At the moment, on my desktop, I have all my regular work, plus I've got a qemu-based ARM system (slowly) building a package I need to test, as well as a kvm-based amd64 system running pretty fast to test a patch to parted. Now, I'm well aware that emulation isn't an alternative to testing on real hardware all the time, but having one real machine on the desk beats having three, for most purposes.

So, everyone involved in qemu and kvm the kick-arse programs they are today: thankyou, from one happy hacker.

I’ve prepared a set of experimental packages of 1.5.5. They seem to be working fine, and are ready for some testing from brave users.

I’m not going to upload them soon to Debian experimental, since I want to be able to use that if for some reason I need testing of an urgent 1.4 update before the Lenny release.

Meanwhile, take a look at http://www.nul-unu.com/quien/rodrigo/debian/liferea/

There are source and amd64 binary packages. I’ll try to get access to some i386 machine to compile them there. One of these days

I just stumbled upon Chronical Recorder.

I’ve been waiting for something like this a long while. How did I miss it getting released?! Thanks Novell!

I want cookies.

A lazy morning again, so you'll enjoy another short list of changes in the upcoming awesome 3.1 (first one is still here):

• Text can now be spread across multiple lines, using pango ability to wrap text;
• New full screen layout;
• awful.clients.swap.bydirection function;
• Images get crop_and_scale() method;
• New module: invaders, a space invader game;
• New module: naughty, notification module (like GNOME's notification-daemon);
• More hooks: "clients" for client list changes, "tags" for tag list changes and "tagged" for client's tag list changes;
• Wiboxes's widgets can now be composed of arrays of arrays, specifying a DAG structure, unless of a simple array. A reference is kept to it so it can be retrieved later. Any array can be modified with awesome being notified using a proxy table system.
• Taglist and tasklist widgets are gone from core and are now written in Lua, using the above system.

Not too much changes, I've spent something like a week thinking and writing the 2 last points. I've now a bunch of things to finish and I think we'll go for a RC release in something like a couple of weeks.

The unofficial rc bug thingy currently lists:

• 217 rc Bugs affecting the next stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny:
  • 87 Bugs of them, fixed in the unstable branch Sid
  • 130 Bugs open in both, Lenny and Sid of these:
    • 5 marked as pending
    • 18 have already a patch
    • 11 have been reported multiple times

Ignoring bugs, which are marked pending, have a patch, have been reported multiple times or concern packages in contrib or non-free, that leaves 95 release critical bugs.

Sadly that's not that well compared to the numbers from last week. But thanks for everyone helping!

However 49 of them have been reported more than 30 days ago; maybe they are quite complicated, so please pay special attention to them.

This will be my last post on the topic of tscreen for at least a couple of days. People who want to follow tscreen work know where to get it.

Anyway this release exposes the notion of layouts - they allow you to save and restore window positions. i.e. If you split your window, detach and then reattach it will be back in the layout you had before!

Simply add "layout new default" to your ~/.tscreenrc file, and have fun.

The layout primitive allows:

• layout [attach|autosave|next|new|number|prev|remove|save|select|show|title]"

Experimentation is fun, people!

I've added a couple of patches from other people which I found on the screen-devel mailing list:

• screen supports -F flag to find windows.
• windows may be hidden - though window groups are the official solution

Anyway sources and Debian packages for Etch, Lenny, & Sid are available in both i386 and AMD64 flavours.

Update: Fixed links to patches, and added if primitive.

ObFilm: 300.

Am I the only person who couldn’t stand reading Gödel, Escher, Bach? I am reading so much praise about it, I sometimes wonder if they sold me the wrong book…

I've ordered my plane tickets -- I'm going to RIPE 57 next week to give a talk called “Global IPv6 statistics: Measuring the current state of IPv6 for ordinary users”, based on a project I did part-time at work for the last few months. (There's some surprises in the data, so I hope it should be interesting for those who care about rolling out IPv6 until the IPv4 bit-bucket dries up.) If any of you should be there, I'd be happy to meet up :-)

Fun stuff I just stumbled over: a personal/human airbag from Japan, supposedly meant for elderly people who might fall and injure themselves.

Watch a video of the airbag in action on Youtube (no need for crappy Flash player, you can use youtube-dl for instance). Such a device could be a lot of fun I imagine; make it cheap enough and lots of people will buy it just for fun falling-on-your-back experiments :-)

Today we finally switched packages.debian.org over to it’s new host, which was long overdue (and about most of that time it was waiting on me :( ).

It did run on it’s old machine for some time, but thanks to the load it really needed an upgrade.

Thankfully 1&1 agreed to sponsor a bigger machine, and here we are with it. Its really nice - cron is running and updating, but you don’t notice it at all, it responds hell fast via the web. Yay. Finally. :)

Now, while I am at it, a few statistics. Everyone loves statistics, right? :) This year packages.debian.org had 5777672 unique visitors creating a total of 122314763 hits, and this excludes bots. Double the numbers if you want to know what bots do (like crawlers from search engines). Appearently the most active times are between 0800 and 2100 UTC.

Limiting our view to this month, the most active bot in terms of hits is MSNBot, most traffic goes to GoogleBot (appears that 30% less hits means 66% more traffic. Bad Google, what do they miss? :) ). Only 49.9% of packages.debian.org visitors do use (or tell their browser to identify with) Linux, 36.2% have Windows, followed by unknown at 10.5% and Macintosh at 2.9%. 41.9% tell us they use Firefox, while only 19.9% admit to use IE, another 19.9% goes to Mozilla, while Konqueror only has 4.9%, Opera 4.5%, “Debian Apt” 2.2% and Galeon 0.2%. It seems that most of our users directly get to packages.debian.org, 47.7% of the accesses do not have a referer header. Search engines aren’t that great, only 23.5% of the accesses seem to come via one of them, while 28.6% are links from various sites. Mostly www.debian.org and some otherwise very related ones.

And finally, mail. As packages.debian.org also does forward mail, lets see what we had there. In the last 12 months we rejected 5367162 mails and forwarded 48784 ones (which means some 97k outgoing mails, as they always get forwarded to two addresses).

Comments: 2

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Umm, wow. So we extended the trip a week longer than expected to accommodate the hospitalisation, and wound up being able to finalise the house inspection, some banking, and get started on the insurance.

All of which means that the three of us have possession of our new place on December 1st!! Yay! We have to figure out if, tax-wise, a December move is the right thing for us, but I suspect it will be. The old timeframes aren't so important now, I guess. Moving still feels like the right thing to do.

The hospital bills came to about $10k for 3 days in the hospital, and one follow-up emergency visit. Our US insurance will cover this with no problem.

Thanks for all the well-wishes and support. I don't know how to reply to it in a meaningful way. Words suck and I wish I could hug you all in person. It's such a rollercoaster to have bought a place at the same time and be so excited by it.

When we have our move date, we'll probably have a wine and fruit party or something. =)

I attended Openmind last week, an interesting conference organized by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) to bring together open source professionals, community members and academics in Finland. In the session about business aspects of open source, in which I gave a talk about FOSS Governance, Nina Helander and Mikko Rönkkö presented the preliminary results of the National Software Industry Survey 2008.

I found the results incredibly interesting. In particular, they found that 75% of responding firms use open source software in some way. This figure is up from approximately 13% in the year 2000, which is a major increase in just a few years. The study also found that that there was no statistically significant difference of company size when it came to the use of open source. Finally, companies that have open source components in their offering rate themselves as more innovative.

Roberto Galoppini, who moderated the session, commented that Finland is where Gartner predicted that companies would be in 3 years. Indeed, I think everyone in the room was pleasantly surprised by the amazing numbers from the survey. We should not forget that the study was with software companies and that the use of open source will certainly be lower in other industries, but nevertheless the study shows that Finland is a leading country when it comes to the adoption of FOSS.

(Originally published on FOSSBazaar)

A busy few hours last night hacking at tscreen, and again today.

I'm now very pleased with the functional aliases:

#
#  Caption toggle
#
alias caption_off  eval "caption splitonly"
alias caption_on   eval "caption always"

#
#  Status toggle
#
alias status_off   eval "hardstatus ignore"
alias status_on    eval "hardstatus alwayslastline"

#
#  Disable both caption and status, and show a message.
#
alias fullscreen   eval "status_off" "caption_off" "echo 'fullscreen'"
alias captioned    eval "status_on"  "caption_on"  "echo 'captioned' "

#
#  Bind these functions to keys
#
bind f eval fullscreen
bind F eval captioned

I've made binary & source packages of a slightly earlier version of the code available for Etch and Sid - both AMD64 - and I'll release another update once I can drop the need for that eval usage in the "bind" and add TAB completion for aliases.

ObQuote: Passage To India

I've been helping Amos Jeffries with a little testing in the last week to help nail some IPv6 bugginess preparatory to the upcoming 3.1 release of squid. In the process of that I've built some Squid3 packages with IPv6 support enabled from current HEAD.

Get 'em while they're hot.

Note that these are in a 'works for me' state. They have been built on Lenny, and I have them running on both Lenny and Sid. I haven't put them somewhere you could apt-get them from because you should be paying attention if you're going to use them!

PS. If you can't click through to Amos' site it's because you're using IPv6 and the EveryDNS servers are continuing to serve up old data for his domain. Sigh.

I might regret this later, but until I recant:

• tscreen: Terminal Screen

This features several changes already, and a few more are pending.

ObFilm: Aliens

I mostly stayed under a rock during the last weeks: exams season, some assingments plus one week of much needed [VAC]; ironically in the DebConf 8 secondary hotel.

I'm in a very interesting course on operating systems' programming, it's a new optative course, and has generated a lot of expectatives: most of the systems-oriented undergrads in the computer science career are attending. The downside is that it's *intensive*: we're expected to build from scratch a minimal operating system, starting from the bootloader. So far my group has already done a bootloader that understands FAT, and the entry point for the OS, in which the basic stuff is setup: gate A20, interruptions, protected mode, GDT, etc.

Also, each group is required to do a presentation of some systems research topic, and we choose Plan 9 from Bell Labs, that mostly unknown OS that was meant to be a better UNIX, but never gained popularity. So I spent many days playing with it, trying to grok quickly what it was about, and creating a small network of virtual hosts (in Qemu) that could show how it all fit togheter.

Plan 9 has all the credentials: created in the same lab as UNIX, designed by the same people, which already learned from past mistakes. It was started in the late eighties, and it really feels like what the future was meant to be. Sadly, we're just starting to see a few of it's revolutionary ideas being applied to other systems: UTF-8, /proc, unionfs, fuse, clone(2), separate namespaces; all of these follow concepts first created in Plan 9, UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson "in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992", in Rob Pike's words.

Not happy enough with reworking all the core concepts, they also recreated the visual environment. I have to admit, the user-facing ideas are so foreign that I still don't feel very comfortable using it. Surprisingly, the desktop is very mice-centric, it cannot be used at all without the mouse, and it's bothersome with less than three buttons. Anyway, the underlying workings are so attractive, that I cannot stop from wondering if a hybrid system could be built (Debian/kPlan9 anyone?).

To illustrate, I'll reproduce here the same example that I showed yesterday and left some jaws hanging. I had booted a CPU server and a diskless terminal, called cpu-0 and term-0 respectively. This is a screenshot taken in the terminal, which is basically a telnet to my Debian box:

Nothing spectacular here, except for the weird syntax, it was seen like this in the Debian box:

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt | grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.30:39879         ESTABLISHED

But here comes the fun, I ran an import command, which is more or less a remote filesystem mount, with which I mount the remote machine's /net in the local namespace. It has to be noted that the /net path is by convention the entry point to anything network related, including all the networking API.

And the wornderful thing is that this works as it should (note the remote address):

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt | grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.10:38158         ESTABLISHED

So, what happened? telnet wanted to create a TCP connection, and that is accomplished opening /net/tcp/clone, but then it found the imported filesystem. The open(2) request was then transferred to the remote machine, and there the networking code did the actual TCP/IP dance.

Things like this make you realise that maybe the BSD sockets API is not that nice an abstraction; in Plan 9 there are no BSD sockets, it's only implemented in the POSIX compatibility libraries, which aren't used by any of the core tools. Neither there exists any threads support, you just call rfork(2) setting the appropiate flags, exactly what glibc does under the covers nowadays. They also decided to live without select(2) or poll(2), there are no non-blocking calls. If you want non-blocking, you rfork(). The only syncronisation primitive is rendezvous(2), and everything else is built on that.

At this point, it should not surprise you that to kill a process you can type echo kill > /proc/$pid/ctl; and that there's no need for an equivalent to Xnest, as rio (the graphical interface) provides a modified /dev, you just type rio inside a window and there you go.

Yes, I'm hooked. If you're interested, I compiled many links here (some Spanish there, but all the content is in English), as one of the weakest points in Plan 9 is the unorganised and missing documentation.

Tags: Plan9, Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Facu

Thanks to the heroic work of Olav and Thomas, Tasks (along with Contacts and Dates) is now in GNOME SVN. Translators, feel free to do your thing. Oh, and would it be possible to get Tasks added to Damned Lies?

I haven’t been blogging this election at all recently — there are enough folks out there saying just about everything that should be said (and lots that shouldn’t), but I couldn’t let this little tidbit slip by without mention.Via the TaxProf blog:

• Politico and Bloomberg report that the State of Ohio has a $1,182.92 tax lien against Joe the Plumber for back income taxes.
• The Associated Press reports that Joe the Plumber lacks a plumbing license.

Also, the Trademark Blog notes the flurry of related domain name registrations.

Technorati Tags: Joe the Plumber, Obama, McCain, Politics, Election

Learnt today: Don’t use printf() debugging within 3D applications. At least, not with \n. Some figures follow.

First case

while (!viewer.done ())
{
  viewer.frame ();
  printf(".");
  /* … */
}

Gives roughly 75 FPS.

Second case

while (!viewer.done ())
{
  viewer.frame ();
  printf(".\n");
  /* … */
}

Now gives roughly 35 FPS.

What‽

Yes, >50% performance hit due to newlines.

By the way, the OpenSceneGraph 3D framework is very pleasant to work with, and pretty well documented. Could almost make coding in C++ enjoyable. Almost.

I have released fourth beta of Adept today. For the unaware, Adept is an APT front-end for KDE: it lets you install, remove, upgrade software and such your Debian and Kubuntu boxes (and maybe on some other Debian derivatives, too).

Changes since Beta 2

Since I have done beta 3 somewhat in a hurry, I have regressed the installer component badly — to point of complete unusability. However un-sound software engineering practice, the deep freeze for Kubuntu Intrepid hits today, so I have released beta 4 in rapid succession. Other than the regression fix, I have mostly reworked the paging implementation in the installer — however, the report of complete installer rewrite (hi Jonathan) is somewhat exaggerated. Sadly, the KPageWidget we have been using before turns out to be completely unsuitable for the job, so a quick rewrite probably fixed more issues than it caused (and this seems to be confirmed by early testing feedback).

Moreover, this beta got a bunch of improvements to the search, including package name hits, a set of cosmetic improvements (button icons, nicer sidebar, etc.) and a button to run software-properties-kde from the Sources tab (works on Intrepid, but sadly breaks on Debian for now… will fix later. Need time, need sleep.)

Where to get

I have prepared binary packages. These should be now part of Debian Sid (unstable) and also of Kubuntu Intrepid. You should be able to get the new version from your distribution:

apt-get install adept

Again, as with beta 2, there is no Hardy backport, since my time is tight. If anyone is willing to do a backport please drop me a note: I will gladly publish installation instructions.

Heroes of Beta 4

• Jonathan Thomas (JontheEchidna) — quite a bit of stuff (and bug sorting, arr!)
• Jonathan Riddell — another bunch of bits
• Harald Sitter (apachelogger) — improved icon choices
• Michael Casadevall — for manpage, which accidentally didn’t get included in the package, only in the source — I’ll try to remember to fix that for beta 5

Jobs for Beta 5, RC and Final

Mostly just testing and reporting bugs. I currently plan a beta 5 with a few fixes that have started accumulating since beta 4 already (mostly one-liner fixes with minimal risk of regressions). After that, an RC is in order and a final release (finally…).

Notifier is not included. Kubuntu has an independent sort of notifier now, I believe. Maybe I’ll find time to reconcile it in 3.1 or so.

Moreover, I assume that a beta 4 or a very minorly patched beta 4 will become part of Kubuntu Intrepid — there should be no major roadblocks left, so I hope everything will bode well for Intrepid. I assume that whatever becomes 3.0 final will be eventually included in Intrepid updates. And then, plans should be set forth for 3.1…

Known issues

The about dialog still says beta 2. Bummer. Please try to note in your reports that this is actually a beta 4 that you are using. I’ll make sure beta 5 fixes that — but it might be another week till then, or so. The Intrepid version should have that fixed, thanks to Jonathan Thomas (again).

Screen Fork?

There are times when I think of forking. Mostly sanity returns very quickly, though

Still GNU Screen is one program that I use almost constantly, and it seems to work at a glacial pace.

The Debian package has a lot of open bugs against it. Some trivial, some annoying, and some with patches.

Making the program GNU/Linux only would simplify a lot of things. But then again would that be a legitimate reason to fork it?

Me? I'd just like to see some additional primitives.

More QPSMTPD

I've come up with a nice simple qpsmtpd plugin to do spamgourmet-like setup.

This means I can have email addresses:

• steve.3.count@steve.org.uk
  • Allows only three mails to this address.
• steve.date.20-10-2008@steve.org.uk
  • Allows only mail to be sent here prior to Oct 20th.

Plugin code will be in the usual place in the next day or two..

ObFilm: xXx

It looks like the jack reporting API for ALSA which just got merged into the mainline kernel for inclusion in 2.6.28 already has its first user - code from Matthew Ranostay supporting the jack detection in Sigmatel HDA codecs was just queued for merge in the next merge window. Admittedly, the jack reporting API has been available in ALSA git since July but it does look like it is just impressively fast adoption after the mainline merge.

Still, a long way to go before user space can start to rely on knowing if things are plugged in or not.

I can't believe that Andrew Pollock didn't go with What a load of Pollocks for his recent blog post. I'm most disappointed.

Making sure you get valid data from users is a constant headache. E-mail addresses just happen to be a particular piece of data that causes me pain and suffering at the day job, because when people put bad e-mail addresses into web apps we host, my mail queues clog up, and that makes me a sad and slightly (more) irritated sysadmin.

Since I work for a Rails hosting shop, and I like programming in Ruby, I got all industrious this weekend and put together EmailAddressValidator, a ruby class to validate an e-mail address via a regex or (optionally) DNS lookups (to make sure something might accept mail for the domain) and making (most of) a delivery attempt to an MX for the domain. It's not foolproof, but it'll stop my mailqueues from getting clogged with a fair percentage of the stuff that gives me ulcers. The fun part now is getting the customer base to (a) use the class at all, and (b) run it over their existing user address lists.

As an aside, if someone wanted to setup an SMTP server configured for a catchall on gmial.com, I think he or she would have a lot of juicy stuff in very short order.

For part of the 32 hours I spent inside a plane crossing the Atlantic, I watched Recount.

I wanted Sarah to see it as well, so we got it with NetFlix and watched it tonight.

I have no idea how factually accurate the movie is, but I'll assume all of the bits that were on the public record were vaguely correct. I'll assume the chad factor with the ballots was correct. The movie portrayed the US electoral system as a complete and utter shambles. The thing I found most striking was that the recounts keep having deadlines that weren't met, and the whole recount got discarded as a result. The process seemed incredibly flawed.

It got me wondering how the Australian vote counting goes, given it's completely manual. I might have to volunteer as a scrutineer when we wind up back in Canberra.

I highly recommend watching this movie if you can get your hands on it.

I got a voicemail message at home from UPS for a Christopher Pollock. I've previously received some mail for him as well, so I went searching, and it turns out that he lives elsewhere in my apartment complex.

Not long after we moved to the US, we were picking up a pizza from Pizza Hut, and someone else was also picking up a pizza for "Pollock". It seems my last name is more common than I thought.

It was complicated getting this done, but finally backports for 4.1.2 are available at kde4.debian.net. Thanks to the help of Aleix Pol and his Mac Mini, there are available packages for PowerPC now.

As well, I have uploaded a backport of Qt 4.4.3 (*), for AMD64, i386 and PowerPC. If you are using KDE 4.1.x, you definitively want to use this Qt 4 version with a bunch of bugfixes.

A lot of people mailed me in the last week asking about problems with the mirror, this was caused by kde4.debian.net being actually 2 mirrors in round robin and the secondary (and faster) one having some problems syncing.

(*) Yes, I know Qt 4.4.2 and 4.4.3 are equal just with copyright changes, but it was easier backport latest version from unstable, right? :)

Christmas came early for me this year: after receiving a Conceptronic CH3SNAS yesterday, a QNAP TS-409U showed up today. QNAP sent it to me a week ago to ensure that Debian works on it but it was stuck in customs for a few days. The QNAP TS-409U is similar to the TS-409 but comes in a rack case (and with more RAM). It seems that QNAP have also changed the layout of the mainboard but essentially it's still a TS-409. This means that the installer works just fine. Another difference to the TS-409 is that the TS-409U has two fans but qcontrol works without any problems on both machines.

The first Xfce beta for 4.6 (codenamed “Fuzzy”) has just been release.

As usual, it's available in my private repository, for early testers. As usual, be warned, this is a beta, not supported by Debian in any way.

Bugs can and should be reported to Xfce Bugzilla. The known issues wiki page has been updated, please look at it before any test, to see what's supported and what isn't, see the various problems you may encounter etc.

Some stuff has changed since Pinkie  so some settings aren't valid anymore. Migration script from 4.4 has been updated,but not for alpha users.

I cooked some script to migrate those settings from an alpha:

 #! /bin/sh

for prop in $(xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -l | grep -v provider | grep -v command )
do
  value=$(xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -p $prop | tail -n1)
  newprop="/commands/custom${prop}"
  echo "prop=${prop}, newprop=${newprop}, value=${value}"
  xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -n -p ${newprop} -s "${value}" -t string
  xfconf-query -c xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts -r -p ${prop}
done

Enjoy!

I finally managed to use my Nokia N810 to do some GPS logging for OSM. The Nokia internal GPS is quite slow, so I used an external antenna and the well known Maemo Mapper tracking capability to log my first 60 kms in my area. I'm not too much happy with the result, because it seems the Nokia tablet is quite slow in tracking points: other trackers are someway configurable on those regards, but Mapper seems not taking in account any user preference about data sampling. Too bad, even if it is able to use OSM maps as default background, which is a great plus for a mapper. Definitively it needs a look to sources to understand what happens under the cover.

Every night I can, I sit with my sister and we read half a chapter of Le petit Nicolas, in French. I read aloud, and she fixes my pronunciation. She says I’m doing well!

I’m also getting to understand increasingly more and more (she helps along the way with that). I’m not sure whether it’s the magic of being written in French, or what, but I’m finding it very nice, and we laugh a lot.

Maybe if I’d be reading it in a language I was fluent in it would not be the same. But, if you ever end up learning French, be sure to give it a try!

Thanks to Thomas Viehmann for the patch on both ftp-master side (aka http://ftp-master.debian.org/deferred/ and on "client side" (and for nagging me enough to activate it), http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php shows now again when bugs are fixed in delayed. Thanks!

As some of you know, the first weekend in October was a big deal for me, because it was NCR's Oktoberfest launch event. My son and I spent the weekend camped out on the prairie with Keith Packard and many of our other friends. Keith successfully went from nothing to a "level 2" high power certification, which was pretty cool. I wasn't quite so lucky.

On Saturday morning, I flew my custom-designed rocket YikStik for a "level 3" certification attempt. The name comes from the word my wife uses to describe lipstick. The rocket was built from a mixture of custom and Giant Leap parts, including 98mm Dyna Wind airframe, a 98-75mm tail cone retainer, and a Pinnacle nose cone. All the centering rings were cut on my 3-axis CNC milling machine, and the fins were custom 7-layer composite layups using plywood, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and epoxy... all vacuum bagged using a kitchen food saver appliance. Painted red, gold, and black, with a custom 8 foot main parachute sewn by my wife Karen from the Team Vatsaas design in red and black rip-stop nylon.

The motor selected was an Aerotech M1297W reload. This is a 75mm diameter motor 66.5cm in length with 2722 grams of propellant yielding 5417 Newton-seconds of total impulse. It was also on sale earlier this year for cert attempts. My simulations said YikStik should have flown to about 14,800 feet above ground level at the NCR north site on this motor.

The launch went perfectly, and the rocket was stunningly beautiful under boost. It disappeared into some high clouds, but we continued to have strong signals from the two tracking transmitters installed in the payload bay behind the nose cone. About the anticipated time after launch, we saw a rocket descending under chute in the distance, and headed in that direction. A few minutes later, we abruptly lost both tracking signals, and that's when things took a turn for the weird.

In hindsight, I think we suffered an apogee deployment of the main chute, and the rocket we saw descending was someone else's. YikStik was designed to deploy a streamer at apogee, then descend fairly quickly to about 1500 feet above ground where a second set of ejection charges would fire to separate the nose cone on a 3 foot drogue parachute that would pull a deployment bag containing the main chute out of the airframe and then pull the bag off the chute. The nose cone, payload bay with the tracking transmitters, and deployment bag would then descend under the drogue chute and the remainder of the rocket would descend under the big chute. In the world of deployment bags, this is called a 'free bag' configuration. With deployment at 1500 feet, the two bits should have landed within sight of each other. But that didn't happen.

It wasn't until late Sunday afternoon, after we had to leave to get Keith to the airport, that some friends finally located the nose cone assembly about 3.5 miles down range from the launch site, over a couple rises and past an area of rough terrain. By then it was cold, windy, and rainy, and so I really appreciated the effort they put in locating the nose, and wasn't too surprised that they didn't immediately see the rest. Since the bulk of the rocket under the main should have had a slightly higher descent rate than the nose cone, I expected to find the rest of the rocket somewhere near a line between the launch rail and where the nose cone was discovered. So last Wednesday I spent about 5.5 hours walking around the area searching... but no luck. Since then, several other people have been out looking for my rocket, including two friends who flew over the area today in a light plane looking down into all the washes. Still nothing.

I posted some signs in the area with a photo of the rocket and my contact info, I hope someone calls eventually. In the meantime, the bulk of YikStik remains missing, and of course I did not achieve a successful level 3 certification.

Lessons learned for next time are that tethering the deployment bag to the main chute instead of flying in a "free bag" configuration might have been a better choice, and it's kind of silly having two tracking transmitters in one of the two pieces of your rocket and none in the other...

Ray LaPanse took some stunning photos of the launch. He will likely post better versions with color correction and so forth at some point, but in the meantime, I've put a few up on my Garbee Rockets web site. She sure was a beauty!

Conceptronic kindly sent me a CH3SNAS for my Debian porting efforts. The Conceptronic CH3SNAS is reported to be basically the same hardware as the D-Link DNS-323 but it costs slightly less. There were some reports that the CH3SNAS uses a 88F5182 chip whereas the D-Link DNS-323 uses a 88F5181 but nobody was able to confirm this for sure. As it turns out, there are two revisions of the DNS-323. Revision A1 uses a 88F5181 chip along with a separate SATA chip. Revision B2 on the other hand uses a 88F5182 which integrates SATA into the SoC itself. The CH3SNAS is equivalent to a D-Link DNS-323 revision B1. In fact, the mainboard of the CH3SNAS even says DNS-323 rev B1.

The Linux kernel from mainline only works on the DNS-323 revision A1 at the moment. Adding support for revision B1 should be trivial since you basically just need to initialize the SATA chip on the SoC and possibly adapt some other values. Unfortunately, the DNS-323 uses a very small serial connector so none of my serial cables work. If I can find someone who will make a serial cable for me, I'll fix up the kernel.

Thanks for the feedback on the xulrunner-1.9 packages I posted yesterday. They led me to find a possible fix for the issue.

Wasn’t the package fixed? will you ask. Well, yes and no. Actually, it was built using the internal copy of cairo in the mozilla source tree. And this internal copy is (guess what) not vanilla. And we don’t want to be using the internal copy because it’s hell for stable security.

I took a deeper look into the changes and spotted something that looks like a workaround for exactly this corruption issue. So if people having the corruptions before installing the test package could downgrade to the current version in unstable (apt-get install xulrunner-1.9=1.9.0.3-1 should do), install the following cairo package: for i386 and for amd64, and tell me if the corruptions are gone, that would be very helpful :).

 00:58:35 up 200 days,  2:36,  3 users,  load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00

Somehow I thought I was past this. :-)

ObRandom:

Any blog post, comment thread, question, or email which starts "Hi guys" is bad, wrong, and probably not worth reading.

ObTitle: Dawn of the dead - the original and best version - 1978

We have had quite a bunch of bug reports for some display corruptions in Iceweasel, most, if not all, of which are due to offscreen pixmaps being badly rendered by the X.org video driver.

If you happen to be a silent (or even vocal) victim, please give a try to these test packages: for i386 and for amd64. If that solves the corruptions for you, please leave a comment here.

Thanks

Procmail

This will be the last time I talk about this, but here's my anti-rubbish procmail filter.

It correctly copes with:

• Foreign character sets that I can't read.
• Bounces from joe-jobs.
• Malformed emails.

Obviously edit to suit your tastes. Especially with regard to character sets - it is a wide brush which is tarring a group unfairly. That said in practise it works for me.

If you want real antispam filtering then you should probably be looking at externalising it, or having a layered approach.

• Procmail snippets

ObQuote: Citizen Kane

Some brief highlights of the last three months of Debian Eee PC development.

Thermal and ACPI breakage resolved in 2.6.26-7

We’re pleased to see that in the upload to Sid of linux-image-2.6.26-1-686 version 2.6.26-7, the pair of 2.6.26 bugs we’ve been tracking that have made it difficult for Eee users to upgrade their systems have been resolved. Since then 2.6.26-8 has been uploaded and is expected to enter Lenny this week due to a freeze exception. Once the new kernel has migrated we will move quickly to build and release a new installer that includes it.

Ath5k wifi works on Eee PC in Linux 2.6.27

Jean-Christophe reports that ath5k works in Linux 2.6.27 on the Eee PC 701, and just needs a small patch to work with our eeepc-acpi-scripts package. This is good news for those of us with models 701, 900, 900A and 1000HD who have been wanting to get off of the non-free Madwifi drivers and onto DFSG free drivers.

New Eee PC model 701SD wifi support in the works

Users of the new Eee PC Model 701SD have just started showing up looking for support in mainstream Linux distros. Martin Filtenborg confirmed using our Eee PC Live image with the GPL’d rtl8187se driver from Realtek that we can at least use it to connect to an unencrypted AP, get an IP address and ping other hosts.

Of course, it is one thing to have a working vendor-supplied driver and quite another to have mainstream support. We’ll make do with what we have now, but will be seeking a mainstream solution as soon as possible.

We’re seeking more testers and developers to work on this. To date, an ITP has not been filed, as it is not yet clear who is going to carry this work forward.

Chasing the 5 second boot

An interesting discussion on Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok’s work to get an Eee 901 to boot in 5 seconds took place this month. While the Debian Eee PC team is not making work on this a priority, we’ll keep an eye on it to see if Debian can incorporate some or all of the techniques they used so that our users can benefit without making radical changes to their systems.

Working towards mainstream support for rt2860

Our filing of an ITP for rt2860 (the wifi driver for models 901, 1000 and 1000H) was followed by discussion about how to separate out the GPL’d driver from the embedded non-free firmware so that it can at least go into contrib. Glenn Saberton has been working on rewriting the build system around kbuild and separating out the firmware.

Numerous improvements to ACPI scripts

Since my last progress report, there have been numerous improvements to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package to deal with all of the various models we now support and make the scripts more robust and flexible. Check out the changelog for details.

The unofficial rc bug thingy currently lists:

• 200 rc Bugs affecting the next stable release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny:
  • 90 Bugs of them, fixed in the unstable branch Sid
  • 110 Bugs open in both, Lenny and Sid of these:
    • 14 marked as pending
    • 28 have already a patch
    • 13 have been reported multiple times

Ignoring bugs, which are marked pending, have a patch, have been reported multiple times or concern packages in contrib or non-free, that leaves 63 release critical bugs.

That's quite impressive compared to the numbers from last week. Thanks for everyone helping!

However 36 of them have been reported more than 30 days ago; maybe they are quite complicated, so please pay special attention to them.

PS: Yes, I know, that the layout of my webpage breaks the nested lists above. Sorry; will fix it soon.

preview of OCaml batteries included Debian packages

OCaml batteries included is a wonderful community-driven initiative to standardize the OCaml development platform. It is similar to initiatives sharing the same motto, like Haskell batteries included and Python batteries included (which then has become the legacy Python distribution), but I have always felt that OCaml was more desperately needing a similar initiative.

David Teller and the OCaml batteries included team have been the first actually doing something to address the frustration of many otherwise enthusiastic OCaml developers.

A couple of days ago, their efforts have given birth to a first milestone: the release of the first alpha version of batteries included.

To help out, I've released as quickly as possible the Debian packages of OCaml batteries included. You can find them in experimental (actually in NEW, at the time of writing), and from my people.d.o space.

I've only built the packages for amd64, if you need some other architecture you can build on it by yourself, but I recommend not trying to rebuild the -doc package (which takes 10 minutes on my laptop to build). You can reuse the -doc package I've built, which is arch: all, to rebuild only the -dev part unpack the source package and do fakeroot debian/rules binary-arch.

Partner to the up of posting about pregnancy is the down of posting about not being pregnant anymore.

Thursday evening, about 4:30am, Angie had a miscarriage. She was sent to the hospital for the usual checkups and all that. They kept her in the hospital for a couple of days with a uterine infection and is now back in the hotel with me and Leif in Quebec city. We're doing well, and will head back to Montreal tomorrow - probably flying back to California on Wednesday.

I’m at the Boston GNOME summit right now. Yesterday a lot of work got done on gobject-introspection and AT-SPI D-Bus, which is completely awesome. I had a great discussion with Dan Williams about where we should go with gnome-phone-manager, NM’s new ModemManager and OpenMoko’s gpsd. My interest here is having a consistent place for getting GSM/CDMA cell location information.

A lot of very interesting ideas have been flying around about new user experience ideas. It seems a lot of people have been thinking similar things but didn’t really know that others were also working/thinking on the same ideas. We’ve just started the future user experience hackfest, I hope out of this we can forge some common future direction and common projects. I’ll report more after the hackfest!

Today, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 will be reported.

Have you bet already?

It is nice to see very clever people also working on low-hanging fruits and not only hair-cutting code...

Translation: Y Giridhar Appaji Nag is one of the people I met at FOSS.IN/2007. Since then, I saw the quality of the work he's doing in Debian, which involves some "high level" stuff but, still, he does not seem to be considering that translating our installer in his nother tongue, Telugu, is a time waste...

He even eplains why the fruits are not that low and translators often face challenges that are as interesting as those one can face when "coding".

Hat off, Appaji...

Additionnal note: since I wrote my blog post about FOSS.IN/2008, Atul Chitnis, the organisation team leader wrote me in private to comment about it. He was regretting that I didn't speak to him before posting this...but I don't think it would have changed my post, indeed.

Atul answered those concerns in the FOSS-IN mailing list. I encourage readers to look at his answer. I personnally don't think this addresses the most important concern I raised as Atul focused on the grieves lead by the "low hanging fruits" expression....which was a minor part of my own reaction.

Since then, the Call for Participation to FOSS.IN/2008 has been sent and, despite the disagreement I have with the strategical choice of organisers, I really wish the even the best success they can achieve.

Version 1.2 of reportbug-ng now shows the tags of a bug if available. This was long overdue. Now you can for example, quickly search your bugs for the ones with the moreinfo-tag set and sort the resulting list by the date of the last action. This should give you a quick overview of bugs which may need some action (eg. another reminder to the submitter) or can potentially be safely closed.

In the next step I’ll improve the filter of rng and add a context menu which will allow to manipulate the tags of one or more bugreports and send all the changes in a single mail to control@bugs.debian.org.

Trying to get prepared for lenny, the new iceweasel annoys me more and more.

• Problem 1: How do I globally set a program to use for mailto: links?
  The old solution no longer works, and the only workaround I found is placing a mimeTypes.rdf with the right contents to /etc/iceweasel/profile, but that of course only works for new accounts, not when upgrading accounts...
• Problem 2: Is there a way to get the Xprint interface of iceweasel back?
  It still suggests xprint, but I see no way to not get those gtk printing dialog boxes. Those of course only show "Print to file" because I am using lprng and someone decides to disable the lpr backend gtk by default. (Those printing backends modules in gtk seem like a nice thing at first, I could easily write one to show the printers in /etc/printcap and have controls for all the options of the printer's PPD file in there, but it only helps to get the dialog better). But the postscript it creates is just broken beyond description. No need to speak about doing color all the time (looks like there is no way to tell cairo to make a surface grayscale), or embedding all the fonts, but it tries to do the distance of characters on its own and miserably fails so. The fonts it embedds also have some strangenesses, or the pswrite method of the new ghostscript has problems, too.
  Another problem with the gtk print dialog in iceweasel is in the print setup dialog box. It always defaults to letter, and I found no way to globally change this. Here most likely the fault is somewhere in the glue code, giving that a first glance looks really like someone only knowing letter and executive wrote it...
• I'm sure there were others, but those I forget over the more urgent ones...

Yesterday I attended a lecture by professor D.J. Bernstein, best known for his products like qmail, owner of one of the coolest domain names in the world and for his often controversial but always interesting visions.

His talk focused on why the majority of internet traffic still is not encrypted. We protect our email passwords but the 95% of other things we do is completely unprotected from a sniffer. He then narrowed it down to DNS. The problems with DNSSEC are evident and it's still a question of whether it will ever be implemented (after 15 years the design is still in flux, let alone that it's properly implemented or actually used).

On a more constructive side he presented his own solution: DNSCurve: using elliptic curve cryptography to not only sign but also encrypt DNS traffic, and do so on the fly rather than the cumbersome precomputation approach of DNSSEC. Bernstein shows that the extra cost of on the fly cryptography is, even for root servers, very minor compared to the costs of the entire system, but it does significantly reduce the administrative burden compared to DNSSEC. As usual he has made an interesting case, a worthwhile read.

Apparently someone actually did some research to find out if the fixie trend will die out. This link lead people to debate, on SF2G, about what people should ride to work on next. The ultimate response was that a penny farthing on skyline is the way to go.

After a few years of only buying laptops with Intel hardware, today I bought something totally different. It's not really what I wanted (which was an HP HDX 16t) but I get the feeling that none of these 16" HD 1080 laptops will make it to New Zealand for a while yet, and the NZ dollar has done such a nosedive recently that it's better not to wait any longer.

In the places that hold stock there seem to be some good specials around at the moment, and as the owner of a new free, open-source consulting business (i.e: a cheap bastard) I went shopping for the cheapest dual-core I could find with a half-decent screen, and I found the Asus X53K for $999 (USD$589) at Dick Smith, including a 2G ram upgrade to take it to 3G. It's entirely non-intel, with a 2GHz Turion dual-core, ATI Radeon X2300 with 1440x900 panel, Atheros AR2425 wifi and 160G HD. I'd bought a replacement 320G hard drive even before I got the laptop, so now I have a pristine, unbooted 160G hard drive with the install files for some other OS on it - no doubt I'll find a use for the disk, at least!

Since AMD got ATI to release all their chip documentation earlier this year I felt able to shell out for this, rather than the extra $100 for the model next to it, and it was nice too to get home and find that Atheros have recently released the HAL for their a/b/g chips. Which presumably means that they haven't done so for their 'n' chipsets, and I should continue to steer clear of that technology for a while yet...

I'm running Debian GNU/Linux 'Sid' on the Asus X53K and, everything pretty much just works out of the box. My installation process was to rsync the old laptop onto a new disk, and boot the new laptop from that - after compiling a new kernel more appropriate to the changed hardware.

After overcoming my own stupidity in not syncing the /dev/ underneath udev, which I easily googled my way out of, the only problem I've found so far is that the free radeon driver doesn't do 3d for me. Presumably the non-free ones would, but they won't compile against my 2.6.27 kernel so I don't know for sure. Fortunately I don't use 3d for anything so it's not a huge inconvenience to me. With 3G RAM and a fast 320G hard drive the laptop actually is an upgrade for me, too, and it has a webcam too, which I expect I'll look at in much the same way as I did the fingerprint reader on the old laptop. It will be good to finally hand that old one back to Catalyst, too, who have given me the flexibility to take my time on this.

Now to try and peel off all these stickers without damaging anything!

I was sure it will be possible.

With current awesome git version it's possible to run a space invaders game.

With only 380 lines of Lua.

Is there any window manager capable of doing this ? And don't say it's useless!

Thanks to Gregor "farhaven" Best for wasting his time with that.

Tuesday evening I was at the Olympia to see Nada Surf, the french New York guys, on tour. The show was very nice. I've already saw them 2 years ago, and it was already very cool, so nothing new.

They played lots of different songs from all albums. I really appreciated this since I'm not a big fan of their latest ones. That was funny to see most bitches fidgeting on their seats when they played some recent successful songs and becoming totally quiet and passive when they announced that they were going to play Telescope from Karmic (a EP from 1995 before their first album).

But well, that still was a great show and was pleasant to be there.

A photographic portrait of Keith Packard writing his lca abstract:

Random news

/back

Yes, I was away... long and sad story involving health issues. :-( I'm trying to get back, hopefully everything will be fine. Let me publicly apologize to some people that was expecting some work from me and I postponed it, not because of slackness but because I was unable to do it. I'm catching up with a lot of tasks and trying to solve long standing issues, feel free to ping me to get some update on a specific matter. I am really sorry!

Slogan

Do you know about the poll to choose a slogan for the release of Debian 5.0, also known as "lenny"?

No!? Shame on you! :-)

People behind Debian Art started a discussion to get opinions! After some input they prepared a poll, maybe they should try to use a doodle. Right now, The Universal Operating System is quite popular, but a lot of people did some nice suggestions, and some of them would like to see a slogan some way related to the Toy Story (tm) character Lenny:



The discussion is distributed across three lists: Debian Desktop, Debian Publicity and Debian Curiosa, I would also point to the comments made by Gustavo Noronha da Silva (here) and Andre Felipe Machado (here).

If you didn't say anything so far, please do!