There is currently a lot of speculation about the future of Windows following the massive failure of Vista in the market. One theory that is being discussed is that Microsoft will cease kernel development and adopt a Unix kernel in the same way that Apple adopted a BSD based kernel. I predict that MS in it’s current incarnation (*) will never do that. Having an OS kernel that enables easy porting of code to/from other platforms is entirely against their business model which relies on incompatibility to lock customers in. Whatever kernel MS use, it has to be incompatible in some ways with everything else. One easy way of achieving this would be to have a shared object (DLL) interface published and have the interface between the libc and other libraries and the kernel be undocumented and ever-changing (simply renumbering the system calls on every minor version increment would be a good start). The DLL interface could then have the complex APIs that MS loves to force on their victims (see Stewart Smith’s post about getting a file size in Windows for an example of the horror [1]). The advantage of this approach would be that MS could cease developing an OS kernel (something that they were never much good at) and concentrate on owning the proprietary DLLs. There would be nothing stopping them from using a Linux kernel for this, as long as they release all source to the kernel they use (including the patch to renumber the system calls) they would be within the terms of the GPL. My specific prediction is that some time between Jan 2011 and Dec 2016 Microsoft will release systems with the majority of the kernel code coming from BSD or Linux as their primary desktop and server operating systems. Could people who disagree please make specific predictions for the future (including dates and actions) so that we can determine who was most accurate. (*) For future incarnations of Microsoft after chapter 11 or being split in the way that AT&T was there seems no possibility to predict their actions.

• [1] http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/2008/02/11/getting-a-file-size-on-windows/

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I would like to suggest to my readers to ask airplane crews for explanations of their rules. If we can get a larger number of people to inquire about the reasons behind the do s and dont s on airplanes, maybe the airline companies will adopt the practice. In the context of a previous post on the lack of explanation of the motivations behind airline rules, I was utterly impressed when the steward on the Air New Zealand flight from Melbourne to Wellington asked me to turn off my music player so that I would hear when they asked us to evacuate the plane or similar. While I doubt that I would continue to listen to The Flower Kings in an exceptional event, his explanation actually got me to turn off the player, which I had previously never done (rebel me!). I know it s a bit ridiculous, but I was previously so set on the idea of small devices like a music player interfering with the airplane instruments that I failed to see this obvious bit of logic. The steward thus gets my best steward award. When you fly, ask the crew about the reasons for the rules they impose on you, the passengers! NP: The Flower Kings: Unfold the Future

Awesomeness. Thanks to Jeff for organising it. My talks went really well, thanks to everyone who attended, asked questions and gave feedback. Huge kudos to the other participants. Some great things were shown off and discussed. I’d also like to use this opportunity to promote Josh Stewart’s Gloss. It’s a replacement MythTV frontend using Clutter. He’d love to get some more MythTV users to test it.

A Snowman in Melbourne

Maybe someone can shed some light on these outstanding questions about airplane safety. The Thai steward earlier made it perfectly clear, with a straight face, that our safety is their priority, but so far, no-one of the crew could give me the answers:

• why do window shades have to be opened during take-off and landing?
• why do tables and leg rests have to be stowed away during take-off and landing?
• why can t I recline my seat during take-off and landing?
• why do they shut down the in-flight entertainment during take-off and landing and force you to watch advertisements and map views? Are those less likely to cause interference?

I ll stick to those airplane-specific ones for now. I have another set of questions about certain airport rules on the ground. I feel that the world would be a much better (and safer) place, if those making the rules would actually let us know what these rules are trying to accomplish. Update: I ve received plenty of responses. Thanks! Most responses explain questions 1-3 wit reference to the critical nature of take-off and landing. Leaving the windows open helps people orient themselves in case of an emergency and that people from the outside can get in at the right spot, tables and leg-rests are obstacles during an evacuation, and the seats are designed to absorb shocks, but won t work so well if they aren t upright. One person argued that entertainment during the critical phase of take-off and landing is distracting in case of a problem, but I am somewhat unconvinced. I have not received another I must say that none of these responses are surprises. I guess my main point is that airlines might want to consider making these things public, rather than just instructing people about the rules. It would make me happier to comply anyway.

awesome 2.0 just released. Great. Someone on #awesome pointed me to a post of Don Stewart comparing the rise of the new tiled window managers. This is quite encouraging, and I hope awesome will grow more with the next releases!

Katherine and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary over the weekend. We still don't think marriage has changed us or our relationship that much; having lived together for many years beforehand was really a much bigger step. A number of fairly major other events have happened to me in the past year, which I don't think either of us could have predicated.

• We moved house to Castlerock. We knew this was likely for Katherine
  (she spent her first year at UU living in Portstewart and had been
  looking for somewhere new), but I didn't think I'd be moving back to NI
  just yet. Unfortunately we're still trying to sell the house in Norwich. :(

• Simon and I sold Black Cat. Really couldn't have predicted that this
  time last year.

• I got a new job with 3PAR in Belfast. I suppose
  that relates to the BCN sale, but if you'd asked me last year if I'd be
  looking for a new job, let alone have one, this year I'd have said no!

All in all I think I'm in a better place than I was last year. 5:30 starts are painful (it's 2 hours door to door with trains at 6am or 8am and nothing in between), but at least I get to come home to Katherine rather than an empty house, and it's nice to be working in an office again rather than on my own. We will eventually get the Castlerock house sorted (there are still lots of things in boxes, the TV isn't even hooked up, the wireless coverage is patchy in the study, the kitchen isn't quite finished yet, the living room is barely started yet, need I go on?). And I'm sure it'll stop raining for at least one day during the year. Please?

Last Saturday, we attended a party at stew and rcox’ place in Brooklyn. Biella, Micah, Clint and a bunch of other people were also there. It was very nice and we had a lot of fun. I had the chance to tell Clint that some of his blog postings really intrigue me; I now feel relieved. Besides, I’ve learned that boxing against Micah on the Wii is so tiring that even days after, my arms and back still hurt We left at around 1:45 am.
On our way back to Harlem, we stopped to have some tacos at El dolo on the 8th Ave and the 14th St, as Kevin suggested me before; for our surprise, they were amazing and have been so far, the best Mexican food we’ve had in NYC So, after getting off on the 145th station and walked nine blocks, we arrived to our warm place at 4:30 am.

I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

I had one of these devices collecting dust in my basement. I finally got around to reverse engineering a userspace driver for it, which was much easier than I expected. It just shows up as a usb->serial device, and it was mostly a matter of of watching the serial line while hitting buttons. I have started to figure out some of what I need to know to communicate with it in the other direction in order to do stuff like turn on the lights and manipulate the lcd displays. That stuff is not yet, however, functional, but in the spirit of "release early, release often", I've uploaded a 0.0.1 release to the project page on sourceforge. Also included is a python extension which allows you to register callbacks for the various controls on the device. After I get the leds and lcds working, I think the next step will be to write a program to generate synthetic MIDI events when the device is manipulated so I can hook the thing up to something like mixxx. Hopefully someone else has one of these kicking around and might also find this work useful!

Due to the fact that my favorite Window manager is now licensed non-freely (and then some), I award Tuomo Valkonen the J rg Schilling award for free software project management. Tuomo can console himself with his award while I console myself with Tritium. With the new dock feature announced today, I think it just turned into something I can switch to.

I finally got it together to release a new version of tritium. Probably the most exciting feature in this release is that you can allocate an area of the desktop to be used for a status bar / panel / dock area.
Here is a screenshot of my desktop showing a working gnome-panel at the bottom. Debian packages/sources are available here, and from sourceforge. The git repository is here. The next big task for me will be to add some kind of 'scratchpad' functionality similar to what ion3 has. update: A number of people have pointed out some missing files in the .deb, so I have posted a 0.3.2-1 to http://vireo.org/debian/tritium/ ; thanks for the feedback.

I was looking in the Java Language Specification (which is "the definitive technical reference for the Java programming language.") to look up the details of instantiating "anonymous inner classes". "new" is the Java keyword that one would use to instantiate a class. I was rather dismayed when I found that "new" doesn't appear in their index but "Newton, Sir Isaac" does appear in their index. Of course, "new" appears all over the text, but "Newton, Sir Isaac" actually doesn't.

Yeah, we are almost two weeks back now, but until now I can feel we are done with lots of pending issues.

To summarize, I left DebConf on Saturday morning, arrived NYC on the afternoon where Raquel was waiting for me. By Sunday, we had the very nice chance to meet with abrotman, rcox and stew. We stayed at stew and rcox’s place until Tuesday, when we got back. We also had the chance to meet with people that we have been working for remotely. We were walking around in NYC, and suddenly, the 5th avenue became multicolor. It was the gay pride parade. You can take a look at the pics on the gallery, lots of gay people. Our visit to NYC was pretty gayish actually, since we spent our first night in Chelsea, presenced an electronic music festival or similar for lesbians, and the next day, first row on the parade

And that’s it, since we came back until like yesterday, life was a mess; lots of work pending to deliver and many other issues. Finally, we are right now settled up again, enjoying a cold rainy nice weather in Mexico City with very cheap beer (compared with UK pints!) and loved people Thanks to all who made such a wonderful DebConf, even that, in my case, I arrived late and left early, it was just great (thanks also to MJ Ray, specially; and also to all people who was worried about my arrival, you know who you are, thanks). Thanks also to Mike and Rachel who hosted us, they are a very nice couple. And also, thanks to Alex who joined us in NYC, coming from Philadelphia, spent a nice day with us, took us to Chinatown and Little Italy and gave me a Phillies baseball cap (just as exchange of the worldwide famous umbrella hat).

Like Mike O'Connor's wife, people here are happier about the 10th anniversary of the Social Contract because of the pancakes more than its cultural significance. In his Everything goes into stew: Celebrating Freedom, there's a pancake recipe which may as well include stew. It's typical of the sort of bloat which users fear from a maintainer who doubled the length of his package name! Let's keep the Social Contract simple: one egg, 1/4l of milk, 200g flour, beat it all together, stand for 10 minutes, pour some into a hot oil-sprayed pan, fry while easing with a spatula and toss when firm enough. If you want to complicate things, run your pancake through the streets - don't add stuff to pancake batter.

Today is Independence Day in the United States. A day we are supposed to celebrate freedom by drinking bad beer and watching people make things explode. I figure, what a better way to celebrate freedom than by making a new release of the window manager which is giving me freedom from unreasonable upstream authors? I have just released tritium-0.2. The most interesting change in this release is that it now supports both tabbed desktops and desktops with floating windows. Its still alpha quality, but it is usable. I'm using it full time on my non-work machine. See my previous post about tritium.

My wife was very excited to hear that debian will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Social Contract with a virtual pancake party. She could care less about the social contract, she's just happy to have an excuse to have me make her pancakes again. In any case, I thought I'd share my favorite recipe for pancake batter:

Oatmeal Pancakes	
2 eggs
4 T. veg. oil
1 3/4 cup buttermilk
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats
3 Tbl. brown sugar
1/2  tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Beat eggs in medium-sized bowl.  Beat in vegetable oil until well mixed, then stir in buttermilk.  Add remaining ingredients and stir to blend. 

I’ve just watched the video of Stewart Smith’s LCA talk Eat My Data about writing applications to store data reliably and not lose it. The reason I watched it was not to learn about how to correctly write such programs, but so that I could recommend it to other people. Recently I have had problems with a system (that I won’t name) which used fwrite() to write data to disk and then used fflush() to commit it! Below is a section from the fflush(3) man page:

NOTES

       Note that fflush() only flushes the user space buffers provided by  the

       C  library.   To  ensure that the data is physically stored on disk the

       kernel buffers must be flushed too, e.g. with sync(2) or fsync(2).

Does no-one read the man pages for library calls that they use? Then recently I discovered (after losing some data) that both dpkg and rpm do not call fsync() after writing package files to disk. The vast majority of Linux systems use either dpkg or rpm to manage their packages. All those systems are vulnerable to data loss if the power fails, a cluster STONITH event occurs, or any other unexpected reboot happens shortly after a package is installed. This means that you can use the distribution defined interface for installing a package, be told that the package was successfully installed, have a crash or power failure, and then find that only some parts of the package were installed. So far I have agreement from Jeff Johnson that RPM 5 will use fsync(), no agreement from Debian people that this would be a good idea, and I have not yet reported it as a bug in SUSE and Red Hat (I’d rather get it fixed upstream first). During his talk Stewart says sarcastically “everyone uses the same filesystem because it’s the one true way“. Unfortunately I’m getting this reaction from many people when reporting data consistency issues that arise on XFS. The fact that Ext3 by default will delay writes by up to 5 seconds for performance (which can be changed by a mount option) and that XFS will default to delaying up to 30 seconds means that some race conditions will be more likely to occur on XFS than in the default configuration of Ext3. This doesn’t mean that they won’t occur on Ext3, and certainly doesn’t mean that you can rely on such programs working on Ext3. Ext3 does however have the data=ordered mount option (which seems to be the default configuration on Debian and on Red Hat systems), this means that meta-data is committed to disk after the data blocks that it referrs to. This means that an operation of writing to a temporary file and then renaming it should give the desired result. Of course it’s bad luck for dpkg and rpm users who use Ext3 but decided to use data=writeback as they get better performance but significantly less reliability. Also we have to consider the range of filesystems that may be used. Debian supports Linux and HURD kernels as main projects and there are less supported sub-projects for the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD kernels as well as Solaris. Each of these kernels has different implementations of the filesystems that are in common and some have native filesystems that are not supported on Linux at all. It is not reasonable to assume that all of these filesystems have the same caching algorithms as Ext3 or that they are unlike XFS. The RPM tool is mainly known for being used on Red Hat distributions (Fedora and RHEL) and on SuSE - these distributions include support for Ext2/3, ReiserFS, and XFS as root filesystems. RPM is also used on BSD Unix and on other platforms that have different filesystems and different caching algorithms. One objection that was made to using fsync() was the fact that cheap and nasty hard drives have write-back caches that are volatile (their contents dissappear on power loss). As with such drives reliable operation will be impossible so why not just give up! Pity about the people with good hard drives that don’t do such foolishness, maybe they are expected to lose data as an expression of solidarity with people who buy the cheap and nasty hardware. Package installation would be expected to be slower if all files are sync’d. One method of mitigating this is to write a large number of files (EG up to a maximum of 900) and then call fsync() on each of them in a loop. After the last file has been written the first file may have been entirely committed to disk, and calling fsync() on one file may result in other files being synchronised too. Another issue is that the only time package installation speed really matters is during an initial OS install. It should not be difficult to provide an option to not call fsync() for use during the OS install (where any error would result in aborting the install anyway).

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I decided it was finally time to go digging in our boxes of books to find my old Xlib manual. We haven't unpacked any of our books since we moved in August, they are all sitting in boxes in our basement. I went through every box I could find, and, of course, the book I was looking for was really in the very last box in the stack. This was a blessing and curse. A curse for the obvious reason that I had to look through every box, a blessing in that I got to pull out a couple of other books that I've been meaning to get my hands on, such as a couple of key birding books, and my NCJOHB. Anyway, I return to the couch with my Xlib Programming Manual (which is from R5, but I'm sure is going to answer some questions I have). I of course turn right to the section on window manager, only to find in the first paragraph:

This chapter is not primarily for window manager writers, as those are a rare breed. There are several good customizable window managers available, and there is very little reason for users or application writers to want to write their own. Only a few people in the X community are going to be actively involved in writing window managers, and chances are good they already know all of what is described here"

Heh, what have I gotten myself into?

During the landing of my flight back to Alicante, I had my powered off laptop lying on my legs. A stewardess approached me and asked me to place it on the bag in the seat in front of me. I looked at her, and said: “Does not fit.”

Today, Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and I are announcing a new book we're working on with O'Reilly: Real-World Haskell. I'm excited about the book and about working with Bryan and Don on this project.

O'Reilly has agreed to publish this book under a Creative Commons license! We plan to post drafts of chapters incrementally at the book's website, seeking feedback from readers and reviewers as we go.

Haskell makes a great practical parsing and scripting language, but this aspect of it has been under-documented. I look forward to helping change that!