey group asking for feedback.

[...] we analysed the debian mailing list archives, especially the debian-devel mailing list, as it is a good representation of the whole network. [...] we identified the 100 main actors and therefor came across your email address.

So, somebody who talks quite a bit on the mailing lists, but really only maintains one package is already one of the top 100 "actors" in Debian? I seriously doubt it.

It gets better. In the last couple years I've barely posted on any public Debian mailing lists at all. And yet I'm apparently also in the top 100 "actors". Say what?

Unsurprising, sad, but still amusing: this guy photographed talks given at a computer conference and released them under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Attribution license. A Microsoft senior program manager copied his work as part of an advertisement, without attribution.

Try violating Microsoft's copyrights and they'll bury you under lawyers and moral outrage. But catch them violating yours and it's laughed off as no big deal (some of the huffy responses from Softies on the blog post I referenced are pretty funny).

Of course, in a real sense, it isn't a big deal: "might makes right" is a dreadful moral principle but a largely accurate summary of how the world actually works. But exposing the hypocrisy of the powerful at least forces them stop pretending that they are anything but overgrown, sanctified, self-righteous bullies. (this doesn't actually make anything better (even if you get rid of one bully, he'll just be replaced by another one), but at least it means you don't have to gag on hypocrisy every time they open their mouth)

While its not the normal action people usually expect from me, I just felt the need to have a little posting saying Thanks to somebody. Who? Well. All of you doing work on a regular basis, like * Application Managers, who regularly process people that want to get Debian Developer status. They are doing a lot of work, asking questions, giving tips and in the end submit their report. Usually thats a process of multiple days up to some months work, depending on the time the Applicant and the AM has. * FrontDesk. who makes sure that the process keeps on running by managing all sorts of weird things people come up with, * Sponsors, who help non-DDs to get their package into the Debian Archive, * The release team, who always tries to get the best possible release out of the door, * All those people that make Debian what it is - the biggest and best distribution ever, * everyone that goes and fixes bugs in debian packages to keep the quality as high as possible, * all people that help people by answering questions on one of our mailinglists, on IRC or in web forums, * every upstream author that releases his software under a free license and happily works together with distribution maintainers to make their software the best it can be, * all those that help to organize DebConf, the yearly Debian Conference with all the time-consuming tasks that that includes, * the people that keep the infrastructure running that allows us to develop our own little gems, like the Debian Admins, SPI Admins, Alioth Admins, IRC Network Operators and anyone who provides and maintains machines for a free project out there, * those behind everyone I mentioned - the families. Who have to look for something else during the time people do all the mentioned work, * everyone who can resist feeding a flamewar, Did I forgot someone? I’m sure I did, so - start your own post and say thanks, without people spending a lot of their spare time you would not have such a great distribution to use and ease your life! Have a good new year and continue the good work!

Somebody intends to challenge DJB’s license for qmail. Most likely we don’t hear from them again, but there is a small chance something might happen. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

I’ve been asked to keep my blog up to date with regard to Linux support of the MacBook Pro, so here are my latest findings. For more background, see the previous post on the same subject. Anything that I don’t mention here or in another post can be assumed to work (or I just haven’t tested that particular thing yet, though I’m doing some extensive tests).

• Sound: still nothing, none of the various patches floating are good enough
• Battery life: no news here, 1h30 is the max you’ll get. You need to suspend to disk if you want to swap the battery, it’s not possible to do that in suspend to ram like it was on the PowerBook (G4 500, at least). Sad.
• Heat/fan noise: catastrophic. Fans running at 4000-4200 rpm on a typical desktop or on my laps, down to 3000 rpm on a glass desktop. More on the SMC below.
• ATI drivers: still suck. No PowerPLAY support on amd64, which means the GPU is running at the highest clock rate, consuming a lot of power and generating a lot of heat. XVideo makes the X server segfault, watching a short movie using vlc’s OpenGL output managed to crash the box hard, corrupting part of the kernel memory. fglrx kills the machine on resume.

In a previous post, I was reporting a lot of timeouts from the applesmc “driver”. After a (very) quick look at the AppleSMC kext for OS X, I know why this happens. It looks like the OS X driver uses an interrupt and configures the SMC for that. So it probably doesn’t poll the SMC 20 times per second like the applesmc “driver” does. It also looks like the OS X driver uses SMC keys we know nothing about. I could also confirm that the SMC has access to temperature sensors for the CPU, GPU and memory, but it looks like we have no idea of the corresponding SMC keys. With this information, it’d be possible to switch the SMC to manual mode with a userspace governor. What probably happens when we run Linux on this machine is that the SMC stays in automatic mode, and it’s very conservative in this mode. It won’t hesitate to run the fans at high speed to keep the machine safe. It is highly probable that the OS X driver is taking over the fan control to keep the machine both cool and quiet. This is mostly speculation, as the better device power management in OS X plays a role too, and the SMC could very well still be in automatic mode under OS X keeping the fans at low speed just because the machine generates way less heat. Unfortunately, the AppleSMC kext isn’t released as part of Darwin, so we’ll have to wait until it is. Could be a long wait, though. The SMC handles a lot of things. I don’t feel safe running an OS without a proper driver for the SMC on this machine. The fans probably aren’t designed to run at 4000+ rpm for 3 years and will probably fail early or something.