English language planet

How to defeat the KKK with an open mind and laughter. Hillarious and brilliant.

In August 2007 I saw inbox zero and realised I really need to treat my email like this (basically: no procastrination, do stuff immediatly or put in proper todo lists, don't check mail all the time). Since about a month I manage to deal with my inbox so that I was down to 1-10 mails, which already was a huge improvement and since 10 days I'm finally down to zero - and this feels really good: When checking new mails I'm not constantly (several times a day) reminded of old stuff I still need to do (and constantly mark it 'unread' so that I don't forget, which also takes time) and so it's much faster and also a lot lighter on my brain and multitasking capabilities. It totally rocks my world and I cannot believe I've lived so long with so much email the old way... I get about 500 per day, lots of system mails but more from mailinglists and until a month I'd say I spent more than an hour on it in average, while now it's down to 30min, or less. Which IMO is acceptable for that amount of information and communication

If you are stuck with too many emails, watch that movie and just do it. Or do something else

With our contribution in the frame of the Helios project, the recently uploaded Mantis Debian package is back up-to-date (1.1.8), and includes again the SOAP interface.

More details in Mantis overview in the PTS.

Debian developer Kenshi Muto backported the latest 2.6.30 kernel plus firmware for Lenny. So if you have to deal with newer hardware and need the latest kernel, read his blog about it. You can also download the installer images from a French mirror, which could be faster because of better bandwidth. Thanks, Kenshi!

Heise Open Source and the H Open have news about a new benchmark for Linux desktops. You can read them in German or in English. I will have a look at them, and at the Phoronix Test Suite. We should make those a standard when comparing hard- and software IMHO. Thanks guys!

With a basic configuration, all system's mails, or almost are forwarded to the user "root". To read them, type "mail" is sufficient, as root. And to know where softwares send their mail(s), take a look at /etc/alias.

I think the reading of mails is not very pratical with the "mail" command, I looked for a solution, to know how to forward mails that root should get to an email of monitoring.

The tip is simple, it's necessary to change in /etc/alias this :

   root:user # (user can be something else)

To :

   root:your@mail.tld

Then, you need to do "newaliases" to update the aliases.db file.

Tip so pratical because from now you will be able to look out to the existing problems on your system (since mails are sent to the system when there is a problem on the system ) !

… well, at least on my machine

The goal is to be able to track remote bugs with bts-link even for your own list of (private) bugs that are not in debbugs (see also prevous post about this idea we work on in the Helios project).

Now, I have some bugs in Mantis, and I add a snippet like the following into one of its notes :
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
*** end bts-link-mantis ***


And starting from that point, bts-link is able to monitor the (remote) Debian bug it refers to, and notify people subscribed to the local Mantis bug.

When running and if the Debian bug status changes, it will add (via SOAP) another note with, for instance :

This is a note generated by bts-link :
remote status report for 0000029
* http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
* remote status changed: (?) -> pending
*** bts-link-mantis variables ***
Forwarded-To: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=528192
User-Tags: status-pending
*** end bts-link-mantis ***


The same principle would work with almost any bugtracker even if they don’t support forwarded-to tags or any similar remote bug tracking mechanism natively.

The code is here (git), for the curious ones.

EDIT 2009/07/03 : I announced this to the Mantis-dev list hoping there will be some feedback.

Yeah, I’m also going to the Debconf9 :

Actually, it will be my very first real Debconf as a contributor to Debian, even if I was around at the Debconf 0 and 1 in Bordeaux, which were held during the early editions of the RMLL/LSM.

And I’ll start the July conferences with the LSM/RMLL where I’ll chair a track on development (where Debian will be discussed, btw).

See you in Nantes and in Caceres, to discuss Helios, bts-link, UDD, bugtracking on the Semantic Web, forges, and other interesting matters.

Germany is now a state with internet censorship like China or Iran. Even worse, Germany is also no real democracy anmore, not even on paper. One main characteristic of a democracy is the seperation of powers into executive ("=police"), a legislature (="parlament" or whoever makes the laws), and a judiciary ("=courts and judges"). With the internet censorship law which has been passed this thursday, this seperation is no more: the police defines which pages must be censored (without anyone controlling them), these lists must to stay secret, and so there is no way to challenge them.



1984 was yesterdays fiction. This is 2009. Excuse me while I puke. Also excuse this brief blogpost (leaving out many many aspects), but there is already a lot of information on the net about this, eg. in English and German.

On the plus side, quite some people now have woken up and became politicaly active. The (electronic) petition against had the highest participation ever (over 130000 people signed), even higher than the one against increase of fuel prices. And that alone tells a lot.

It was quite telling (though not unexpected) that two hours after the law was passed the first request to extend its scope (to different type of content) was made. I'm sure it was the first in a long series to come. And all in the interest of public safety. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. I think I have heard that one before.

"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength", so true.

The videoteam is looking for someone (or two) who is willing and able to hack on Pentabarf and merge last years video controller code into the current codebase. Pentabarf is written in Ruby, additionally some, little SQL knowledge is needed. There is a test server, so you cannot really break things. The video controller is used to provide the videoteam with a nice workflow for scheduling roles for recording (who is operating the cameras, who the video-mixer, the audio mixer) and reviewing (set cut marks, rate quality and completeness of the recording) as well es scheduling of encodings and uploads. If you want to help out, you need to be able to dedicate some time in the upcoming four weeks as well as during ?DebCamp. During ?DebConf things will hopefully just work (Always the optimist... If you can help here, please join #debconf-video on OFTC.

Additionally we are looking for a crowd of helpers for operating the cameras and mixers as well as for reviewing. These jobs require a dedication of an hour or two (though we won't stop you if you work more) and can be done by basically anyone, even if you have zero experience in that area. That's how most^all of us started

We can even offer something in return, besides the thanks of the Debian community for making those video possible: 40 videoteam t-shirts will be given out on a "first registered, first come" base. Obviously registering is not really enough, you also need to turn up for the schedule you signed up for For now just add your name to the team members wiki page. Then, once the video controller is set up (and the talk schedule is available), add yourself in penta for the shifts you actually want to work.

Thank YOU already!

The other day, Romain shared his concerns about using Git for team-maintained packaging. His comment system is currently broken, so I wrote an e-mail reply, which I would like to share.

I agree with Romain that the design decision to not support subtree checkouts like SVN is not without problems. As opposed to a single SVN repo with components in subdirectories that you can individually check out, you might end up with a hundred Git repos, and the same change to all then requires one to iterate all 100.

I’d like to make the distinction between trivial changes (e.g. s/© 2008/&-2009/g) and those that might not be (e.g. Standards-Version, or something even more elaborate).

In case of the former, there’s no question, it can be painful to operate across a hundred repos. Tools like mr make that a bit easier, but it’s still far from optimal.

The latter, however — updating Standards-Version and adding the appropriate changelog entry — is not really comparable. Neither would be e.g. changing a file location in 100 different repos. In those cases, every single package needs manual intervention, and if only for quality reasons and testing. In this sense, I actually think that a single SVN checkout with all the subtrees and the possibility to easily commit the result of a recursive action is counter-productive.

On the other hand, I don’t say that I am pleased with the workflow Git (or any other DVCS for that matter) imposes. It’s sometimes quite painful, as Romain says. We are missing higher-level tools that allow for easier and more intuitive bulk operations. I think that they should be implemented outside of the VCS-tool though, true to the Unix principles. SVN integrates it all into a monolithic piece of software, and that often isn’t ideal either (think size and slowness, or backup weight, or chance of corruption, or granular access control, or the impossibility to properly track files across subtrees).

mr is a step in the right direction, and we need more tools along those lines. First, however, I think that people need to figure out how exactly to use DVCS for packaging, such that there is any chance of consolidating workflows across a larger number of packages; if everyone does it their own, slightly unique way, then that goal is inifinitely far. This is the reason I started vcs-pkg.org, and even though we’re still far from anywhere, I am quite pleased with what we’ve done so far.

If you’re at Debcamp or ?DebConf, maybe you could join the discussion.

Romain also mentioned that distributed VCS don’t allow for the same sort of centralisation as SVN does. I disagree: you can use Git in exactly that way, as a centralised repo from which packages are built. The nice advantage over SVN (one which svk tried to close) is the ability for everyone to easily branch/fork, or work offline.

Once you start down that path, it somehow inherently becomes everyone’s own responsibility to ensure that one’s changes end up in the central repository (where commit hooks might verify the build-ability, ensure that the test suite still passes, or run simple format/consistency checks).

This sort of workflow is very different from the one with a self-appointed benevolent dictator at the top, who (like Linus, or Junio for Git) sometimes forget to include patches due to overflooding. The question is really: Given that you need some sort of centralised release coordination, do you want a human or a repo to be the central entity (and single point of failure)?

I really prefer the repo, since that places the sole responsibility on the leafs, on the contributors, who need to see their code through all the way.

It’s a whole lot more rewarding to commit/push, get a rejection, pull, merge, commit/push, and be done, rather than to send a patch to upstream, wait, reping, notice that it’s not in in the new release, ask, ping, change, reping, get angry, ping, hope, wait, ping, wonder why the heck you are still doing this, write angry email but don’t send it, reping, ask, and finally notice that it’s been accepted after all.

NP: Deep Purple: Made in Japan

For a while I’ve configured Xinerama to be able to properly use the two video outputs on my laptop (the standard internal laptop screen and the VGA output for video projector). I can then switch to a mode with a wide virtual desktop split on two monitors which is 2 times 1280×1024 wide, and being able to slide windows from one to the other. I’m using that mode when making presentations on a projector.

Since OOo 3.0 there has been a new feature allowing to use the two “monitors” / outputs to project something different for the audience and for the presenter (Slide show | Slide show Settings | Mutliple Monitors).
And it has even been recently improved, in offering some nice features for the presenter (apparently called “Sun Presenter Console“), like a display of the notes or thumbnails of all slides, of the next slide, or of the time of presentation, all appearing only on monitor 1 (the presenter’s screen) while the audience will only see the traditional slide in fullscreen. Excellent to know what the next slide will be and prepare oral transitions. Definitely a must have extension (available in the openoffice.org-presenter-console Debian package in testing).

Still there’s one issue with this setup if you want to quit the presentation and show stuff to the audience, for instance in a browser : the browser will be on your presenter’s monitor and you’d have to slide it to the other display, but then you’d have to use it only on the other display, which is usually in your back : no mirroring of such apps to the external projector in an easy way.
But then, there’s a workaround, in using x11vnc to export the presenter’s part of the desktop so that you can launch a vnc viewer on the audience’s part, which will mirror the other one : then you’ve got best of both xinerama and OOo to display separate views on the different monitors, and still be able to replicate some elements from the presenter’s desktop to allow the audience to view it.

Definitely great for conferences, lectures, and all public presentations with a laptop and a beamer. You’ll love it

What’s this:

1. proof, that Microsoft still rulez the browser market?
2. a pathetic admission that they lost?
3. an advertising about standards-noncompliance?

Poor sods. Let’s give them a hand for trying.

Go Firefox, and the other free browsers out there.

(By way of my awesome girlfriend, and thanks to Adeodato Simó for the screenshot after the clowns appear to have taken the original page down.)

NP: Mono: You Are There

Since some years I've been stating on occasions, that I consider myself dead on the day I stop learning.

It just occurred to me that there is a less morbid way to express this: understanding and learning are like security, there is no final state to achieve, those are ongoing processes which shall never stop. Once they stop, they basically fail. Luckily the fix is almost easy: restart the processes

This morning I have been running in Cáceres for the first time, yay! Tomorrow I will have been running every day for three weeks now, with only 3 days missed: two I had fever and yesterday I was lazy and slept way too long for any sensible running. Running is only sensible here+now before 9am, even after sunset it stays too hot for hours (and it's not summer yet) and also it's just no fun to go running after a hot day.

So in a week I should know the city basics better than I do now, there is no big park close anyway, so I'm just running on the streets. Also Anto is busy showing me interesting places more hidden, which obviously really helps and is fun too.

In related news, I had my second longer conversation (>20min) in spanish this saturday. I still make a mistake per every second word or so, at least (but not one per word..!), but hey, I'm finally talking in spanish! And isn't "bad spanish" the second most spoken language in the world anyway?!

Tonight there will be another ?DebCon9 localteam IRC meeting and some of these days we will visit the venue again, this time looking for and arranging more detailed stuff, like the serverroom location, basic network and video setup, accessible accommodation details, etc.. And there are many more details being arranged abroad (eg T-shirts and the schedule..) by a still growing and already great team and so by now I finally started to really look forward to ?DebConf9...!

http://libresoft.es/Members/jgb/blog/the-evolution-of-debian describes a very interesting paper published by Jesus M. Gonzales-Barahona et al. about the evolution of Debian between 2.2 and 4.0 : “Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation”.

Can’t wait until it’s updated for inclusion of figures relating to 5.0 also

Most striking figure : Debian doubles in size every 2 years.

Must read.

In two weeks, the eighth „Gulasch-Programmier-Nacht“ will be held in Karlsruhe, a yearly geek event  by the Entropia e.V, which is the local CCC club. It will, as usually, offer a lot of interesting talks and events. One of my personal highlights have always been the programming games: Games, where you write your own code to compete against others, while the playing field is projected in the hacking area. The last few years, dividuum has done a great job providing these (as regular readers of my blog might remember).

This year, I’m trying to follow in his footsteps and will provide the programming game, called „L-seed“. This blog post is an introduction (and a call for contribution, at the bottom of the post

The idea

The participants will write code (the „genome“) that describes how plants (the biological type, not the industrial) will grow. The plants will grow simultaneously on the screen (the „garden“), will compete for light and will multiply. The players can not change the code of a growing plant, but they do have the chance to update their code for the next generation – when a plant drops a seed, it will run the newest code. All in all, the game aims to be slowly paced and relaxing, something to just watch for a while and something that does not need constant attention by the players. The score is based on the total amount of biomass produced, but I expect (and hope) that some players will aim for the most beautiful or weirdest shapes.

The plant code

In contrast to the previous years, this year’s game will not allow player to use a full-fledged Turing-complete programming language, but a rather minimalistic rule based language to describe the plant’s growth. Especially, it will be hard to coordinate different branches of the same plant: Information mostly flows from the leaves to the root, and not the other direction.

The simplest plant is based on this code:

// This is the trivial plant, which just grows and grows

RULE "Very simple Rule"

GROW BY 1

You can see that each rule has a name (which is purely informational), and an action which tells the current branch to, well, grow by one. The syntax allows for Java-style comments, whitespace and newlines are insignificant and the reserved words are case-insensitive. The result will be a plant that just grows straight up, for ever and ever. A more complex rule might be this:

RULE "Start"

WHEN Length <= 0

GROW BY 1

SET TAG = "Root1"



RULE "Story 1"

WHEN TAG = "Root1"

// No Percentage means 100%

BRANCH ANGLE = 70°, LENGTH = 2, Tag = ""

       ANGLE = -70°, LENGTH = 2, Tag = ""

       ANGLE = 0°, LENGTH = 1, TAG = "Root2"

SET TAG = ""



RULE "Story 2"

WHEN TAG = "Root2"

BRANCH AT 100% ANGLE = 70°, LENGTH = 1.5, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = -70°, LENGTH = 1.5, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = 0°, LENGTH = 1, TAG = "Root3"

SET TAG = ""



RULE "Story 3"

WHEN TAG = "Root3"

BRANCH AT 100% ANGLE = 70°, LENGTH = 1, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = -70°, LENGTH = 1, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = 0°, LENGTH = 1, TAG = "Root4"

SET TAG = ""



RULE "Story 4"

WHEN TAG = "Root4"

BRANCH AT 100% ANGLE = 70°, LENGTH = 0.5, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = -70°, LENGTH = 0.5, Tag = ""

               ANGLE = 0°, LENGTH = 0.5, Tag = "Tip"

SET TAG = ""



RULE "Star"

WHEN TAG = "Tip"

Blossom

I added a picture with the resulting tree. The yellow blob at the top is a not-yet-polished rendering of a blossom. At the right, there is already the first offspring of the plant. One thing to keep in mind while writing a genome is that rules are applied to single branches, and not the whole plant. The program will, for each branch individually, check which rules apply and choose one.  I’ll skip a detailed description of the syntax here, eventually you will find proper documentation on the entropia wiki page. You can find more examples in the source repository.

The gameplay

The players will register at a website providing the usual CRUD functionality for their code, with integrated syntax checking. They can have more than one code at the same time, but only one can be marked as „active.“ The program actually serving the projector will regularly fetch the active code and run a around (called „season“) of the game. Whenever a new seed grows, the program will get the possibly updated active code of that user and use that. A season will probably last for a fixed amount of time, and at the end the total biomass accumulated by each player is added up and written back to the database.

The game code

You can fetch the source code from my git repository and browse the haddock documentation. Unsurprisingly, it is written in Haskell. To compile it yourself, you will need the GHC Haskell compiler, parsec version 3 and for the visualization the gtk2hs package, all of which are packaged in Debian unstable. The main.hs is the interesting program. You pass it one or more plants as an argument, and it will start the simulation. If it’s too slow for test runs, then reduce the dayLength variable in Lseed/Constants.hs. If you have trouble getting it to run, just talk to me.

The call for help

As you can see in the picture above, the graphical output is not very aesthetic. I am no artist, and I don’t pretend to be one. So, if you think you have the right touch, maybe know OpenGL and a bit of Haskell, I’d be very grateful if you make it look better. The UI interface is quite simple: You need to have a module that returns an Observer value, which contains a few callbacks for various situations. The code in Lseed/Renderer/Cairo.hs can of course be used as a guideline. I’m suggesting OpenGL because my code is not only ugly, it is also too slow very quickly. If you need any help, just contact me by mail or jabber.

I’m also interested in comments about the game balance, and the expressiveness of the programming language. If you play around with the code and discover that there are missing features in the language, or that your plants grow too fast or too slow, or when you discover bugs, please also tell me.

Thanks

L-seed is based on an old idea of mine, advanced together with Cupe, Sven Hecht is programming the web interface, and Lay is testing the game and bugs me about it to keep the motivation going.

Update: I uploaded the package to hackage, to encourage contributions.

More than three years ago, someone unidentified created Wikipedia page about me. The author appears phony, and I have an inkling of who he is, but I never received confirmation.

When I found out about the article a while later, I was flattered and excited. I couldn’t help but edit it, not knowing then (but well understanding now) that that was considered to be a violation of the Wikipedia policy. I wasn’t really familiar with Wikipedia editing policies at the time, and I disagree with some of them now that I’ve read up a bit, but now I am in the situation of being accused of conflict of interest, when my motivation was to enhance the content.

I won’t deny that I was also proud to have a page on Wikipedia.

A year later, my Debian colleage Josip Rodin stumbled over the article and questioned its notability, and I started to investigate the issue. I’ve talked to Josip and several other people I know about this, and went ahead to change the article in ways to centre its notability around my Debian book, which by then had sold over 20’000 times. That seemed to settle the issue.

Over the course of the next two years, several changes were made to the article, some by myself, but most by other people. Admittedly, the article grew more and more biographical and included more and more information about my involvement in Free software, as well as my research.

In January 2009, a user suggested that my article be merged with the article about my book. A brief discussion ensued, in which I ended up being the “lone dissenter” against two of the content police. My main argument was:

I don’t see a point in merging a person with a book; what is the benefit? It is not like Wikipedia has to save paper, and having separate, interconnected pages rather than single monolithic ones is the spirit of the Web. Notability also comes from my research (which is about to be completed) and work on open-source software.

Again, I can clearly see the conflict of interest, because I obviously view myself as much more important than anything else in the Wikipedia-Universe.

Three weeks later, one of the two policemen called it consensus, because my arguments were considered invalid due to aforementioned conflict of interest.

Around that time, I had the chance to attend LCA in Hobart, where I spoke to several people about the issue, including Angela Beesley, who had in the past worked for the Wikimedia Foundation on editing content and setting policy. I learnt that Wikipedia contributors are split between three camps: Deletionists, inclusionists, and those who don’t care.

Since it was pretty obvious that I was dealing with two people of the deletionist camp, I took this information to the discussion and offered to invite those with whom I had spoken to give their input, and to balance out other instances of conflict of interest in this matter. Nothing came back, and I put the issue on the backburner.

A few days ago, my article was redirected to my book’s article, which I continue to oppose. It seems that the merging policeman is not ready for further discussion, and now I am unsure how to move on.

• I would like to keep the article.
• I do not think merging a person and a book make sense, especially since we’re not saving any paper. I think that such a change diminishes the worth of the online encyclopedia and goes against the spirit of the Web.
• I do not want my name to be redirected to my book’s article; if my article cannot stand, then my name needs to be removed.
• If Wikipedia’s content policy is truly such that my article cannot stand by itself, then I wonder what should happen to many other articles, e.g. in the category of Free software programmers.

I would appreciate if you would email me with any advice.

NP: Tunng: Comments of the Inner Chorus

Its been a while since I’ve done a good hack article. so again I’m back onto my favourite topic of 3G modems. Thanks to the generous promotions at 3dongles4free I’ve been able to pickup a new Three dongle for next to nothing. As I’ve already got my E160G I didn’t really need this to be on the Three network.

After a quick search around and a few suggestions from existing mailing lists I’ve found out that a hacked firmware exists and these cheap and cheerful dongles can be flashed to allow any SIM card to be used. This should be a simple job of updating the software and using the new SIM card.

First of all, grab the software pack from Rapidshare, due to the questionable nature of this copy of the firmware no one has been willing to host it on their own hosting, and I’ll keep to that idea. Extract the files from the RAR and you should have a firmware upgrade, and a installation folder for the connection software. As the existing Three connection software is very limited, the software package includes the Telstra version which allows you to define your own settings.

Before you attempt the software upgrade, you need to remove any existing Three software, install the Telstra version and remove your SIM card from the dongle, then simply plug it in and run the firmware upgrade. This process will take around 15-25 minutes and once it’s done it’ll give you a prompt. During the upgrade do not power off your PC or remove the dongle from the USB socket. This will brick your dongle rendering it completely useless.

Now, put in your non-Three SIM card and plug it back into your PC, the Telstra software should start-up and try detect the device, you need to configure the software for your provider’s APN settings, but the PDF document included with the software package will give you all the details you need.

Remember, I take no responsibility for people bricking their equipment, you have been warned.

First off: this is no ad, nor a bying recommendation. In fact, I couldn’t really recommend this card. Not for Unix/Linux, and even more so not for Windows.

Why? Or, rather, why not?

Well, to make it short: the card actually does run under Linux. It has a Broadcom 4318 chip set, so with the usual “aptitude install b43-fwcutter” you can download the latest (proprietary) firmware, cut out the relevant parts, and store this in /lib/firmware; all more or less automagically, like we are used to it.

And then the card will start. And give you headaches.

First, (re-) authentication with an access point is flaky, to say the least. Sometimes these cards won’t associate at all, even when less than 2-3 feet away from your AP (tested with a Fritz!Box 7170 and a Linksys WRT-54g with ?OpenWrt).

Second, with a ping check to your AP, it will give you something between 5% and 25% of dropped packets, some also reported duplicates.

But there’s help.

Read  Linux Wireless about the b43 and b43legacy. And read the bcm43xx-dev mailing list archive. Browse April 2008, or go directly to Stefaniks entry, who explains the SPROM chip, and how Asus managed to get this one wrong.

You’ll need git, and at least build-essential, and then you can improve the performance of these cards. Mine (on 64 bit Asus/Nvidia hardware) went from 25% dropped packets to something like <5%; Mitchie’s (on 32 bit Intel) from something like 6% to 3% or so. Still not perfect, but lots better, especially the authentication issues.

Thanks, kernel & driver hackers - you guys are awesome.

And what are these cards good for? Well, if you don’t like hardware hacking and tweaking, then there’s still the fact that these come with both a normal and a low profile bracket, and they also do a great job listening, e.g. with kismet and the like.

Not yet done with those, but getting closer…

I’ve just delivered our presentation about the use of Semantic Web techniques and on some of the tools we’re interested in at the moment for our work on HELIOS, at the WOPDASD 2009 workshop.

Here are the slides :

And here’s the position paper (PDF) we had submitted.