Gunnar Wolf has written an interesting post about the current situation in Egypt, which includes references to Israel (where he lived for a few years) and Mexico (where he has spent most of his life) [1].Gunnar included a copy of Mohammed Sameer s blog post on the topic [2], which is a good idea as we can t rely on Mohammed s post remaining online.The Reid Report has an interesting summary of various news sources [3].I hope that the end result of this is a democratically elected government that respects human rights and offers fair trials to people accused of crimes and humane punishments those found guilty. It would be ideal if the transition could happen in a way that involves little violence and no interruptions to the food supply etc.Update: Chris Samuel provided some information on free PPP access in other countries for people in Egypt [4]. This will probably be of short-term use as the Egypten regime will probably cut International phone access too.Update2: Lars has written some interesting comments including links to articles about the US government wanting the power to cut off Internet access in the same way as the Egyptian government [5].

• [1] http://gwolf.org/blog/echoing-mohammed
• [2] http://foolab.org/node/7892
• [3] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/01/egypt-in-chaos-elbaradei-reportedly-under-
  house-arrest/
• [4] http://www.csamuel.org/2011/01/29/ppp-dialups-for-people-in-egypt-egypt-jan25
• [5] http://blog.liw.fi/posts/egypt-blocks-comms/

The government of Egypt has blocked almost all Internet and mobile phone access, and, probably, every other form of communication as well. The government wants to prevent its citizens from protesting and demanding the president to resign. I wish the people of Egypt well. When the blocks are taken down, I hope the people report that the country is peaceful and that they have finally gotten some freedom. The government of Egypt claims to be democratic, but what they are doing should not be possible in a democracy. The fundamental aspect of a democracy is that every citizen should have the right to vote, but it is not the only necessary right for a democracy. Making your concerns heard to the government, and to other people, is also a fundamental right. As is hearing what other people have to say. Riots and violence are not acceptable ways to protest. Cutting everyone off is not going to prevent that, however, and it greatly harms any chance of peaceful resolution. But that's hard to see, when you're effectively a dictator, sitting at the top of a high tower, looking down at the common people. If the government is actively, and violently, hostile towards its people, the people have three choices: they can submit and accept the situation and continue suffering; they can oppose peacefully; or they can oppose violently. It requires great wisdom to oppose peacefully, and quite a lot of patience. It's easy, from my northern European point of view, to look at Egypt from afar, and think lofty thoughts. We here in the cold are not safe from such oppression, however. Evil people in the US have already tried to give the US president similar powers months ago. They're trying again. It is only a matter of time until this will be proposed in the EU, too, if it hasn't been already. In a crisis, people need timely access to reliable information, otherwise the crisis gets made worse by rumors and people making bad decisions based on bad data. Switching off communications is never the right solution, from the people's point of view. Those in power obviously think differently. See also: Information on how to bypass some of the blocks in Egypt.

There s been a lot of discussion regarding whether or not Nokia is Doomed or not. The people who say Nokia are doomed basically point out that Nokia doesn t have any attractive products at the high end, and at the low end the margins are extremely thin. The high end products suffer from the Symbian being essentially dead (even Nokia is recommending that developers not develop native applications for Symbian, but to use Qt instead), and Nokia doesn t have much of a development community following it, and it certainly does have much in the way of 3rd party applications, either targetting Symbian or Qt at the moment. So what do I think of the whole debate between Tomi and Scoble? First of all, I think there is a huge difference in American and European assumptions and perspectives, and a big question is whether the rest of the world will end up looking more like Europe or America vis-a-vis two key areas: cost of data plans, and whether phones become much more application centric. Tomi took Apple to task in the comments section of his 2nd article for not having an SD card slot (how else would people share photos with their friends?) and for not supporting MMS in its earlier phones. My first reaction to that was: Um, isn t that what photo-sharing sites are for? Is it really that hard to attach a photo to an e-mail? And then it hit me. In Europe, data is still like MMS a few years ago a place for rapacious carriers to make way too much money. Many European telco s don t have unlimited data plans, and charge by the megabyte and even if you re lucky enough to live in a country which does have an American-like data plan, the cost of data roaming is still incredibly expensive. In contrast, in the US, I can pay $30/month for an unlimited data plan, and I can travel 2000 miles south or west and it will still be valid. Try doing that in Europe! The US had consumer-friendly data plans much earlier than Europe did, and so perhaps it s not surprising that Nokia has engineered phones that were far more optimized for the limitations caused by the Europe s Wireless carriers. The second area of debate where I think Scoble and Tomi are far apart is whether phones of the future are fundamentally about applications or well, making phone calls. Here I don t have proof that this is a fundamentally European vs. US difference, but I have my suspicions that it might be. Tomi spent a lot of time dwelling on how Nokia was much better at making phone calls (i.e., better microphones, better radios, etc). And my reaction to that was, Who cares? I rarely use my phone for making phone calls these days! And that was certainly one of the reasons why I gave up on Nokia after the E70 its contacts database was garbage! It was OK as a phone directory, but as a place for storing multiple addresses and e-mail addresses, it didn t hold a candle to the Palm PDA. And that s perhaps the key question how much is a smart phone and about being a phone , versus being a PDA (and these days I want a cloud-synchronized PDA, for my calendar, contacts, and todo lists), and how much is it about applications? This is getting long, so I think I ll save my comments about whether I think Meego will be an adequate savior for Nokia for another post. But it s worthwhile to talk here about Tomi s comments about most smartphones being much cheaper than the luxury iPhone, and so it doesn t matter that Nokia s attempt in the higher end smart phones has been a continuous history of fail. First of all, it s worth noting that there are much cheaper Android phones available on the market today, which are price-competitive with Nokia s low-end smartphones (i.e., available for free from T-Mobile in the States with a two year commitment). Secondly, the history in the computer market over the last twenty years is that features inevitably waterfall into the cheaper models, and prices will tend to drop over time as well. Apple started only with the iPod, but over time they added the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle. And it would not surprise me if they introduce a lower-end iPhone as well in time as well. It would shock me if they aren t experimenting with such models even as we speak, and have simply chosen not to push one out to the market yet. So even if you buy Tomi s argument that the high-end smartphones don t matter, and you only care about volume, and not about profit margins (talk to the people at Nokia that will need to be laid off to make their expenses match with their lowered revenue run rates; I bet they will care), the question is really about whether Nokia has time to execute on the Meego vision before it s too late and the current application-centric smartphone ecosystems (Android and iPhone) start eating into the lower-end smartphone segment. More on that in my next post. No related posts.

There s been a lot of discussion regarding whether or not Nokia is Doomed or not. The people who say Nokia are doomed basically point out that Nokia doesn t have any attractive products at the high end, and at the low end the margins are extremely thin. The high end products suffer from the Symbian being essentially dead (even Nokia is recommending that developers not develop native applications for Symbian, but to use Qt instead), and Nokia doesn t have much of a development community following it, and it certainly does have much in the way of 3rd party applications, either targetting Symbian or Qt at the moment. So what do I think of the whole debate between Tomi and Scoble? First of all, I think there is a huge difference in American and European assumptions and perspectives, and a big question is whether the rest of the world will end up looking more like Europe or America vis-a-vis two key areas: cost of data plans, and whether phones become much more application centric. Tomi took Apple to task in the comments section of his 2nd article for not having an SD card slot (how else would people share photos with their friends?) and for not supporting MMS in its earlier phones. My first reaction to that was: Um, isn t that what photo-sharing sites are for? Is it really that hard to attach a photo to an e-mail? And then it hit me. In Europe, data is still like MMS a few years ago a place for rapacious carriers to make way too much money. Many European telco s don t have unlimited data plans, and charge by the megabyte and even if you re lucky enough to live in a country which does have an American-like data plan, the cost of data roaming is still incredibly expensive. In contrast, in the US, I can pay $30/month for an unlimited data plan, and I can travel 2000 miles south or west and it will still be valid. Try doing that in Europe! The US had consumer-friendly data plans much earlier than Europe did, and so perhaps it s not surprising that Nokia has engineered phones that were far more optimized for the limitations caused by the Europe s Wireless carriers. The second area of debate where I think Scoble and Tomi are far apart is whether phones of the future are fundamentally about applications or well, making phone calls. Here I don t have proof that this is a fundamentally European vs. US difference, but I have my suspicions that it might be. Tomi spent a lot of time dwelling on how Nokia was much better at making phone calls (i.e., better microphones, better radios, etc). And my reaction to that was, Who cares? I rarely use my phone for making phone calls these days! And that was certainly one of the reasons why I gave up on Nokia after the E70 its contacts database was garbage! It was OK as a phone directory, but as a place for storing multiple addresses and e-mail addresses, it didn t hold a candle to the Palm PDA. And that s perhaps the key question how much is a smart phone and about being a phone , versus being a PDA (and these days I want a cloud-synchronized PDA, for my calendar, contacts, and todo lists), and how much is it about applications? This is getting long, so I think I ll save my comments about whether I think Meego will be an adequate savior for Nokia for another post. But it s worthwhile to talk here about Tomi s comments about most smartphones being much cheaper than the luxury iPhone, and so it doesn t matter that Nokia s attempt in the higher end smart phones has been a continuous history of fail. First of all, it s worth noting that there are much cheaper Android phones available on the market today, which are price-competitive with Nokia s low-end smartphones (i.e., available for free from T-Mobile in the States with a two year commitment). Secondly, the history in the computer market over the last twenty years is that features inevitably waterfall into the cheaper models, and prices will tend to drop over time as well. Apple started only with the iPod, but over time they added the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle. And it would not surprise me if they introduce a lower-end iPhone as well in time as well. It would shock me if they aren t experimenting with such models even as we speak, and have simply chosen not to push one out to the market yet. So even if you buy Tomi s argument that the high-end smartphones don t matter, and you only care about volume, and not about profit margins (talk to the people at Nokia that will need to be laid off to make their expenses match with their lowered revenue run rates; I bet they will care), the question is really about whether Nokia has time to execute on the Meego vision before it s too late and the current application-centric smartphone ecosystems (Android and iPhone) start eating into the lower-end smartphone segment. More on that in my next post. No related posts.

I decided last night to upgrade the firmware on my G1. I've been fairly happy with my lightly hacked Android 1.6 (basically the stock T-Mobile image rooted and with a couple of apps added) but I'm interested in whether Froyo will bring performance improvements and the office is now full of Desire users so I figured I'd install 2.1 to see if it was any good, and prepare for 2.2. I went for CyanogenMod as it seems to be fairly sane ROM put together by someone with some clue.

Of course I decided to ignore some of the instructions; particularly the bit about doing a factory reset first. Most of my data is easily backed up, either to Google or locally, but I wanted to keep my SMS+MMS history. There's nothing really that interesting there, and the SMS stuff is backed up automatically via SMS Backup, but still. It was a challenge. What I ended up finding was that if I didn't do the data deletion then Contacts wouldn't work, but I'd keep the SMS/MMS. And if I did the data deletion everything worked fine but I didn't have the SMS/MMS history.

I fired up adb to have a look around the filesystem, to see if there was something obvious. And there was! I found /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db, which is actually an SQLite database of received messages. So I booted up with the old data present, logged in, tarred up all of /data, copied it across to my desktop, reset the phone and deleted all data, waited for it to boot, extracted mmssms.db from the tarball and put it back on the phone. Result! My message threads reappeared. Turns out that wasn't enough for MMS, but that was solved by copying the contents of /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/app_parts/ across as well.

Yes, I accept this is kludgey and most end users aren't going to do it, but a couple of points:

• I'm flashing an unsupported ROM. I expect things to potentially break and not be able to complain to anyone about it. I'm very happy that it's an option, having had issues in the past where an operator wouldn't release an updated Nokia ROM for months after its release even when it fixed major issues.
• This is something I wouldn't have been able to do under WinMo or Symbian. I've had a world of pain in the past moving between phones, even when using Nokia's PC Suite to try and copy stuff from the old one to the new one. Being able to get a full shell on the phone is hugely useful for dealing with this stuff when it goes wrong or you want to do something slightly different.

While the above is Android specific I'm fairly sure WebOS on the Pre or Maemo on the N900 would offer me the same level of power and control. I think I've just convinced myself that alternative smartphone OSes are no longer viable options.

As you might have read, one of Debians slightly important machines had some hardware trouble. Before I get into more details of this story, let me say thank you to all the people who worked on this issue: - The DSA (Debian System Administrators) team, - the local admins at Brown University Computer Science department. I intentionally leave out the HP support here, I think their work in this issue was pretty suboptimal. While they do follow a certain schema, it took a bit long and the stunt with the technician not finding the replacement board and later on leaving without further notice wasn t all that great. (Update: Just to clarify this: In general we are happy with HP and the hardware and relationship and all that stuff. And usually the support works pretty well, like for all the times we had to replace broken disks.) Now, the story. This all started by us noticing something in ries kernel output telling about some trouble with the ram:

ries kernel: [168074.392016] Northbridge Error, node 0, core: -1
ries kernel: [168074.392186] K8 ECC error.

This was first noticed somewhere at the beginning of January. A DSA member then used the usual HP tools to check whats up, none of it reported an error. There wasn t much of an option left besides waiting what happens in the future. No support would do anything here. Until March we did not have any trouble. But at the 14th of March this changed, as the HP tools now found a serious error, reporting Status: DIMM is degraded for the third DIMM module. A support ticket was opened at this point and a replacement DIMM got sent out. Unfortunately the well known Mr. Murphy did look at this issue and so the wrong thing was sent out to the wrong place. Countdown continued and 10 days later the host decided to randomly lockup. And as HP servers have an Automatic Server Reset function in such cases, the whole machine rebooted. Not only once. Guess how much a filesystem likes such things when the machine is active. And for added fun a second DIMM got reported as broken, we now had DIMM #3 and #4 gone off. A certain ping-pong with HP support later we asked the local admins to take out the broken DIMMs and then also to change the order in which the remaining DIMMs are arranged. Unfortunately this did not help, the errors stayed. At this time we already turned off the services running on the machine and it mostly waited in the HP Insight Diagnostics test from HPs SmartStart CD. (And it always locked itself at 97% here). The support asked us to try another round of work on the machine, which our DSA team and the local admins did. But as it already was the 30th of March and nothing helped, our DSA got a little more direct in asking for a working solution. Like replacing the board and sending a technician to look and fix the machine. This was scheduled for the 1st of April, but turned out to not work as hoped. For some reason the technician was not able to find the board that was sent as replacement (no fault of our local admins!), so nothing happened the 1st of April except us getting a little upset. DSA communicated this to HP support, asking for escalation and finally getting this fixed. Our local admins could at last greet a HP technician on the 2nd of April then and he even had the replacement board with him, so he did his work there. He also confirmed that the two DIMMs mentioned above are faulty. For some reason he did not replace them, but left them outside of the machine. He also left the place without telling the Brown CS staff, so it wasn t the best performance he made. Fortunately the machine was in a working state again, only missing 2 of its DIMMs, 4Gb RAM. This has to be replaced by HP in the next days. When the Brown CS staff found out the technician left without notice they enabled our DSA to access the ilo of the machine again, so they could get the machine back up. Of course the first run was the HP SmartStart stuff again, running a full test. It reported no error, pheeew. There had been a few more steps in getting the settings of the ilo correct again and running a full filesystem check on it, but somewhere in the night the machine was back up and ready for us FTPMasters and Release team to get the services back. As the machine was back up in the middle of the night where I was sleeping, I did start my work somewhere this morning. At 10:25 CEST this started with a md5sum check of all files we have in our pool/ structure, ie. the Debian archive. We had 655k files to check, so it naturally took a while. Luckily we only found 32 broken files. Even better a set of them is already fixed, the rest of them is easily fixable with a set of binnmus the buildd people helpfully schedule, so not too much work involved in fixing this issue. Could have been worse. (Actually, when the first reboots happened, before the long downtime, we also had some broken logfiles, unreadable changes files and such things. But those I already fixed back then). More or less in parallel to the md5sum check we also started the queue daemons again, to let our upload queues from the other hosts forward their files to the central queue on ftp-master, tested the triggers to the new buildd peoples machine and the release team did a britney run. This took the first 5 hours (and a bit) of the process. As a second step, and we are still in this, we started the processing of the incoming queue. Turned out we have to process 10gigabytes of new uploads, in a total of 1285 uploads. This process is still running at the time I write this blog post, having processed about 1100 uploads. A good 9 til 10 hours run, but this was expected. I actually thought it will take even longer. When this is done I will go and have a manual dinstall run. That is, I will run every action a dinstall is usually doing by hand. And verify each step. Usually dinstall takes some 2 hours, manually it can take a bit more. Somewhere during this run a mirror push will also be done, a fairly huge one this time, with all those updates. When this all works I will turn on FTPMaster cronjobs after this dinstall, or at latest tomorrow morning, as usual, and service is back as usual. As far as I know the release team plans to turn on their cronjobs tomorrow morning too, so this will all be nice then. Apropos release: Please note what I wrote in my latest d-d-a mail:

As a sidenote from me: If you have a package that might be involved in
whatever transition to testing, or simply might get involved, it could
really help if you wait a day or two with the next upload, so the
release team can sort through all before you give them new trouble. If
in doubt, try mailing debian-release@lists.debian.org and ask. :)

So, thats it, enough annoyance with all those status bits here and there. I go leave you alone now. :)

I ve now had my new Thinkpad T61 [1] for almost a month. The letters on the keyboard are not even starting to wear off which is unusual, either this Thinkpad is built with harder plastic than the older ones or I m typing more softly. Memory The first thing I did after receiving it was to arrange a RAM upgrade. It shipped with two 1GB DDR2 666MHz PC2-5300 SODIMM modules and as I want to run KVM I obviously need a lot more than that. The Intel Chipset page on Wikipedia is one of the resources that documents the Intel GM965 chipset as supporting up to 8G of RAM. Getting 4G in two 2G modules seemed like a bad idea as that would limit future expansion options and also result in two spare modules. So I decided to get a 4G module for a total of 5G of RAM. I ve updated my RAM speed page with the test results of this system [2], I get 2,823MB/s with a matched pair of DIMMs and 2,023MB/s with a single DIMM. But strangely with a pair of unmatched DIMMs Memtest86+ reported 2,823MB/s I wonder whether the first 2G of address space is interleaved for best performance and the last 3G runs at 2,023MB/s. In any case I think that losing 29% of the maximum RAM speed would be an acceptable trade-off for saving some money and I can always buy another 4G DIMM later. I had to order a DDR2-800MHz PC2-6400 module because they are cheaper than the PC2-5300 modules and my Thinkpad works equally well with either speed. I have used the spare 1G SODIMM in my EeePC701 which takes the same RAM presumably because the EeePC designers found PC2-5300 modules to be cheaper than slower modules (I think that the 701 was at the time it was released the slowest PC compatible system that was selling in quantity). The EeePC gets only 798MB/s out of the same memory. My document about Memtest86+ results has these results and more [2]. I noticed that if I run Memtest86+ booted from a USB flash device then inserting or removing a USB device can cause memory errors, but if I boot memtest86+ from a CD it seems to work correctly. So it seems that Memtest86+ doesn t disable some aspect of USB hardware, this might be considered a bug or it might just be a don t do that issue. Misc To get the hardware virtualisation working (needed to load the kvm_intel kernel module) I had to enable it in the BIOS and then do a hard reset (power off). Telling the BIOS to save and reboot was not adequate. This would be a BIOS bug, it knew that I had changed the virtualisation setting so it should have either triggered a hard reset or instructed me to do so. The default configuration of Debian/Lenny results in sound not working, I had to run alsaconf as suggested on the Debian Etch on Thinkpad T61 howto [3] which solved it. Generally I m happy with this system, the screen resolution is 1680*1050 which has 20% more pixels than the 1400*1050 screen on my Thinkpad T41p, it s a lot faster for CPU operations and should be a lot faster for video when I get the drivers sorted out (currently it s a lot slower), and I have virtualisation working again. But when you buy a system that s much like the last one but 6 years newer you expect it to be better. Generally the amount of effort involved in the process of buying a new system, upgrading the RAM to the desired specs, installing Linux and tweaking all the options is enough to make me want to wait at least another 6 years before buying another. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that I want to get so much functionality from the machine, a machine with more modest goals (such as a Netbook) takes a lot less time to configure. Problems There is Bluetooth hardware which is apparently enabled by default. But a quick search didn t turn up any information on how to do the basic functions, I would like to just transfer files from my mobile phone in the same way that I transfer files between phones. The video card is a nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1). 3D games seem slow but glxgears reports 300fps. It doesn t have Xvideo support which appears to be the reason why mplayer won t allow resizing it s display area unless run with the -zoom option, and it s also got performance problems such that switching between virtual desktops will interrupt the sound on a movie that mplayer is playing although when alsaplayer is playing music the sound isn t interrupted. Also when I play a Youtube video at twice the horizontal and vertical resolution it takes half of one CPU core. It s a pity that I didn t get an Intel video controller. It seems that Debian is soon going to get the Nouveau NVidia drivers so hopefully video performance will improve significantly when I get them [4]. The next thing I have to do is to get the sound controls working. The older Thinkpads that I used had hardware controls, the T41p that was my previous system had buttons for increasing and decreasing the volume and a mute button that interacted directly with the hardware. The down-side of this was that there was no way for the standard software to know what the hardware was going to do, the up-side was that I could press the mute button and know that it would be silent regardless of what the software wants. Now I have the same buttons on my T61 but they don t do anything directly, they just provide key-press events. According to showkeys the mute key gives 0 71 0xf1 , the volume down button gives 0 72 0xf2 , and the volume up button gives 0 73 0xf3 . Daniel Pittman has made some suggestions to help me get the keyboard events mapped to actions that can change the sound via software [5] which I haven t yet had time to investigate. I wonder if it will ever be possible to change the volume of the system beep. The system has an SD card slot, but that doesn t seem to work. I m not really worried at the moment but in the future I will probably try and get it going. It has a 100G disk which isn t that big, adding a 32G SD card at some future time might be the easiest way to upgrade the storage copying 100G of data is going to be painful and usually a small increment in storage capacity can keep a system viable for a while. Any advice on getting sound, the SD card, and Bluetooth working would be appreciated. I ll probably upgrade to Debian/Testing in the near future so suggestions that require testing features won t be ruled out.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/15/new-thinkpad-lenovo-web-site-sucks/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/computers/ram-speed-memtest86/
• [3] http://www.klabs.be/~fpiat/linux/debian/Etch_on_Thinkpad_T61.html
• [4] http://bgoglin.livejournal.com/19624.html
• [5] http://lists.luv.asn.au/wws/arc/luv-main/2010-03/msg00123.html

After some stability problems and an unresolvable PCI IRQ problem with my Debian server at home (Internet gateway, mail, PostgreSQL, LDAP and NFS server and test system), I decided to get a new mainboard and wireless card last week. I did some research to get hardware that is properly supported and where I can use the rest of my current components. I had

• a AM2 socket AMD Athlon64 3500+ CPU
• 2 1GB DDR2/667 DIMMs
• a ATX chassis
• an IDE Transcend 4GB SSD for my root partition
• 2 750GB SATA hard disks (software RAID-1)
• a Intel EtherExpress 100 Server PCI adapter (that I wanted to use to separate the internal and external networks but which did not work due to the above mentioned PCI trouble)

So I had to find a mainboard with at least 2 DDR2 DIMM sockets, an AM2 compatible CPU socket in ATX format with SATA ports at least one IDE Port, a Gigabit ethernet port (serving NFS home directories) and at least 2 PCI slots (one for the wireless card) that is well supported by the current Debian Squeeze Linux kernel. As I had some issues with the previous board's nvidia SATA chipset I wanted to get something else that is AHCI compatible. After some research I decided to buy a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H (rev. 3.0) which is available for a good price and fits all my criteria (2 DDR2 DIMM slots, 6 SATA ports, an RTL8169 based Gigabit ethernet ports, 2 PCI slots, ...). The mainboard uses an AMD 740G + SB710 Chipset. It has an integrated graphics chipset which I don't really need because I run the machine as a headless system. As I use the server as a wireless access point I need a wireless network adapter that supports AP mode. There are not many chipsets that are properly supported in AP mode and allow good data rates so I decided to get an Atheros ath9k based card, because I don't need non-free firmware like with broadcom based cards and could find some affordable hardware. The previous was a Netgear WG311 ath5k card that had issues that it lost its connection under more than minimum load and could only be reanimated by a system reboot. I looked at the Linux Wireless pages and found out that D-Link has a matching adapter the DWL-G520. Unfortunatelly they don't tell about the used chipset (as almost all other vendors too) and write about possibly changing hardware at the product sheet. To be sure I looked at their Windows driver's .inf files and found nothing indicating that there are any non Atheros variants of the card. I also ordered two Fantec MR-35 SATA mobile racks for more comfort when one of the RAID1 discs crashes (had 2 crashes last year) and a 12" chassis fan to keep the system cool. Today the package arrived and after unpacking and putting everything together I started the system (with keyboard and a display attached) to see how it works. All hardware was automatically detected by the current Debian Squeeze system and I only had to remove the entries for the old onboard network adapter and the old wireless adapter from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and fix the device names for the new network cards. I added a new stanza for the Intel ethernet adapter in /etc/network/interfaces and setup a set of ferm rules to have a working firewall (thanks to Formorer for the suggestion to use ferm). After this was finished everything worked fine so far and I put the machine at its normal place without keyboard and display. To verify that the stability situation had really improved, I copied some huge files over the network (both wired and wireless and in both
directions). Afterwards I did a bonnie++ benchmark to test the SATA and hard drive reliability. Everything went well and I'm happy with my investment.

Work doesn't often send to me places as great as Manilla in the Philippines, but here I am. It's a reasonably modern place and to me feels more like America than Asia in so many ways, posssibly because of its history. One thing is for sure, noone follows road rules here. Red lights are a suggestion and a zebra crossing is just some painted lines that you do need to stop at.

As for food, it's not that different, in fact this sad lot is about what was different:

• McSpaghetti - Was supposedly sugar coated spaghetti but actually was very tame, my son would of loved it.
• Wow Steak from KFC - Neither Wow nor Steak, like a big chicken nugget with gravy and rice
• Halo Halo - A dessert drink which was sugared or preserved fruit, milk and ice.

Generally though the food has been pretty good but nothing I could get at home.

Good news about Gjay, the previous maintainer said it was ok for SourceForge to hand over the control of the program to me so I've set it up in git and started working on it. Most of the work was getting the code up-to-date to the later gtk APIs and making it work with audacious instead of xmms. It's almost ready for (re)initial release and there is even an ITP ready to go.

Git is a rather interesting and new (for me at least) version control system. I've been using cvs for more years than I'd care to think about and svn but while it is a bit different as you'd expect I haven't had it get in my way. In fact I've been so impressed with Git I have put a few other projects into it, mainly with the collab maintence Debian project for a few of my packages.

In the past I have had parents ask for advice on buying a digital camera for a young child. For some years there have been digital cameras on sale for much less than $100 cheap enough that no-one will be THAT bothered if the child breaks it, so digital photography is a good hobby for a young child. Such cameras are however quite bulky and require AA batteries which often don t last that long between charges. Some of the cheap phones are large enough that a 3yo child can have trouble carrying them. I recently gave an old LG U8110 phone to a young child for use as a camera. The phone has a 640*480 resolution camera and a display that is a few centimeters wide. It s no good for any remotely serious photography, and among other problems I never managed to get it s USB connection to work so the only way I ever managed to get a photograph off it was to MMS it to a newer camera. But it s quite adequate for a child to play with, it s small, light, and the battery stays charged for ages. Also the phone has a clock built in which is a handy feature it seems that nowadays the trend in society is away from wearing a watch and towards using a mobile phone to discover the time. Also a phone is a fairly capable computer, I think that the first two computers that I owned had significantly less CPU power and RAM than an LG U8110 and lots of newer phones compare well to PCs that were manufactured in the mid 90 s. The trend has been towards having an increasing number of applications and games on phones which of course gives more things for a child to play with. I believe that playing with computers that have a variety of different user interfaces and sets of applications is good for the education of young children. Now to make a phone work you need to have a SIM. If a phone was designed by someone who was intelligent and who was acting on behalf of the owner of the phone then it would support the camera etc without a SIM. But it seems that mobile phones are either designed by idiots or they are designed to act on behalf of the phone companies to the exclusion of the customer s interests, so I haven t seen a camera-phone that is usable for any purpose other than calling the emergency services when there is no SIM installed. Fortunately it is possible to get old SIMs, I had one that was replaced due to an intermittent fault that caused calls to drop out. I also have some SIMs from other telcos that would probably work (I m not sure whether a phone that is locked to one carrier will take photos if a SIM from another carrier is installed). Update: It seems that there is a range of phones that operate without a SIM, a Nokia N900 (if you consider it to be a phone rather than an Internet tablet), an Android, or a phone running the Symbian OS. I suspect that the majority of phones that are currently in use and due to be replaced soon will require a SIM though. One final notable aspect of giving a phone to a child is the possibility of it being used to call emergency services (which will work even when there is no SIM or a SIM that is not associated with an account). If you are planning to give a phone to someone else s child then you should ask the parents first, some parents believe (either correctly or incorrectly) that the chance of their child making prank calls to the emergency services is too great. A present that a child receives which is undesired by their parents will probably get lost or broken quickly When such a phone gets broken by a child (they are tough, but almost everything that is used without restriction by a child gets broken) the next thing to do is to disassemble it. With modern design and manufacturing probably all that a child could really learn from a phone is how the keyboard works and not even that for a touch-screen phone. But it s still a good experience for a child to take apart old machines. When I was young my father gave me many old machines to take apart, I had a lot of fun and learned some interesting things. I find it really sad to see those boxes for recycling old phones at the mobile phone stores which are full of 2yo phones that are mostly in good condition. Almost everyone has some young relatives or friends who have children who could find a good use for that stuff. Send the bits to be recycled AFTER the children nearest to you have finished doing things to the old phone!

Two years ago, I wrote about my switch from my beloved xmms to audacious. During this 2 years with Audacious, I suffered a bit. It was working quite fine, but I saw no big progress around it. Life happened, and I had to use a network system to play music. I started to use PulseAudio over TCP, but it does not work well, and does not work at all with Audacious (and even if the plugin is provided by upstream). So I decided to dump it. And some days ago I discovered Sonata, a MPD client. I never liked MPD so far because all clients I found were lame. But I really like Sonata. It allows me to listen music the way I still want: load everything in one playlist, listen everything randomly or type a song/artist to jump to it directly in the current playlist. It even has some nice feature (lyrics, so I'll be able to song out loud, covers, tag editing ) and is written in Python and GTK+ (some days I may even hack it!). You can rest in peace x11amp :-p

I've spent the past few days trying to get MMS to work on the N900.

EDIT: Seems frals has managed to beat me! read more

Time away from work and its been either raining or hot. So I've updated and released some software. It always seems to happen there is a lot of Free Software development during the breaks.

psmisc got a bunch of updates, including a new program called prtstat which formats the stat file in the procfs for a pid in (hopefully) a nice way. No sooner had I released the latest update when a bug report came in. It seems fuser -m -k is a little too happy about killing itself. The fix is in the CVS but anoying I missed that.

Next up was the Debian gw6c package. I was asked why it didn't get moved from unstable to testing. The problem is that while Linux has iproute, kfreebsd does not so the lack of a dependency was stopping it transitioning. To make matters worse the freebsd template was missing from their package. After some deb-substvars evilness to fix the dependencies and some dh_install overrides in the debian/rules file it should all be happy when its finished.

Finally, I miss having good random playlists. I'm too lazy to make them myself so I use some random thing which often gives me rubbish. A program called Gjay used to be in the Debian archive but got removed, mainly because the upstream stopped supporting it. I can write C (the programming language its written in) and I wanted to use it, so I fixed it. My version is 64-bit clean, so it works on my amd64 and it works with audacious not the old xmms which is great. More importantly, it compiles, it runs and it even works properly.
I'm just wondering if I want to release it out to the wider world or not.

Somehow, I'm still lacking the optimal media player application. Many popular ones are totally overloaded (e.g. amarok). Others like totem seems to be just a minimalistic frontend for a particular backend.My current choice:

• Single-shot playback: to view a random song or video I usually open them with Totem (the GNOME default) and that works okay
• Library: I use MPD as player because it just seems to be rock stable. As UI I currently use Sonata, but I don't use it for much more than choosing a song from the currentl playlist.
• Editing: ExFalso seems to have the best ID3v4 support, in particular it also allows multiple genre fields. (Note that Vorbis even suggests you should use multiple artist fields instead of the common "Arist A & Artist B" way of filling the fields)

However, there is one thing I'm really not satisfied with: when putting together a CD compilation for friends (say, as Christmas present), they are quite useless. A key issue here is the total playlist length. Guess what, I want to make sure it fits on a single CD. So I really need to know the total playlist length. Why do so many media players (e.g. totem, alsa-player-gtk, xfmedia4, vlc, mplayer, ...) not show you the total playlist length? They did read all the files to get artist and title. Many even have the individual song lengths, just not the total sum.In the past I've been using old XMMS1 to check for the total length, or a CD burning application like K3B by repeatedly importing my current folder.Right now, I'm using Quod Libet (since I like the tag-editing component exfalso a lot) to arrange the playlist. It also gives me the total length, albeit I belive I've had incorrect song lengths in it before (broken VBR files?), and it's not perfect, too: being database-driven it has really long startup times for occasional users (because of updating the database) and is much more heavyweight. I also believe I've lost some playlists because I had moved my files around once ... so I'm a bit sceptical.Anyway, there are still hundreds of media players I havn't looked at. Don't bother me to send me an email about one I havn't mentioned!But if you are developing a media player, please consider the use case of putting together a music CD for your friends. In particular, for users that do not use your player all day.

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff.... (unfortunately in German only....)

22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gew nschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anf ngst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is  blicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zur ckgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten m ssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim t v das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie m gen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste pl tzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> sch ne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> l dst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zur ck und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit f r
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne l ngre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten s cke, die sich
zur cklehnen und  ber die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren qu len lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode

A palestra sobre produ o musical com software livre no latinoware 2009 foi um sucesso. Muita gente pediu pra ter a musiquinha que produzimos para ilustrar a palestra, e que <noindex>Cesar Brod</noindex> cantou com tanta desenvoltura Ent o aqui segue o arquivo de projeto da m sica A minha menina que foi escolhida em homenagem a <noindex>minha namorada</noindex> e porque Brod queria algo MPB. Eu precisava de algo que pudesse vagamente se tornar parecido com Technopop/Electro. A m sica foi editada com <noindex>LMMS</noindex> (Linux MultiMedia Studio) 0.3.2 e poder ser carregada em qualquer vers o igual ou superior, pois foi feita exclusivamente com plugins e samples padr o da distribui o do LMMS. Apesar do nome, o LMMS est dispon vel para windows tamb m. O que voc est esperando? <noindex>Baixe daqui o LMMS</noindex> e o arquivo original da m sica daqui. P.S: A prop sito, a m sica n o foi masterizada e os volumes est o ajustados segundo os par metros do meu laptop, fone de ouvido e da sala l do latinoware. Brinque com os volumes de cada trilha para ajust -la a seu equipamento.

So after Royal Mail shut down useful community websites causing MP comments on the idiocy of Royal Mail, I was rather surprised to get this little thing in the post today: That s a postmark advert for Celebrating 50 years of POSTCODES 1959-2009 . So this is what Royal Mail does with some of the money it makes from its claimed monopoly on postcode databases: it spends it on ink to celebrate postcodes in the bit where they can t sell adverts. After the postcode-takedown, I suggested deleting postcodes from all our co-op s websites. Instead, another member has persuaded me to contribute to something like free the postcode, which I first saw on CycleStreets blog. As well as slapping its customers, Royal Mail is also currently taking on its workers who are campaigning for sustainable jobs and against the recent increase in bullying and harassment cases. I already send most of my letters, invoices and so on electronically since our three nearest post offices closed last year. I ve noticed Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op switching to DPD and Terry Lane suggesting more online use. Are those good approaches? How are you adapting to the postal delays? Have you put your postcode into free the postcode or a similar site?

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net. From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties. Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his Dirty Jobs TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier. The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time. Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I ve visited the crypt, it s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors some of which had mummified flesh attached Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it s in transit. Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9]. The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well. Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines. Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests. Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11slee.html
• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25985054-29277,00.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
• [4] http://www.gapminder.org/
• [5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html
• [7] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2009-08-30-11-33_trying_to_understand_tcp_performance.html
• [8] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/christian-couples-share-email-accounts-to-stay-faithful-20090907-fdaw.html
• [9] http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html
• [11] http://opensource.org/node/465
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [13] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/netbooks-microsoft-a-turning-point/
• [14] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983 2009-rest-in-peace.ars

Yesterday was my first appearance as a sardine in Zurich s public transport vehicles, as part of a campaign by the Swiss group for sustainable mobility, umverkehR, which I support: We handed out flyers and answered questions, and the general reaction was very positive. The fact that we got covered in Switzerland s most popular newspaper, 20 Minuten will add greatly to the reconnaisance factor, so that in the months to come, us sardines will be immediately recognised, hopefully provoking thought and chat over the roots of the campaign. Most of us know the sardine as a dead fish perched into a can with many others in a way to minimise space. Human-sized, walking sardines are a great way to increase awareness of the issue of over-crowded public transport. It was fun to see even the Really Serious Newspaper Readers unable to suppress a smile. Talking to friends about the campaign, I ve often been met with expressions of how absurd such a campaign is in Switzerland, possibly the country with the best public transport system world-wide. I agree, but that doesn t mean that we should not keep working on further improving it. If you ve ever been stuck in a commuter train during rush-hour, standing around in stifling heat and jealously eyed those that managed to grab a seat before you, you ll probably agree that even in Switzerland, we could be doing it better. These days, with the financial crisis weighing heavy on everyone s budgets, and with environmental concerns on the rise, we are witnessing a never-before level of readiness of the public to make sustainable choices. Confronting those people with stuffed trains doesn t reconfirm those decision. Instead, it will make those people crave their air-conditioned cars and possibly switch back to polluting the air with exhaust and noise, because it surely is more comfortable to sit in your own cool car than it is to be perched in public transport like a sardine. Thus, umverkehR s message goes mainly to the politicians: prioritise public transport in your future mobility plans, keep the prices affordable, and help get people off the road in the interest of our environment. You can see more pictures in the gallery and a short film on Youtube. We have a separate sardine blog, a Facebook account and there s even a chance for you to win travel coupons: all you have to do is submit an original photo of anything to do with over-crowded public transport by e-mail or MMS to sardine t umverkehr.ch by October 2009. You can browse all submissions on Flickr. I hope that we can spread the idea as far as New Zealand and the countries between. There are always chances in any crisis. NP: Porcupine Tree: Stupid Dream

After being able to plug in all four 1G DIMMs, the machine recognizes them as 4x 1GB dual-ranked. Sadly only 3.1 GB are usuable., though. But more annoying are random lockups from the radeon driver:



The machine itself is still reachable and working, but the radeon module causes 100% CPU load and X is not killable.

sigh