I have been accepted to Google summer of Code 2012 and have been given the OK to reduce the scope of my project since i will be starting a full time job in a month or so. My project is using GCC to automatically generate Pxd files for cython. Cython is similar to SWIG in that it generates wrapper code for C + Python. Cython is in many ways superior to SWIG in that is very much more specific to python and you have a lot more control. Swig is moer generalised such that it works with so many different and obscure languages.

Generating wrapper code can be very tedious for large libraries but having GCC to figure out whats going on for us such that we can simply pull out the declarations for us makes its very simple and quick. To generate input for cython in one go. A very simple example of what PXD and cython looks like:

#include "test.h"

int add (int x, int y)
{
  return x + y;
}

#ifndef __TEST_H__
#define __TEST_H__

extern int add (int, int);

struct foobar {
  int a;
  unsigned char * b;
};

#endif //__TEST_H_

We run gcc -fplugin=./python.so -fplugin-arg-python-script=walk.py test.c

And i output out.pxd:

cdef extern from "test.h":
	int add (int, int)

	ctypedef struct foobar:
		int a
		unsigned char * b

This thread shows in much more detail whats going to be achived http://mail.python.org/pipermail/cython-devel/2012-March/002140.html

On May 7th, I drove to the East Bay, hopped on BART, and headed in to San Francisco to attend the Tizen Developers Conference.

On February 9, 2012 I showed off the Freedom Jar, a coin jar for my pocket change, that when full will be donated to a non-profit organization that promotes freedom. Well guess what?

The Jar is Full

This is all of the change in the jar.

For some reason, I had the uncontrollable desire to dump the change on the floor. Messy is good.

It's Not Going Back In

Try as I might, I couldn't get all of the change back in the jar.

How does that happen? It doesn't matter. The change was put in a bag and off I petaled to the nearest Coinstar machine. Hey Coinstar, please put the EFF on your machines as a charity.

$35.97

In total, the jar held about 39 dollars, and after Coinstar took their cut I had $35.97 to give to a non-profit organization that promotes freedom.

When I handed my receipt to a cashier in order to collect my loot, the cashier asked if I had 3 pennies. Hey, if I had 3 pennies, I would have put them in the Coinstar machine.

There was a 1958 dime that was rejected by the machine so I decided to keep it.

When I petaled home, I got online and donated $35.97 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for internet freedom.

Thank you EFF. Thank you very much.

The Liverpool FC crest

In keeping with my new agenda to post on any topic that takes my fancy, I’m going to talk about football today. That’s English football. You know, the game you play with your feet. I just wanted to say up front that the following is a football rant.

It’s pretty much the end of the season now for my team Liverpool FC. We’ve played 37 league games and only won 14 of them. There’s one more to go at the weekend and if we win that we could finish a mighty 7th in the Premier League. Not good enough by any measure. I’m not going to hark on about the past, others do that more than enough and while I’m proud of our history it’s the future that concerns me. I’m not delusional like some other LFC fans either, we have no right to be at the top of the league these days. We’ve slipped a long way down the pecking order and while I don’t like it we have to be honest with ourselves. We’re light years away from the Manchester clubs and we’ve even been leap frogged by teams like Tottenham in recent years. So what’s our biggest problem? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and one thing keeps coming back into my mind.

You might expect me to say “lack of goals” here. True, we’ve only scored 47 goals and that’s definitely a problem, but I can sum up our most pressing problem in one word – midfield.

Take a look at the midfield we had out for the FA cup final. We were effectively playing a 4-5-1 formation: Gerrard, Spearing, Henderson, Downing and Bellamy. If you believe this is a world class midfield then you need to your head examined, and probably your eyes too. Steven Gerrard has been a fantastic servant to the club and bailed us out many times over the years, but on Saturday he seemed to be attempting to play 4 positions at once while covering for Spearing, Henderson and Downing. Nobody can do that. Not even Gerrard in his prime could have. I don’t subscribe to the argument that he’s “past it” now. I’m probably biased as we’re only 5 days apart in age but he turns 32 at the end of the month, it’s not that old. I think his problem this season has been injury and lack of playing time. He hasn’t been able to build up any form or rhythm. Long term we’ll have to look to a younger player of course, I don’t argue with that. But he has 2 or 3 good seasons left in him. Possibly in a less mobile role slightly deeper breaking up play. Moving on, Jay Spearing seems like a really hard working lad and he’s trying, but I’m not convinced he’s up to the level we need, or whether he ever can be. Henderson looks lost since moving from Sunderland. We paid 20 million for him in the hope he’d be “the new Gerrard” but he hasn’t showed much of that so far. It’s only his first season and I know he’s young, but he needs to start improving fast. Neither Spearing nor Henderson look capable of breaking up play and controlling the midfield. The “midfield general” is an often used phrase in football folk lore and right now we don’t have one. Every successful Liverpool team had a clear boss in midfield, from Emlyn Hughes to Didi Hamman and many others. Lucas Levia was doing a reasonable job in that role and losing him to injury for most of the season hasn’t helped, but come on. It says something when the stats point out that Lucas has still made more tackles than any other Liverpool midfielder this season. He hasn’t played for months!! You need more squad depth than that. Charlie Adam isn’t going to fill this role either, he had a good season at Blackpool but he just isn’t up to it. We need a midfield anchor and that would be my priority in the summer. It’s the unglamorous but essential heart of every decent team. The reason Bobby Charlton and George Best looked so good was because they had Nobby Stiles winning the ball and giving it to them. Ok so they were obviously special players, but they needed a provider. I don’t see that in the Liverpool team today. A few years ago we had Mascherano and Alonso in the middle, we’ve definitely gone backwards in this department.

Onto the wingers then. Bellamy has done well when he’s played but he can’t be relied upon every week. He’s not fit enough. When we signed Stuart Downing from Villa last summer and Ashley Young went to Utd people said things like, “oh but Downing is the better crosser, we’ve got the better player”. Bollocks, utter bollocks! I said it at the time and I still believe it. Young is infinitely better than Downing in almost every department and Man Utd certainly got the better deal. I still believe Downing can be a useful for Liverpool next season but the key thing is he needs to believe that himself. He seems to lack confidence and I’m not sure how he’ll adapt. Our other options on the wing this year are Dirk Kuyt, a man who’s never been a winger but forced to play there by Rafa Benitez. He’s done a lot for the club and I like him. How could you not like his attitude and effort? But he’s still a striker out of position. Maxi Rodriguez is a good player and he’s been criminally underused this season. He’s coming to the end of his career now though and looks set to leave the club anyway.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I like the look of young Jonjo Shelvey. He seems to have a lot of potential as a playmaker in the middle of the park. We should give him more of a chance. Perhaps there are some other youngsters we can try. We might as well. That big expensive academy out in Kirkby has produced precisely nothing and it’s becoming a white elephant. There must be talented kids out there, so why aren’t they coming through?

Our defence is pretty solid and the record supports that. Reina is a good goalie and Luis Suarez is probably our only world class player. Andy Carroll is another one who needs confidence and people forget he’s only 22. It’s not his fault we paid far too much for him and I believe he will come good eventually. We could still use at least one more decent striking option but if Kenny Dalglish really wants to fix this team he needs to look at the gaping quality vaccum in the middle of the park. That’s where the problem lies. Napoleon said an army marches on it’s stomach, well a football team marches on it’s midfield.

Hi everyone, this is just a cheeky cross post really but I hope you’ll like it. In case you didn’t know I write a technology column for popular Liverpool site SevenStreets. My latest post is about digital inclusion. What’s that you say? Read on.

You can comment over there and also share the article. Hint hint. Thanks

Dan

After Amendment One passed in North Carolina, I have had a change of heart about this Old Testament legislation thing.

Based on Old Testament values, I think we should get rid of eating burned, carcinogenic animal corpse.

Selected passages:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and care for it. And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden’ – Genesis 2:15-16

“The Lord said to Moses “Say to the Israelites: ‘Do not eat any of the fat of cattle, sheep or goats. The fat of an animal found dead or torn by wild animals may be used for any other purpose, but you must not eat it. Anyone who eats the fat of an animal from which an offering by fire may be made to the Lord must be cut off from his people. And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. If anyone eats blood, that person must be cut off from his people.” Leviticus 7:22-27

“But all creatures in the seas or streams that do not have fins and scales – whether among all the swarming things or among all the other living creatures in the water – you are to detest. And since you are to detest them, you must not eat their meat and you must detest their carcasses” Leviticus 11:10-11

“Every creature that moves about on the ground is detestable; it is not to be eaten. You are not to eat any creature that moves about on the ground, whether it moves on its belly or walks on all fours or on many feet; it is detestable” Leviticus 11:41-42

Based on New Testament values, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Well today i had a thought where i have spent about 3 to 4 years of my life working on my own projects and Open Source trying to learn outside of University. In my Degree path there is no Final Year project or anything, this always annoyed me. I only have 2 exams at the moment which i don’t fee that confident in. And since Gccpy is actually starting to get interesting where its starting to work and i completed my own interpreter to a decent amount crules and i created my own static compiler cmod a modula compiler for i386. I already had a thesis document started along side Gccpy and i am thinking of finishing it up this week to some extend detailing all 3 of these projects focusing on gccpy of course and handing this into my university i feel this must count towards something and i just want this monkey off my back i guess and i feel this might help. You can view the code for any of these projects over at:

code.redbrain.co.uk

Reminder the Gccpy code has been moved to the gccpy repository on that server and stable *ish code is maintined on the gccpy branch of the GCC git repository when i reach more stable code i will push the svn server also.

I was asked to replace a keyboard on a Sony VPCEJ series laptop this week and couldn’t find any kind of service manual or dissasembly guide, so here’s my guide on removing the keyboard.

Follow these instructions completely at your own risk. I offer no warranty that this procedure is correct or that it won’t damage your laptop.

1. Start with the laptop upside down on the desk. Remove the battery.
2. Remove the optical drive by removing the screw (ringed in red below) and then sliding the drive out of the chassis to the right.

Remove Optical Drive

3. Remove the two screws securing the keyboard (ringed in red)

Remove Keyboard Screws

4. Turn the laptop over and open the lid. Through the optical drive bay opening, release the locking tabs (marked red) and use the holes (marked orange) to release the right hand edge of the keyboard. Insert a plastic pry tool and gently work along the top edge of the keyboard releasing the tabs (marked blue). The keyboard will release and fold towards to you get access to the cabling. Note in the image the keyboard has already been removed to better illustrate the locations of the locking tabs and access holes.

Remove Keyboard

5. Remove the securing tape and lift the black ribbon cable connector up to release the keyboard cable.

Disconnect Keyboard

6. Reassembly is the reverse of removal.

Kim Rasmussen has made me think of layers of society.

Many of the people in the circles I frequent are high-volume consumers of Ted Talks and podcasts like Radiolab, Freakanomics, To the best of our knowledge, Stuff To Blow Your Mind, Skeptically Speaking and a truckload of technology casts – just to mention a few examples. There is a huge load of such programs of educational entertainment.
I find that this occasionally leads to a mental disconnect where I mention things to people in passing – things that completely blew my mind when I learned about it. A recent example was a conversation I was having where I said “it is like that Dawkins thing about considering your childhood memories, where the remarkable thing is that all of your cells have been replaced over the years, so no part of your body was actually part of this memory, even if you remember experiencing it physically” – and then I continued – until I stopped, because I realised that the person I was talking to was having a mental expansion experience.

In many ways this is what happens when a politician says that there are fairly simple solutions to piracy or child pornography like, say, DNS-blocking. Since this is clearly useless, the conversation completely disconnects my brain between the starting point and an actual solution.
Same thing happens when a teacher is associating freely and comes to the epiphany that it is actually a question of making the children engage in the learning the same way as when they play video games. So I pull out maybe 15 podcast episodes discussing this, or I say ‘Since this is already being done, we should probably focus more on…’ leaving the other person disconnected.

I am not trying to guru myself here, I just have this experience frequently – and I find that this makes it difficult for me to discuss things with a lot of people who actually have an executive role where I have only just grasped the basic principles behind it.

This week, we have started to see the demise of Game, the UK computer game shop company. They own Game shops and Gamestation shops, as well as a bunch of websites. They were massive at one point. Everyone would buy from them. I’ve spent countless hours in those shops over the years pouring over the stuff they had in stock to see if I could get a bargain. But I never could. Well, that’s a lie, I could. But it was never great.

We have found out that Game are looking for a buyer as they are in serious financial trouble. So much so that EA and a number of other game’s companies have refused to supply them, the biggest title being Mass Effect 3. Game had none of this title in stock from launch till now. Today, after they said that they were in serious trouble, their stock price dropped 50% and is (as of market closing 12th March) sitting at £1.16. It dropped to a low of 85p today.

Some of us have expected this for a while. And when you go into the shops you can clearly see how they got into this mess. I saw a copy of Little Big Planet today, second-hand, not in original packaging, for £15. This is a game that is about 4 years old, and you can buy new on Amazon for less than £10.

So, this is clearly 1 of the reasons that they have gone down the pan. But it’s not the only one. This is specific to this one company, but there are reasons that I believe that the industry of physical game shops (with the exception of 1 chain) is on the way out. It may take a few years, Gamestop in America still has a lot of clout, but it’ll happen eventually.

I want a game. What shall I do? I have 4 choices:

1. Buy it from Amazon
2. Buy it from PS store/XBL/Steam
3. Buy it from a physical shop
4. Get it second-hand

Now let’s look at the pros and cons of each:

• Amazon

Pros: Easy to buy, you don’t have to take the time to go to a physical shop, they don’t have to pay for high street buildings, so generally cheaper.

Cons: Don’t get to see the item in real life, have to get it delivered.

• PS store/XBL/Steam

Pros: Easy to buy, you don’t have to take the time to go to a physical shop, they don’t have to pay for high street buildings, so generally cheaper.

Cons: Not always cheaper than Amazon, no physical media, no ability to resell.

• Physical shop

Pros: Get to see it physically before you buy it, the community aspect.

Cons: Normally more expensive, time-consuming to get to and generally quite annoying.

• Second hand

Pros: The price.

Cons: Well, its second-hand. Sometimes the DLC bundled with it is 1 time only.

Basically, what does a physical shop give you (apart from second-hand) that online and download-only can’t? The community aspect. But then, we are gamers. We don’t really like talking to people in real life. If we want to talk, we’ll do it on our respective social networks or gaming multiplayer networks.

For all intents and purposes, downloading games is the future. It isn’t the present, as it’s still annoying as we can’t resell them, they are sometimes more expensive than Amazon and we sometimes have rubbish internet connections. However, it is the future. And for that, physical shops don’t matter. Other than that, if you know what you want to buy, you know what you want to buy. Why would I want to see the case for a game I want to buy in real life before I buy it? I won’t, I’ll buy it off Amazon.

Now, we come to the type of physical shop that will survive for a while. Second hand game shops. I was in CEX today, and it was full of people. The prices were much lower than Game and Gamestation (even with their apparent fire sale) and there was just a great feeling in there. People love a bargain, and they love waiting a month and getting a second-hand game for £25 instead of £40 or £10 instead of £20, or whatever. It’s just a great feeling.

Basically…the reason Game is going to disappear (even if it gets bought over, it’ll disappear soon enough) is because there is no need for them anymore. The internet and dedication second-hand shops have replaced it, and the industry is just going to have to get used to it.

So I have a dilemma with what I use as my computing platform. It is a silly thing, but I suspect that others experience a similar thing, and that makes it something worth considering. It is a technical issue mixed with, or undermined by, aesthetics.

I have been a Linux user for a number of years – in various incarnations. I started out as a Red Hat user – back then I dual-booted between Windows and Red Hat, partly because getting a working internet connection was a challenge. I changed to Mandrake Linux which was impressive enough to let me change entirely. After that I tried out a large number of Linux distributions as well as variations of the BSDs. I settled on Slackware with Slackware 10.0 and enjoyed the Slackware philosophy: You can set up this system to do and be anything. I learned to rewrite the boot scripts, recompile the kernel to only support the hardware I owned but do that well. It was a great satisfaction.

However, with my two most recent laptops, both Thinkpads, I have experienced difficulties with wireless as well as power management. It seems they have the same issues with suspend, and the wireless connection is consistently dropping. The first aspect I have found an explanation for and solution to, but not the latter.
As a result, I have had to leave Slackware and look elsewhere for the most fitting system   for this old X32. And this leads me to an embarrassing problem with making an appropriate choice.

I guess it comes down to a perception of hierarchy. Plainly, everyone will agree that Slackware is a distribution for Linux users who know their way around the basic Linux system, simply because if you don’t, you are not going to get an installation that is usable.
What this means is that Slackware is an endgame distribution. If one looks at the mailing lists, people have been using Slackware for ages, and people who end up with Slackware are going to stay there.
However, if you have to become a refugee from Slackware, the original Linux distribution, it is going to be an extremely ambivalent process. Because you already made it all the way.

I am using Fedora 16, the Lxde respin. And actually, this is a lovely distribution. It is lightweight, it is up to date, it will do the nice things you want without too much customisation. However, it goes through a lot of stuff before it is ready to log in, and I have no way of gettng a feel for the system. And it gives the distinct impression that one is not supposed to. A lot of stuff works automagically on this system, and it does seem a bit sensitive to tampering. I should not neglect to mention that one can get quite spoiled using a system which will do a lot automatically compared to a distribution where one has to do a lot of work before using it will be smooth and simple…

Now of course, the most marketed hobbyist distribution is Ubuntu. But that is a mainstream beginners’ distribution with a questionable approach to community and going for the mindshare. Leaving aside that Gnome3 and Unity will not run on my hardware, Ubuntu simply does not appeal to me. While Linux Mint is considerably more appealing visually and when it comes to functionality – I just downloaded their new Lxde release, and it works quite well – but I always get bugs with these Ubuntu derivatives, and somehow a couple of lines of terminal output will always peek out. If one is running an OS where this is intentional, that is not a problem, but with these, it just looks sloppy. I can also choose to see it the way that they can’t be bothered to support the older hardware I have chosen to buy. This does not make it more appealing.

Recently, I have installed Chakra and Arch – they both had some boot issues I could not track down. They would boot, but they would be probing the hardware for so long that it was pointless. I tried FreeBSD, GhostBSD and PC-BSD – they give a strange boot freeze error. The Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS/Scientific Linux family will not accept my machine because it has to go with PAE – which my CPU does not. Since this is an older machine, I am not even going to attempt to make Gentoo play on it. It would take me a week to build a usable system on this old iron. Dragora, while interesting as a Free-as-in-freedom-FSF-approved take on Slackware, simply won’t give me a good X.org implementation.
I mention these because they are respectable systems. Arch, FreeBSD and RHEL are distributions for technologists. Fedora gets a few bonus points as a member of the Red Hat family with a healthy dose of community.

Long story short, I feel a bit like a phony, and the more I use this, I feel less of the feeling that made me happy about running an open source craftsman’s OS. For the time being, I will stick with Fedora. I have Debian Live sitting on a USB stick next to me – Debian is a respectable community tool. A bit of work would be needed to really get into it. When I used Debian way back, it seemed very elaborate, but powerful.

The quest continues…

First off, if this is a bit incoherent, let me apologize and explain. The first thing I found out when I woke up this morning is that I had to go downtown for an emergency. It’s cold and raining. I do not have an umbrella while out of town. I have a rain jacket, but every other part of me was soaked. I had to take care of some things before leaving for the emergency. All-in-all, the emergency cost me 2+ hours of my day. I do not have 2+ hours to spare while in law school.

Separately, one of my friends got arrested and his mom has tried to call me a couple times. Remember I said I don’t have 2+ hours to spare. Yeah, this hasn’t gotten any better.

Now, some background to the issue at hand. Adding to my frustration this morning was that my SD card died, again. I think this is related to the slow as hell Internet here, but it’s not entirely clear to me why my SD cards all seem to die. I tossed two a couple of weeks ago. I left dd running on one of them for an entire week and it never finished. I have posted about the SD card issues several times over the past couple of years on my microblog site. No one has ever given any good reason as to why this happens. I would buy a new phone, but I am poor. I have tried to fix this issue in the past by buying new SD cards, but after buying however many I have bought (I think two, but I can’t find one of them…maybe I have forgotten throwing it away), I feel like I can’t afford to spend any more money on it (though given the amount of time I have spend on this today, I may change my mind about this).

More details on the issue at hand:

I am trying to use ext2 for my SD card rather than FAT because FAT craps out on me all the time. It has happened twice on my trip already and I have only been gone since late on Friday.

I can use chmod to set permissions to 777, but once an Android application makes a new dir, I cannot access those files. Specifically, I can download podcasts using BeyondPod, but then I cannot actually listen to those files until I have changed permissions. It looks like this from gnome-terminal (minus the changed username):

drwxrwxrwx  3 dw      10038  4096 2012-02-29 11:15 Android
drwxrwxrwx  4 dw      10067  4096 2012-02-29 14:17 BeyondPod
drwxrwxrwx  3 dw      10065  4096 2012-02-29 11:27 com.google.android.apps.scoreboard
drwx——  4 10021      10021  4096 2012-02-29 14:16 DCIM
drwxrwxrwx  2 dw root       16384 2012-02-29 11:00 lost+found
drwxrwxrwx  3 dw dw  4096 2012-02-29 12:55 Music

You can see, for example, that the camera application created DCIM, but left it as user 10021, not my user, which is the global owner of the SD card.

So, I did a bit of reading and it seems like I should be able to put apps in .android_secure. However, I cannot move any apps there. The internal storage on the Nexus One is quite small, so I can’t really install any apps without moving them to the

I tried using “Fix Permissions” but no permissions appeared to be fixed.

I tried to use “Root All to SD” and while it appears to have created a second partition and mounted it to /data/rallsd, I do not understand how to actually move apps. It also appears that Link2SD does not use that second partition, perhaps because it can’t or perhaps I do not know what I am doing.

So, to be clear, if I haven’t been in my rage, all I want to do is use ext2 on Android without having to change permissions every time an application creates a file. Please help me!

• How do I change the name of a USB stick?
• How do I mount an ISO?
• How do I automatically mount a file server at boot?

If the answer to any of these questions starts with “Open a terminal”, that is a bug. A design bug. What some people might call a Human Computer Interaction bug. You may know how to use it, and I’m sure most people reading this blog will know exactly how to do these things. The first one would probably start with “open gparted”, but ya know what…that isn’t good enough. When a normal person wants to edit the name of a USB stick they look in the file manager, they right click on it and expect to be able to click on “rename”. As far as I know, that doesn’t work in anything. It definitely doesn’t work in nautilus (and therefore Gnome) and probably won’t work in KDE or similar. This is not good. This needs fixed.

Ubuntu calls these “papercuts”, and btw, this is a fantastic project in Ubuntu. And I know half of you have now gone “oh no, another Ubuntu-ism”. Well, I don’t care what you think about the name. The name isn’t the important thing. What is important is the concept. These are design issues that we need to solve, and they are not being solved in any way.

I think it stems from a fundamental problem with a lot of Linux users. You don’t want “normal” people on Linux. You are quite happy with having it all to yourselves. Well ya know what, if you really like choice like you say you do, we need to work on these problems. If you want normal people to take you seriously when we think about these things, these need sorted.

This is why I am calling for distributions and programs to take a cycle out from implementing new features. Ya know what, things happen so fast, we can afford for 6 months – 1 year to get rid of a lot of these issues. The main reason I think we should do it now? Windows 8 is going to be a big disaster. I can feel it. I can already feel the venom coming out of people about metro, and the fact that the desktop on Windows is probably going to be a second class citizen.

What are these people going to do? Are they going to continue using XP or 7? Well, some may continue to use 7, and a few will use XP (although hopefully that will decrease rapidly), but we need to offer an alternative. Some will go to osX, but what about the serious users who realise the need for change, but don’t want an operating system that doesn’t function like a traditional desktop in any way? They know osX is going that way as well. We need to be that other desktop. The choice we offer is huge and means there will always be a stable, functional, supported desktop that they will like in some way. But they won’t come if we have these horrible issues.

**EDIT** Some people seem to be missing the point. This is not about these specific issues, so please don’t give me solutions for them. The point is the overarching issue of design problems that we quite often ignore as geeks. **EDIT**

That is all I have to say now, apart from the fact that there are other issues with Linux. I hope to focus on some of them in the future, such as the stupid way some things are organised in the filesystem (just try and find that executable for that program please, or that specific library…oh its in /lib? /usr/lib? /usr/local/lib? /usr/share/lib? /usr/local/share/lib? …?????) and the pathetic attitudes of some people in the communities that give our great fantastic people a really bad name.

I'd like to thank Harald Welte for his reasoned and clear blog post about GPL enforcement which I hope helps to clear up some of the confusions that I also wrote about recently.

Harald and I appear to agree that all enforcement actions should request, encourage, and pressure companies toward full FLOSS compliance. Our only disagreement, therefore, is on a minor strategy point. Specifically, Harald believes that the “reinstatement of rights lever” shouldn't be used to require compliance on all FLOSS licenses when resolving a violation matter, and I believe such use of that lever is acceptable in some cases. In other words, Harald and I have only a minor disagreement on how aggressively a specific legal tools should be utilized. (I'd also note that given Harald's interpretation of German law, he never had the opportunity to even consider using that tool, whereas it's always been a default tool in the USA.) Anyway, other than this minor side point, Harald and I appear to otherwise be in full in agreement on everything else regarding GPL enforcement.

Specifically, one key place where Harald and I are in total agreement is: copyright holders who enforce should approve all enforcement strategies. In every GPL enforcement action that I've done in my life, I've always made sure of that. Indeed, even while I'm a very minor copyright holder in BusyBox (just a few patches), I still nevertheless defer to Erik Andersen (who holds a plurality of the BusyBox copyrights) and Denys Vlasenko (who is the current BusyBox maintainer) about enforcement strategy for BusyBox.

I hope that Harald's post helps to end this silly recent debate about GPL enforcement. I think the overflowing comment pages can be summarized quite succinctly: some people don't like copyleft and don't want it enforced. Others disagree, and want to enforce. I've written before that if you support copyleft, the only logically consistent position is to also support enforcement. The real disagreement here, thus, is one about whether or not people like copyleft: that's an age-old debate that we just had again.

However, the anti-copyleft side used a more sophisticated political strategy this time. Specifically, copyleft opponents are attempting to scapegoat minor strategy disagreements among those who do GPL enforcement. I'm grateful to Harald for cutting through that ruse. Those of us that support copyleft may have minor disagreements about enforcement strategy, but we all support GPL enforcement and want to see it continue. Copyleft opponents will of course use political maneuvering to portray such minor disagreements as serious policy questions. Copyleft opponents just want to distract the debate away from the only policy question that matters: Is copyleft a good force in the world for software freedom? I say yes, and thus I'm going to keep enforcing it, until there are no developers left who want to enforce it.

As a web developer, I always face the specter of how my pages will appear in IE browsers. We've been able to abandon 6 recently, but 7-10 are still with us, and for some projects I need to test what those users will see.

As a Linux guy, installing Internet Explorer natively is not really an option. Anyone on a non-Microsoft platform hasn't been able to run IE since IE 5.5 or so. However, Microsoft has provided a way to test their browser: by downloading a Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image.

These "images" are actually virtual machines running a whole Windows operating system. They require some serious horsepower and disk space &emdash; downloading all the VMs comes to a whopping 14 GB — and the trouble doesn't stop there. These images are actually set up to run under Microsoft's "Windows Virtual PC" software. Surprise surprise, Windows Virtual PC is restricted to... Windows.

No matter, the images they use are very basic disk images, and completely supported by Virtualbox, including the open source version included in Debian Squeeze. There was just one point of contention that I ran into: Virtualbox tried to connect the disk image to a virtual SATA controller, which caused the VM to bluescreen and reboot repeatedly.

Once you switch your disk image to a virtual IDE controller, it seemed to work alright. This lets me troubleshoot issues that only appear in specific IE versions, and also let me make sure people still stuck on Internet Explorer can use the pages I develop.

If you still use Internet Explorer, and aren't stuck by policy or some other reason, consider switching to a better browser. There are better options out there — and your local web developer will love you for it.

Last month, Mr Dark wrote:

Why have you turned #! into a server distro????
Debian Stable is the server version… (to be compared with centos)
Debian Testing however is the desktop version of Debian!
Please do yourself a favor and add “Testing” images back.. that way as many users wount leave you as they do now, and some might even move back!

Normally I would be happy to ignore such a comment, (it obviously came from a misguided person, or troll) however, it did get me thinking about how fantastic a release Debian Squeeze has been.

I have been using Squeeze, in one guise or another, on desktops and servers, for well over 18 months and it has been an absolute joy to use (I say “joy”, but to be honest, I am not sure that “joy” is the correct term. What is the correct term for something that stays out of the way and just works?)

I am so glad I made the decision to switch from using Ubuntu when I did. This last 18 months of using Debian has not only provided me with a solid OS on which to build, but it has also given me a better understanding of the advantages of using a release for more than 6 months at a time; something I am sure I would never have been able to achieve as an Ubuntu user. Now, before I get slated, I should point out that I am well aware that Ubuntu do provide a long term support release, but the thing is, as an Ubuntu user I always found the temptation to upgrade too much to resist (I point the finger of blame directly at the Ubuntu hype machine, not at my infallible self) :P

Anyhow, while I am looking forward to playing around with Debian Wheezy, the current Debian testing branch, I can foresee Squeeze and my #! Statler builds remaining on a couple of my boxes for a good while yet. IMHO, the release still has plenty of legs left in it, even if some people consider it only fit for servers. Troglodytes!

BTW, I updated the Statler images today :)

--
Tagged: crunchbang linux, debian

I've had the interesting pleasure the last 36 hours to watch people debate something that's been a major part of my life's work for the last thirteen years. I'm admittedly proud of myself for entirely resisting the urge to dive into the comment threads, and I don't think it would be all that useful to do so. Mostly, I believe my work stands on its own, and people can make their judgments and disagree if they like (as a few have) or speak out about how they support it (as even more did — at least by my confirmation-biased count, anyway :).

I was concerned, however, that some of the classic misconceptions about GPL enforcement were coming up yet again. I generally feel that I give so many talks (including releasing one as an oggcast) that everyone must by now know the detailed reasons why GPL enforcement is done the way it is, and how a plan for non-profit GPL enforcement is executed.

But, the recent discussion threads show otherwise. So, over on Conservancy's blog, I've written a basic, first-principles summary of my GPL enforcement philosophy and I've also posted a few comments on the BusyBox mailing list thread, too.

I may have more to say about this later, but that's it for now, I think.

I am not sure if it is just me, but I have always found New Year’s Eve to be problematic. Social doctrine dictates that I should probably celebrate the event by socialising in meatspace, which involves getting totally wankered on alcohol, dancing like a complete muppet, and freezing my tits off as I watch a squazillion pounds worth of gunpowder being shot into space. Now, call me a “boring old fart”, but personally that sounds like far too much complicated multitasking for one night.

So, when I read that the Hacker Public Radio crew were planning on holding a special 12 hour LIVE New Year’s Eve event, I danced with joy (well, not quite, but I was pretty excited.) I mean, what better way to celebrate the New Year than by joining some like-minded geeks for an open round-table discussion?

So, both Becky and I joined the event for a few hours and we spent our night chatting about all manner of things. Topics included some chatter about CrunchBang, mesh networks, drugs and naughty stuff, as well as other random subjects.

It was a fun event and I just wanted thank everybody involved for allowing Becky and I to be a part of it. It was definitely the geekiest New Year’s Eve that I have ever experienced and I really hope it becomes a regular event!

P.S. If you missed the event, but would like to listen to the discussions, the whole 12 hour show is being made available from the HPR site.

--
Tagged: crunchbang linux, hacker public radio, hpr

The past few days it has been pretty unnaturally warm, and we've had all the windows in the house open, but last night it seems the cold has rolled back in. Not very cold, but at least the heat is back on and the windows are shut now.
I did come across an old blog of mine a couple of days ago--on livejournal no less. It was quite amusing to read through--I think the dates ranged from early 2004 to the end of 2006. I was definitely a dumb kid back then, haha. Had a lot of good times with friends, though.

And that got me thinking about blogging systems. I like this one decently, but it is "no frills" for sure. Sometimes it is nice to have some additional features... So I was considering moving back to wordpress, or maybe even tumblr or something. I don't actively think I will do it though, it is nice to have the freedom of my own platform and host and all that. Besides, I could always program in the features I would like to add, since this whole thing is open source! One thing that I do not like is that articles are stored and named as numbers, since there is no db backsystem. I may have to go and try to re-work this so that it is more intuitive for humans. Without using a db, it can get tricky, and would be facilitated by an editor of sorts to create posts. Right now I just ssh in and use nano to create posts, which is an advantage of the simplicity in the way that it is currently set up.

I think today the family is going to go to church, and then this afternoon we will go to my parents' house for Christmas stuff with my immediate family and mother-in-law. Should be fun, and I'm sure that the kids will have a blast.

Kids really bring Christmas alive!

Tags: #christmas #random #life #blog

With some of the money I got from selling my #jeep, I got a PS3. I haven't had a gaming console except the Wii for a long time. I did have an Xbox 360, but sold it not long after we started having kids since I just didn't have any time to play. And it's bogus that you have to pay to play on Xbox live.

I've been playing Fallout3, which I got for $10, but I also have Red Dead Redemption, that I've only just started playing.

Hmm, what else has been going on? I rarely sign onto identi.ca anymore--I mostly use G+ and occasionally sign into diaspora. And facebook for my family and other friends. Too many networks, and I'm only online 30 minutes or so a day--usually in the mornings while I drink my coffee and try to stay up to date with news and everything.

I am thinking about not renewing the factorq.net domain, I don't really need two. The only downside is that I have my email setup on that domain, though I really only use it for mailing lists. I'll have to figure out if I can transfer it out or something like that.

Christmas is coming up quickly, and my kids are growing up way too fast!

That's all I can think of at the moment. I do intend to come back and make a separate post about some code development stuff that is going on at work, but I don't know when I will be able to get around to that.

Tags: #random #linux #opensuse #ps3

Just wanted to note a very bizarre bit of behavior that I noticed with some of PHP's predefined constants.

The $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] variable in PHP gives you the currently executing script's file name - no surprises there. It always gives you the name of the parent script, though; so, if you include a file, and reference $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] in that included file, it will give you the address of the including file.

For example, if we execute test.php, and it includes lib.php, a reference to $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] in either file will return "test.php". Here's the code:

  test.php:
<?php
echo $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], "\n";
include('lib.php');
?>
lib.php:
<?php
echo $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'];
?>
Produces:
/var/www/test.php
/var/www/test.php

The __FILE__ variable in PHP gives you the file name of whatever script it's called in. So, if you call it from an included file, you'll get the file name of the included file.

  test.php:
<?php
echo __FILE__, "\n";
include('lib.php');
?>
lib.php:
<?php
echo __FILE__;
?>
Produces:
/var/www/test.php
/var/www/lib.php

The bizarre behavior comes with symlinks. On my workstation, I had a symlink for /var/www that pointed to a folder in my home directory. This caused some very bizarre behavior:

  test.php:
<?php
echo __FILE__, "\n",
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], "\n\n";
include('lib.php');
?>
lib.php:
<?php
echo __FILE__, "\n",
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], "\n\n";
?>
Produces:
/home/windigo/test/test.php
/var/www/test.php
/home/windigo/test/lib.php
/var/www/test.php

Well, that was unexpected! Apparently the $_SERVER variables report the path that I would expect, where the magic constant seems to dereference (?) the symlink and point directly at the target file.

This caused some strange behavior in the pages I was working on, so I thought I should shed some light on things and write it down in case I ran into it again later. Hope this helps somebody out - otherwise, carry on. :)

Note: Formatting kinda jacked up, will work on that once I get my blog moved to newer, cooler software.

I like solid desktop look. And the fact that Iceweasel didn’t quite blend in has been bugging me, as much as I like the personas. Anyway I found GTK+ Native and it’s awesome!

In other news, I upgraded my #! Statler which is bases on Debian Squeeze to Debian Testing today. :o Took a while but everything seems to be working. Pondering just what to do with the long autoremove list.

ps. In future you may expect a recycled PekWM post.

--
Tagged: debian, firefox, iceweasel, screenshots

Uniguin (thanks for inventing that name goes to Robert at G+) is mythical creature. It’s like penguin with pretty pearly colour horn. I had been pondering bit what do to this default layout and then was inspired by joke that went old before telling it for the first time. I was thinking unicorn but I felt that penguins fitted to my theme better. So uniguins were born and they are as rare as girls in internets. This is still pretty much the default. :P I’m quite surprised I was able to draw that penguin and make it look fine with GIMP. Yay. :D

--
Tagged: uniguins

Recently I switched my personal password manager from Revelation to KeepassX.  I keep an encrypted password file in my Dropbox account, which syncs across all of my computers (Dropbox on Ubuntu).

Install KeepassX
You can install KeepassX by opening a terminal and running ‘apt-get install keepassx’, or by opening the Ubuntu Software Center and searching for it there:

Create a password database
After installing the first thing you are going to want to do is create a password database.  This is where your passwords will be stored on your hard disk.

Add a new entry
Now that you have created a password database, you can start adding entries in

Generate a password
One of the best features of using a password manager like KeepassX is that for every single site you use, you can use a very long password, and a different password for each website.  Here we can hit the button labelled ‘gen’ and create a password

Right click your entry
Now you can right click your new entry, copy the new password and paste it into sites. This is much more secure, as if you use the same password for every website you visit, and one of them gets hacked, you will have to change your password on the other sites, if you even get a chance before they exploit your information. In addition, KeepassX is cross platform, working on Windows and OS X also.

Related posts:

1. A thousand passwords
2. Dropbox on Ubuntu
3. Migrated to a VPS

A few months back I wrote a post that had quite a few reactions, speculating on why open source developers run OS X.

Recently I have been using the newest Macbook Pro 15″, and I thought I would update my direct experience on how Ubuntu and OS X stack up.

Web Browsing
On both platforms Chrome, in my view, is the defacto standard for nerds and an ever increasing porportion of the general population. Having used Safari for the first month to try ‘the apple way’, I can say that Chrome feels faster, has better features, and was just really well thought out. Both platforms are a wash on this one.

Flash Plugin
This one is also a wash, both platforms have support for flash — I actually think Ubuntu has an edge here since Flash can be installed via the package manager, instead of an entirely separate installer in OS X.

Text Editing
Textmate is a very cool application, with tons of pre-defined bundles that allow for quick completion, and a great project view.  However for Java development, it seems that IDE autocompletion / debugger integration is hard to beat (Eclipse / Netbeans work on both platforms), while for Python / Ruby etc Vim was a better fit for both platforms, as an advanced user.  Definitely a great entry level editor that is an inbetween for Gedit / Vim.

Terminals
I think here gnome-terminal blows away terminal.app — gnome-terminal is noticeably faster and the design was clearly by people using the terminal day in and out.  I think the Mac community feels the same way, and in general uses ITerm, or the recently released ITerm2 (not same authors as ITerm oddly enough).  ITerm2 does work well, but again it feels like the terminal lacks speed in comparison.

Performance
One thing that struck me was the lack of responsiveness / speed.  This Macbook is a quad core with an ATI dedicated graphics card, but for most operations the OS feels quite sluggish.  Starting up iTunes or Safari takes much longer than you would expect for a $2000 USD piece of machinery.  I will however note that I only use Gnome 2, so Gnome 3 may suffer from a similar issue, but I am not experienced enough to write about it.

Application Installation Method
I was able to install apps through the Mac App Store, in the same manner I do in Ubuntu using the Software Center.  The Mac App store has many more commercial applications, however most of them like Photoshop are just not needed for a Linux veteran as Gimp does everything needed.  I also purchased XCode 4, but was underwhelmed other than the Iphone emulator which ran awesome in comparison to the Android emulator I was previously used to.

Email
I am sure a lot of people use Mail.app and like it, but I have always been a fan of the GMail interface.  I guess if we are comparing Apples to Apples, Evolution and Mail.app are both not very strong competitors (ie the rest of the world either runs on Outlook or Gmail).

Photo Management
iPhoto is a strong point, it is very easy, intuitive and nice looking to manage photos.   Linux alternatives here are weak.

Music Management
iTunes is a horrible, slow monster of expensive music.  One thing I miss is my Droid and the Amazon MP3 application, as that was by far a better deal, and my purchases went straight to the cloud.  iCloud is coming shortly, but Amazon is still my vendor of choice, and they already have proven to get the cloud right.

Gaming
OS X and Ubuntu both have my favorite game, Heroes of Newerth.  Mac OS X has Steam, which is definitely a benefit and World of Warcraft.  Ubuntu can’t really compete in this arena, so it is something to consider.

Conclusion
So, if you were like me, and curious about Mac OS X, you can see I am not overall impressed.  Maybe I am just biased towards Ubuntu, but I find overall it has favorable performance, and I can change out any pieces I don’t like.   I would recommend OS X if you wanted a generally worse experience but the ability to install Photoshop and a few more games (still nothing compared to Windows in this respect).

Related posts:

1. Workspaces
2. The Cherokee Webserver
3. Flash 64-bit on Ubuntu Intrepid

Considering the amount of time I've spent not updating my blog, Google probably doesn't agree. :)

I've been a lot (most) of my time doing web-development related things. Reading every paper I can get my hands on on site optimization, applying them to all the sites I administer, and (of course) measuring. You'll notice the newly-minted PostOn, a replacement for our old use of AddToAny that pulled in a bunch of unnecessary junk. As my home page reflects, I've also been aquiring design information in school (no way to measure design performance without outside assistance, unlike performance; summer for tech, rest of year for the much clumsier design).

The rest of my time has been spent randomly playing games, Bible reading, and basic body functions. It's an extremely uneventful summer before returning to school, but it's not exhausting at least.

A lot of sites will tell you to do this:

CREATE TABLE t2 SELECT * FROM t1;

Problem is that you’ll lost your auto_increment, primary key and any other indexes you have (and any other extra meta data like that.)

This might not be the best solution, but hey it worked for me:

CREATE TABLE t2 LIKE t1;

INSERT INTO t2 SELECT * FROM t1;

Hope that helps somebody.. I only noticed I’d lost all my primary keys after copying a load of tables using the old method.

For about a year I noticed that very infrequently my VPS would run out of memory.. at first I thought it was probably just a wordpress plugin, but after a while I discovered it was actually saslauthd. This is a known bug (not known very well though..) with saslauthd on Debian. Anyway, here’s the fix – I’m not totally sure of the implications, so if you run a busy mail server I’d recommend you look into it a bit more before doing it:

I changed this line:

Update the file: /etc/default/saslauthd

OPTIONS=”-c -m /var/run/saslauthd”

to:

OPTIONS=”-c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r”

I think this basically disables threading and enables forking of the process (or something like that) which is what was responsible for the memory leak.

So if you’re running out memory on your server, maybe give this a try

[Thanks to Djamu: http://www.howtoforge.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-52750.html ]

I don’t get it. There’s a huge bunch of people, users and contributors, throwing mud at each other in the name of their favorite Free Software project. Online on blogs, identi.ca, forums, mailing lists and virtually any form of communication known to the broader Free Software community. Most blog posts have no actual content, but are just slurs and hatred wrapped in nice rhetoric. Both sides seem to largely have lost the ability or will to talk to each other. What I’m observing is the GNOME/Canonical debate.

On the GNOME side, people accuse Canonical of not working together with the GNOME project. Most of the controversy seems to evolve around the decision to use the desktop that started as an in-house Canonical project called Unity instead of the new GNOME Shell in the upcoming release of Ubuntu. Supporters of GNOME seem to see that as an open attack on their project, or something like that. Much of the argument is also fueled by past and present Canonical “mistakes” like moving the window buttons, their policy of copyright assignment and most recently the change of the Banshee Amazon affiliate ID.

On the Canonical side, it seems people are sick and tired of receiving a ton of hate mail for every little change they make. I could imagine that having to justify that they’re working on a Free Software project and giving it away for free can be quite frustrating for Canonical employees and Ubuntu community members. After all everything they do (at least on the desktop) is completely Free Software.

Now, when I see both sides putting so much effort into the discussion, I am asking myself:
What do they try to achieve?

The thing is, that’s not that easy to answer. Of course everyone speaking/writing on this subject may try to achieve something else, but the general tone I seem to hear is:
GNOME: Use GNOME Shell in your next release and abandon your non-upstream stuff like Unity, Application Indicators, Messaging Menu etc or at least integrate it into GNOME Shell.
Canonical: We would really like to keep using that stuff, leave us alone already.

Let’s broaden the perspective a bit. Let’s move away from the current discussion and look at what the projects, GNOME and Ubuntu, try to achieve. Because I think they have a common goal, and actually a very similar vision of how that goal should look like. A Free Software desktop, easy to use, elegant, with a unified user experience and a unified developer experience. In short, a Free Software desktop operating system and platform that is able to compete with the proprietary alternatives. This also includes an App Store/Software Center. Let me show you two screenshots.

GNOME 3 in the Fedora 15 Alpha

Unity in Ubuntu 10.10

Does this look like a different vision to you? Does this look so different to you that it’s worth having a heated argument about it? To me it seems that GNOME and Ubuntu still share the same vision, and also have very similar understandings of the concrete manifestation of a Free Software desktop. This is what the Ubuntu community means when they say they are still a GNOME distro. Canonical tweaked the desktop over several releases with the introduction of App Indicators, the MeMenu etc etc and presented Unity as an end result of this, while the GNOME people got their Shell ready and ported most of the core applications to GTK3.

Now the final release of Unity for standard desktops and the final release of GNOME 3 (which will first be included in a major distro in Fedora 15) are soon to happen. It’s not a new phenomena in Free Software communities that when two projects are equally good and it doesn’t look like one is going to cease development anytime soon (it is my point of view that Unity and GNOME Shell are currently equally good desktops, I’m trying to be as objective as possible here), a huge flame war starts. These are almost never based on “technical” arguments, only sometimes based on project politics, and all of the times pure personal preference. The latter also applies in this case. You might argue about Canonical’s decision finding process, or the way they develop software, but they release working software that obviously pleases its users. This is Free Software. Even if you don’t like the company developing it, in the end only the code matters, and whether the users like it. The freedom is not going away.

What I’m trying to say is: Are the points brought up against Canonical really that grave? Grave enough to justify a major split of the Free Software Desktop? Can’t two projects with such similar goals, such similar visions and such a shared history as GNOME and Ubuntu stop the turf war and try to get things done together? And if that’s not possible for reasons I fail to see right now, at least accept and respect the existence of each other? If Google launches Chrome OS soon, I’m sure they’ll put all their force behind it, and I don’t think there will be enough space left for a fourth major player on the desktop market after that. This might be the last chance for the Free Software Desktop. Can we unite, or will we go down fighting each other?

Title says it all.

<iframe frameborder="0" height="520" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="auto" src="http://socialcompare.com/en/w/the-price-of-mobility-lymrs0v" width="100%"></iframe>

The Price of Mobility: iPhone 4 VS Random Amazon PC

I so wanted to like Mint KDE. Lately, I’ve been getting a little bored of my Gnome Desktop. And I’m a longtime admirer of Mint’s various output. So I lept into their KDE version with much anticipation. But it sadly turned into a bit of a let down.

I have to say that the first impressions were extremely good. The installer was very swish, and didn’t have any bother hooking into my separate /home partition. And the prettiness of the eye-candy continued to impress through boot into initial tasks. The KDE Plasma idea have having everything at your fingertips is very seductive indeed. You find yourself pushing all sorts of simultaneous tasks onto the desktop, just because you can. And for a while I found myself dismissing glitches and irritations because of a lack of familiarity. But soon, the novelty of your machine looking so different begins to wear off a bit and some rather fatal flawes start to severely undermine the experience.

For me it began with KDEs rather odd launcher. Not only have they retained the really annoying menu structure that hides your path leaving you often clueless where you are, but they managed to make it worse. I should stress, there is an option to turn it off, but i’ll come back to that in a minute. The thing that really puts you in a spin is they no longer list the apps in the menu by application name, but by what the application does. I can see why, and it’s a nice idea, but in practice it’s just fucking confusing. For example in the “Internet” menu grouping, I expected to see Firefox About a third of the way down the list, A bit below Chrome (ordered alphabetically or by most used?) but because they were listed by function, ie Web Browser, they were skulking away at the bottom of the menu where I couldn’t see them. That’s the first I noticed, but so it continues, and nothing is where you expect it to be. Which is fine I thought, that must be just a default. So I delved into the launcher settings and switched the launcher to listing by app name.

I think at this moment, I really started to notice the gaping holes creeping in. I’m going to try another KDE distro soon just to see if this is a Mint implementation thing, or whether it’s KDE at fault. The problem was I tried to change that menu option and it didn’t do anything! So I tried again and rebooted. No change in the annoying menu, and my lovely uBlog plasma widgets bringing Twitter and identi.ca to the desktop decided to forget all my settings. GRRRRR!

Speaking of which, you can’t merge the uBlog timelines, so you have to have two widgets open at the same time. The LCD weather widget doesn’t work at all. the Facebook wideget does a similar thing etc etc. Ugggh, it started going from bad to worse.

If I have the time to go fiddling to put these things right, the least I could expect is to have a little music on in the background. Now this bit really got on my nerves, No matter what media player I tried, and which ever of various methods of streaming or linking I tried, It just wouldn’t play a playlist of tunes from my Tonido. I must emphasise that Tonido streaming and WebDav is utterly rock solid with every other interface I use. But Mint KDE was just a sea of fail on the media front.

As I say, I’m going to try another KDE distro soon, because this is after all, Mint’s first stab at it. But I did get the strong feeling that it was KDE not behaving. My experience of Mint’s other versions has been outstanding (Their Debian version is very nice and they do a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu does, in my humble opinion). Overall, I have to concur with other reviews of KDE that I’ve read recently. That’s to say that the whole thing has the air of having bitten off more they can chew. It just left me feeling that I wish the leaders had said no to some of the glut of features they’ve pushed in, and concentrated on bug fixing, useability and general QA issues. A cautionary tale for Unity and Gnome 3?

PS. Fuck me is it pretty though.

There’s no accounting for taste, and I understand subjectivity… but!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-Best-David-Hasselhoff/dp/B00005Q8UG

I was taking the piss out of the Germans earlier, specifically Fab on Linux Outlaws during the live show. He was bemoaning the fact that Spotify doesn’t work in Germany. I was basically jibing along the lines of “What do people in Germany want it for? 24h David Hasslehoff?”. Yeah, I know, dreadful national stereotyping, but what the fuck I was just getting a rise out of a friend amongst friend.

The thing is, it did get a bit of a rise, so on the off chance that I could get a further Fab rant going (Fab is sublime when spitting feathers!), I went on the hunt for more sources of the Hoff with which to bait him 

So, I happened across the page on Amazon that I’ve linked to above. The first thing that caught my eye was the average customer rating. 4 ½ stars out of 5? And there were a fair few ratings there as well. What the fucking hell is going on? I know it’s subjective but really?

Check the reviews out, there are fifteen glowing reviews on there. I have to admit that back in the day, I bought quite a few Whitesnake albums, including the truly dreadful Slip of the Tongue, without realising for a little while how much they sucked the sweat off a donkeys balls. (A quick dose of Led Zeppelin 1 soon sorted that out thank the heavens). But even then, I could feel in my bones how much of a shit eating monkey the Hoff became when he got near a recording studio.

If there are any Germans out there who can explain it to me, do please try, because I am totally mystified 

Okay my nw HD PVR arrived I’m really liking it it so far. I bought it with the intention of archiving some gaming footage and so far it works very well for that. I’ve starting uploading some to Youtube. It’s also nice to be able to capture in HD. My original choice was going to be the Blackmagic Intensity Pro but it would have required me to add 4 more drives in a raid to my setup which I didn’t feel like doing.

One of my captures:

<object height="306" width="500"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/e/6OUr3OZssCg"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="306" src="http://www.youtube.com/e/6OUr3OZssCg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500"></embed></object>

This blog post is a response to a post by John Gruber.

The argument is that Google are hypocritical for not dropping support for Flash at the same time as supporting WebM instead of H.264.

In my view, saying this is hypocritical is complete rubbish.

Whatever your opinion of Flash, it’s widely used on the net at the moment and has some features that cannot be replicated SENSIBLY by HTML5 at the moment. In time that will change, but that’s the reality of the situation at the moment.

Chief amongst those features is access to client side audio and video from webcams. Flash is the only sensible way of accessing these resources and streaming them beyond installing additional plugins (which may or may not be any better than Flash’s effort).

In WebM, Google has a patent free alternative to H.264 (the Apple-preferred codec which may at any time cease to be free for use on websites). The quality of WebM encoded video is arguably very slightly lower than H.264, but immaterial when discussing low bandwidth streaming in a browser. Google’s commitment to integrating open standards understandably sees them implementing WebM in Youtube and Chrome because it’s a sensible and viable alternative to H.264. Sure, right now there’s no hardware acceleration for decoding WebM, but that will come in time. Of the major browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and Chrome will all support WebM/VP8 encoded video in HTML5.

There is currently no credible alternative to Flash. If Google were to abandon Flash purely on the basis that it is propitiatory,  they would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face. In the same way that H.264 served them until there was a viable alternative (in WebM/VP8), Flash will continue to serve Chrome users until the shortcomings in HTML5 are addressed.

If, and only if, at that time, Google choose not to remove Flash in favour of the open standard, then they can justifiably be called hypocrites.

Hey everybody, I thought I’d share an E-Mail I wrote recently. I was inspired by Jezra’s letters to Dell and Google, but didn’t actually have the patience to find out Steve Ballmers postal address. So I just sent it to his Microsoft e-mail address. I’m still waiting for an answer and will update this post if he eventually responds…

To: steveb@microsoft.com
Subject: An extraordinary request

Hello Mr. Ballmer,
my name is Julian Aloofi, I'm a 17 years old pupil, currently living in
Germany, and interested in PCs and especially programming. I'm a very
satisfied user of Windows Vista (I'll upgrade to 7 with my next computer
soon, I promise!) and generally tinkering with the .NET framework.

Well, why am I writing to you?
I heard rumors on the internet that you threw a chair at one of your
employees. Maybe you heard about this as well yet. I don't even want to
talk about whether this was right or not, it's your chair after all.
However, my chair recently broke, and while I was looking for a new
chair, I thought that the best chair I could think of possibly is this
very chair. If someone owns a good office chair, who but not the CEO of
Microsoft?
Would I ask too much if I'd ask you to send this chair to me? I know it
probably doesn't mean much to you, but just imagine how happy you'd make
a small german boy. If you're interested, write me back so I can tell
you the postal address. My eternal gratefulness is of course guaranteed.

Best regards and a happy and successful New Year,
Julian Aloofi

PS: Yes, I'm serious!

I just hope he doesn’t find out about the operating system I actually use…

By the way, I made some new packages for eViacam. They should contain no errors, regarding the application itself and packaging guidelines compliance. You can find 32-bit packages on my fedorapeople space. 64-bit users will have to rebuild the latest SRPM for now. If you try them and something breaks, please let me know!

So the end of 2010 is here and I’ve been thinking about the game that made the biggest impact on me this year. There were plenty of great games this year but only one which I feel stands above them all which is Mass Effect 2. The world, the characters, and everything else made it a fantastic RPG experience from start to finish. I think EA really did an amazing job crafting the whole Mass Effect universe and the story as a whole. It’s also cool to be able to import you’re character from the previous games and see choices you made take shape and cause changes in the future. The first Mass Effect which was my GOTY for 2007 and the sole reason I purchased a 360 was amazing but by no means perfect since it did have a few flaws (*cough* elevators *cough*) but I still very much enjoyed it. However with ME2 they improved so many aspects of the game and really polished it. They also went the extra mile with the DLC they’ve released and hopefully they continue to release more of it. Lair of the Shadow Broker really added to the game and the way it fleshed out more the story especially at the end was awesome. Hopefully EA can ME3 my 2011 GOTY.

Other great mentions this year were Bayonetta, Final Fantasy XIII, Dragon Quest IX, Halo Reach, and Ryu ga Gotoku 4. All in all it was a great year for gamers and hopefully 2011 is the same especially with the release of 3DS (which I plan on importing).

east coast/west coast

Seasonal (and not so seasonal) beers

The season of seasonal beers is upon us and if there’s anything I’m up for it’s seasonal beers.

While the first of the beers I’m going to talk about is not exactly seasonal, it’s good. After having some mixed experiences with Dogfish Head brews, one caught my eye: “Aprihop”. It’s an IPA brewed with real apricots and weighs in at a warming 7% ABV. If you can find it, buy it. It’s awesomely drinkable and it looks like this:

Second is Christmas Ale from Anchor Steam (another great brewery all around). What’s great about this beer is that it isn’t the same every year. Each Christmas Ale is unique. While that may not sound appealing for say, bringing it to holiday parties, it’s definitely worth picking up for some home or small crowd consumption. At 5.5% ABV it’s a nice beer to sip/swig on while getting dinner ready or relaxing with friends (or both AT THE SAME TIME). I recommend it and my west coast pick looks like this:

The reviews are brief (I just drink it, I don’t usually write about it), but I hope you try (and enjoy) my picks.

The moral of the story is go drink some beer. There’s some really good ones out there today. Support your local micro breweries and maybe some that aren’t so local.

I’m always on the lookout for beer recommendations so comments are appreciated!

The Release Candidate (read: almost finished) version of everybody’s favorite Ubuntu-based Linux distro is up for grabs! Most improvements are highlighted on the Linux Mint blog where you will also find download instructions.

Some new features that I particularly like:

• The Mint menu highlights newly installed apps and has GTK themes support
• The Update Manager displays the download size, it has a revamped UI and should also be faster
• The Welcome screen will immediately give you the opportunity to install missing codecs that aren’t shipped with the distribution due to international licensing issues.

Here’s a link to the torrent (32-bit)

So, what do you think? Will any of you Ubuntu users be switching to Mint 10? Will any of you Mint users be switching to the upcoming Debian-based edition?

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Linux Mint 10 “Julia” RC, Hot Off the Presses!

During the last few days I’ve been playing around with two of the most prominent XMPP servers currently out there: ejabberd and Openfire. ejabberd is written in Erlang, a functional programming language developed at Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory for use in telephone switches. With this use case in mind, they designed the language and its runtime for high degrees of concurrency and fault-tolerance. As it turns out, these traits are quite desireable in messaging servers as well. Right off the bat, I declare this ejabberd’s biggest advantage - the scalability inherent in the technologies it is based on. Yet another Erlang-induced win is the fact that hot code loading is supported, meaning that a live server instance can be upgraded without disrupting the service.

This is where the fun stops, at least for developers looking to extend ejabberd by writing modules. The process of installing and configuring ejabberd is thoroughly documented, but the developer documentation is severly lacking. It all ends up in a good amount of RTFS. The Java-based Openfire is in many ways much more manageable than ejabberd. If you intend to extend the functionality of the server with plugins, you’ll come to appreciate the availability of developer documentation and guides to get you started. The way plugins can be snapped into place through the web-based administration interface is really sleek too.

So, any closing thoughts? If scalability is key, and you don’t have any immediate plans of adding custom behaviour - bite the bullet and go with ejabberd. If you do decide to start tinkering with modules, I recommend Jack Moffitt’s excellent blog related to the topic. If you just need an easily manageable, easily extensible messaging server - try Openfire. Actually, try them both (and preferably a few more) like I did, as your mileage may vary.

Stacktraces are a Good Thing™, but not very useful when hidden away in your server logs. Hoptoad is a useful exception tracking and notification service for your application. Although skewed towards Rails applications and webapps in general, Hoptoad can be integrated into existing logging frameworks quite easily. This is exactly what I did with the aptly named frog4j.

Setting it up

The sources can be built using Ant. The default task builds a jar, so just run ant in the top level directory, grab the jar from the dist directory and put it in your classpath and smoke it.

The source contains a sample log4j.properties file that shows how to configure frog4j:

log4j.rootLogger=INFO, stdout, hoptoad

log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=[%d,%p] [%c{1}.%M:%L] %m%n

## frog4j appender
log4j.appender.hoptoad=org.freeasinbeard.frog4j.HoptoadAppender

# mandatory parameters
log4j.appender.hoptoad.api_key=76fdb93ab2cf276ec080671a8b3d3866
log4j.appender.hoptoad.environment=production

# optional parameters (with default values)
log4j.appender.hoptoad.threshold=ERROR
log4j.appender.hoptoad.only_log_exceptions=true

By default, frog4j only forwards exceptions to Hoptoad (only_log_exceptions=true) but can also forward normal log messages at the given threshold (Level.ERROR).

Todo

• Adding support for log4j layouts so that the error messages can be customized

smtp_toolkit

Speaking SMTP to mail servers with Python!

In my daily work, I often find the need to test various mail servers: verify that they are responding, see if they support TLS, check what the max supported message size is, etc. This is usually an exercise in running a telnet session to port 25 of the mail server and inspecting from there.

Seeing as telnet isn’t installed by default on some operating systems these days (I’m looking at you Windows 7), writing a Python class seemed to be the right thing to do. I can incorporate it in to scripts, schedule checks, work it into mxutils.com… The list goes on.

It’s pretty straightforward to use, and I’ve made the code available under the BSD license at http://github.com/polera/smtp_toolkit.

Here are some basic examples of usage:

 1 from smtp_toolkit import SMTPServerTest
 2 
 3     # setup a list of servers to check
 4     server_list = ['smtp.gmail.com']
 5   
 6     for server in server_list:
 7       print(server)
 8       s = SMTPServerTest(server)
 9       # server connection results are returned as a dict
10       print(s.results)
11       # get the EHLO options (i.e. what would be returned after an ehlo command)
12       print("EHLO options %s" % ", ".join(s.ehlo_options))
13       # see if the server supports TLS (based on the EHLO response)
14       print("TLS Supported? %s" % s.server_supports_tls)
15       # what is the max message size that this server will handle (also from EHLO)
16       print("Max message size: %d MB" % s.server_max_message_size)

I plan on building this out to support more features in the near future, so if you’re interested, keep an eye on the github repo.

Now, go test your servers!

So in general these suggestions are meant for Canadian Government Websites. I believe that these sites are especially guilty of the following problems but are also applicable to other sites.

1. Problem: Poorly implemented or no RSS. Even if present it is usually useless, hand-generated, out of date or doesn’t pertain to very much of anything.
Solution: Implement RSS or use a CMS that has RSS built in. Even most good programming languages have excellent XML handling built in.

2. Problem: anything.aspx
While aspx is a semi-decent programming language, using it doesn’t encourage you to use some of the great CMSs or Frameworks like Drupal or Django. Not to mention it screams to the world that you are using windows to host your site. Terribly insecure.
Solution: Use different languages that can run on several platforms to have a heterogeneous environment.

3. Problem: IIS
No respectable outfit, ever… EVER uses IIS as their web server. And it leads to using html mangling programs like Adobe Contribute and Front Page.
Solution: Use Linux/BSD/OpenSolaris or if you must, I think SCO is still around right?

4. Problem: www.example.com vs example.com
Every good website since 1996 has fixed this problem, one redirects to the other. When I go to a government site and I see “Under Construction” because IIS is misconfigured I think less of politicians.
Solution: Correct configuration of IIS or switch to Apache.

5. Problem: streaming WMV etc.
While I believe that governments should disseminate content in open and non-patent encumbered formats(I’m a believer that people shouldn’t have to have a license to read a word document or play an mp3), and even though (most) browsers support HTML5 elements that allow for embedding video, I realize that using flash is the most realistic option. Most government sites don’t even do that, They stream video in wmv and audio in wma. Using this is a bit jenk on a Mac and technically possible(but practically impossible) on Linux. Also transcriptions should be available for every video(for people using text browsers) or captioned.
Solution: Use Flash or open formats like ogg, or better yet use both.

6. Problem: Intelligible URL structure
I am a believer that I should be able to navigate 90% of a website by typing plain English words into a URL. Call me old fashioned but it is just the way that I feel. HINT: It also keeps the site easier to maintain. If the URL structure is a mess, the code is probably a mess.
Solution: Use a language like python or frameworks that encourage or require clean URLs.

7. Problem: English or French?
Every Time that you go to a Canadian Government site for the first time, the site will ask you what language you would like to view the site in. Every browser that has been made in many years has been able to send information about your language preferences. Most English speakers don’t realize this because they are too dominant to ever run into the problem. But if that is too difficult to implement for the government, then enable a checkbox that says “Remember my selection whenever I visit a Government of Canada Website.”
Solution: Learn about cookies.

8. Problem: Colour Scheme
No one worries about the 216-256 “web-safe” colours anymore. NO ONE USES 8-BIT DISPLAYS ANYMORE. But if you had been to a government website even today it seams that they are still subscribing to this philosophy. The design of the sites could be so much more appealing with better colours.
Solution: Use colours.

9. Problem: “What’s New”, “Top of Page” and other similarly useless links.
“What’s new” is a throw back to when site were smaller, they quickly become out of date and are made redundant by things like RSS feeds. Top of page is a throwback to when browsers did not have scroll bars. Guess what? They do now. “A-Z Index” this is an interesting one. Some usability experts believe that “you should be able to access all of a site’s content within X number of clicks”. I would append one thing to this “you should be able to access all of a site’s content within X number of clicks and in under 1-2 hours”. An (A-Z Index) is useful when you approach $items>26. However, there is an upper limit to this.
Solution: Top of page might be useful for accessibility, or text browsers. Do browser detection. If the user is using a browser that would benefit from this show it, if not hide it with Javascript.

10. Problem: Open Data.
I have issues with Crown Copyright. I believe that, in most cases, works that a government create should be owned by the people and not by “The Monarch”. I am sure the queen could care less that she has all the rights to the 2006 Ministry of fisheries report on salmon populations. I was amazed, when during a recent copyright consultation roundtable, Minister of Industry, Tony Clement did not understand why it mattered that Canadians should hold the rights to government works. A good compromise to this would be to make both the crown and Canadians both rights holders. It doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Also government Data should be made available to the public as easily as possible. Either by dumping the raw data on the internet or creating open databases with APIs to access the data. NOTE: It is important that crown copyright be fixed before this happens. I should not have to pay money to get at government data, nor waste paper in the process. All I should need is an internet connection and the desire to find out.
Solution: Create a mechanism and reform copyright so that this information can be disseminated more easily. Embrace Creative Commons. Follow the lead of the Americans.

I has been awhile since I have had the time/opportunity to do a distro review due to other projects I have been working on, but I will get to that later. I am currently testing the beta for Xubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Kola) which is set to be released on October 29th. I have not gotten the ‘Netbook’ remix of this version yet, so that will have to be saved for another time. So here goes, first look at Xbuntu 9.10 on the AAO.

Speed:

Karmic seems to be getting a lot of press regarding boot speed,but I cant say that I notice much of a difference.  In fact, the new login window and GDM seem to possibly be slower (right now I am comparing this to Linux Mint GLORIA). But it does seem to be faster doing a suspend/resume. It also seems to be a small amount faster in all around performance.

Improvements:

One of the things I have always liked about Ubuntu is how well the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ has worked. This has gotten even better with the introduction of the Ubuntu Software Center . This combines all that was good with the old system and improves upon it. They have also improved the mechanism for adding a PPA (personal package archive) for software that is in active development (such as chromium). This is now accomplished with the simple line: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:x where x is the name of the project (chromium daily). I will (hopefully) be doing a full how-to on PPA’s (both for pre-Karmic, then Karmic) shortly. Another improvement is that at least in the main line version of Ubuntu which has always been very much into integration of the different desktop apps, you now seem to have the ability to remove any one of these applications without causing any problems with the rest of the suite. Specificaly, if you chose to, you can now remove Evolution/Empathy without complaint from the ubuntu-desktop package. This is good for the users (like myself) who appreciate the effort made to integrate all the applications into a cohesive desktop, but disagree with the choice of software used (I personally prefer Pidgin IM client and Thunderbird mail client) .

Theme:

The new them for Karmic seems to have finally gotten past the Brown/Orange theme and gotten into the realm of a darker theme for the desktop. This includes a more streamlined GTK theme (smaller buttons, smaller borders). The Xubuntu theme sticks with blue, but also brings a darker feel, which I personally enjoy.

Other Thoughts:

The new release seems to boast better battery life (have not confirmed yet, still testing this) and required no additional work to get all of the usual features working, though it seems that microphone support (for the built in mic at least) is still non-existent.

This is my first look of the beta, and I will update this post once I have used it longer. My initial reaction is very hopeful, and if the final release shapes up to be as good as the beta promises, Karmic will be a bit hit. I hope to be doing more distro-hopping in the coming weeks, as well more general how-to’s. As always please send me any suggestions for new distros to try, or any how-to’s you would like to see.

-x1101

I have recently downloaded and installed Kubuntu 9.10 and it is great! The problem I have always had KDE is that half of the applications are much better than most Windows/Mac/GNOME apps, and half of them are about 90% as good as the other platforms. Well I have used Kubuntu 9.10 for a bit now and I must say it is giving me very little to complain about. Network has a little ways to go yet. New installer bling is great! Some great new improvements to gwenview. You will also notice that unlike in my 9.04 review I didn’t have to turn compositing off to get screenshots. (Most) compositing effects now show up in screenshots! Congrats to Pinheiro for his work on icons and theming. K3B looks great now that it is integrated into KDE4 as well as the newest air desktop theme. Kopete can now integrate with Skype. Awesome

I was disappointed that they decided not to include the Arora in this version, as I think it shows a lot of promise. There is now a Firefox installer included in the menu structure. I also installed Chromium from a launchpad PPA and even though Firefox and Chromium are GTK apps they finally(Firefox especially) are more integrated with the desktop. In previous releases Firefox wouldn’t know what to open files with unless you had GTK apps installed.

Great job KDE and Kubuntu Teams!

Hello again.

Today’s topic is another general introduction before we really get started on our journey. Since the AAO (like most net-books) doesn’t have a CD ROM drive, UNetBootIn is a must for installing a different OS. That being said, I thought it would be appropriate to spend a bit of time delving into the specifics of UNetBootIn so that anyone who wants to has enough information to try a distro or two out for themselves.

The only things you need use UNetBootIn are 1) A PC running Windows or Linux and 2) A USB drive large enough to hold the disk image (ISO) of your desired distro. For most distro’s a 1 or 2GB drive should be plenty, but if your prefer a meatier offering, such as Fedora, you will need at least a 6GB drive (because Fedora and others are DVD ISO’s, which are approximately 4.5 GB in size.) I have a 2 and an 8 GB drive for this, depending on how large the image is, and on which one is not being used.

To start off, open up UNetBootIn. You have two options on how to use it. Firstly, you can use the top portion of the application to download a specific version of your distro of choice (many are included, though often not the most up to date versions)and burn it all in a single step.

The image below shows this method with the live image for Ubuntu 9.04 chosen. If you were to select a location and start the process, you would download and install the Ubuntu live installer environment onto the USB drive selected below.

The other way to use UnetBootIn is to download the ISO on to your computer manually and then create the USB installer. Use this if your distro or version of choice is not listed in the automatic download menu.

With either option simply insert your USB drive and select it from the “Drive” menu. Then Press OK and the installation (and download if you selected the automatic download) will start.

If you selected the Automatic download your screen will look like this, and the download will begin. How long this will take depends on the size of the image you have chosen and your connection speed. This will download the ISO file of your selected distro and save it as a TEMP file in the default location for your OS. After the install you may want to go and delete this to save space.

Regardless of which method you choose, UNetBootIn will extract and copy files into specific locations to use for booting the installation environment. It will then install the boot loader and finish up.

If you are doing this download on the PC you wish to install the new distro on, go right ahead and click the “Reboot” option on the next screen. Otherwise simply select “Exit.” Either will close the installer. From here you simply insert the USB boot device you have created into your AAO (or other PC/Netbook.) Make sure you have “USB Hard drive” or similar chosen as your 1^st Boot device in the BIOS (the initial start-up screen will flash press <Some Key> to enter setup, press that key to enter the BIOS and make changes, carefully) and boot up your new installer.

Hopefully this little UNetBootIn walkthrough will be useful to you. This is a very powerful tool for installing operating systems on any PC that does not have a CD ROM drive (as long as it has a USB port.)

Stick around, because next I will begin reviews in earnest. The first distro up is #!CrunchBang Linux, a minimalist project based on Ubuntu, running the OpenBox window manager.

-x1101

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