Planet Debian

Martin Michlmayr: Marvell publishes roadmap of its ARM series called Armada

Martin Michlmayr — 2009-11-07T10:49:27+00:00

For those who haven't seen it yet, LinuxDevices published an article recently looking at the roadmap of Marvell's ARM line. The new line is called Armada and for Debian the Armada 510 (known as Dove) is of particular interest. To me, it essentially looks like a Kirkwood (the current platform) but with ARMv6/v7 (instead of ARMv5), integrated VGA and some other features. According to the article, the Armada 510 is aimed at "high-end smartbooks and tablets".

I'm happy to see the integration of VGA because I'd like to see more ARM based smartbooks, tablets and thin clients. At the same time, I'm worried that the VGA will be some proprietary chip without proper open source drivers and I'm surprised that the new chip only offers 1.2 GHz. After all, the current Kirkwood chip clocks 1.2 GHz already, so I'd have expected an increase to 2.0 GHz for the next generation.

Daniel Leidert: Good bye Warren, …

Daniel Leidert — 2009-11-07T04:54:52+00:00

A tragic loss has hit the open source software community. Warren Lyford DeLano, among other things, open source advocate, scientist and the author of the famous PyMOL molecular visualization system, suddenly passed away at the age of 37. I remember you as a genial, pleasent intelligent guy and software author. It has been a pleasure to work with you. Good bye.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Whirlwind visit to Brisbane

Andrew Pollock — 2009-11-07T04:19:00+00:00

Sarah's Mum is flying her back for the scattering of her grandmother's ashes, and I figured that as this will be her third trip back this year, and she's seen my family more than I have in the last 12 months, I should come as well.

So I'm getting my first opportunity to sample V Australia's service. I must say that flying Virgin America to LAX and then transferring to V Australia to fly direct to Brisbane seems like a fairly civilised way to do it. Anything that involves Virgin America is always a delight. My only complaints so far are that the SFO-LAX flight left late, and the check in line for V Australia in LAX was ridiculously slow given it was so short.

The time of the flight is pretty good - it leaves LAX at 10:30pm, so hopefully we'll get a semi-decent amount of sleep. It gets into Brisbane at 6:30am on Sunday, so we'll have to try and imitate the living dead for the day.

I'm heading back again on Saturday, as I have to be in Dallas next week for the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Neil Williams: Successful start . . .

Neil Williams — 2009-11-06T23:15:01+00:00

gPDFText was only released yesterday and it's being downloaded three times faster than my next most popular upstream project: drivel. Even nicer, it only took under a month to get to this point - and that includes a string freeze to get four translations for the program output and three for the User Manual (which uses yelp, as usual).

gPDFText is a text editor for GTK+ that opens PDF documents for ebook readers, converts the text contents into plain ASCII text, restores the original paragraphs and removes unwanted line breaks to allow easier zooming on the reader.

Many downloaded PDF files for ebook readers still use the A4 paper type (or letter which is similar in size) and when the PDF is displayed on the ebook reader, the zoom required to display the entire page makes the text too small. Simply exporting the PDF into text causes problems with line wrapping and the various ways that ebook PDFs indicate page headers and footers make it hard to automate the conversion.

gPDFText loads the PDF, extracts the text, reformats the paragraphs into single long lines and then puts the text into a standard GTK+ editor where you can make other adjustments.

On the ebook reader, the plain text file then has no unwanted line breaks and can be zoomed to whatever text size you prefer.

Each reformatting option can be turned off using the gPDFText preferences window.

Spelling support also helps identify areas where the text has not been fully reconstructed.

Debian & Ubuntu - it's waiting in NEW but it should build fine on Squeeze and Jaunty or Karmic. Any feedback, use the wiki. Any bugs, use the Trac tickets. All links available via the SF pages.

Hopefully, the extra interest will produce some more people will join the work to improve it. It's a fairly simple codebase, lots of TODO and FIXME items for new contributors to work on and it's all up to date with GtkBuilder and ready for GTK+3.0. If you are looking for an upstream project, take a look at the SVN and give it a go.

Joey Hess: nethack

Joey Hess — 2009-11-06T22:33:51+00:00

The large cat sniffs the planter. Your houscat snarls! Your housecat hits.

   --|--........                   Tools
   |*.(|-..|...                    l - A blessed +1 laptop named gnu
  %|/..|..'|'f**                   Armor
  .....+...f..**                   j - blue jeans
  #|@..|..{|                       t - t-shirt
  ----------                       s - socks of warmth +2

When an afternoon on the sun room begins to look like this, I swear off nethack for a few more months.

Matt Brubeck: Android 2.0 ships with V8 JavaScript engine

Matt Brubeck — 2009-11-06T19:12:15+00:00

Google has not yet released most of the Android 2.0 source code, but they did publish source for a very small number of components, including a WebKit snapshot. I was very excited to see that the snapshot includes Google's V8 virtual machine! (Previous Android releases used Safari's JavaScriptCore/"SquirrelFish Extreme" VM.) But without the rest of the source tree, there was no way to build and run this on a real Android phone. The SDK includes a binary image that runs only in the qemu-based emulator.

Today I got to try out a Motorola Droid. Here is how its browser compares to Android 1.6 on my HTC Dream (Android Dev Phone / T-Mobile G1) in the V8 Benchmark Suite (version 5):

Test	Dream	Droid	Change
Richards	13.5	15.6	16%
DeltaBlue	5.23	12.9	147%
Crypto	13.2	10.9	-17%
RayTrace	10.9	80.1	635%
EarleyBoyer	23.5	74.7	218%
RegExp	did not complete	16.5	–
Splay	did not complete	did not complete	–

Some tests (Richards, Crypto) see little or no improvement, while others (DeltaBlue, RayTrace, EarleyBoyer) are dramatically faster. Just for comparison, let's run the same benchmark on Safari 4 (JavaScriptCore) and a Chromium 4 nightly build (V8) on a Mac Pro:

Test	Safari	Chromium	Change
Richards	4103	4640	13%
DeltaBlue	3171	4418	39%
Crypto	3331	3643	9%
RayTrace	3509	6662	90%
EarleyBoyer	4737	7643	61%
RegExp	1268	1187	-6%
Splay	1198	7290	509%

The precise ratios are different, but the same tests that showed the most improvement from Android 1.6 to 2.0 also show the most improvement from Safari to Chrome. Based on this plus the source code snapshot, I'm pretty sure that Android 2.0 is indeed using V8.

This is exciting news. It makes Droid the first shipping product I know that uses V8 on an ARM processor, although V8 has included an ARM JIT compiler for some time now. For mobile web developers (like me), it means we're one step closer to having desktop-quality rich web applications on low-power handheld devices.

Final thought: Although the Motorola Droid is still 100 times slower than Chromium on a Mac Pro, it's actually faster at some benchmarks than IE8 on a low-end Windows machine, or Firefox 2 on hardware from just a few years ago.

Joachim Breitner: Releasing zpub as Free Software

nomeata — 2009-11-06T16:37:28+00:00

Earlier this year, my brother and I developed a “documentation management server” for a small software developing company. They were sick of creating their documentation by sending around Word documents, having to manually merge them, losing changes and not getting a clean, consistent layout.

So we created zpub for them: It is based on DocBook and Subversion, and adds a fairly nice web interface to it. Now their work flow is

The editor checks out the DocBook source document via Subversion. With a client like TortoiseSVN, this is possible even for the less tech-savvy editor.
He works on the document using the editor of his choice. We recommended an editor with a proper DocBook mode such as the XMLMind XML Editor or Serna Free, which was recently published as Free Software, to our customer.
When satisfied, he commits his changes via Subversion, adding a comment describing his modifications.
On the server, zpub renders the document in the various output formats (.html, .pdf, .chm), and makes the result available via the web interface. The commit messages are put there, and all previous revisions of the document can still be accessed.
Optionally, an e-mail about the change is sent out to a per-document configurable list of recipients.
Optionally, the documents are rendered with a “DRAFT”-Watermark on the pages, to avoid leaking wrong revisions to the outside. Only users with extended rights are allowed to release a document, thus causing a version without that watermark to be rendered.

For more details on the feature and usage of zpub, check out the documentation that you can find on the demo instance.

We are actually quite satisfied by zpub, and it would be a petty if that was just it. Of course, there are quite a view programs out that that can provide these features – plus many more, much more than a company the size of our customer would want to have (or even to worry about). So there is a niche between „sending Word documents by mail“ and „buying a very expensive, complicated product“ where zpub fits in.

Being a fan of Free Software myself, and since zpub is based on Free Software, we decided that we want to release zpub itself under a Free License. We chose the EUPL, which is a GPL compatible license created by the European Commission, since our customer comes from a municipal environment. The code is hosted on gitorious now, so if you have a need for zpub, just give it a try.

Also, if you run a Free Software project, manage your documentation in DocBook (or want to start to do so) and think that zpub might be a neat idea to allow more documentation writers to contribute, talk to me. I might well offer free hosting in that case. If you are a commercial user, I’m still offering hosting (and support or feature development), just not for free any more. Note that the zpub user interface and documentation is currently only available in German.

Steve Kemp: What would you have me do, Stephen?

Steve Kemp — 2009-11-06T14:42:36+00:00

Things which should exist, but don't yet:

Transparent SQL Cache

Imagine a proxy listening on 127.0.0.1:3306, receiving SQL Queries.

Any query that was "SELECT .." could return the result from a local cache for the appropriate table. Any query of the form "UPDATE" or "INSERT" would flush all caches for the table.

Should be near-trivial: Hash the incoming query & parameters via SHA1sum to get a unique key then store/lookup results in Memcached.

Would it be useful? I think so, but of course it depends on the application and the effort involved.

"Global status"

A single site that would rebroadcast a posted (short) status message to facebook/twitter/your chat client/etc/etc.

Hard part would be receiving comments from the sites it re-served to.

Scraping statuses from facebook is hard, not sure about twitter.

This concludes my Friday wishlist.

ObFilm: Master and Commander

Stefano Zacchiroli: DPKG source v3 stats

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2009-11-06T10:11:42+00:00

graphing DPKG source v3 adoption

Given that now we can upload DPKG source v3 packages to the archive, prodded by Lucas and Martin, I've added yet another page to my Debian graph/stats collection: namely stats about DPKG source v3 usage in the archive.

This time, I've done even less work than the other pages: Lucas was already providing the actual data via a UDD CGI. So thank him, I'm basically just aggregating/mirroring the graphs for bandwidth reasons.

Of course, I've also added the new page to the stats index on wiki.d.o.

Jaldhar Vyas: The Road to Wigan Dpen

Jaldhar Vyas — 2009-11-06T05:11:33+00:00

3.0 format source packages can now be uploaded to the Debian archive. (Note: despite the title of this post, this is not the "Wig and Pen" format which is 2.0. See dpkg-source(1) for a detailed description of all the source package formats.) I tried converting my libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl package with mostly good results.

l-a-b-p-b-p is an aggregation of perl modules (in .tar.gz format) from CPAN. There is no upstream, this is a Debian only package. Currently the source looks something like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
        tarballs/
            CGI-Application-Dispatch-2.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0.16.tar.gz
            CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1.31.tar.gz
            ...
            [rest of modules]

The files in the tarballs directory are unpacked at build time to create the binary package. This works but has all the disadvantages of "tarballs in tarballs."

By adding a file called debian/source format with the single line:

   
3.0 (quilt)

...dpkg-source is directed to use that format. Now I can rename each upstream tarball to

   
<package name>_<package version>.orig-<upstream tarball name with .'s replaced by -'s>.tar.gz

...and organize the source like this:

   
build-area/
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl-0.5/
        debian/
            [all the standard stuff: control, rules, etc.]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Dispatch-2-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode-0-16.tar.gz
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl_0.5.orig-CGI-Application-Plugin-ConfigAuto-1-31.tar.gz
    ...
    [rest of modules]
    libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz

Each module is now a seperate file in the debianized source with MD5sum etc. The only problem I am having is with the last file. libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl.orig.tar.gz makes no sense for me because there is no upstream yet dpkg-source insists on it. I can make a dummy easily enough but this is an unnecessary annoyance so I filed bug #554488. Raphael Hertzog responded quickly. He is considering adding a --create-empty-orig option to dpkg-source which would solve the problem nicely.

Martin Michlmayr: New devices from QNAP: TS-110, TS-210 and TS-410

Martin Michlmayr — 2009-11-05T21:07:04+00:00

When I visited Taiwan last week to talk about Debian at a conference on smartbooks, I used the opportunity to meet up with the folks from QNAP. It was really nice to meet many of my contacts at QNAP in person. We talked about their roadmap and existing products and I found out that they had just released a number of new devices that may be of interest to Debian users.

I really like the hardware from QNAP but one downside of their high quality is also that the devices are fairly expensive. Last week they introduced a number of lower cost alternatives: in addition to the TS-119 and TS-219, you now have the TS-110 and TS-210. They feature a 800 MHz CPU (instead of 1.2 GHz on the TS-119/TS-219), 256 MB (instead of 512 MB) and have a plastic case (as a result of which, the TS-110 now has a fan unlike the TS-119). Similarly, in addition to the TS-419 and TS-419U, you now have a TS-410 and TS-410U.

Since the TS-110/TS-210 and TS-119/TS-219 are compatible, the Debian installer will work out of the box.

Chris Lamb: Confusing bugs

Chris Lamb — 2009-11-05T13:27:29+00:00

I love bugs that are just confusing and/or break your mental model of how you think the software works.

Here is a good example: Given the following HTML in Gecko, what happens when a user clicks the button?

<form method="POST" action="/form-action">
  <a href="/anchor-target">
    <input type="button" value="harro">
  </a>
</form>

GET /anchor-target HTTP/1.1
GET /anchor-target HTTP/1.1

2 GET requests? Okay, perhaps some sort of event bubbling problem; it's relatively common in GUI internals. But what about:

<form method="POST" action="/form-action">
  <a href="/anchor-target">
    <input type="image" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/LHC5.jpg">
  </a>
</form>

POST /form-action HTTP/1.1
GET /anchor-target HTTP/1.1
GET /anchor-target HTTP/1.1

Wait, this time it POSTs the form and makes 2 GET requests?

Answers in a Bugzilla report, thanks.

Martin F. Krafft: This space intentionally left blank

Martin F. Krafft — 2009-11-05T09:41:16+00:00

Your favourite pretend-do-no-evil information monopolist appears to have discovered wit:

This is part of ongoing design experiments. What should happen is that the message fades out and gives way to the content that used to be there.

Some of us continue to oppose JavaScript bling, or use text-mode browsers. In those, it just looks like Google inserted space between the search box and the money-making/legalese stuff at the bottom to be able to declare it intentionally blank. How witty!

Apart from that, you cannot fade something else into the space you previously declared “intentionally blank”.

Go Google. Be good!

Tollef Fog Heen: Package workflow

Tollef Fog Heen — 2009-11-05T07:31:00+00:00

As 3.0 format packages are now allowed into the archive, I am thinking about what I would like the workflow to look like and hoping one of them fits me.

For new upstream releases, I am imaginging something like:

New upstream version is released.
git fetch + merge into upstream branch.
Import tarballs, preferably in their original format (bz2/gzip), using pristine-tar.
Merge upstream to debian branch. Do necessary fixups and adjustments. At this point, the upstream..debian branch delta is what I want to apply to the upstream release. The reason I need to apply this delta is so I get all generated files into the package that's built and uploaded.
The source package has two functions at this point: Be a starting point for further hacking; and be the source that buildds use to build the binary Debian packages.

For the former, I need the git repository itself. It is increasingly my preferred form of modification and so I consider it part of the source.

For the latter, it might be easiest just to ship the orig.tar.{gz,bz2} and the upstream..debian delta. This does require the upstream..debian delta not to change any generated files, which I think is a fair requirement.

I'm not actually sure which source format can give me this. I think maybe the 3.0 (git) format can, but I haven't played around with it enough to see. I also don't know if any tools actually support this workflow.

Eddy Petrișor: Know your rights!

eddyp — 2009-11-05T00:07:35+00:00

It is only a few days since my last post about the referendum which is due to happen on the same day as the Presidential elections, but I am forced to make another post because there are lots of incorrect views on the subject.

So let's try take the issues one by one and see what is the problem with every one of them, using reason and the information we have available from more mature democracies than Romania's.

What's the referendum about

The referendum, in this case, is about two issues:

reducing the number of representatives (deputies and senators)
transforming the Parliament from a two-chamber Parliament into a one chamber Parliament

Information on the subject

For an election such as the referendum (basically asking the population on a subject of national importance) every citizen has the right to be correctly informed about the options of the referendum, what each implies, what are the pros and cons for every option, what problems does the referendum tries to resolve.

There is no information on the subject, no videos, no spots, no fliers, nothing, just biased posters (I'll explain later).

Debate on the subject

In order to have a correct information, a clear public debate which should happen, without the pressure of a presidential campaign at the same time as the debate.

Well, we have no debate, so I guess there is no problem of overlapping (sad, but true), but on the other hand, there is no information on the subject.

Analysis of the options

Now let's analyse the two proposed measures in opposition to the current situation.

reducing the number of representatives

pros

reducing costs
minorities have a bigger influence (they can defend their rights - see comments for explanations)

cons

easier to corrupt (obtaining a corrupt 5% in a 300 seats parliament is easier than in a 500 seats parliament)
minorities have a bigger influence (they are disproportionally powerful, in regard to the population they represent - see comments)
absence of a representative with a big vote power could allow passing an abusive law (to pass a regular law there is a need of a majority relative to the number of present representatives, not the total number), but, in a numerous parliament, the absence of a person isn't that risky (other colleagues would be present to stop the abusive initiative)

one chamber instead of two

pros

faster processing of decisions
less bureaucratic

cons

in the current system there can be a passive vote (law passes silently if not discussed) which has just one occasion to be caught, while in the current system silent passing is allowed only in one of the chambers, but needs to be discussed in the other
there is a chance that one chamber might amend/catch abusive initiatives with "two chambers", but with "one chamber" there is one chance only
more prone to power abuse

So, there are pros and cons for all solutions, but now we can make an informed decision and know the risks for each option.

This shouldn't have been taken in haste without any public debate.

I don't want to influence anyone's vote, so I'll abstain from telling my options.

The president has the right to associate his image with one of the options.

OK, let's analyse that.

The law doesn't explicitly forbids this, but there are some recommendations from Venice on fair elections (sorry, I couldn't find the link) which say that in a vote such as the presidential elections there shouldn't be an unfair advantage for one of the candidates. Why is that relevant? Because the current president actually uses the referendum as his campaign and he's speculating people's innate hatred for political figures.

His election material is only comprised of virulent attacks at the representatives or calls to the population to vote in favour of both questions.

Why is that unfair? Because the current president is using his current position (president) as launch ramp for his campaign as a candidate.

OTOH, if the seal of the presidency was used instead his face, the problem wouldn't have been that bad.

Organisational issues

There were various rumours about how the voting will take place. Here is a list of things I heard:

there will be a single list for both presidential elections and referendum and there will be a single column for signature to confirm your presence at vote
there will be one paper, but two columns for signatures
no matter what the list looks like, you'll be given both sets of ballots, but you can annul the one you don't want to vote on

All the variants above are incorrect from a democratic pov, but to different degrees:

a single signature covering for either of the vaiants "presidential vote only", "refrendum only", "both" asks for trouble because unused ballots in "only" variants might be added later to the valid votes as if they were expressed by voters; since there is no distinct count for each of the ballots to confront that with signatures, before the counting period one could use unused ballots and vote for you on the issue you didn't want to express an opinion on
informing on what to do in some cases such as "only" vote is essential to prevent fraud; e.g.: strike through the cell corresponding to the the election you don't want to express a vote on, instead of signing
giving the ballot unconditionally to everybody, leaving you to decide to annul it or not is abusive, because vote is not compulsory in Romania; more than that, this artificial presence burst (even with void votes) could end up validating the referendum since a 50%+1 presence is needed to pass Constitution modification, as we have here

So, recap:

favours fraud by allowing inside people to obtain untraceable/unaccounted ballots
preventing fraud isn't of any concern, it seems (and could be achieved)
forced voting might lead to validation of the referendum because the voting presence is sufficient, even if there are many annuled ballots

Vote validation and artificial voter presence

Since validation of a referendum on the changes on the constitution depends on sufficient voter presence (there is some mandatory threshold, but I can't find references now), it is in the interest of people wanting to promote the changes to mobilize people to vote.

By different measures the vote presence at the referendum is artificially increased raising the risk of validation, when people, in fact, wouldn't want to validate it and would, to express neutrality, will be be forced to annul the ballot.

Also, a high presence in the referendum might increase the number of voters for presidency, and the people mobilized this way may have a high chance to be biased in favour of the current president because he associates himself with the violent message against the representatives.

What does it take to implement, if referendum passes

If the referendum passes, the changes aren't immediate. The proposed changes are discussed in the Parliament and a final proposal for the constitution changes is made; after approval of the proposals by the Parliament, the ball goes back to population for final approval.

This means it will take a while to see a changed parliament.

Conclusions

Romania is not a true democracy yet and there are areas where individuals should know what their rights are and not let authorities fool them into buying any argument uncritically.

Romanians must learn their rights so they can't be manipulated whenever somebody wants to trick them into some scheme by knowingly omitting issues and creating insane situations.

Romanians, wake up, learn you have rights, form your own oppinion, as distinct individuals, then we might see a change.

Eugene V. Lyubimkin: cupt-standalone

Eugene V. Lyubimkin — 2009-11-04T23:24:28+00:00

Some people worried that cupt has a lot of dependencies, so it's uninstallable on very limited systems. I probably have good news for them:

$ dpkg -l | grep perl
ii liblocale-gettext-perl 1.05-4 Using libc functions for internationalizatio
ii perl-base 5.10.1-6 minimal Perl system

$ ./cupt-compiled-i386 -s full-upgrade
Building the package cache... [done]
Initializing package resolver and worker... [done]
Scheduling requested actions... [done]
Resolving possible unmet dependencies...
The following 15 packages will be INSTALLED:

dash gnupg-curl insserv install-info libc-bin libc6-i686 libdb4.7 [...]

The following 118 packages will be UPGRADED:

apt apt-utils base-files base-passwd bash bsdmainutils coreutils cpio [...]

Need to get 48.5MiB/56.0MiB of archives. After unpacking 46.7MiB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [y/N/q] q

$ wc -c ./cupt-compiled-i386
3584686 ./cupt-compiled-i386

This is a part of the log from my i386 chroot.

The only extra dependency for the binary is 'libcurl3-gnutls' for downloading from http/https/ftp. It does not need even perl-base to work, but I can't remove perl-base from the system as it's essential.

PAR rocks.

Kartik Mistry: Kavin@School

Kartik Mistry — 2009-11-04T16:57:28+00:00

* This really deserve more than ‘twit’, so I am putting it here as NEWS.

We selected nearby no-nonsense, no-hype, no-big-fees kind of school running in somewhat 4 BHK kind of bungalow in residential area. He is in ‘Playgroup’ where primary motive is to interact with others, to learn by monkey business and to learn some good (hopefully) stuffs. I was glad that he did not cried while going to school, but we had to drag him to home and he cried a lot

Current school timings are 9.30 AM to 11.30 AM, so I must help K and need to wake up early in the morning and probably stop (or reduce) useless hacking till late night.

However, I’m kind of down due to RCT, Stomach issues and now some pain in shoulder – but still alive to write this.

Enrico Zini: Custom function decorators with TurboGears 2

Enrico Zini — 2009-11-04T16:52:38+00:00

Custom function decorators with TurboGears 2

I am exposing some library functions using a TurboGears2 controller (see web-api-with-turbogears2). It turns out that some functions return a dict, some a list, some a string, and TurboGears 2 only allows JSON serialisation for dicts.

A simple work-around for this is to wrap the function result into a dict, something like this:

@expose("json")
@validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
    # Call API
    res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)

    # Return result
    return dict(r=res)

It would be nice, however, to have an @webapi() decorator that automatically wraps the function result with the dict:

def webapi(func):
    def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
        return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
    return dict_wrap

# ...in the controller...

    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    @webapi
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)

        # Return result
        return res

This works, as long as @webapi appears last in the list of decorators. This is because if it appears last it will be the first to wrap the function, and so it will not interfere with the tg.decorators machinery.

Would it be possible to create a decorator that can be put anywhere among the decorator list? Yes, it is possible but tricky, and it gives me the feeling that it may break in any future version of TurboGears:

class webapi(object):
    def __call__(self, func):
        def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
            return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
        # Migrate the decoration attribute to our new function
        if hasattr(func, 'decoration'):
            dict_wrap.decoration = func.decoration
            dict_wrap.decoration.controller = dict_wrap
            delattr(func, 'decoration')
        return dict_wrap

# ...in the controller...

    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    @webapi
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)

        # Return result
        return res

As a convenience, TurboGears 2 offers, in the decorators module, a way to build decorator "hooks":

class before_validate(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before validation is performed'''
    hook_name = 'before_validate'

class before_call(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before the controller method is called'''
    hook_name = 'before_call'

class before_render(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run before the template is rendered'''
    hook_name = 'before_render'

class after_render(_hook_decorator):
    '''A list of callables to be run after the template is rendered.

    Will be run before it is returned returned up the WSGI stack'''

    hook_name = 'after_render'

The way these are invoked can be found in the _perform_call function in tg/controllers.py.

To show an example use of those hooks, let's add a some polygen wisdom to every data structure we return:

class wisdom(decorators.before_render):
    def __init__(self, grammar):
        super(wisdom, self).__init__(self.add_wisdom)
        self.grammar = grammar
    def add_wisdom(self, remainder, params, output):
        from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
        output["wisdom"] = Popen(["polyrun", self.grammar], stdout=PIPE).communicate()[0]

# ...in the controller...

    @wisdom("genius")
    @expose("json")
    @validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=api_validation_error)
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)

        # Return result
        return res

These hooks cannot however be used for what I need, that is, to wrap the result inside a dict. The reason is because they are called in this way:

        controller.decoration.run_hooks(
                'before_render', remainder, params, output)

and not in this way:

        output = controller.decoration.run_hooks(
                'before_render', remainder, params, output)

So it is possible to modify the output (if it is a mutable structure) but not to exchange it with something else.

Can we do even better? Sure we can. We can assimilate @expose and @validate inside @webapi to avoid repeating those same many decorator lines over and over again:

class webapi(object):
    def __init__(self, error_handler = None):
        self.error_handler = error_handler

    def __call__(self, func):
        def dict_wrap(*args, **kw):
            return dict(r=func(*args, **kw))
        res = expose("json")(dict_wrap)
        res = validate(validator_dispatcher, error_handler=self.error_handler)(res)
        return res

# ...in the controller...

    @expose("json")
    def api_validation_error(self, **kw):
        pylons.response.status = "400 Error"
        return dict(e="validation error on input fields", form_errors=pylons.c.form_errors)

    @webapi(error_handler=api_validation_error)
    def list_colours(self, filter=None, productID=None, maxResults=100, **kw):
        # Call API
        res = self.engine.list_colours(filter, productID, maxResults)

        # Return result
        return res

This got rid of @expose and @validate, and provides almost all the default values that I need. Unfortunately I could not find out how to access api_validation_error from the decorator so that I can pass it to the validator, therefore I remain with the inconvenience of having to explicitly pass it every time.

Jon Dowland: FAC-10

Jon Dowland — 2009-11-04T15:43:11+00:00

Halloween was a blast. The aformentioned homebrew went down a storm: I think we finished about 25 pints. Apart from hangovers, everyone survived!

My good friend Rob was kind enough to knock up a label for the brew. Thanks to Rob, Dan for the photo and Helen for putting on the party!

Jon Dowland: ZFS de-duplication

Jon Dowland — 2009-11-04T15:26:36+00:00

Sun's Zetabyte File System (ZFS) has grown de-duplication support.

De-duplication is where each block of storage is hashed and stored only once: if two (or more) files contain blocks which are identical, the common block will be saved only once, saving you disk space.

This is very topical for me because I've been thinking a lot about backup solutions lately and de-duplication is a feature I'd rather like. backuppc does it; dar and rdiff-snapshot do not. git does it and I've been looking at backup systems built around that.

The default settings in ZFS are to use the SHA256 algorithm for hashing and not to check for collisions. A collision would mean the newest write would skip over the block which was thought to be already stored, corrupting the file(s) referencing it.

If this is a problem for people, the ZFS folks have implemented a (costly) 'verify' feature:

if this makes you uneasy, that's OK: ZFS provies a 'verify' option that performs a full comparison of every incoming block with any alleged duplicate to ensure that they really are the same

This will detect - and crucially handle - hash collisions. Jeff Bonwicks' advice is to use a low-complexity hashing algorithm in conjunction with 'verify', to offset the additional computational workload.

There's no mention of how they resolve hash collisions. Presumably they use something like hash chains. The tradeoff involved there needs to be considered against the risk of collisions and cost of the chosen hash algorithm. I suspect most people will stick to the defaults, so this code won't get much use.

It will be interesting to see some of the discussion and performance measurements that will inevitably come out once this becomes more widely available. For now, I'm quite tempted to take a peek at their source code.

Florian Maier: sorry for the silence

flo — 2009-11-04T14:34:26+00:00

... we are moving to bigger office building at the moment ;-)

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: People panel

robster — 2009-11-04T14:25:56+00:00

Previously i’d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i’m going to talk about another component that i’m responsible for, the People Panel.

An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a “feed” of “items” (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We’ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28.

One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it’s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

Stephan Peijnik: How to move panels in Gnome 2.28

stephan — 2009-11-04T09:04:07+00:00

I just installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala on my workstation and came across the problem of not being able to move/drag Gnome panels around in order to have the panels on my primary monitor.
On the Debian system that was powering the workstation before this was a non-issue as I could simply click, hold and drag both the upper and the lower panel, but this didn’t work.

So, after a few minutes of googling I came across an entry at answers.launchpad.net[0] and a blog post, but I cannot seem to remember the URL to that one. I can imagine that some of you might be having the exact same problem, so the solution is holding down the ALT, whilst dragging as usual.

[0] https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+question/264

MJ Ray: ssh security

MJ Ray — 2009-11-04T07:31:45+00:00

A periodic security review at our co-op suggested switching PasswordAuthentication no on even more hosts. One of those caused a bit of a heated discussion about the benefits of increased security and the drawbacks of making emergency access harder, reminding me of the old joke about a secure computer being one encased in a block of concrete, not connected to anything and buried in a secret location.

More usefully, I found a Discussion summary on improving SSH which seemed to cover the basics pretty well. It also suggests that “nearly two thirds of all SSH private keys were stored on disk with no password protection” which is scary and can server admins even detect that sort of risky behaviour?

One thing I’ve not really noticed before is how common brute-force ssh attacks are. There are some denyhosts statistics which make interesting pictures and Strong passwords no panacea as SSH brute-force attacks rise summarises some data from last year.

So what can we do? libpam-cracklib seems like a first step, along with denyhosts. While searching around, I noticed sslh – ssl/ssh multiplexer which looks like a useful trick that I might try somewhere. It entered debian testing earlier this week and looks simple to backport to the stable version.

What tips would you give? Do you think it’s worth having at least one reasonably secure host with PasswordAuthentication enabled, just in case of disasters disabling private keys? Are you a fan of port-knocking and other more sophisticated things? Do you know more numbers about ssh security?

Adrian von Bidder: DeviantArt

Adrian von Bidder — 2009-11-03T20:36:39+00:00

I am eager to get feedback on some of my pictures. Some people already liked them, so the ego is quite well right now... :-)

Gunnar Wolf: Megaofrenda UNAM 2009

gwolf — 2009-11-03T20:09:32+00:00

Megaofrenda UNAM 2009

Every year, for Día de Muertos (November 1 and 2) the Mexican tradition is to set colorful, beautiful offerings for our deceased loved ones. The offerings often have the very vivid orange color of the cempalsúchitl flower, and have pictures, food, and whatever our loved ones used to like.

The offerings are traditionally set up at home and at some offices and public buildings. UNAM, Mexico's largest university, where I am very happy and proud to work, has set a yearly offering for many years already. Every year they select a base theme around which the invited groups base their monuments — For 2009, it was Edgar Allan Poe's 200th anniversary.

By early November, the rainy season has usually finished. This year, however, the rain lasted a bit more – And many structures and altars were sadly damaged. Still, it is a very colorful and worthy visit to share.

Riku Voipio: The Dark side of "Ad-supported" web

suihkulokki — 2009-11-03T18:17:50+00:00

Techcrunch wrote recently an enlightening article about Scam ads in social games.

Irony is the techcrunch article itself showing scam banners as well:

Julian Andres Klode: My First upload with new source format

Julian Andres Klode — 2009-11-03T17:51:34+00:00

Yesterday, I uploaded command-not-found 0.2.38-1 (based on version 0.2.38ubuntu4) to Debian unstable, using the “3.0 (quilt)” source format. All steps worked perfectly, including stuff like cowbuilder, lintian, debdiff, dput and the processing on ftp-master. Next steps are reverting my machine from Ubuntu 9.10 to my Debian unstable system and uploading new versions of gnome-main-menu, python-apt (0.7.93, not finished yet) and some other packages.

In other news, the development of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx just started. For the first time in Ubuntu’s history, the development will be based on the testing tree of Debian and not on the unstable tree. This is done in order to increase the stability of the distribution, as this release is going to be a long term supported release. Ubuntu will freeze in February, one month before the freeze of Debian Squeeze. This should give us enough room to collaborate, especially on bugfixes. This also means that I will freeze my packages in February, so they will have the same version in Squeeze and Lucid (applying the earliest freeze to both distributions; exceptions where needed).

Posted in Debian, Ubuntu

Daniel Leidert: Toshiba Tecra A10 (PTSB5E) - Part I

Daniel Leidert — 2009-11-03T15:57:09+00:00

I recently got a Toshiba Tecra A10-1HU laptop. This is a series describing my experiences with this hardware using Debian Sid.

This one comes without any operating system. So I got a recent testing-netinstall CD-image and ran the installer procedure (in expert mode). Everything went fine and I ended with a shiny Squeeze and kernel 2.6.30. Because I use Sid as my usual system, my first action was a dist-upgrade to Sid.

This is what lspci -nn tells:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 [8086:2944] (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller [8086:2929] (rev 03)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
05:0b.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II [1180:0476] (rev ba)
05:0b.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 04)
05:0b.2 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 21)
05:0b.3 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev ff)
05:0b.4 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter [1180:0592] (rev 11)
05:0b.5 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller [1180:0852] (rev 11)

Things that worked out-of-the-box:

Display/Graphics (Intel GMA 4500M HD)

The integrated graphics chipset, an Intel GMA 4500M HD, works with the xserver-xorg-video-intel package and the default X.org configuration. No custom /etc/X11/xorg.conf is necessary.

The (IMHO non-reflecting?) display runs at 1280×800 at 60 Hz.

Cable network device

The integrated Intel 82567LM Gigabit Network device works with the e1000e kernel module. No customization was necessary.

Touchpad/Trackpoint

The notebook comes with the so called Toshiba Dual Pointing Device a touchpad (+2 buttons) and a trackpoint (+2 buttons). Both worked without customization.

Energy savings/Suspend/Resume

apmd and acpid handle this. No problems yet. Suspend/Resume works. I did not yet test (and I’m not sure if I should) hibernate and uswsusp.

Webcam

The webcam is a CNA7157 model or at least detected as such. The video4linux modules handle it and the cheese application produces pictures.

Volume-control wheel

It works. Module and package information will follow as soon as I figure them out.

Things that needed customization

WLAN (Intel WiFi Link 5100)

The notebook comes with an Intel WiFi Link 5100 device. It does not work out-of-the-box. Following this article, I’ve installed the firmware-iwlwifi package and loaded the iwlagn module.

Sound (Intel)

For the sound device to work the snd_hda_intel module is necessary. Further the following lines must be added to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

# not sure about the first line, start adding the second only
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=toshiba position_fix=1

Unsure/Not yet working

Temperature sensor

After installing the sensors-applet I got two identical temperature displays. I’m not sure what they show. Anybody an idea how to examine this?

Modem

The notebook comes with an internal modem device:

00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)

From what I read I need hsfmodem or the sl-modem packages. “Unfortunately” the latest version is not available for amd64 from the archive, although it seems to have been built.

Untested

I did not yet test

Bluetooth (icon there, kernel module loaded)
Firewire (kernel module loaded)
Card-reader (kernel modules loaded)

Summit

This what lspci -k -nn tells about the used kernel modules:

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub [8086:2a40] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a42] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0004]
00:02.1 Display controller [0380]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:2a43] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0004]
00:03.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset MEI Controller [8086:2a44] (rev 07)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
00:19.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection [8086:10f5] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: e1000e
00:1a.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:2937] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 [8086:2938] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 [8086:2939] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1a.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 [8086:293c] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller [8086:293e] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 [8086:2940] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 [8086:2942] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 [8086:2944] (rev 03)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport-driver
00:1d.0 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:2934] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.1 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:2935] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:2936] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: uhci_hcd
00:1d.7 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 [8086:293a] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller [8086:2917] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller [8086:2929] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: ahci
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless WiFi Link 5100 [8086:4232]
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:1201]
	Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
05:0b.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II [1180:0476] (rev ba)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: yenta_cardbus
05:0b.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 04)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: firewire_ohci
05:0b.2 SD Host controller [0805]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C822 SD/SDIO/MMC/MS/MSPro Host Adapter [1180:0822] (rev 21)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
	Kernel driver in use: sdhci-pci
05:0b.3 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C843 MMC Host Controller [1180:0843] (rev ff)
	Kernel driver in use: ricoh-mmc
05:0b.4 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C592 Memory Stick Bus Host Adapter [1180:0592] (rev 11)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]
05:0b.5 System peripheral [0880]: Ricoh Co Ltd xD-Picture Card Controller [1180:0852] (rev 11)
	Subsystem: Toshiba America Info Systems Device [1179:0001]

Biella Coleman: Touching Music via the Voice-O-Graph

Biella — 2009-11-03T14:54:58+00:00

In no way can I be describe myself as music aficionado for I rarely seek music. But music being that it makes its way into your ears through so many venues and vehicles, certainly finds me. A few years ago I stumbled upon Owen Chapman’s music at live performance (using ice among other objects) at a conference on copyright’s counterparts.

I immediately loved it not only because it is a genre of electronic music I tend to like but because of the depth of its texture. While all music enfolds this feature, when I listen to his music, it is as if I am not listening to music but also touching it (and vice-versa).

He just released an album whose song and sounds keep with his signature style of deep texture. It also makes an ethical call and claim: since remixing/sampling is citational, akin to academic quotation, it thus deserves a kind of explicit recognition and commentary. To honor this he is providing his music free of charge once one dips in with their own commentary and contribution. Full details and music here

Benjamin Mako Hill: Meta-Microblogging

Benjamin Mako Hill — 2009-11-03T14:37:30+00:00

So I don't tweet because I'm not ready to hand my data and autonomy over to Twitter. Luckily -- or unluckily perhaps -- that hasn't kept me off the microblogging wagon. I "dent" semi-regularly over at freedom-friendly identi.ca.

I've found that microblogging is a great public outlet where one can talk about all those otherwise little meaningless things that we all do in our daily lives. High on my list of meaningless little actions, however, is microblogging itself! But can you microblog about your microblogging -- i.e. can you "metamicroblog" (or "metadent", or "metatweet")? I created a new account, metamako that over the last month or so, has been proving that you sure can!

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - week 8

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2009-11-03T12:41:24+00:00

RCBW - week #8

This week I'm behind schedule. Part of the reason is that, after all the traveling (first the GSoC mentors summit, where I met several other Debian folks, then a work meeting in Lisbon), I got sick again for a while: plain flu, no H1N1 yet

Now that I'm finally feeling better ... here is a (delayed) weekly RCBW update; as usual, dates are mostly indicative.

26/11/2009 ~~bug #507201~~ - lsb-appchk3 - snprintf usage and undeclared NULL (Ubuntu patch)
27/11/2009 ~~bug #507204~~ - lsb-pkgchk3 - snprintf usage and undeclared NULL (Ubuntu patch)
28/11/2009 ~~bug #527754~~ - gsetroot - update ltmain.sh (fix FTBFS)
29/11/2009 ~~bug #543553~~ - bum - verify with maint that his address does work
30/11/2009 ~~bug #395609~~ - html-template - add debian/rules target "binary-arch"
31/11/2009 ~~bug #533435~~ - pida - specific to home build Python (downgrade)
01/11/2009 ~~bug #395725~~ - openwince-include - add debian/rules target "binary-indep"

This week, you might have noticed an upward spike of about 200 bugs in the RC bug graph: that's Manoj reporting a lot of neglected violations of policy "MUST" requirements. No matter what's your take on how those bugs have been reported, all of them (up to false positives) are indeed bugs of RC severity.

So roll up your sleeves and join RCBW, we will be freezing soon.

Michal Čihař: Enca 1.12

Michal Čihař — 2009-11-03T09:37:17+00:00

Well it has been released some time ago, but I forgot to announce it here, so here it comes - I have released Enca 1.12. If you don't know Enca, it is an Extremely Naive Charset Analyser. It detects character set and encoding of text files and can also convert them to other encodings using either a built-in converter or external libraries and tools like libiconv, librecode, or cstocs.

The full changes are short:

Fixes some minor memory leaks.
Fixes little problems in autoconf scripts.

You can download from http://dl.cihar.com/enca/.

Joachim Breitner: Mimesweeper

nomeata — 2009-11-03T09:00:28+00:00

Martin Michlmayr: New Debian on NSLU2 documentation available

Martin Michlmayr — 2009-11-02T22:32:08+00:00

I wrote several new guides about Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 this weekend. The new guides cover the following topics:

Troubleshooting: common problems and their solutions
Internals about the boot process of Debian on the NSLU2
Modifying a NSLU2 firmware image
Cloning a NSLU2
Migration guide: how to move your Debian installation from your NSLU2 to a SheevaPlug.

You can find this documentation at my Debian on NSLU2 site.

Eddy Petrișor: Remus Cernea - direct phone intervention at Sinteza Zilei

eddyp — 2009-11-02T21:36:50+00:00

Remus Cernea called at Sinteza Zilei on Sunday, November 1st:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOzQO8mAm1Y

Axel Beckert: 192.168.noone.org

Axel Beckert — 2009-11-02T20:41:50+00:00

About a year ago, Eric Poscher invented the IP address blog and installed his one at http://192.168.epe.at/. Every hour his netbook notes down the IP address of the interface which currenntly the default route goes through and if it has an internet connection, it uploads the list of IP adresses it had. Additionally, he filters the list to IP addresses in 192.168.0.0/16.

June this year he published the source code behind his IP blog under GPL and Creative Commons. I modified his script slighty to just write down the new IP address if it’s different to the previous one, but without any filter. This makes the list much more colorful (and my online times less traceable :-) as you can see at http://192.168.noone.org/.

But the biggest disadvantage of Eric’s code design is not the fact that it’s a (quite nice to read :-) shell script but that it doesn’t save the list of IPs separately and is not able to regenerate everything if you want to change the design, but always just adds a line to the HTML page.

So I rewrote the whole thing in Perl last Saturday while sitting the dog of my parents. If you change the templates and call the script again, it regenerates the whole list with the new templates. The code is also under GPL, the HTML parts are under Creative Commons, too.

And hey, this is one of the very few (if not only) applications which are much more fun with IPv4 than with IPv6. ;-)

Tollef Fog Heen: Distributing entropy

Tollef Fog Heen — 2009-11-02T20:23:00+00:00

Back at the Debian barbeque party at the end of August, I got myself an EntropyKey from the kind folks at Simtec. It has been working so well that I haven't really had a big need to blog about it. Plug it in and watch /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail never empty.

However, Collabora, where I am a sysadmin also got one. We are using a few virtual machines rather than physical machines as we want the security domains, but don't have any extreme performance needs. Like most VMs they have been starved from entropy. One problem presents itself: how do we get the entropy from the host system where the key is plugged in to the virtual machines?

Kindly enough the ekeyd package also includes ekeyd-egd-linux which speaks EGD, the TCP protocol the Entropy Gathering Daemon defined a long time ago. ekeyd itself can also output in the same protocol, so this should be easy enough, or so you would think.

Our VMs are all bridged together on the same network that is also exposed to the internet and the EGD protocol doesn't support any kind of encryption, so in order to be safe rather than sorry, I decided to encrypt the entropy. Some people think I'm mad for encrypting what is essentially random bits, but that's me for you.

So, I ended up setting up stunnel, telling ekeyd on the host to listen to localhost on a given port, and stunnel to forward connections to that port. On each VM, I set up stunnel to forward connections from a given port on localhost to the port physical machine where stunnel is listening. ekeyd-linux-egd is then told to connect to the port on localhost where stunnel is listening. After a bit of certificate fiddling and such, I can do:

# pv -rb < /dev/random > /dev/null  
17.5kB [4.39kB/s]

which is way, way better than what you will get without a hardware RNG. The hardware itself seems to be delivering about 32kbit/s of entropy.

My only gripes at this point is that the EGD implementation could use a little bit more work. It seems to leak memory in the EGD server implementation. Also, it would be very useful if the client would reconnect if it was disconnected for any reason. Even with those missing bits, I'm happy about the key so far.

Raphaël Hertzog: New source formats allowed in testing/unstable

Buxy — 2009-11-02T18:33:40+00:00

The ftpmasters merged my dak branch last week during their meeting and have enabled the support of new source formats “3.0 (quilt)” and “3.0 (native)” in testing, unstable and testing-proposed-updates. I have uploaded 3 packages using the new formats already: logidee-tools using “3.0 (native)”, quilt and ftplib using “3.0 (quilt)”. The latter is arch any and has been successfully built on all architectures even those that still use an old version of sbuild (it looks like the fears that the old version would not cope with the new format were unfounded). For logidee-tools I built it with “-Zbzip2” in order to use bzip2 compression on the native tarball.

I have updated the wiki page and the release goal page with latest information. Feel free to convert some of your packages to give it a try. For ftplib, it led me to discover a Debian specific patch that I completely missed when I took the package over. This is precisely the kind of benefit that I expect from generalizing this format, it will encourage us to have separate documented patches instead of keeping everything hidden inside the usual .diff.gz. Combined with DEP-3 (patch tagging guidelines), we have a better infrastructure to share our patches with the rest of the free software community.

The next step is to fix all bugs listed here and make dpkg-source use the new source formats by default (#553928). Feel free to help by preparing patches (and offering NMUs), it’s a release goal to have all packages buildable with new source formats.

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Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: 0x20 040 32

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho — 2009-11-02T18:18:14+00:00

Now.

Axel Beckert: Still happy with the ASUS EeePC 701

Axel Beckert — 2009-11-02T17:32:47+00:00

Recently Eric asked on the LUG Vorarlberg mailing list about netbook experience. I wrote a lengthy reply summarizing my experiences with the ASUS EeePC 701. And I thought this is something I probably should share with more people than only one LUG:

I ordered an ASUS EeePC 701 (4G) with US keyboard layout at digitec in Spring 2008, got it approximately one month later and posted a first resumé after one month in my blog.

I’m still very happy with the EeePC 701, despite two commonly mentioned drawbacks (the small screen resolution and the small SSD – which I both don’t see as real problems) and some other minor issues.

What matters

Very robust and compact case. And thanks to a small fan being the only moving part inside, the EeePC 701 is also very robust against mobile use.
Very pleasing always-in-my-daypack size (despite the 7" screen it’s the typical 9" netbook size) and easily held with one hand.
Black. No glossy display. Neither clear varnish nor piano laquer. Short: No bath room tile. Textured surface, small scratches don’t stick out and don’t matter.
Debian (previously Lenny, now Sid) runs fine on it, even the webcam works out-of-the-box.
Despite all those neat features, it was fscking cheap at that time. And it was available without Windows.

Nice to have

There’s power on the USB sockets even if the EeePC is turned off but the power supply is plugged in.
The speakers are impressingly good and loud for their size. (But my demands with regards to audio are probably not too high, so audiophiles shouldn’t run to ebay because of this. ;-)
It has three external USB sockets.

What doesn’t matter

The small 7" 800×480 screen: I like small fonts and do most things inside a terminal anyway. And even with 800×480, those terminals are still much bigger than 80×25 characters. Only some applications and webpages have no heart for small screens.
The small disk size: Quite a lot of programs fit on 4 GB of disk space. Additionally I use tmpfs a lot. And music and video files are either on a external 500 GB Western Digital 2.5" “My Passport” disk (which I need quite seldomly) or much more come via sshfs and IPv6 from my home server anyway. :-)
The small keyboard: I just don’t have any problems with the size or layout (right shift right of the cursor up key, etc.) of the keyboard. Well, maybe except that any standard sized keyboard feels extremely large after having used the EeePC exclusively for some weeks. ;-)
The to 630 MHz underclocked 900 MHz Intel Celeron: It’s enough for most of the things I do with the EeePC. Also the original 512 MB RAM are somehow ok, but for using tmpfs, but no swap space at all, 1 GB or 2 GB are surely the better choice.
A battery runtime of 2.5h to 3h is fine for me.

What’s not so nice

The “n” key needs to be pressed slighty stronger than other keys, otherwise no “n” appears. So if one of my texts in average misses more “n” than other letters, I typed it on the EeePC. ;-)
Home, End, Page-Up, and Page-Down need the Fn key. This means that these keys can only be used with two hands (or oe very big hand and I have quite small hands). This is usually no problem and you get used to it. It’s just annoying if you hold the EeePC with one hand and try to type with the other.
What looks like a single mouse button is a seesaw and therefore two mouse buttons below one button. This makes it quite hard to press both at the same time, e.g. for emulating a middle mouse button press. It usually works in about half of all cases I tried it. My solution was to bind some key combination to emulate a middle mouse button in my window manager, ratpoison:
```
bind y ratclick 2
```
And that mouse button bar already fell off two times.
The battery reports only in 10% steps, and reporting in percentage instead of mAh is an ACPI standard violation because reporting in percentage is only allowed for non-rechargable batteries. It also doesn’t report any charging and discharging rates. But in the meanwhile nearly all battery meter can cope with these hardware bugs. This was quite a problem in the early days.
Now, after approximately 1.5 years, the battery slowly fritzes: When charging there are often only seconds between 10% and 40%. Rigorously using up all power of the battery helped a little bit. Looks like some kind of memory effect althought the battery is labeled Li-Ion and not Ni-MH and Li-Ion batteries are said to have no memory effect.
The SD card reader only works fine if you once completed the setup of the original firmware or set the corresponding BIOS switch appropriately. No idea why.

Similar models

Technically, most of this also counts for the EeePC 900SD (not 901) which only differs in screen, resolution and disk size as well as CPU, but not on the the case. So same size, same robustness, same battery, same mainboard, bigger screen, resolution, disk and faster CPU. (The 901 has a different CPU, a different battery, and a different, glossy and partially chromed case.) See Wikipedia for the technical specifications of all EeePC models.

ASUS’ only big FAILure

Stopping to sell most EeePCs with Linux and cowardly teaming up with Microsoft after having shown big courage to come out with a Linux only netbook. Well, you probably already know, but it’s better without Windows…

So basically you no more get these really neat netbooks from ASUS anymore and you get nearly no netbooks with Linux from ASUS in the stores anymore. It’s a shame.

Would I buy it again?

Sure.

Well, maybe I would also buy the 900SD or 702 (8G) instead of the 701, but basically they’re very similar. See Wikipedia for the differences between these EeePC models. And of course I still prefer the versions without Windows.

But despite the low price, the EeePC 701 is surprisingly robust and still works as on the first day (ok, except battery, the mouse button bar and the “n” key ;-), so I recently bought a second power supply (only white ones were available *grrrr*) and ordered a bigger third party battery plus an adapter to load the battery directly from the (second) power supply without EeePC inbetween.

What desktop do I use on the EeePC?

None.

I use ratpoison as window manager, uxterm, urxvt, and yeahconsole as terminal emulators (running zsh with grml based .zshrc even as root’s login shell :-), wicd-curses as network manager and xmobar (previously dzen2) with i3status as text-only panel. Installed editors are GNU Emacs 23, GNU Zile and nvi. (No vim. :-)

And of course a netbook wouldn’t be a netbook if it wouldn’t have a lot of network applications installed. For me the most important ones are: ssh, scp, autossh, sshfs, miredo, conkeror, git, hg, and rsync.

Sandro Tosi: Google Wave Invites

Sandro Tosi — 2009-11-02T09:58:26+00:00

Still looking for an invite to Google Wave? I got some, so give me your GMail address (either via email, IRC or as comment here).

UPDATE: invites are finished quite fastly - I'll repost when (if) they'll give me others.

Michael Prokop: Grml 2009.10 – Codename Hello-Wien

mika — 2009-11-02T00:31:16+00:00

Distrowatch, Heise, Pro-Linux, Symlink, Golem & CO already have the news: a new version of the Debian based Live system for system administrators has been released: Grml 2009.10 – Codename ‘Hello-Wien‘.

One visible new feature is the new bootsplash which should lead you through the most important boot options. The new release features kernel 2.6.31.5 with various patches and extra modules. We’ve an automatic hostname configuration via DHCP & rDNS, improved network boot capabilities, extensive documentation to Grml’s Z Shell features and configuration, support for GRUB2 and directory-specific Z Shell configuration. Amongst the new software packages are Google’s stressapptest, btrfs-tools and guymager.

A full changelog and release notes can be found at http://grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-2009.10/.

As always, images for 32 bit and 64 bit x86 architectures are provided in the sizes grml (~700 MiB), medium (~200 MiB) and small (~100 MiB). They can be downloaded via HTTP, FTP, rsync and Bittorrent.

Thanks to all the contributors for being part of this rocking release!

Martin-Éric Racine: modulation wheels on the RIGHT side of the keyboard?

Martin-Éric — 2009-11-01T20:18:39+00:00

Am I the only one who thinks that a 3-octave synthesizer (low-A to high-C) with the modulation wheels placed on the right side of the keyboard would be the ultimate Funk machine in the hands of people like Bernie Worrell and myself? Something like a NordBass III comes to mind...

Similarly, could synthesizer manufacturers please standardize on keyboard layouts that always start on the low-A and include quick octave transposition buttons? The Roland Rhodes Mk60 included both a 5 octave 64-key layout (low-A to high-C) and two quick octave switch buttons (octave up and octave down), which made it a wonderful MIDI controller. Sadly, this was a one-off and no other keyboard on the market ever adopted this brilliant layout.

How about we go and fix it now? Korg? Nord? Roland? Yamaha? Are you guys listening?

Aigars Mahinovs: Gnome typing break has no way to lock the screen

aigarius — 2009-11-01T17:44:31+00:00

Want a definition of a paper cut bug? Here it is. And here and here are two more side effects of the same bug. The original bug report will be 6 years old in a month. Can we do something to prevent this bug surviving that long?

Axel Beckert: /var/cache/apt/ on tmpfs

Axel Beckert — 2009-11-01T15:44:49+00:00

My ASUS EeePC 701 (4G) “nemo” running Debian Sid has a 4 GB SSD as main disk, which is on the one hand quite full (mostly with software I use, but also local working copies of software I work on) and on the other hand an SSD, so I always try to reduce the amount of write to disk without losing convenience. Similar issues have systems which run off a CF or SD card or maybe even an USB stick.

Since I ordered a 2 GB RAM bar together with the EeePC, I not bound to the 512 MB which it had originally. But on the other hand I seldom needed more than 1 GB of RAM. Usually I needed between 400 MB and 1 GB of RAM. So it’s quite obvious to use tmpfs on as many places as possible.

Making /tmp, /var/run and /var/lock tmpfs were the most obvious directories to mount as tmpfs. Especially /var/run on tmpfs brought up a few bugs a while ago (mostly init.d scripts relying on /var/run/$PACKAGENAME/’s existence), but it’s no hassles to use nowadays. Even in Debian Stable such bugs got fixed.

Next target to explore for was /var/cache. According to the FHS, /var/cache is intended for cached data from applications. […] The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data. So it should be safe to put anything under /var/cache on tmpfs.

One directory in there which gets written quite often and with a lot of data on Debian Unstable is /var/cache/apt and its subdirectories, especially /var/cache/apt/archives. If you update your Sid installation daily, all new or updated .debs will be downloaded to /var/cache/apt first.

So I put /var/cache/apt on tmpfs by putting the following line into /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/cache/apt tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755 0 0

But despite FHS stating that anything under /var/cache must be reproducible by the application, apt is puking and refusing to work:

!447 Z31 ?0 L1 root@nemo:pts/0 (-zsh) 16:13:10 [~] # apt-get update
E: Archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial is missing.
!448 Z32 ?100 L1 root@nemo:pts/0 (-zsh) 16:13:17 [~] #

If you create /var/cache/apt/archives/partial, it will also argue about /var/cache/apt/partial.

Of course the workaround is simple: Just put mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/partial /var/cache/apt/archives/partial in /etc/rc.local.

But nevertheless, this is a bug in apt – which already has been reported by madduck earlier this year (#523920). Unfortunately the APT maintainers have not yet even commented on this FHS violation and therefore also a Debian Policy (Section 9.1.1) violation.

One more thought about /var/cache/apt vs only /var/cache/apt/archives: apt-file also caches its data under /var/cache/apt. So if you want to use apt-file after a reboot and have /var/cache/apt mounted as tmpfs, you have to run apt-file update first and it will download all Contents files (can be dozens of megabytes) and not only the differences to previously downloaded Contents files.

So if you use apt-file a lot, you probably go better with making only /var/cache/apt/archives tmpfs and not whole /var/cache/apt.

Jeff Bailey: Crap error messages

Jeff Bailey — 2009-11-01T15:32:21+00:00

updated

When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator.

My most recent encounter with this was this morning with bzr (On my work laptop, so it's Windows):

C:\Users\jeffbailey\workspaces\webhack\Webhack>bzr push lp:~jbailey/webhack/trunk
Connected (version 2.0, client Twisted)
SSH C:\Users\jeffbailey/.ssh/id_rsa password:
Authentication (publickey) successful!
Secsh channel 1 opened.
bzr: ERROR: RemoteRepository(bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jbailey/webhack/trunk/.bzr/)
is not compatible with
CHKInventoryRepository('file:///C:/Users/jeffbailey/workspaces/webhack/Webhack/.bzr/repository/')
different rich-root support

Umm. What? Okay. I work for a search engine. So I fired up Yahoo!^WGoogle to figure out what the message could possibly mean. The top result is Bug 172360 in Launchpad:
"branching from rich-root to non-rich-root gives confusing errors"

Sounds perfect, until you see that the bug is marked as invalid.

Something got missed here. If your user says "I don't understand" - they are NEVER wrong. It doesn't matter if you think they should've understood. It doesn't matter that you think you explained it well enough. The user doesn't understand, so you lose. Actually, it's worse. *they* lose.

There are lots of other bugs leading up to how I got to where I was seeing this in the first place. But none of those are as important as the fact that the developers thought a user saying "I don't get it" wasn't worth the 30 seconds of adding the text "The best way to fix this is to run: bzr upgrade --default " + branch.url;

Update: Jelmer pointed out to me in a comment that it wasn't the devs who marked it as invalid, it was the submitter. He's reopened it. This just further supports the notion that users are insane and need hand-holding. =)

Junichi Uekawa: Playing with xemacs.

Junichi Uekawa — 2009-11-01T15:10:12+00:00

Playing with xemacs. Looking at a 3 year old bugreport that I thought was a bug on xemacs, and seeing that it's still not fixed. Hmmmm.. I'm working around in my elisp side but I don't think it's a very good idea. 364234.

Steve Kemp: Do I look like your travel agent?

Steve Kemp — 2009-11-01T13:16:23+00:00

This entry is primarily composed of "random".

Palm Pre

Several people have persuaded me that I need to change my phone. I've elected to purchase a Palm Pre. Rooting them, and installing Debian is trivial, though I think its missing an openssh client - so I can read my mail in mutt via the device.

(I've seen mentions of the "scary black window" as a terminal; it isn't obvious how well that works.)

I went shopping yesterday to purchase one, but because my mobile phone contract doesn't end for another 9 days I'd have to pay an extra fee. Instead I'm going to wait 9 days and get it for free.

Getting Bigger

Having randomly remembered the idea that people shrink over the course of a day due to gravity affecting the spine I decided to test this.

For a few days in a row I measured my height before going to bed, and then again in the morning. It certainly appears to be true, average difference in height is about 9mm for me.

SEO - Is it hard?

I was involved with the setup of a new site last weekend. Today it is top-5 when searched for by two pretty broad keywords in google.

This does not seem unusual for me - though I appreciate there is a difference between "site being popular/succeeding" and "site being findable".

(I remember once attending an interview for a hotel portal site. The interview wasn't that interesting, but I remember they perked up a lot when I said "Search google for Steve Kemp - I come top".)

ObFilm: Mortal Kombat

Joerg Jaspert: Debian FTPMaster meeting, all broken

Joerg Jaspert — 2009-11-01T10:43:18+00:00

Heyho. The last morning and we are all very tired. Yesterday we had a nice 20hour workday that only ended this morning at 03:30h. But it was entirely worth it, as we managed to get the last big patchset working. Something where the idea is years old, but noone ever came around to do it. Granted, it is a really big change, so not easy to do and it took us time and lots of energy, but it is really worth it. Especially as it will instantly kick out a lot of race conditions we could never properly fix with the old code. And will help also against the case where an orig tarball could get lost, this is no longer possible.

Now I am way too tired writing up more in this post, just two things:

We had 82 hours simply working on stuff this week. Combined with the number of people and their arrival times we can sum the total time spent working on the archive up to more than 400 man hours.
140 files changed, 11922 insertions(+), 9715 deletions(-)

(We have nearly 30k lines of code).

So, lots of changes, stay tuned, we will post multiple times to d-d-a when we are back home and feel human again. :)

Jaldhar Vyas: Unfortunately They Don't Make Squeeze Costumes

Jaldhar Vyas — 2009-11-01T04:31:41+00:00

Jersey City needs a candy stimulus.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Adventures with Comcast: Part ohnoesnotanotherone in an ongoing series

Dirk Eddelbuettel — 2009-11-01T02:30:00+00:00

Regular readers of this blog (yes, both of you!) may remember the computer/broadband/ directory that this post appears in as the collection of my Comcastic (yeah right) experiences with my ISP.

But I think this week may top everything. I'll just try to jot down some notes before I forget all the gory details:

On Tuesday, I edited one of the internal nvram configuration variables of my trusted wrt54g router in order to add the older daughter's shiny new iPod Touch to the set of 'permitted' MAC addresses. This router, running a custom Linux variant called OpenWRT had essentially not been upgraded since I first installed it, and still required a quick reboots after updating of configuration values. However, that worked fairly flawelessly for 4 1/2 years. Until Tuesday.
Upon reboot, I got what appeared to be an invalid network setup from the cable modem. IP and Gateway assigned , but no DNS and no ability to ping anywhere. Crap. So I fiddled with this all evening, including a service call to Comcast but to no avail. When a laptop was directly plugged into the cable modem, it got correct settings albeit on a completely different subnet. So for the next day, we left one machine directly plugged so that my wife could at least telecommute.
Somehow it became apparent that waiting insanely long for the router to remain powered-down -- and we're talking five minutes or longer -- helped. So by now we were suspecting the cable modem. I use a standard Motorola SB5101 I once had to buy in a rush because of the Comcastic ones who all of a sudden changed their minimum requirements which meant they would no longer connect to my existing modem. Anyway. So on Wednesday I called Motorola and had a decent service call with them but as I was at work I couldn't follow up with part numbers etc pp. At least I learned that I seem to have two months of the two-year warranty left...
So by Wednesday evening I decided to fall back to the really cheap and old Speedstream router I had used before the Linksys wrt54g. That worked, albeit sloooooowly. Wired and wireless ethernet, direct assignment from the cable modem. All well. But did I mention it was sloooow though?
Thursday evening was skipped as I was at the Chicago R meeting we organize to complement our R / Finance conferences in the spring.
Given that the cable modem worked with the old Speedstream and with directly-connected machines, I decided to finally go for a long overdue update of the wrt54g software. So that happened on Friday, i.e. yesterday. And similar to my previous wrt54g notes, I needed to flash the new software with the tftp protocol and a helper script on a laptop connected to the router. All this took a while as I needed to remember to also send to a ping flood to the router to be able to catch the tftp request, needed to test which of the atftp and tftp binaries worked reliably, and whether the router prefers .bin images over .trx images when using the tftp protocol. But lo and behold this worked, and I configured a shiny new Kamikaze aka 8.09.1 version of OpenWRT. This even connected to the cable modem once I helped with DNS entries. OpenWRT generally rocks, and this new release is a lot nice than the more bare-bones version I used to run.
Unfortunately, I had picked the bcrm47xx variant -- the 2.6.* kernel version of the OpenWRT Project's software for my WRT device. And guess what, that one does not include wireless support due to issues with Broadcom drivers and the kernel. Grrr. So once I had that confirmed this morning, I quickly switched to the bcrm-2.4 variant of the same 8.09.1 release. At least now I can flash from within using the mtd command from the commandline.
But once up and running with the bcrm-2.4 release, I ran into the same issue we have had with the Motorola cable modem and Comcast behind them. Each time I connect with the wrt54g, I end up on a specific subnet, without DNS and with no ability to connect. The Speedstream still worked. So what to do? Well, MAC Cloning to the rescue. Now the Linksys wrt54g pretends to be the Speedstream, and all, at last, is well again.
So after four days of intermittent service, which means that my few web pages, blog, and goodies like CRANberries were invisible, I now have better router software. That could have come a little easier, and I still don't quite know why Comcast decides to no longer service the wrt54g under the MAC address it presented itself with for 4 1/2 years. I have paid thousands of dollars over that time to get broadband access. But this, I don't quite call service. To top it all off, guess who cold-called to sell VOIP service while I wrote this up? Oh, it's Comcastic ...

John Goerzen: First impressions of the iPod Touch

John Goerzen — 2009-11-01T02:23:10+00:00

So far, our household has resisted any piece of the iPhone onslaught. Yes, I carry an iPod Classic, but that’s different.

Terah’s old Palm m100 is becoming a problem. The platform is dead, and the desktop sync drivers for it are decaying rapidly in every operating system. Not only that, but we would really like to be able to share calendars between us. Terah doesn’t need a phone or a mobile data plan.

After thinking about it a bit and getting some advice, we decided to get her the $200 8GB iPod Touch. And it arrived Friday.

I’ve used portable devices plenty before. I had my share of PalmOS devices: III, V, Clie; an HP 200LX DOS-based … err … netbook; a Zaurus; and an N810.

The first thing that struck me about the iPod Touch was beauty — no surprise there. The interface exuded an air of stability, like it wasn’t going to just crash when something went wrong. It felt solid and well-planned. Physically, it’s thin. Really thin. That’s perhaps the most impressive thing about it of all.

Sometimes the GUI masked underlying performance issues. For instance, it may take awhile to draw a web page. On the N810, you get to watch as different bits of the screen appear. On the iPod Touch, you sit there staring at a white screen with a spinning wheel for awhile, and then suddenly poof, the webpage is there. I’d have to say the Apple approach feels better.

Terah and I decided to sync with Google Calendar, and that setup was easy and well-done on the iPod Touch — easier than on the Blackberry with Google’s own app, in fact. The only question was that Contacts was a bit counter-intuitive; select the Google account and nothing shows up, but everything is there under the generic “Contacts” bucket. The Calendar worked very well, even properly handling meetings and invitations.

The mail app works well, though it takes a long — very long — time to scroll through a lengthy email to get to the attachment at the bottom. There’s no “go to bottom of message” feature that I could see, and my idea of pinching the screen to make the text tiny to make scrolling faster didn’t work.

The mail setup, though, is a complete and utter pain. There is no way anybody that doesn’t know a lot of details about SSL certs could have made this work. When you add a mail account, it requires you to have an IMAP and SMTP server defined. It would like to use SSL/TLS with these, which is great. But if it can’t validate the cert, it pops up a dialog box asking if you want to continue. You can say yes, but it just sits there for a couple of minutes and then fails with a mysterious error. I had to put my cert up on a webserver, point Safari at it, and install the cert to the device before it would talk to it. That solved IMAP.

SMTP was another matter too. Strangely, on the initial account setup, there is no way to put in the port number for SMTP server. Yet it won’t save your account until it can connect to one. Of course, most ISPs block the smtp port, so this was bound to fail. Finally I pointed it at a server on my local network temporarily, then went in and edited the account to point it to the real server with the second non-25 port it listens on for just such situations.

Safari works really well. It’s probably the best mobile browser I’ve seen yet (I haven’t seen Android or Palm Pre yet.) It is far better than the N810 browser, both in terms of speed and in terms of ability to reformat pages to fit the device. The “tabbed” browsing is a lot faster switching than the N810’s separate windows, and nicer too.

The app store essentially lived up to my expectations. It was very easy to use, and obviously a closed proprietary ecosystem. The free apps that existed there mostly were adware. I looked for a Jabber client, and wasn’t happy with any option. Some of them required Apple Push Notifications, with a complex network of two servers between the device and the Jabber server. No thanks to that invasion of privacy.

And that brings me to the topic of weird limitations. iPod Touch apps, in general, can’t run in the background. You exit Safari, and when you get back in, it’s reloading that webpage. Now many apps are good at remembering their state, but this feels very PalmOS to me.

You can’t use the iPod Touch — at all — until you first sync it with iTunes. That is incredibly weird. The device has Wifi, people. Plus, why should I have to “register” it with Apple anyhow?

And then there’s the lack of a file manager, or anything like it. I can’t scp a file from my computer to the iPod Touch like I can my N810, nor the other way ’round. It is generally unclear how much of the 8GB is in use, and by what.

Terah needs a password-keeping program. There are several in the app store. I’d really like one that uses Bruce Schneier’s standard Password Safe format — which is supported on just about any platform you care to name. Couldn’t find one. Even if I could, I guess it wouldn’t do me any good, since you can’t copy the file to a PC anyhow. Sigh.

Overall, Terah is very excited with the device, and I must admit to being so too. Its faster web browser means it’s probably a good replacement for the N810 — especially if you want a calendar, which the N810 completely lacks. It makes an excellent PDA, perhaps the first PDA I’ve seen that equals the usability of the old PalmOS. On the other hand, it isn’t really a power user’s device. There are a lot of surprising limitations and missing features that competing devices have had for years.

Christian Perrier: Samba 3.4.3 in unstable

Christian Perrier — 2009-10-31T16:37:00+00:00

Only two days after Karolin released upstream samba 3.4.3, I uploaded a Debian package in unstable. Happy.

Frank S. Thomas: Automatic generation of a C header from Fortran code?

Frank — 2009-10-31T15:19:20+00:00

Dear Lazyweb,

In my newest project I need to use Fortran routines and variables in C. From the source code point of view this requires only to declare the needed Fortran entities in your C code whilst taking the “right” types of the variables and the name mangling of the Fortran compiler into account.

Here is an example. Consider you have the following Fortran code:

module X
  real, dimension(0:1) :: v
 
  subroutine Foo(A, b, c, &
    & D)
    integer, intent(in) :: a, &
      & B
    real, intent(out) :: C, d
    ! <Foo's body>
  end subroutine
end module X

To use the array v and the subroutine Foo() in C, you need to add (something like) the following declarations to your C source code:

extern float x_mp_v_[2];
 
void x_mp_foo_(int* a, int* b, float* c, float* d);

If only a handful of Fortran routines are needed to be called from C, declaring them by hand may be feasible. This is however error-prone and becomes impracticable for more than a handful of routines. Especially if the routine signatures change frequently.

So what I’d like to have is a tool that generates a C header file containing all declarations of Fortran entities from a given Fortran source file. Or if such tool does not exist, a tool that extracts variable declarations and routine signatures from a Fortran source file into a format that is easier to parse than Fortran itself would also be helpful. Any suggestions?

Stefano Zacchiroli: mail indexing for mutt

Stefano Zacchiroli — 2009-10-31T14:11:00+00:00

a tale of three tools: mairix, maildir-utils (mu), nmzmail

I think/fear I'm getting into this Getting Things Done thingie. For weird reasons I'll explain later on, part of the GTD work flow I'm implementing requires quick lookup from Message-IDs to the corresponding mail, no matter in which mailbox (actually Maildir) I've stored it.

Hence, I've looked for a mail indexing tool which is Mutt-compatible, handles Maildirs, and supports Message-ID queries. In Debian (where else should I look? g), I found three: mairix, nmzmail, maildir-utils (whose upstream name is actually "mu").

The first one I tried is mairix. Last upload in Debian was 2 years ago, it doesn't seem to be particularly buggy, and in popcon it has about 300 installations. The integration with mutt is good: searches can create a sort of virtual Maildir, whose files are symlink to the search results; with a couple of macros you can have Mutt easily open the result directory after query. The reason why I ditched mairix, is that it heavily suffer from the NIH syndrome. mairix is a self-contained executable with no external dependencies; that in principle being good, I found nowadays totally unreasonable to not use some third party full text search indexer, given that in the FOSS world we have several good ones. A good aspect of mairix, which is missing in the competitors, is the ability to index messages incrementally as they flow in, e.g. via procmail. Still, the problem of that is that it is difficult to pair that with the habit of moving messages across mailboxes. To that end, periodic re-indexing, or better batch index updates, offers a better work flow.

Then I tried nmzmail, which claims at is killer feature the "better integration with Mutt" wrt competitors. Actually, this is false, it has the same level of integration of the other (virtual maildirs with macros) and it doesn't even offer a ready to use set of macros in the doc! (yeah, they're easy to write, but given that you claim you're so well integrated with Mutt ...). The reason why I ditched nmzmail is that I didn't particularly like its choice of (external at least) indexer: Namazu. The index it created was very big (something like 250 Mb for about 400 Mb of Maildirs). Also, I had a bad feeling that the indexing was somehow Japanese-specific (the project having support for that language) and I found no way to disable support for that, which I obviously do not need.

Finally, I tried maildir-utils and I was finally happy. It is implemented on top of Sqlite3 (for mail metadata) and Xapian (for full-text indexing). There are some bugs, but Norbert, as the very reactive maintainer, have tackled down most of them now and I've been happy to help with various feedback. Integration with Mutt is granted by the following 2 macros:

    macro index <F8> "<shell-escape>rm -rf ~/.mu/results; mu-find -o l -l ~/.mu/results " "mu-find"
    macro index <F9> "<change-folder-readonly>~/.mu/results\n" "display mu-find results"

The first one query (you) for the search string, the second jumps to the results opening the virtual Maildir (which is useful, especially when you want to go back to the last query you did). I update the index every two hour with the following cron entry:

    31  */2 *  *   *     on_ac_power && mu-index -q

Beside a corner case bug which is close to solution, updating the index is very fast, usually a few seconds; index size is about 150 Mb. To conclude, my initial goal (message path lookup via Message-ID) is easily achieved as follows:

    $ mu-find -f P m:20091030112543.GA4230@usha.takhisis.invalid
    /home/zack/Maildir/INBOX/cur/1256902638_0.25702.usha,U=37563,FMD5=7e33429f656f1e6e9d79b29c3f82c57e:2,S

In addition to that, I've now gained all-maildirs full-text search from within Mutt

As a concluding remark, Enrico pointed me to Not much mail, but it seems to be (by authors' own admission) in early stage of development. Also, AFAIU it aims to be a MUA, whereas I'm perfectly fine with Mutt, I just need from time to time to integrate it with other components of my daily work flow.

Andreas Metzler: new tv

Andreas Metzler — 2009-10-31T09:59:47+00:00

I am still not used to find a printed copy of the (L)GPL in home-appliances. My new Philips 32PFL840H/12 did, thanks to the usage of e.g. libgphoto2.

Romain Beauxis: Liquidsoap 0.9.2 is out !

Toots — 2009-10-31T03:45:23+00:00

The savonet team is proud to announce the release of liquidsoap [1] 0.9.2. This release is a snapshot of upcoming features, but it also brings several important bugfixes. As a snapshot, it contains experimental and unpolished features, and also slightly breaks compatibility with previous 0.9.x versions.

The interesting features in this release are:

Switched to a custom implementation of the shout protocols. This allows in particular AAC+ output support, using either the external aacpluenc [2] binary or the native libaacplus [3] [4].
New scheduling algorithm for request-based sources which avoids queueing multiple songs at once.
Support for libre.fm [5].
Built-in support for extracting replay gain [6] metadata.
Supports for fallible outputs.
MANY bugfixes !

You can read a detailed changelog there [7].

This release is a milestone on our way to liquidsoap 1.0.0. Major changes are going to be merged into the main development branch now. We keep getting closer!

The Debian package for sid/unstable will soon be available too.

Additionally, a stable debian backport should be available anytime soon.

[1] http://savonet.sourceforge.net/

[2] http://teknoraver.net/software/mp4tools/

[3] http://tipok.org.ua/ru/taxonomy/term/36

[4] Output using libaacplus is still experimental and bug prone and both outputs suffer from the limitations of the same codebase, in particlar when streaming at low bitrate such as 32Kbps..

[5] http://libre.fm/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain

[7] http://savonet.rastageeks.org/brows...

John Goerzen: Where to go in Europe…

John Goerzen — 2009-10-31T02:21:35+00:00

I’ve wanted to visit Europe for years, and just haven’t quite made it. School, jobs, kids, all got in the way. Well, it looks like Terah and I may have a chance to spend a week there in March. We’re trying to figure out where to go.

There are two main reasons I want to go: history, and experiencing different cultures. I’m especially interested in old buildings: anything from castles to old country churches and everything in between.

Terah would really prefer to avoid too much adventure. Something that feels not too different would be her preference for our first trip. That means probably proper private hotel rooms or B&B.

We prefer to avoid having to rent cars when we travel, but would if we had to. We usually like to stay in one hotel for a whole trip, rather than a day in 5 different places.

Between us, we know English (of course), and a few bits of Spanish and German.

Right now, I think we’re leaning towards England or Wales. That can satisfy Terah’s “not too adventurous” criteria (yes, we do know that many Europeans speak English), while also my history criteria. Of all the cultures in Europe, though, I’m probably most familiar with Britain already.

But I have also long wanted to see other parts of Europe too.

I’m ready to stock up with Lonely Planet books in my (sadly US-only) Kindle, but would gladly accept any suggestions people have too.

DebConf team: DebConf10 dates and venue announced (Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz)

DebConf Organizers — 2009-10-31T00:29:00+00:00

The DebConf10 team just sent out a press release announcing the dates and venue for DebConf10 in New York City. Most of the readers of this blog already saw it through some other list, so I’ll just put the dates here and provide the full text plus other relevant info via links.

Dates: July 25-31, 2010 will be DebCamp and August 1-7, 2010 will be DebConf.
Press release text
First press coverage in response to our announcement
Main conference website
Visa info
Email address for visa help(read the visa info page before emailing)
Yes, thanks to Valessio Brito we already have “I’m going to DebConf10” buttons.

We hope to see many of you there!