Okay, so this little article maybe shouldn’t be referenced on the main page, since the only purpose of it is to explain how I like things done, and it is not… particularly impressive in the news stream.

The reason is that I hands-down completely beyond a shadow of a doubt prefer to use Claws Mail. And not a lot of people get that, since the default look of Claws Mail is… pretty terrible, to be honest (see this article from cyberciti.biz to see the default Claws layout). I find, however, that with a bit of cleanup, it is very good and even pleasant to look at; and it has some very good features to make use of. So this little piece is actually intended as a answer to people who ask me how I can use something as horrible as Claws. It is entirely my opinion, and if I am the only person in the world who has this right, I am also the only person in the world who knows that you  are wrong when you say I am.

Now: Maybe I should just show you the design I am going for, to make it clear:

This is simply a series of settings to be made, none of which are particularly advanced, but make a great difference.
I should also note that part of the reason I am doing this is that I have an aging Thinkpad which will do a resolution of 1024×768. This is adequate for a lot of things, but it means that an application like Thunderbird looks terrible nowadays, because the text spacing and the huge attachment field leave so little space for the actual message. As you see, this setup allows me to use all the information in the email, and though the font is a little smaller, it still allows for comfortable reading.

None of these concepts depend on each other, so the order is of minor importance. The easiest will probably just be to go through it as the options come in the Preferences panel. In other words, start with going to Configuration > Preferences.

• Receiving – These are sensible defaults to me, but I ask it to check email every 8 minutes. Obviously you can set this as you prefer. I don’t set it to check mail on startup, because I often just want to find a detail in an email, and the interface will get quite unresponsive when fetching mail. On the other hand, it fetches mail quite quickly compared to other mail clients.
• Sending – Never get into this much, except I ask it never to send return receipts. I hate people asking me for a receipt.
• Writing – I keep the default setup.
• Templates – Ah, now there is something for people to get into. I don’t actually use these – I use a signature, which is defined elsewhere – but you will note the Information button at the bottom, which offers a lot of data that could be entered into a template. I have occasionally fiddled with the reply template, because a well-structured reply makes it pleasant, but – this is up to you. Also, as with many other things, Claws will be able to make a user-input template and include information from external applications – which make the customization options quite extensive.
• Wrapping – I check them all and have it wrap at 72 characters – for when people have mail clients which will keep you text in one very long line, if you don’t make it wrap. So, that’s a wrap.
• Spell Checking - Well… I kill it. We have too different vocabularies. Actually, now that I am in the States and almost all my email is in English, I might turn it on, but in Danish, spell checking is cr… unsatisfactory.
• Text Options – Ah, now we get into the meat of it, visually. A lot of what you can see about the email can be defined here, in “Display headers in message view”. These can be quite extensive. I like to be able to see which client the email came from, for one thing. Here, you can also change the distance between the lines. I leave it at the default two pixels, but when I was using an 800×600 machine, I reduced it. And of course, I make it render HTML as text. While it is possible with one of the Claws Mail plugins – more on those later – to have the client render HTML, that is just so wrong in general, that I like to keep it text; and it does a very good job of extracting the text from the HTML.
• Image Viewer – I let it show images, and reduce them to make them sensible to look at. I allow printing, since I would never print an email unless the point was to get everything in there. Which happens a couple of times a year, so I don’t lose a lot.
• External programs – Guess how this works. I have set the very nice medit editor as my default, but I have never actually come across anything that opened in this editor, unless I ask Claws mail to use the external editor to compose emails.
• Colors – The Color Labels tab is very nice, it allows to set the colors to use, though I usually don’t; I do like the second tab, though, discretely named “Other” – this is where you can set the URL color and, for those who do a lot of newsgroups, colors indicating the quotation level. This can be a powertool for some people.
• Summaries - This is one of the places where the action is, when it comes to clearing up the interface. You see how there are three columns in Claws’ Folder list on the left? They take up quite a lot of space – but you can do it differently. So under “Display message number next to folder name”, choose “Unread and Total messages” and under “Displayed Columns”, press the “Edit” button. In the interface which comes up, remove all but “Folders” in the “Displayed” column.
  If you press OK at this stage and come back to the Claws interface, you can see how those very space-consuming fields have been replaced with a summary next to the folder name.
  A bit down the page is another thing which makes quite a bit of uncluttering difference: Date Format. It is set to display month, day, year, weekday, hour and minutes. If you take the weekday out here – which you usually won’t need when you go back anyway – you get a bit of extra space. Again, the “Information” button will tell you how to get the info you want shown. I use %d/%m-%y %H:%M – which would be a European notation, Americans would go %m/%d/%y %H:%M – this will will keep it neat.
  Here, you can also select which message lidt columns you would want to show. There is a ‘mark’ column and a ‘status’ column. I like to have these – to see what I have replied, forwarded etc. – but if that makes no difference to you, you can take them out. I usually put in the “Size” field as well, and for some that would be enough of an indicator to take out the “Attachment” field.
• Fonts – This is the other primary place which makes a big deal. In other clients, it is problematic to get it to reduce all the font sizes in the interface. Here, Claws will let you reduce the font size for Folder & Message lists and the message font itself. One of the main problems in the message list is how the data “sneaks up” on the next column. I set “Folder & Message Lists” to Sans 8 and “Message” to a monospaced font size 9 – monospaced because people sometimes drop in ASCII in the emails, and it will look terrible if the font is not Monospaced. I usually use Liberation for that.
  After doing this, you will probably want to adjust the width of the columns in the message list, but you should be able to get decent spacing.
• Themes - Here is where you get a major facelift – not so much in functionality, just prettier. You can get other themes on the Themes section of Claws-mail.org – I use the one called “elementary” to get some more contemporary icons. Download the tarball, untar it, press “Install new”, navigate to the theme folder and okay the selection – the theme will be installed. As you select it from the list, press “Use this”, and it will be your default afterwards. You will want to go back to the main screen to see how great a difference this actually makes!
• Toolbars & Other sections I don’t touch. I don’t remove any of the functions from the toolbars.
• I do, hovewer, change to icon view. In the main interface, I choose View > Show or Hide > Toolbar > Icons Only. Once more, that gives a bit more space to work with. Here, you can also remove column headings – in case you feel confident that you know that the column list is a column list, the date is the date et cetera. I suspect most people would.
• There is a search field between the message list and the messages. When you need it, you need it – and it is quite powerful – but when you don’t, you don’t. It can be folded up simply by pressing the folder with the magnifying glass. More space.
• One last thing, which you may notice, or you may not at first. After a while, the vertical scrollbar in the Folder column started annoying me – it is there regardless of whether it is needed or not. I quickly discovered that the frustration is not uncommon for setup fetichists or people with small screens (or those of us who are both), and that this is possible, though in a bizarrely difficult way (okay, not for BASH monkeys, but considering how many things can be done in the Claws interface, it seems strange that they have not included this).
  It seems one has to edit the settings file of Claws Mail manually. So one has to open ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc for editing and look for the line that says “folderview_vscrollbar_policy=0“. If you change the value to 1, it will automatically resize – and disappear if it is not needed.
  Now, there is one thing to be aware of about this: Claws will save the default setting if you make this change while it is still running! So you will want to shut Claws down, then edit the file. When you open the application again,  the scrollbar should be gone.

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!

As someone who doesn't run a full desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, I'm learning a lot of new tricks about the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps Linux ticking. For instance, my heybuddy links kept opening in Arora somehow - and I didn't really know where to change that. Arora kept closing/crashing immediately after loading a link, so I thought I should probably research that a bit.

It turns out that opening URLs is done by a bash script called 'xdg-open' located at /usr/bin/xdg-open (or at least it is in Ubuntu systems). Since link opening is handled by this script, setting your default browser also requires a little bash stuff.

The way to set a different browser (in my case, Chromium) to be the default for opening links, is to add the following to your '.bashrc' file in your home folder:

export BROWSER=/usr/bin/chromium-browser

A quick note: this only applies to things that use xdg-open to open links. Gnome software uses a Gnome setting, with the same being true for KDE (I think). If you want your default browser changed for them, you'll have to hunt down whatever setting they use.

Today I’ve been playing with generators in Python. I have to say they are yet another awesome Python feature! They give you a very cool and efficient way to store some state within a function, this is useful if you’re trying to do something like generating a sequence, which you would otherwise need a class for. I’m going to go over a couple of quick examples here in order to demonstrate what generators are and what you can do with them.

Side note: You need Python 2.4 or above to use generators, you’ll probably have this anyway, but it might pay to check before wondering why this stuff doesn’t work.

A Quick Introduction

At it’s heart a generator is a function which can return a value several times within it’s body. Each time the function is called it resumes from where it terminated in the previous call, with all it’s internal state intact (i.e. variables are held between calls). In Python a generator is defined by creating a function which uses the ‘yield’ keyword. Each time that a yield is hit the function will return the specified value. Let’s start with an example which defines a generator implementation of the built-in ‘range’ function:

def genrange(start, end):
    i = start
    while i < end:
        yield i
        i += 1

As you can see this is incredibly simple and behaves in the same way as the standard range function. The only difference is that when the generator method is called it will return a generator object rather than a value (in contrast to range, which will return a list of values in the range). These generator objects are iteratable so calling the ‘next’ method on the object will run your code and return the next yielded value. Because the generator object is iteratable, the way in which you are likely to use it should look familiar:

for i in genrange(0, 10):
    print i

If you want to go ahead and create a list from the sequence as you generate it, you can use a list comprehension, like so:

l = [i for i in genrange(0, 10)]

Of course, as hist comprehensions can be much more complicated than this you can use it to achieve more than just creating the equivalent list as calling the built-in range function. For example, you could filter the output elements according to some criteria, or call a method on each element returned.

A Trade Off

Although the above example is incredibly simple, it presents an interesting trade off between memory use and the speed of iteration through the ‘list’. The trade off exists because you could just build the list of elements in a separate function and then iterate through it. This is a perfectly valid approach but if there are a large number of elements you will use a significant quantity of memory to store the list. You are also more likely to double handle the data, unless you are building the list up over a period of time. Using a generator in this case is likely to be more efficient, as you are just creating the elements as you need them, so only storing a minimal amount of data at any one time.

The other side of the trade off is performance. If the process that produces your iterative data is computationally expensive, it makes no sense to calculate more values than you will need. So if you have a data processing loop, that can potentially exit early (i.e. before reaching the end of the ‘list’) a generator will be more efficient. But equally, if you require a tight loop which iterates quickly, you would want to pre-compute the values.

When considering using generators you should weigh up these factors and think which method is going to be most efficient for your situation. I think in a lot of cases, you will end up coming down in favour of the generator solution.

Another Example (Dan Brown is going to love me)

I’m going to leave you with another quick example, namely a very efficient way of generating Fibonacci numbers using a generator. Without further ado:

def fibonacci():
    p1 = 0
    p2 = 1
    while True:
        f = p1 + p2
        p2 = p1
        p1 = f
        yield f

There you go, easy. Many other Fibonacci implementations use a recursive method, which is horribly inefficient. Most other implementations will require either a class to store persistent data in, or the use of static variables, both of which are more tricky to handle from a programming point of view.

Well that’s it. I think I’ve demonstrated that generators are pretty cool. The examples I’ve presented are very simplistic, but I’m sure you can think of awesome uses for them. Go forth and code!

Well today marks that day I finally finished “Remembering the Kanji”. Frame 2042 was finished earlier this morning and as I finished I felt really surprised at the fact that I actually finished it. I still remember the day I picked it up and thought to myself “I’ll probably only get to 300″ but in the end I made it all the way to 2042. I wasn’t without help though because without the community over at RevTK and the large amount of stories I doubt I would have ever finished. Now all I have to do is worry about is keeping up with the daily SRS reps which should be no problem at all. I’ve already been grabbing lots sentence decks for Anki to get daily practice with and soon I’ll start building my own custom deck. I’m also glad I’ll be able to finally shelf RTK since it looks likes it’s been to the depths of hell and back.

On another note lately I seem to be obsessed with AKB48. I just can’t stop listening to ヘビーローテーション. I find myself watching the video over and over.

I’ve been watching tons of AKBINGO! even old episodes that I’ve seen many times before. It just seems weird especially since I was never into AKB48 that much but lately I just can’t get enough of them.

Howdy folks. Apologies for missing an article last week. It was a very busy weekend and I just didn’t get the time, I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I was surprised to learn this week that some friends of mine actually read this blog. It’s odd because although I write this stuff and publish it, I never really expect anyone will bother to read it. It’s nice to find out they do. I’ve got almost 2 weeks worth of stuff to catch up on, so let’s get into it.

I’ll begin on Wednesday 18th of August. The day was mostly taken up with Drupal hacking and various bit’s of CSS. Whisper it quietly, but I finally feel like I’m starting to make some sense of CSS. I’m far from a master but I’m getting somewhere at last. I received a last minute call to appear as a co-host on FLOSS Weekly again just the night before. One of the hosts dropped out and Randal asked if I could fill in. Of course I was happy to. We interviewed Stephen Hemminger about Vyatta, a Linux-based network gateway. My first appearance on FLOSS a couple of months back went ok but was dogged by technical problems. I’m glad to say the delay was sorted this time and the HD camera sent to me by Fab was a big improvement. I used my studio kit and the audio sounded a lot clearer. People seemed to enjoy the show and it was released as a podcast a couple of days later.

Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 1

I’ll skip forward a little bit to the weekend. On Saturday it was my cousin Anthony’s stag do in Liverpool. He’s getting married next month and we all went on a tour of the Cain’s Brewery in town. Cue the jokes about arranging a piss up in a brewery. The tour was very interesting and I really enjoyed it. We ended up in the Brewery Tap pub at then end, sampling the wares with our beer vouchers. This was pretty early Saturday afternoon and I’m not a big drinker so it was an early start for me. Despite that I kept up alright and we staying in the pub a few hours before heading to a restaurant in the Albert Dock. We then wandered back into town and hit a couple of places like the Slaughterhouse, before my uncle insisted on taking us all to The Cavern. He knows the manager and was desperate to show we could get in free with his connections. It was very nice of him and we did indeed all get in for free. They had a band on called The Cave Dwellers in the main bar. I’ve not heard of them before but they seemed fairly good and apparently they always invite members of the audience up to sing and play with them. I was asked many times if I would be getting up and my uncle put my name down, I asked if they could do Jumping Jack Flash, they couldn’t. What sort of pub band doesn’t know that song. A quick look through their catalogue showed they didn’t know many songs I know. I settled on Ziggy Stardust and didn’t think much more of it. Suddenly the MC called out my name and I was shuffled onto the stage in front of a fairly big crowd. This is all after about 12 hours drinking. I borrowed a guitar (managing not to break any strings) and struck up the opening riff. The song went well, though I’m not sure if I was singing in tune because you couldn’t hear a thing on stage. People clapped and congratulated me afterwards so they must have thought it was alright. After that we had to move quickly to catch our last train back home. I stumbled in sometime after midnight and watched TV for a while before bed.

The following morning I was supposed to be helping with the How Why DIY event in Liverpool. I was pretty late after my long Saturday. I loaded up the car with gear for the Rathole Radio live show and then drove over to town. Finding parking was a bit of a nightmare but I managed eventually. As I walked through the door with all my stuff I was informed I was running a session on streaming video, not a subject I’m really an expert on, and it started “10 minutes ago”. Nevertheless Andy Goodwin and I formed a great double act with no plan or rehearsal. The people attending the workshop certainly seemed to enjoy it and that’s the main thing. The rest of the day was spent helping out in various ways and moving my car around before I got parking fines. I also went up to Kimo’s a couple of times for food. It’s a really great Mediterranean place nearby. The event was all taking place in the old Rapid Paint shop on Renshaw Street, right in the heart of Liverpool. It’s quite an iconic DIY shop which recently moved to a new location, that’s why we wanted it for How Why DIY.

Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 2, inside

In the evening I set up in the shop and did a live Rathole Radio show in front of about 15 people. A small but appreciative audience. I took my electric guitar and played a few live songs for everyone but managed to break 2 strings in as many songs and that put paid to it really. I’ll have to sort out a heavier gauge of string or look at my playing action I think. It can’t be right that I break so many strings all the time. I became used to playing an acoustic guitar for years and I was able to bash out rhythms on it quite heavily. You can’t get away with that on an electric guitar, this is something I’ll have to work on. I think I’m single handedly adding points to Ernie Ball‘s share price at the moment, hehe. The show was great fun and people seemed to like being there to see it live. Hopefully it’s something I can do more of in the future.

That brings us up to this week, which started with more Drupal hacking as always. That continued as the week went on so I won’t bore you with all that again. We were scheduled to do Linux Outlaws as usual on Monday night but it was aborted at the last minute, Fab managed to douse his laptop in coffee. It seems even a Thinkpad can’t take that kind of abuse. The free time did allow me to watch the Liverpool V Man City game instead, but I wish I hadn’t. We were hammered by City and it didn’t look good. The show was recorded on Tuesday and released yesterday as episode 165 “Hairy Fridays”. It’ll be the last show for a couple of weeks as Fab is off to Italy on holiday. We’ll be back very soon but in the meantime please don’t panic, everything is fine

Me at How Why DIY, not sure what the Fez is about.

On Wednesday night there was more podcast action as I again joined Randal to co-host FLOSS Weekly. This time we were talking to Dan Scott about Evergreen library systems. I was still a little nervous with the large audience on FLOSS but I feel as though I’m finding my feet now. I’m never quite sure if it’s ok to cut in with a joke as I would on Linux Outlaws. The recording went well and hopefully it’ll continue to be a semi-regular gig. I’m enjoying it a lot and the exposure doesn’t do me any harm. The rest of the week was fairly quiet apart from the aforementioned Drupal stuff. We had a band practice on Thursday night and I was pleased to get back into the swing of things. We’ve finally decided on a name, get ready for it….

Twenty Pound Sounds. It’s a bit odd I know but it was the one we could all agreed on, and I think after messing around for a couple of months it’ll do us good to finally have a name. I’m thinking it should be pounds as in weight rather than currency. In keeping with my addiction to domain names I’ve registered 2 for the band already: 20pound.net and 20lb.net, unfortunately twentypound.net is taken. There’s not a lot to see there yet but we’ll have a proper site soon. I want to do it with Drupal and make something we can all contribute to, somewhere people can join up and get involved as well. We need a decent logo/design and I’m thinking the name should be written 20lb Sounds, if anyone has ideas on that let me know. I might have an acoustic gig for us in town soon and we certainly need to book more gigs. I think that’s how you really get good. Practising is great and it definitely helps, but regular gigs are how you really learn to play together. I saw Noddy Holder talking about this recently on a documentary, he said “once you’ve played in pubs on a Saturday night with people right in your face looking for a fight, how can any gig phase you after that? Stadiums or whatever”. He makes a good point, not that I think we’ll playing stadiums any time soon. The weekend has been spent doing various little things I can’t remember right now but I plan to chill out and enjoy a break today and tomorrow. It’s a public holiday here in England tomorrow, woo hoo!

Upcoming:

There’ll be a break from Linux Outlaws for a couple of weeks as I said, so don’t turn up on Monday night expecting to see a show. I don’t have any more bookings for FLOSS Weekly yet but hopefully more will come. It’s Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night and I’m keen to get down there after missing the last one. I missed Chester LUG last week so apologies to everyone for that. At the weekend there is talk of another live Rathole Radio from the old Rapid shop, I’m yet to confirm it though. I hope we’ll be able to do an unplugged gig with the band as part of that. I’ll let you all know as soon as I find out for sure. No doubt other exciting things will crop up, so I’ll tell you about those next time. Till then, take care everyone.

Dan

You cannot be a true petrolhead until you’ve owned an Alfa Romeo – it’s like having really great sex which leaves you with an embarrassing itch

- Jeremy Clarkson

I first became aware of the Sun RPC license in mid-2001, but my email archives from the time indicate the issue predated my involvement with it; it'd been an issue of consideration since 1994. I later had my first large email thread “free-for-all” on the issue in April 2002, which was the first of too many that I'd have before it was all done. In December 2002, the Debian bug was filed, and then it became a very public debate. Late last week, it was finally resolved. It now ranks as the longest standing Free Software licensing problem of my career. A cast of dozens deserve credit for getting it resolved.

Tom “spot” Callaway does a good job summarizing the recent occurrences on this issue (and by recent, I mean since 2005 — it's been going long enough that five years ago is “recent”), and its final resolution. So, I won't cover that recent history, but I encourage people to read Spot's summary. Simon Phipps, who worked on this issue during his time as the Chief Open Source Officer of Sun, also wrote about his work on the issue. For my part, I'll try to cover the “middle” part of the story from 2001-2005.

So, the funny thing about this license is everyone knew it was Sun's intention to make it Free Software. The code is so old, it dates back to a time when the drafting of Free Software licenses weren't well understood (old-schoolers will, for example, remember the annoying advertising clause in early BSD licenses). Thus, by our modern standards, the Sun RPC license does appear on its face as trivially non-Free, but in its historical context, the intent was actually clear, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, by 2002, we knew how to look at licenses objectively and critically, and it was clear to many people that the license had problems. Competing legal theories existed, but the concerns of Debian were enough to get everyone moving toward a solution.

For my part, I checked in regularly during 2002-2004 with Danese Cooper (who was, effectively, Simon Phipps' predecessor at Sun), until I was practically begging her to pay attention to the issue. While I could frequently get verbal assurances from Danese and other Sun officials that it was their clear intention that glibc be permitted to include the code under the LGPL, I could never get something in writing. I had a hundred other things to worry about, and eventually, I stopped worrying about it. I remember thinking at the time: well, I've notes on all these calls and discussions I've had with Sun people about the license. Worst case scenario: I'll have to testify to this when Sun sues some Free Software project, and there will be a good estoppel defense.

Meanwhile, around early 2004, my friend and colleague at FSF, David “Novalis” Turner took up the cause in earnest. I think he spent a year or two as I did: desperately trying to get others to pay attention and solve the problem. Eventually, he left FSF for other work, and others took up the cause, including Brett Smith (who took over Novalis' FSF job), and, by that time, Spot was also paying attention to this. Both Brett and Spot worked hard to get Simon Phipps attention on it, which finally happened. But around then began that long waiting period while Oracle was preparing to buy Sun. It stopped almost anything anyone wanted to get done with Sun, so everyone just waited (again). It was around that time that I decided I was pretty sure I never wanted to hear the phrase: “Sun RPC license” again in my life.

Meanwhile, Richard Fontana had gone to work for Red Hat, and his self-proclaimed pathological obsession with Free Software (which can only be rivaled by my own) led him to begin discussing the Sun RPC issue again. He and Spot were also doing their best negotiating with Oracle to get it fixed. They took us the last miles of this marathon, and now the job is done.

I admit that I feel of some shame that, in recent years, I've had such fatigue about this issue — a simple one that should've been solved a decade and a half ago — that, since 2008, I've done nothing but kibitz about the issue when people complained. I also didn't believe that a company as disturbing and anti-Free-Software as Oracle could ever be convinced to change a license to be more FaiF. Spot and Fontana proved me wrong, and I'm glad.

Thanks to everyone in this great cast of characters that made this ultimately beneficial production of licensing theater possible. I've been honored that I shared the stage in the first few acts, and sorry that I hid backstage for the last few. It was right to keep working on it until the job was done. As Fontana said: Estoppel may be relevant but never enough; software freedom principle[s] should matter as much as legal risk. … [the] standard for FaiF can't simply be ‘good defense to copyright infringement likely’. Thanks to everyone; I'm so glad I no longer have to wait in fear of a subpoena from Oracle in a lawsuit claiming infringement of their Sun RPC copyrights.

On Monday I recieved my shiny new Samsung Galaxy S mobile phone. I’ve been putting off getting a smart phone for quite some years now as I never felt there was anything worth spending money on, and after some experience with my ipod touch I was put off getting an iphone. Anyway, I felt like writing my thoughts on the device now I’ve had it a week.

The hardware

My first impressions were that it does indeed look a lot like the iphone 3g, and I found I was trying to press the standby button which wasn’t there quite often, as well as picking it up and holding it upside down. As other reviews have pointed out, the handset does feel very light – this was a bit strange at first as I’m used to my wife’s iphone 3gs which weighs considerably more.

When I turned it on, I was genuinely impressed by how bright and sharp the display was – it easily outdoes the iphone 3g/3gs screen (I think the iphone 4 screen is probably better though.)

One thing a lot of reviews will skip over is how well the phone makes phone calls – I had no problems making a call from the phone, however because the phone’s speaker is on the back it’s sometimes hard to hear it ring if it’s on a flat surface.. bit of a weird issue but an issue non the less.

The sensitivity of the touch screen was reassuring. One reason why I’ve put off getting an android phone until now is because I’ve seen videos on the internet of slower devices and been really put off by the lag you can see when scrolling/pinching to zoom etc.. fortunately this isn’t a problem here. I did notice however that the accuracy of where you place your finger to begin with and then start to scroll is slightly off.. not a problem but I don’t think that happens on the iphone.

Inside, there is a SIM card slot (obviously) and an empty micro sd slot for adding more memory. My SGS came with 16MB of internal memory, which is strangely referred to as an SD card from within Android – my guess is that it does indeed use an internal sd card somewhere as it was probably a cheap way of manufacturing the thing.

Speaking of cheapness, the phone does feel a tad cheap compared to the iphone, although compared to any other device I’d say it’s fairly well built (certainly a lot better than my dell laptop for example!)

The GPS sensor on the phone seemed fairly good although it wasn’t so great when I went under some trees and when I began a walk to my local town to test it. There are known issues with the GPS which will be fixed next month (September) with a software update.

The compass and tilt sensors seem fairly standard. The compass only seems to be accurate if the phone is being held up rather than laid flat, but I guess that’s normal.

The front facing camera was fairly crappy, but I haven’t really found a use for it yet.. hopefully Skype will be released properly for Android soon so I can make use of it.

The software

Unfortunately, Samsung have decided to install their own custom software on the phone which is not easily removed (as far as I know you have to root the device.) This is apparent straight away as there’s a fairly naff locked screen thing and there’s a samsung task killer widget on one of your home screens. One of the nice things about android is you can customise it quite a bit so removing that widget and all the crappy samsung items from your home screens is easy enough.

I got this phone with version 2.1 of the Android OS also called Eclair, which is a fairly modern release although the most recent is 2.2 – Froyo which is due to be released for the SGS next month. One of the first things that struck me about the OS was how different it felt from the iphone operating systems (including iOS4.) Even though the home screen that the SGS uses is blatantly set up to mimic the iPhone’s, it’s still very different and there was certainly a bit of a learning curve to using it.

The first thing you notice is how there are more menus and options than on the iphone, which at first was a little bit strange, but now seems pretty logical. Rather than apps having a back button, there’s a physical button on the phone (a touch sensitive one,) along with a menu button which brings up a context menu much like right clicking something in windows. Having a back button is great, it’s certainly something I think Android has over the iPhone.

Another big feature of Android is the fact it does real multi tasking unlike the iPhone. This feature is certainly cool and useful, but requires some thought on the users part. I think this is the real deal breaker for whether someone will prefer Android to the iphone or not as some (bad) programs like to use up lots of CPU time when they’re in the background and this can slow things down and make stuff laggy. At first I was killing apps off left right and centre, but after doing a bit of a search on google I found that perhaps this isn’t the best idea.. and I think they’re right.. it’s basically working the same as your computer does by keeping apps resident in the memory it means if you ‘load’ them again or switch back this will be instant rather than having to load the app back of the internal storage. It’s quite complicated to explain, and for this reason alone I think anyone used to the iphone’s way of doing things will get pissed off with this until they ‘get it.’

Anyway, the apps from google seem very good, perhaps with the exception of google listen which seems to have a very laggy interface – which is surprising. I won’t go into any individual apps as there’s a lot of good/fun ones I’ve been playing around with and I don’t want to spend too long writing this.

All in all I’m very happy with the handset, I get fairly decent battery life out of fairly heavy (but careful) usage – perhaps just under 2 days. I’ll probably make some additions and corrections to this post over the weekend.

Love the folksy Trail Name

I’m not traditionally a nature-as-scenery photographer.  I prefer animals and humans.  But on a recent hike through a trail in Papatsco State Park, I took my camera along and captured some of the lightly forested trail.

People love to mess up trees just to leave their mark

The view above in some of the more heavily forested parts

Fallen trees were abundant, but most of them were off the trail

The wife and I went hiking to get away from technology for a while and get some nature. Stuff like this kinda ruined the mood.

What lies around the bend? More trees....

I definitely prefer for photographs like these to have animals.  It looks so empty and desolate.  But this may just be a consequence of being a suburbanite raised on the Discovery channel.  It’d be pretty boring if they didn’t cut all the footage they had of jungles and savannahs devoid of animals.

A slight incline near the end.

Related posts:

1. A Sunday Afternoon Bike Ride
2. Hawaii Day 4
3. Rediscovery

So, have you heard about this WebSocket thing? Apparently it’s the new hotness in web development. It gives you “TCP-like” networking capabilities from within your browser, through a JavaScript API. But sometimes you just want to write a desktop application. Unfortunately, the selection of WebSocket client libraries is quite scarce, and not all of them are compatible with the server implementations since the WebSocket spec has yet to stabilize. I needed a client library for Python, so I wrote one. The protocol itself is quite simple: just a HTTP handshake (with optional cookies), followed by a thin layer on top of TCP. The code is currently lacking proper testing, so I wouldn’t recommend using it for production stuff.

Here’s how to use it:

def my_msg_handler(msg):
  print 'Got "%s"!' % msg

socket = WebSocket('ws://example.com/demo', onmessage=my_msg_handler)
socket.onopen = lambda: socket.send('Hello world!')

try:
  asyncore.loop()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
  socket.close()

Pretty sweet. It tries to mimick the browser API to a T. Now, onto the good stuff:

Source and docs: http://github.com/mtah/python-websocket
License: GPLv3

As of GDM 2, customization of the login screen has been severely limited. Here’s a quick (yet surprisingly elegant) hack to change a few aspects of the login screen.

sudo ln -s /usr/share/applications/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop \
/usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow

Log out. The “Appearance Preferences” dialog will reveal itself on the login screen. Here you can customize the login screen to your liking. Once done, log back in. Now, run

sudo rm /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gnome-appearance-properties.desktop

to keep the “Appearance Preferences” from appearing on every login. Neat, huh?

Last year was Dina’s graduation Tiki Party.  This year it was Daniel’s turn.  We arrived the night before (no hospital visits this time) and so we had plenty of time to help cook and set up.

Dina's interpretation of how the party would go

The party seemed a lot less crowded, but I’m not sure if that’s due to setup (all the tables were off to the side), people coming and going in waves (there wasn’t really anyone who was there from beginning to end other than those who lived there), or just less people being invited.  It was also a lot less sprawling, being limited to Dan’s back area instead of spilling over to their neighbor’s area.  I also happened to shoot a lot fewer photos this time.  This pretty much came from me knowing a lot more people this time around.  I spent more time talking to people than taking photos of strangers.

Dan teaches the girls how to do The Lambada

I ended up having much more fun as a result, even though it left me with less photographic memories.

Related posts:

1. Dina’s Tiki Party 2009
2. My Grandfather’s 70th Birthday Party
3. Otakon 2010

Bored of the normal everyday terminal colors? These can be easily changed by right clicking on the terminal window, clicking preferences and changing the colors:

You can see how my terminal colors are different than standard:

If you want to know where this information is stored on your filesystem:

#!/bin/bash
cat ~/.config/terminator/config

My current palette:

palette = "#2e3436:#cc0000:#4e9a06:#c4a000:#c48dff:#75507b:#06989a:#d3d7cf:#555753:#e52222:#a6e32d:#fc951e:#3465a4:#fa2573:#67d9f0:#f2f2f2"

The same can be done for gnome-terminal, but that stores it’s defaults in gconf. You can retrieve them using gconftool-2:

#!/bin/bash
gconftool-2 --all-entries /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default

This is fun as these colors carry over into Vim etc, so when you are not using the graphical versions, you can still spice up your syntax highlighting.

Related posts:

1. Workspaces
2. Making OpenBSD more friendly

Above you should get some music.

Also, not sure about BCMKE5.  I’m kinda stressing about this law school thing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tablets recently. My dad got an iPad recently and seems to absolutely love it. You can read about his thoughts on it on http://gordonsramblings.blogspot.com/. Now, he recently took it to a camp we were involved in, and used it for notes, timetables, etc and it got me thinking. In a paperless world, do we need tablets?

I love the idea of a paperless world. Anyone who knows me will recognise this. I hate paper so much. I look over at the other side of this room, and there is so much wasted space with loads of paper. But, do current computers really cut it? I don’t think so. I think, in a world with no papers, we need tablets/e-reader type devices. I’ve not totally decided what a device to completely get rid of paper would be, but it certanarily wouldn’t be an e-reader, an ipad or many other of the tablets that exist at this moment in time. It would have to have either a screen that is very very low powered, can be seen in bright sunlight, be nice on the eyes, and still be able to view videos and other colour, and fast-refreshing items (possibly like a colour e-ink screen that has a fast refresh rate), or a screen like a pixel qi screen. I have talked before about pixel qi screens which are used in devices such as the olpc XO laptop, and the Notion ink adam. But, as I said, I’m still not sure which would be best.

Then, of course, we come to the question of input devices, and whether typing on a virtual (or physical) keyboard, or using handwriting recognition, or just allowing freeform writing (so that its like paper) would be best. For the 2nd, we would need better algorithms and for the 3rd we would need nicer screens that would allow pressure sensitivity etc, but I don’t think these are that far off.

Obviously, there are many, many questions that there are during thinking about tablets etc, but the point of this article is to say that I think that we need tablet/e-reader/ipad-like devices to enter the paperless world (and also a change of attitude from some people…but that is a different story).

This post is a short guide for running Grim Fandango in Wine under Fedora. I’m mostly writing it for myself so I don’t forget what I did, but I’m sure other people will benefit from it as well, because I just wasn’t able to get Grim Fandango running with the popular guides from other places. I tested this under Fedora, but there’s no reason why it wouldn’t work in other distributions as well.

So, let’s jump right into it:

1.) Install Wine, obviously
1.1) If you have it enabled, temporarely disable SELinux with setenforce 0 as root

2.) Start winecfg
2.1) Don’t choose to install Gecko, you don’t need it for the game

3.) Set the Windows version to Windows 98
3.1) Open the “Audio” tab and select your preferred driver. The default one should generally work
3.2) In “Drives”, select “Add”, choose the “Path” to your mounted Grim Fandango Disc 1 (or a folder on your hard drive containing all files from the Disc 1), open advanced settings and select “Type” CD-ROM

4.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: (or whatever letter you gave to the CD drive) and run wine SETUP.EXE
4.1) Follow the instructions on the screen to install
4.2) If it asks you to setup your joystick, don’t do that. It crashes the installer over here. I didn’t try using a joystick, so if you want to use one you’ll have to figure that out yourself
4.3) If it asks you, install DirectX 6.0

5.) Go to ~/.wine/dosdevices/d: again, enter the folder PATCH and run wine start /unix GFUPD101.EXE
5.1) If you don’t have that folder, download and apply the patch from ftp://ftp.lucasarts.com/patches/pc/Gfupd101.exe

6.) Download the Grim Fandango Launcher from http://quick.mixnmojo.com/grim-fandango-launcher (or if that’s down, the older version from http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=launcher)
6.1) Unzip the launcher and launch the .exe with wine
6.2) If you want to, you can go to “Options” and select “Run Grim from Hard Drive”. If it asks you to override files, always select no to save time, or select “Yes to all” if you’re lazy. It won’t make a difference.
When it asks you for Disc B, just open winecfg and point the CD drive to the mounted disc B (or a folder on your hard drive containing the files from disc B)
Note that it may look like the program froze or crashed, but it’s just copying files so give it a bit of time
6.3) Select “Run Windowed”. When the game started, press F1. If you can see the menu, you’re done! Go directly to step 8

7.) If you can’t see the menu when pressing F1, press F1 and do: Arrow Down, Enter, Arrow left, Enter
This will exit the game. Don’t just kill the process or hit Ctrl+C
7.1) Go to ~/.wine/drive_c/ and navigate to the install folder, usually Program Files/LucasArts/Grim/
7.2) Run wine GRIMFANDANGO.EXE -h. That should fix it

8.) Never ever change the ingame graphics options

9.) Make a nice shortcut somewhere to launch the “Grim Fandango Launcher.exe”, and always play in windowed mode. Maybe Fullscreen works for you as well, but it definitely doesn’t over here

PS: If you think this was too hard, support the Residual project!

I just opened Akregator and saw that the Wikileaks blog had a new entry. This isn't very common (the Wikileaks blog isn't a firehose of leaks; it's news about the site itself), and, after reading it, had to do a double-take.

Now I suppose Julian Assange isn't any more or less likely to be a rapist, but exactly one rape report and one molestation report means something's going on, either one/some of his many enemies is stooping incredibly low, or he's actually been performing atrocities.

I'll withhold opinion and judgement until more information surfaces.

Comments

AMP

Hey folks, just a very quick post to let you know I presented the AMPed podcast this week. It’s the weekly round up from the Association Of Music Podcasting which I joined quite recently. The show contains music submitted by some of the various member podcasts. It’s only 37mins long but still had plenty packed in.

You can download it here if you’re interested.

Should have mentioned it in my last Weekly Rewind but forgot. Now you know

See ya,

Dan

So, I finally worked out that WordPress can do awesome photo galleries. This means I have somewhere to put my photos that isn’t evil (i.e. not Facebook), that actually works and is simple to use. Yay!

Here are a few photos from some tramping trips I organised over the last few weeks, the first was to the Dome Forest Park and the other was to Pohuehue Scenic Park (the last two photos).

Many have already opined about the Oracle v. Google lawsuit filed last week. As you might expect, I'm not that worried about what company sues what company for some heap of cash; those sort of for-profit wranglings just aren't what concerns me. Rather, I'm focused on what this event means for the future of software freedom. And, I think even at this early stage of the lawsuit, there are already a few lessons for the Free Software community to learn.

Avoid Single-Company-Controlled Language Infrastructure

Fourteen months ago, before the Oracle purchase of Sun, I wrote about the specific danger of language infrastructure developed by a single for-profit patent-holding entity (when such infrastructure is less than 20 years old). In that blog post, I wrote:

[Some] might argue that with all those patents consolidated [in a single company], patent trolls will have a tough time acquiring patents and attacking FaiF implementations. However, while this can sometimes be temporarily true, one cannot rely on this safety. Java, for example, is in a precarious situation now. Oracle is not a friend to Free Software, and soon will hold all Sun's Java patents — a looming threat to FaiF Java implementations … [A]n Oracle attack on FaiF Java is a possibility.

I'm sorry that I was right about this, but we should now finally learn the lesson: languages like Java and C# are dangerous. Single companies developed them, and there are live, unexpired patents that can easily be used in a group to attack FaiF implementations. Of course, that doesn't mean other language infrastructures are completely safe from patents, but I believe there is greater relative risk of a system with patent consolidation at a single company.

It also bears repeating the point I made on Linux Outlaws last July: this doesn't mean the Free Software community shouldn't have FaiF implementations of all languages. In fact, we absolutely should, because we do want developers who are familiar with those languages to bring their software over to GNU/Linux and other Free Software systems.

However, this lawsuit proves that choosing some languages for newly written Free Software is dangerous and should be avoided, especially when there are safer choices like C, C++, Python, and Perl⁰. (See my blog post from last year for more on this subject.)

Never Let Your Company File for Patents on Your Work

Even if you like your company today, you never know who will own those software patents later. I'm sure James Gosling originally never considered the idea that a company as revolting as Oracle would have control of everything he's invented for the last two decades. But they do, and there's nothing Gosling can do about what's done with his work and “inventions”. Learn from this example; don't let your company patent your work. Instead, publish online to establish prior art as quickly as possible.

Google Is Not Merely a Pure Free Software Distributor

Google has worked hard to cast themselves as innocent, Free-Software-producing victims. That's good PR because it's true, but it's also not telling the whole truth. Google worked hard to make sure Android was completely Apache-2.0 (or even more permissively) licensed (except for Linux, of course). There was already plenty Java stuff available under the GPL that Google could have used. Sadly, Google was so allergic to GPL for Android/Linux that they even avoided LGPL'd components like uClibc and glibc (in favor of their own permissively-licensed C library based on a BSD version).

Google's reason for permissive-only licensing for “everything but the kernel” was likely a classic “adoption is more important than software freedom” scenario. Google wants Android/Linux in as many phones as possible, and wants to eliminate any “barrier” to such adoption, even if such a “barrier” would defend software freedom.

This new lawsuit would be much more interesting if Google had chosen GPL and/or LGPL for Android. In fact, if I fantasize about being empowered to design a binding, non-financial settlement to the lawsuit, the first item on my list would be a relicense of all future Android/Linux systems under GPL and/or LGPL. (Basically, Google would license only enough under LGPL to allow proprietary applications, and license all the rest as GPL, thus yielding the same licensing consequences as GNU/Linux and GNOME). Then, I'd have Oracle explicitly license all its patents under GPL and/or LGPL compatible licenses that would permit Android/Linux to continue unencumbered, but under copyleft. (BTW, Mark Wielaard has a blog post that discussed more about the issue of GPL'd/LGPL'd Java implementations and how they relate to this lawsuit.)

I realize that's never going to happen, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I am of course opposed to software patents, and I certainly oppose companies like Oracle that produce almost all proprietary software. However, I can at least understand the logic of Oracle not wanting its software patents exercised in proprietary software. I think a trade off, whereby all software patents are licensed freely and royalty-free only for use in copylefted software is a reasonable compromise. OTOH, knowing Oracle, they could easily have plans to attack copyleft implementations too. Thus, we must assume they won't accept this reasonable compromise of “royalty-free licensing for copyleft only”. That brings me to my next point of FaiF hackers' concern about this lawsuit.

Never Trust a Mere Patent Promise; Demand Real Patent Licenses

I wrote after Bilski that patent promises just aren't enough, and this lawsuit is an example of why. I presume that Oracle's lawyers have looked carefully as the various promises and assurances that Sun made about its Java patents and have concluded Oracle has good arguments for why those promises don't apply to Android. I have no idea what those arguments are, but rarely do lawyers file a lawsuit without very good arguments already prepared. I hope Oracle's lawyers' arguments are wrong and they lose. But, the fact that Oracle even has a credible argument that Android/Linux doesn't already have a patent license shows again that patent promises are just not enough.

Miguel de Icaza used this opportunity to point out how the Microsoft C# promises are “better” by comparison, in his opinion. But, Brett Smith at FSF already found huge holes in those Microsoft promises that haven't been fixed. In fact, any company making these promises always tries to hide as much nasty stuff as it can, to convince the users that they are safe from patent aggression when they really aren't. That's why the Free Software community must demand simple, clear, and permanent royalty-free patent licenses for all patents any company might hold. We should accept nothing less. As mentioned above, those licenses could perhaps require that a certain Free Software copyright license, such as GPLv3-or-later, be used for any software that gets the advantage of the license. (i.e., I can certainly understand if companies don't want to accidentally grant such patent licenses to their proprietary software competitors).

Indeed, it's particularly important that the licenses cover all patents and those possibly exercised in future improvements in the software. This lawsuit has clearly shown that even if patent pools exist for some subsets of patents for some subsets of Free Software, patent holders will either use other patents for aggression, or they'll assert patents in the patent pools against Free Software that's not part of the pool. In essence, we must assume that any for-profit company will become a patent troll eventually (they always do), and therefore any cross-licensing pools that don't include every patent possible for any possible Free Software will always be inadequate. So, the answer is simple: trust no software-patent-holding company unless they give an explicit GPLv3-compatible license for all their patents.

We Must End Software Patents

The failure of the Bilski case to end software patents in the USA means much work lies ahead to end software patents. The End Software Patents Wiki has some good stuff about this case as well as lots of other information related to software patents. There are now heavily funded for-profit corporate efforts that seek to convince the Free Software community that patent reform is enough. But, it's not! For example, if you see presenters at FLOSS conferences claiming to have solutions to patent problems, ask them if their organization opposes all software patents, and ask them if their funders license all their patents freely for GPLv3-or-later software implementations. If you hear the wrong answers, then their motives and mission are suspect.

Finally, I'd like to note that, in some sense, these patent battles help Free Software, because it may actually teach companies that the expense of having software patents is not worth the risk of patent lawsuits. It's possible we've reached a moment in history where it'd be better if the Software Patent Cold War becomes a full Software Patent Nuclear War. Software freedom can survive that “nuclear winter”. I sometimes think that in the Free Software community, we may find ourselves left with just two choices: fifty more years of Patent Cold War (with lots of skirmishes like this one), or ten years of full-on patent war (after which companies would beg Congress to end software patents). Both outcomes are horrible until they're resolved, but the latter would reach resolution quicker. I often wonder which one is the better long term for software freedom.

But, no matter what happens next, the necessary position is: all software patents are bad for software freedom. Any entity that supports anything short of full abolition of software patents is working against software freedom.

⁰I originally had PHP listed here, but jwildeboer argued that Zend Technologies, Ltd. might be a problem for PHP in the same way Oracle is for Java and Microsoft for C#. It's true that Zend is a software patent holder and was involved in the development of later PHP versions. I don't think the single-company-controlled software patent risks with PHP are akin to those of Java and C#, since Zend Technologies isn't the only entity involved in PHP's development, but certainly the other languages listed are likely preferable to PHP.

Well I’m still slowly getting through “Remembering the Kanji” and since my last restart I’m still at ~700. So being more than 1/4 through the book I’m still finding it hard to go through sometimes. It is fun however when I arrive at a kanji that I already know since I can quickly commit a story to memory. For example if I wasn’t already familiar with the kanji ‘曜’ I think remembering it would have been a bit difficult.

The way I review is using the standard Heisig deck from Anki and go from keyword to kanji. Until today I’ve been struggling remembering some of the stories since I used just the keyword. For me I thought I was perparing myself better by just using using memory for the story. Today I decided to actually take Khatzumoto’s advice and place the story on the cards since the focus should be remembering to write the kanji instead of the stories. It’s only been one day but my reviews today felt better for the most part.

Hopefully this time I can actually finish the book. I do hope to finish because writing the kanji is a big issue for me. I can read and recognize far more than I can actually write so finishing RTK will be a big milestone for me.

My Desktop
Read Seif’s post on his desktop, so I copied most of that style (original post) :

I actually enabled compiz for the first time in a long time, and AMD’s linux drivers have come a long way since my critical posts a few years ago about them. Great to see the whole stack improving.

Default Search Engine
This week I switched over my default search engine to Duck Duck Go.

I really like it’s clean interface, and their attention to privacy and technology enthusiasm.

New Home Page
In addition, I updated my generic landing page using Python / Flask to pull feeds etc, I really like the simplicity of Flask and the well thought out design / documentation. I also published the source on github.

Related posts:

1. Looking for help
2. Using SSH to access internal network sites from an external network
3. Make your bash shell cool again

"Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android. Yes, you got it right. After Oracle bought Sun (along with their Java patents), they started suing people. According to Oracle:

In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly, and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property

The intelectual property they're refering to is comprised of seven patents related to Java.

Comments

Hey guys, so its been a while I’ve got a lot of stuff done and many core things working in Gccpy now more links on how to get up and running with it soon.

I am asking for help from you or from your friend.. anyone, all you need is:

all minezz

• 5 minutes
• text editor
• basic knowledge in python

I am trying to build up a test suite for this compiler and i would love to have it all built from scratch for this project rather than taking something from CPython where i think licenses will clash and i want to avoid anything like that. So what does this all mean?

I need people to write up their favourite python snippets, but there are requirements: what you can do is use anything EXCEPT any imports. Imports are something which will be handled soon, and isn’t that important  yet for the core language implementation.

So I have set-up this mailing list and i would love it if as many of you would join: http://crules.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gccpy

So join the mailing list or simply post a message if you prefer and we will try to remember to cc you with in. One thing i would ask is only submit a small test case if you are ok with this being pretty much un-licensed because GNU projects require copy approval for you to submit code, but we can negate this by going though me just submit this to me under a http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ (Whatever you want to do license) . This just saves any pain of licensing, you will of course still be attributed! Leave your name and an email within the test-case file, since really that’s all we care about as hackers anyway we don’t care about licensing so long as we have some attribution. To give you a flavour of how simple these test cases can be lets look at one i made earlier:

Things for testing the expression syntax handling or calling functions, parameter passing like keywords parameters and positional parameters, class’s anything! Even if it is as small as one expression and a print for the result it is more than enough for a test case! The reason I want as many people involved is so i can see what features/trends matter most important to python users and then I can focus on making them extra awesome. And if it only takes you 5 minutes to write a small piece of python code and send an email while you get your name within the Gcc sources the more the better:).

When you create a test case simply send an email to the mailing list with the subject “Test Case <name>”. You can submit as many as you like the more the better  and the funnier the better…. * looks at Jezra ! @yamatt i am reusing that python while loop you sent me ages ago to freak out my processor! Thanks so much every one, watch this space in the next week for links on how to use and see your test case running in Gccpy, so you can compile your python code to an executable!

So remember the mailing list is over here. http://crules.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gccpy

If anybody can help me get my touchscreen working in Mint9 again, I would be eternally grateful!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/dude-youre-35-year-old-with-neck-beard.html

I read the above article with some interest on the day it was published. To Benjamin’s credit, he’s not only apologised http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/i-said-few-things-wrong-lets-move-on.html , I think he can see what was wrong. That is a step forward from other spats I can recall in the Open Source and Linux community.

It reminds me of various arguments about Mono, Lefty Buttons, Emacs vs Vi etcetera ad nauseum.

Unbelieveably, I think we can learn something from politics here. Political parties have a tool they use to refine their arguments which could be a lesson to us. The tool is a “Position Paper”. Basically, they get their best people to construct the argument from the opposing point of view. The aim being to try to understand the other side’s argument better. They then use the position paper to test whether their proposals might stand up to opposition.

I’ve always believed that one of the greatest strengths of Linux and Open Source is that there are so many competing elements of the community. However, a downside to that is the frequent factionism and bruising way we debate issues.

My suggestion comes from deep within my Hippie sensibility. Nonetheless, I think the thought is valid. Why think of of distros as teams, or territories or tribes? Instead why not think of Distros and Projects as Position Papers?  Wouldn’t that be a more productive way to approach disparities of opinion?ey

Unless we learn to do something like that, then what we’re doing is ultimately pointless. While I’m a lifelong Atheist, I can see that one of the central beliefs of Islam has lot of value. Their teaching is that it’s not enough to convert non-believers to Islam. It is as important that if somebody converts to Islam, it must be of their own free will and because they have chosen the faith because they have seen the benefits if living as a good Muslim. I’m not suggesting that the consequences of poor communication in Open Source will be radicalised geeks strapping themselves to servers and blowing themselves up. But I am suggesting that we learn not be so decisive and partrician in our debates.

Essentially, my thought is this. We as individuals within a community have got to be able to lose an argument with some grace. If we don’t, the progressive evolution we all crave from our software communities will stall. And worse still, we won’t be able to enjoy the fight!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Well… On Sunday I felt sudden urge to try other distros. So I tried to install Fedora, I actually I was able to do that although I am still not quite sure how it happened because the installation process did freeze. But somehow when I had basically given up, took the cd out and was going to boot from my Crunchbang usb stick, instead my computer booted to Fedora. o_O Eventually I ended up in Linux Mint though – XFCE rc edition to be precise. I feel bit odd about this because in the end my desktop looks exactly same as it has been looking whole summer (and same as in my last desktop screenshot entry). Mint feels nice though, but I doubt I’ll stick with this forever. I’d say I’ll go back to Crunchbang in near future.

This is not so much about Linux, but I bought external hard drive. FINALLY. Been planning that for ages. While my important stuff has fitted well in my 8GB usb stick (for backup purposes), 250GBs definitely makes things bit easier. :P I have to admit that my decision to buy this particular external drive (Iomega Select 250GB) was fairly sudden and completely based on price. Seems to work.

I have also been planning to buy new laptop for quite a long time now. I found Lenovo ThinkPad SL510 from Amazon.de which is actually being sold without any OS, comes just with DOS apparently. I quite like that idea.

Ok, so I decided to natively install Ubuntu 10.04 on my Studio 1555.. fairly impressed.. almost everything works out the box which is a bit annoying.

The only issue I’ve had is that the included proprietary ATI driver fails when you try to use suspend, however this is apparently easily circumvented by using the most recent driver from the ATI site (it was a bug with their driver.)

Using the open source driver results in poor power management, so I’d advise against doing that.

I just launched the second podcast from Sixgun Productions: Rant-o’Fab. I have talked about this project for quite some time now and I am very happy that I can finally announce the release of the first episode. Rant-o’Fab is all about me ranting about technology and other semi-related stuff that I come across, whenever I feel like it. It will be a highly opinionated show and quite an acquired taste, I suspect. The first episode that I’ve just released explains all that and what you can expect from the show in the future.

So if you think you can handle a few more thought-provoking rants from your favourite mad German in your life, go ahead and subscribe: we have a regular MP3 feed as well as an Ogg Vorbis feed for all the freedom lovers out there. I hope you enjoy the new show, a second (more regular) episode will be out very soon!

Over the last few weeks I've been trying a few different Linux Distributions. If you follow me on Twitter (@daveyspeedstar) you may have noticed that I grew disillusioned with Ubuntu Netbook Edition (10.04). It may be co-incidence, but since Ubuntu adopted the ex4 file system,

 it seems to have become noticeably unstable. A specific example being that on lifting the lid on either the netbook, or the ThinkPad that is in the house, instead of the machine coming back to life, it will just freeze, and require a re-boot.

Instead of hunting for a fix, I decided to abandon Ubuntu and try some other versions of Linux. However, I didn't stray away too far from Ubuntu, as Hull LUG's illustrious leader StarTrekSteve first suggested that I give Peppermint OS a try.

Peppermint is one of the many Linux distros that is build on Ubuntu, or to be more specific, built on MintOS (which is built on Ubuntu). My initial reactions were very positive as it booted quickly, felt very lightweight, especially with the LXDE desktop, which is ideal for a netbook, and the operating system utilises a lot of web apps, which is excellent for a system that has limited storage.

However the problem with the machine not coming out of hibernation persisted, and then the web-app launchers began to fail. I'm not sure if this was a problem with the system or with Prism, which is the app that creates the launchers, however I soon got to the stage where I was spending more time repairing launchers, than I was using them.

Following that I decided to take a backwards step, and use a distro built on an earlier version of Ubuntu,. For this reason I'm currently running Super OS. This is essentially Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) which has all the necessary video codecs. This does work, bar the lid opening issue, but whatever I was installing I still had the lid problem. As a result I’ve actually hunted out a solution for this.

Chatting to people at Hull LUG suggested that it might be an issue with the Power Settings Manager, however no=-matter how I adjusted these settings nothing improved. I have since had a look at the Ubuntu release notes with a view to re-installing using the ex3 file system which under certain circumstances is a preferable system, however while checking this out, I noticed a note about laptops freezing when coming out of hibernation. It suggested that if he swap partition is not at least as big as the amount of RAM, then there can be problems regarding freezing under these circumstances.

For this reason, I have just got a new .iso of Ubuntu 10.04. To start with I'm running a standard install, with the exception that I now have a 1.7Gb swap (I have 1.5Gb of RAM on my netbook). If I still experience problems I will try again, and install an ex3 file system.

My brief flirtation with Peppermint OS was not a complete waste. I was extremely impressed with the Prism, and love the idea of being able to run web-apps directly on the desktop. Although I didn't stick with Peppermint long enough to fully test Prism's capabilities I will certainly be looking at how I can use it in the future.

After all the sessions at GUADEC¹ about Gnome Shell, I got once again really excited about it as well as the whole future of Gnome itself. I had run Gnome Shell previously, you can just install it from the Fedora repos, but the version that is currently in most distros (including Fedora 13) is months old and the project is obviously making great strides constantly. After a pretty abysmal attempt at installing it from the project’s experimental repo which shot most of my GTK-related packages point blank in the head, leaving me only with the option to delete integral GTK packages from my running machine and reinstalling them via yum downgrade, I decided to build a stand-alone version of Shell from their git repository. Luckily, this turned out to be amazingly easy. So if you have about half an hour (depending on how fast your system is with compiling stuff) and you want to have a look at what’s coming in Gnome 3, you might find the following instructions helpful²:

This will pull the current dev version of Gnome Shell from the git repository and compile a stand-alone version of it in your home directory that you can run at you leasure. To do this, the first thing you want to do is download the install script from the Gnome site to your home directory and run it.

cd ~
curl -O http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
/bin/bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh

You can then start the actual build process. This will take some time as the script has to check out a ton of packages from git and compile them one after the other. You best start this in its own little terminal window and get on with whatever you were doing before or fix yourself a nice cup a coffee and watch the awesome matrix simulator build into gcc (best viewed fullscreen in an old school terminal font and green-on-black text).

jhbuild build

If this completes without errors, you got yourself a standalone version of Gnome Shell that you can now manually run. Change into the specified directory and start up Shell.

cd ~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src
./gnome-shell --replace

The --replace command will tell it do replace your current window manager so that you get the full experience, if you want to quit out of Shell just issue a Control-C in the terminal you started Shell from. If something major goes wrong, you can always change to a different tty (Control-Alt-F2 for example), log in, and kill X by issuing the command killall Xorg as root. Just be aware that this kills all of your currently running programs. Bear in mind that I have tested this on Fedora 13 and depending on your distribution, some of these details might be slightly different. The actual steps to run and build Shell from git, however, should be pretty universal.

I hope you enjoy tinkering with it as much as I do at the moment. Feel free to file bugs and help the devs out with valid feedback, I think they are quite short on people testing this at the moment. If you want to rebuild a newer version of the packages, you can follow these instructions. You can also follow the development on identi.ca of course.

ZeroMQ

ZeroMQ WOW – Introduction

This looks promising:

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Just realised I hadn’t let my blog readers know that I am, in fact, away mostly from the internet for the greater part of 3 months. I came over to the Isle of Arran (on the west coast of Scotland) to help out at a campsite, on the 14th of June and will be here, give or take, until the end of August.

I will be at home at weekends, but that is for my saturday job and so won’t leave me much time to blog.

It is for those reasons that I have not been blogging for the past 5.5 weeks, and will continue to be reasonably absent. I will, however, try and write at least a few posts over the summer. I am currently working on one explaining exactly why I prefer the ideaology of open-source software, as a nice introduction to anyone wondering what it would actually do for them.

In the meantime, I am still tweeting and denting under the username “yamanickill” quite heavily, so feel free to follow me there.

Other than that, have a good summer/winter (depending on your hemisphere).

I’ve started another project: Saturday morning competitive football.

Additionally, I am starting preparation for the LSAT.

Thus, I will be taking a hiatus until mid-October.  I will be missing BarCampMadison3 and will be attending BarCampMKE5, so that is a prefect time to come back and write a post on BarCamp.

As much as possible, I plan to attend BCMad3 via IRC and UStream.

It’s a fact of life that if you work in Education ICT once someone gets hold of your email address then it’s very hard to turn back the tide of unsolicited “opt-in” email lists that you find yourself subscribed to.

Generally it’s a case of clicking through an unsubscribe process for that company and you don’t hear from them again.

Not so with customers of School Emails. School Emails aka SchoolsRegister seem to be a particularly obnoxious company in the way that they deal with the email addresses they claim you have given them for inclusion in their listing.

In my dealings with them I have requested on 3 separate occasions via email and twice via their web form to be removed from their lists – yet I’m still bombarded by emails from their customers over a month on. They also refuse to tell me how they obtained my contact details and what opportunities I was given to opt-in or out of their service and on what dates.

Of particular note for being ignorant and unhelpful are PromoPrintUK aka Money4school.co.uk who initially sent all their mailings with no unsubscription information, and then tried to tell me they have no control over who they send their bulk emailings to.

Their later mailings do finally carry unsubscription information, however it’s just a link back to SchoolEmails web form which we already know is studiously ignored by the company.

Other companies I’ve encountered using their services include WTA Education Services who are at least helpful in removing email addresses from their bulk mailings.

If you’re a company considering bulk-emailing schools, think long and hard before subjecting your potential customers to emails via SchoolEmails. They clearly don’t care – do you want your company to be associated with that attitude?

Some thoughts on the 4th of July, which is Independence Day here in the US.

First, I should derail the entire thing by mentioning that I have actually already experienced one independence day celebration this year, and that was here in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn: The Norwegian independence day. Usually, the Scandinavians stick together here, but since the Norwegians got their independence from the Danes, I thought I would keep a low profile that day.

Right, back to the topic. What I actually wanted to say is that I find it remarkable that practically every household thing here is made outside of the US. So, the United States are celebrating the independence from the United Kingdom, but the States are in fact tremendously dependent on a lot of supplier countries.
This is remarkable in some ways. If, for one thing, we compare to the invasion of Iraq – something which people even now say is not about oil, but seriously: If it was an effort to stop a regime of oppression, then there is no end of questions to ask; I vould, for instance, ask: What about Yemen? A colorful place in Human Rights debates. Just a random question. And if we are talking about oppression, and getting into just the most superficial definition of that, I would think sweatshops would be somewhat relevant to discuss under that category. I do understand that China is a bit of a mouthful to be policing with military, but we have a very close tie with China. And for a place talking so much about democracy, human rights and freedom, you would wonder about all these Chinese products here. You know how people talk about voting with your feet, spending the dollar where it will buy the rights you are fighting for? I would say that someone speaking about rights and democracy wearing Chinese-made clothes are about as impressive as fur-wearing animal activists. And how many computers are actually made without a Chinese component?

Now, you could say that this is a resource issue, but it obviously is not. If, like me, you grew up in Denmark, a tiny country with few natural resources, this might be a partially valid argument, but this is the United States of America, and I doubt that there are any resources that could not be sourced here.
I mentioned the question on Identi.ca, and Jeff Ratcliff pointed me towards the MadeInUsa.org website. Actually, in the beginning I was thinking about doing a “US patriot product” type of marketing thing, and I see that some products like American Apparel go into that. But as I was looking into it, I gradually began wondering how much the US has actually sold off.
There are disclaimers on this one: I live in New York, which is obviously a place with a concentration of the country’s white-collar work, so there isn’t much in the way of physical production here, just some secondary and a lot of tertiary production. That may be skewing my impression.
Also, and this seems a bit silly, but: I may be taking the offical lingo too seriously. It seems reasonable that the patriotic statements are a stylized picture of the state of the nation, and going to war doesn’t work as well if you state that it is a war for practical purposes. The United States have been in a curious position in the last years after the 9/11 attack (no, I am not going to go into conspiracy theories; if this has your interest, watch the first Zeitgeist movie), because they had never been attacked directly, all the wars had been conducted off-continent. And so, 20th century-methods were applied to a 21st century challenge – a challenge called terrorism which, one might add, still has a considerably smaller loss of life than obesity and bad living conditions in countries like, say, China, Thailand and other places which make our daily products. Sweatshops are not there to further economic development, and anyone who says so is lying to someone.

Does all this make me sound like a hippie? I was a left-winger once,  but these things have lost their meaning as I got older. What I certainly can say is that the US is nothing remotely close to independent, and there is a lot of hipocrisy about the values behind policies and corporate actions. Perhaps there is just less hipocrisy in those who support predatory capitalism, since that is what happens when everybody turns a blind eye.

On a different note, a personal comment -
Talking about independence, it also seems relevant to talk about those you depend on, and those who depend on you!
I moved to the US in December, and I have come to appreciate it. I was looking for work for a long time, and this spring I finally got employed at the Danish-American Chamber of Commerce, an interesting networking group for companies interested in working and investing between the two countries, and recently also at Miller Rosenfalck NY, the New York branch of a London law firm specialised in internation law for American companies getting established in Europe and vice versa.

When we came here, I was registered as my wife’s dependent – a bit hard to swallow, as I left my job in Denmark to come here – but now I am earning money for the household as well, which is a tremendous relief to me. While I have no doubt that my wife’s job has been made easier by me being able to help with the house and our son – making the conecpt of the dependent a bit floating – it is good to balance it out.
My wife is pregnant again, and we are expecting a second child in december.
Considering the family and the independence one would have without it – and that is my personal thought today – there are some ways of giving up independence that make life better. Some people like to say that nobody owns them, but I do need my wife and my son, and I have an obligation to them that make me theirs, as they are mine.
It is the heart that binds.

So – happy 4th of July. Enjoy your independence and the places where you have given it up for something greater.

From all the work i have been doing on compilers recently i have started to realise a lot of people won’t know how to compile up GCC or even how that works. Since how are you meant to compile a compiler written in a language that itself implements. Well the technique is called bootstrapping. But this is something people try and think its more complicated that it usually is. To understand how it works we have to think how was GCC built; well its as simple as it NEED’s a C compiler . But how did that first c-compiler get there in the first place, well it goes back years of people made the first c compilers in Assembler and then it bootstrapped up!

Within GCC when you start the build we bootstrap 3 times, which means we build it 3 times but why you ask? The generated code for the first compiler run, is by the host compile so the compiler itself cannot be trusted, then the 2^nd is done with the newly built compiler and the 3^rd for good measure to guarantee we’ve compiled with the new compiler and GCC itself should be running off its own code. Then you can look at something like the GHC the Glasgow Haskell compiler which is written in its own language, but the thing they don’t say is that it is written in a some-what simplified dialect of Haskell and bootstraps off a small amount of C code if you don’t already have a Haskell implementation already present. Which is similar to the bootstrapping languages of GCC which use C90 to maintain language portability.

Then you can look at something like what if someone writes a new operating system how do you port a compiler and libc over to the new system. Well this is done by a mixture of cross complication and complicated kernel work which can take quite some time to get going correctly.

But I digress as usual now onto a little tutorial how do we compile GCC well yes it uses the ./configure, make, make install build system. But it doesn’t quite work like this so we do it slightly different.

First to run experimental I prefer to use git:

# to get my gccpy work use this git repo it merges with gcc master at least weekly into master

$ git clone git://crules.org:gcc-dev.git

# or run the gcc git mirror:

$ git clone git://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git

Now compiling time:

$ aptitude install libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev

# GCC now requires libmpc which you may need to compile and install from:

# http://www.multiprecision.org/index.php?prog=mpc

$ cd gcc

$ mkdir build

$ cd build

Useful configure options

$ ../configure

–enable-gold | use the GOLD linker

–disable-bootstrap | useful for gcc developers not recommended for users or for your first build

–enable-languages=c,c++,python,gccgo …

….

–with-gmp-lib=/usr/local/lib

–with-mpfr-lib=/usr/local/include

-with-mpc/mpfr …. the same optiosn to point to different library locations.

Now to build:

$ make

$ make install

And you should be good to go. We have to do our build in a separate directory due to the size of GCC some components don’t like being built directly.

Along with the last LTS release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx, there have been a few requests to bring back Rapache and make it work on the newer Ubuntu releases. (what’s Rapache ? Here’s all the posts about it)

Will it happen ? Probably not. Here’s why.

A bit of history

Rapache has been my first real open source project and a good excuse to learn Python programming and do something useful. While the name and icon has been brought by others, the concept and coding for the very first release has been done entirely by me. (read the announcement)

The first version of Rapache

While the concept has not been appreciated by some, the software proved itself useful for some and I soon received a helping hand from another person, Jason, who helped me developing and added himself a terrific number of features and improvements.

Along with my newly found mate, newer releases flew. A plug-in system, advanced virtual hosting editing, Apache’s modules configuration, GUI tweakings, and so on. The Apache config parser has been rewrote 3 times, and I’d dare to say that the last version of it (even though not feature complete) is pretty good.

Eventually, Rapache made it to the Ubuntu Universe repository.

Everything was working fine, and, even if we had pretty much no feedback for the program (yes, we almost never heard a word from our users, we knew the software was used just thanks to Popcon stats and the very few number of bugs reported), we began to work onto the next version, with the radical changes needed to support the SSH protocol.

This is the SSH alpha which will never see the light.

Then Jauny Jackalope came out

When Ubuntu 9.04, we found out that Rapache wasn’t working anymore. Even though the bug had been reported before Ubuntu’s final release, we began looking into it only some day after such release. For sure I undervalued it.

Why does Rapache freeze when you try to do almost anything ?

Funnily enough, with people reporting the bug, Jason and I finally discovered to have some users !

We traced back the problem to be in python-gksu2. There was apparently no other explanation, since until Hardy Rapache was working fine. While I was working on a fix, Jason released a quick patch to solve temporarily the problem. I posted it on Launchpad, then asked Emanuele (emgent), a MOTU which was - formally - part of the team and official packager to issue a SRU to fix the problem.

Nobody, not Emanuele, nor the MOTU team, not anybody else ever did that.

The removal

Since I was not satisfacted with the quick fix, I began to work on a better solution. I never found it. I haven’t been able to trace out in google any similar problem with python-gksu2, nor I ever got any response from the MOTU channel. In many ways I considered and still regard that bug as an Ubuntu bug, not really Rapache’s.

Then I made a radical change in my life and moved to another city for a while (almost a year).

In the mean time, Rapache, since not working was stripped from Debian. I am fine with that, it never really worked in Debian, simply because it was packaged like shit on it, and un-updated. Funnily, people reporting the bug in Debian seemed pretty happy to have the program and the need of patching it manually to make it start seemed normal to them.

Right after being removed from Debian, Rapache got removed from Ubuntu repositories as well. I am very fine with that too as it has unmaintained for a long time, and it’s good for distribution to strip non-working packages.

A second try

Recently a french guy proposed to help and handed me a quick patch to substitute python-gksu2 with a normal dialog. With my surprise and horror, that would freeze Rapache as well.

My guess is there is something bad about the threads in the program, but frankly I couldn’t find out what. In my own opinion, the only right thing to do would be to re-engineer the whole GUI, move away from python-gksu2, implement D-BUS and Policy Kit. That would require an awful lot of time (also consider the code is not that clean, being that my first experience with Python).

Why Rapache won’t be brought back

So in true open source fashion, as the maintainer of this project, I am going to arbitrarily drop off the face off the of this earth for purely selfish reasons, and leave the entire cause in limbo. That is how open source projects truly die. But hey, all the material is out there for y’all to see (it’s “open source” in it’s own way), so maybe someone else will take up the cause. Carry on, lusers!
– Linux Hater’s [source]

I have no time, and not good motivation to re-engineer the whole software. Development has been hard sometime, I spent a nice bunch of sleepless nights and I’m frankly not willing to put that much energy into Rapache development anymore.

Normally, this would mean the software would be maintained with small fixes, just to keep it useful and working for the users. But here we have a software with a big problem, thus requiring a lot of work.

A lot of you have been asking what you can do to help. The answer is very simple though unpleasing: fix it. Do it for yourself, do it for the community or don’t do it at all and pass by. Shall you wish, you can even fork it, it’s free software, you have the full right to do that.

My final stance is the following:

• I won’t probably fix it for a long time, since I have to work to make a living.
• If somebody forks it, I’m totally okay with that, as long as he changes the name of the software
• If somebody fix it and publishes a (really) working branch for Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04 in that case:
  • I am available to publish it on the Rapache PPA.
  • I’ll include him in the dev team
  • I’ll help maintain the software with small fixes
  • I won’t ever spend time, not even 5 minute, to get Rapache included into an Ubuntu official repository. MOTU are for that, I won’t propose it for inclusion or do any work that doesn’t belong to the upstream domain.

Shall you wish to install the broken Rapache under Ubuntu 10.04 (for patching and use or development), you can download the code with this command:

bzr branch lp:rapache

I’m sincerely happy to have helped the community, even for just one year. Big thanks to Jason and to everybody who helped.

My X crashes pretty much daily (which is obviously starting to piss me off). Last time it crashed just couple minutes ago. And this is not the error message completely (but I could imagine that this is the problem):

WARNING: All config files need .conf: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, it will be ignored in a future release
WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist line 4: ignoring bad line starting with ‘END’
FATAL: Module fbcon not found

Fatal server error
Failed to submit batchbuffer: Input/output error

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

# cat << END >>/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
blacklist pcspkr
blacklist snd_pcsp
END

I have there also the blacklist.conf… should I just remove the blacklist? What is fbcon?

I haven’t experienced X crashes before Statler, so I’m bit lost with this one, so if you need more information just let me know.

EDIT //

Xorg.0.log
Xorg.0.log.old

I have posted this also in the Crunchbang forums

Here output of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 01)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 81)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) SMBus Controller (rev 01)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC’97 Audio Controller (rev 01)
05:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB PRO/100 VM (LOM) Ethernet Controller (rev 81)

Very cool indeed.  I hope this starts a sea change in the banking industry.

MasterCard has announced that it will be rolling out new credit and debit cards with integrated display screens, in an attempt to further prevent bank fraud.  The cards, developed by NagraID Security, resemble their regular counterparts, but – when an integrated button is pressed – display a one-time passcode that can be used to authorize online and phone transactions.

Here are all the details.

Attention: This post is not open source related. For some FOSS goodness, check some previous posts.

I love my Nokia E71. I can listen to podcasts, browse the Web and navigate using the built-in GPS. But for a long time I’ve had an itch that needed serious scratching. When I wanted to make a quick note I always used the Active Notes app. So my ideas were safe. Unfortunately, Active notes were accessible only through the device. I wanted my notes to be available anywhere, just like the Evernote client. I’m a geek, I spend a lot of time on the computer. The notes on my computer are not in sync with my mobile notes. This is a big problem since the bigger players in the notes-anywhere market like Evernote refuse to do a Symbian application, forcing users of Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices (a HUGE user-base) to either use stripped-down version such as evernote.com/m or sync notes by cable/Blutetooth.

What I needed:

1. A note-taking app that works on my Symbian 3rd Edition device and syncs to the cloud (Active Notes – out)
2. This app should also work offline, since I’m not always connected (Evernote’s mobile site – out)
3. An interface for editing and making new notes on the computer
4. This interface should be cross-platform, preferably web-based

Enter Upvise.

“Upvise provides mobile on-demand sync & collaboration software and hosted services for small businesses and individuals. With Upvise, you can organize and share information with your co-workers, and sync data between all the mobile phones and web accounts in your company.”

A free user’s account gives you much more, but let’s just focus on the Notebooks application. You download the Java-based app here. You will notice you can set it for online/offline mode. I removed all other menu options and just left Notebook. Sync your notes when you are ready by pressing the space key. Signing in at Upvise.com and visiting the Notebooks page will get you a fairly usable online interface for organising and editing your notes.

Not much to it, is there? Well, while this is kind of true, Upvise remains the only application I know that currently offers this functionality, for free, and I’ve done a lot of research. All the current workarounds don’t satisfy my 4 basic criteria. Being able to create and edit notes anywhere, anytime is a huge productivity booster and helps me remember cool ideas. So I hope this helps all of you Symbian users who, like me, have been searching for a client with this basic functionality. It certainly made my day.

Evernote Mobile Alternative for (Nokia) Symbian S60 3rd Edition – Upvise

There are lots of ways that you can screw up your apache configuration... here is a way to at least see what apache thinks is going on..

on redhat try

httpd -S

on debian it's

apache2ctl -S

Output:

[Wed May 26 19:01:45 2010] [warn] NameVirtualHost 192.168.65.150:84 has no VirtualHosts
[Wed May 26 19:01:45 2010] [warn] NameVirtualHost 192.168.65.150:85 has no VirtualHosts
[Wed May 26 19:01:45 2010] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:84 has no VirtualHosts
VirtualHost configuration:
192.168.65.150:80       is a NameVirtualHost
         default server site1.dev (/srv/site1/etc/httpd.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost site20.dev (/srv/site20/etc/httpd.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost site15.dev (/srv/site15/etc/httpd.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost site12.dev (/srv/site12/etc/httpd.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost site4.dev (/srv/site4/etc/httpd.conf:1)
         port 80 namevhost site3.dev (/srv/site3/etc/httpd.conf:1)

*:80                   is a NameVirtualHost
         default server site50.dev (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/010-site50:1)
         port 80 namevhost site50.dev (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/010-site50:1)

That is virtual hosts, ports, warnings and named servers all in one command along with a path to the files where they are defined... Pretty awesome..

UPDATE 5/31/2010 – thanks to bibitte

This script is not valid anymore (well it works, but there is a newer, better method).
use this PPA repository, you can see instructions here: http://code.google.com/p/gma500/wiki/PPARepository

A little heads up to every angry Intel GMA 500, “Poulsbo” chip-powered netbook owner who has not been following this great thread on the Ubuntu Forums: a user called Lucazade, the main driving force behind the 9.10 script, brings you the new modified Poulsbo driver install script.

Owners of netbooks like the Asus EeePC 1101HA, Dell Mini v10, MSI X320, Sony Vaio P and similar Poulsbo machines can now rejoice because you can install Lucid Lynx and have acceptable graphics support right after installing Lucazade’s patch.

If you already installed the patch on a previous Ubuntu version, try to clean your system with the following command:

sudo apt-get remove –purge poulsbo-* psb-firmware psb-kernel-* xpsb-glx* xserver-xorg-video-psb* libdrm-poulsbo1* libva1 libva1-*

Then get the patch:

wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1338581/Gma500/scripts/poulsbo_lucid.sh && sh ./poulsbo_lucid.sh

The patch now reportedly works, but it is still being improved. I am not the author of this script and haven’t yet had the chance to try it on my own machine. If you are having trouble installing or want to troubleshoot please visit the Poulsbo thread on the Ubuntu Forums. If the script works for you, please also take the chance to thank Lucazade.

HOWTO: Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

The upshot of the General Election for me was a change in Parliamentary representative in the form of the Conservative MP Simon Kirby.

There follows an open letter to Mr Kirby outlining my suggestions for cuts to the BSF program which would potentially save the country millions of pounds and safeguard jobs in to the bargain. I also mention the need to repeal or heavily rework the Digital Economy Act and to urgently look at Copyright reform.

I intend to publish here any response I might receive.

Dear Mr Kirby

Firstly my congratulations on your recent election success, and your parties subsequent proposed coalition Government with the Liberal Democrats.

As my elected representative, I’m taking a couple of minutes to put to you my point of view on a couple of important issues in the hope that you can take my views on board.

One of the stated aims of the Conservative Party is to begin cutting the budget deficit with immediate effect. May I suggest a thorough review of the Building Schools for the Future scheme and the quango appointed to run it (Partnerships for Schools) would be an excellent point to begin.

BSF in its conception was a revolutionary rework of state-funded secondary schools nationwide, however over time it has become clear that the needs of large businesses have been pushed to the fore and it is now the normal situation in a BSF scheme to spend millions of pounds unnecessarily on consultants, propitiatory software and replacing nearly new equipment like-for-like at each and every school it touches.

Education desperately needs its funding for ICT, but schools that have invested in their ICT services are being penalised by this levelling process that has been imposed by Partnerships for Schools.

Supporters of the BSF program would say that it’s possible for schools to opt out of the Managed ICT Service side of BSF – and it is, theoretically and on paper. In reality it’s a very long and difficult process to demonstrate that existing provision exceeds that offered by an MSP. It falls to the school – which is rightly working towards educating its students – to counter the claims made by dedicated teams from the MSPs. It’s not surprising that almost all schools that embark on that route fail to win their argument.

Please therefore consider cutting the monies spent on the BSF Managed ICT Service such that the remaining funds are spent directly where they are needed by frontline ICT staff, Headteachers and Governors in schools rather than wasted on consultants and replacing systems like-for-like.

The previous Parliament also presided over the farce that was the passing of the Digital Economy Act. The arguments surrounding that act are well publicised and I’m sure you’re aware of the pertainant points.

Nick Clegg made an election promise to repeal the Digital Economy Act if the Liberal Democrats were in power. I hope that the Con-Lib coalition will seriously consider repealing the act or at the very least undertake a major overhaul of the act to address the very serious shortcomings that it has.

And finally please use this period of Conservative-Liberal accord to tackle the issue of Copyright reform. The UK is still applying copyright laws passed decades ago to modern business practises and I’m afraid they just aren’t fit for purpose any longer. Indeed proper copyright reforms would largely address the contentious issues that the Digital Economy Act attempts to legislate around and would probably negate the need for its existence at all.

Yours sincerely

Alex Harrington

I just read an interesting article at abuse.ch about anonymizing proxy use and the privacy and security concerns that many of us don’t take into account.

*** The bad things you don’t know about such proxies ***
Unfortunately the other site of the coin looks much worse:

• You don’t know who run these proxies
• You don’t know if these proxies are secure and clean from any malware and drive-bys
• You don’t know the intentions of the persons who runs these proxies (maybe they have mean ill?)

But you have must be aware of one fact: Those proxies aren’t anonymous! Web Proxy scripts like Glype&Co have a free configurable option wheter the administrator of the (glype-) proxy wants to log the requests which are passing his proxy or not. And you can be sure that the most Glype administrators will do.

Go have a read here.

Ideal Situation:

everything under /var/aegir aegir:aegir
files 775
directories 775

drupal files directories are aegir:www-data
drupal files directories are 777

aegir is in the www-data group
www-data is in the www-data group

Therefore, the commands to fix aegir permissions (after adding aegir to www-data group)

cd /var
chown -R aegir:aegir /var/aegir/
chmod -R 775 /var/aegir/
find /var/aegir/ -name files -type d -exec \
chown -R aegir:www-data {} \;
find /var/aegir/ -name files -type d -exec \
chmod -R 777 {} \;

Have you heard about flattr yet? If not, you should definitely check it out! m3tti pointed me to it on #linuxoutlaws on Freenode.

It’s in Beta right now, but it’s the idea that counts. To get an idea of it, visit the homepage and watch the introduction video.

It basically is about adding a little button (like Tweet this!) to every website that offers content, and users will be able to click it and automatically donate a share of their monthly donation budget. This way you always know what you’re going to pay at the end of the month and can support authors, photographers or even developers you like.

I’m asking myself how many “normal” people will use it in the end though, if they can get the stuff for free anyway… It could make donating to creative people sharing their content on the internet much easier though, as opposed to visiting some website, searching the donate button and entering all kinds of payment information.

I like the idea!

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.

All this fuss about Google ChromeOS.

Is it a threat to Microsoft ? Is it a threat to the Ubuntu ?

(funny nobody wonders if that’s a threat to Apple, especially considering everything is a threat to Apple, even being able to take DRM free songs *out* of the freaking iPod)

I’ll just assume you’ve already read the OMG ! ChromeOS Live Blog.

Now, let’s examine extract some important points:

18:13: Netbooks incredibly popular; most people have important data stored in the cloud; webapps most successful platform so far;

First keyword: Netbooks. But let’s go on.

18:15: ChromeOS to be super fast, boot should be just like switching a TV on! Chrome will be even faster on Chrome OS than any other OS.

Another important thing: Super fast boot.

18:15 Better model of computing = Chrome OS.

Whahahah This is not important, but I find it very funny.

18:16: All apps to be WEB APPS. NO desktop applications. No binaries.

…also (not only) because it’s too hard. BTW here comes the more interesting indication:

Here it is: custom firmware !

Does that reminds you anything ? Splashtop ! (and similar systems) Quoting myself:

Splashtop is an instant on embedded Linux which boots in seconds (I mean, 3-4 seconds) and give the user fast access to web-based features as Web Browser, Skype, online gaming and similar stuff.

Actually, the most interesting thing about Splashtop is that, being embedded in the computer’s firmware, it does not substitute to the chosen operative system. It’s just a faster alternative to check the mail, and chat with friends.

Google has already agreements with hardware vendors to get dual booting Android/Windows netbooks to the mainstream public. It’s no wonder the droid will be soon replaced by ChromeOS.

So that’s it. Google Chrome OS is (partly) firmware based operative system, that just runs on specific systems (SSDs are required for example) and that you’re likely to find already installed on your brand new netbook, along with Windows.

It will just be the thing you switch into when you have no time to boot the full blown windows (or you don’t want to, or it when win is broken).

My 2 cents

We’re talking about the most inflated operating system ever (no, wait, there’s the mac..). When the marketing bubble will explode we will realize it for what it really is: a brilliant technical achievement, hard to install on anything, useful only as a quick and dirty Internet alternative to Windows.

Is there any chance it will become a full blown operative system ? At least a little bit ?

Well, the official launch will be within a year. My prediction is something more may come in approximately 3-4 years from now.

Is Google ChromeOS a threat to Ubuntu ?

Not within the next 10 years. The only real threat in the meantime being Mark Shuttleworth possibly choke by laughing reading Panettieri’s post. (no offense Joe, I love you. Really.)

And to Windows and MacOS ?

Whahahaha.

Will Linux benefit from it ?

It will get some optimized code and some drivers. The drivers are important, but since netbooks have not much hardware inside (and are almost 100% compatible with Linux already) the benefit won’t be huge.

The boot procedure, being so customized, won’t benefit linux that much, but I’m not very into the technical details, so I may be wrong.

The most interesting chance, already anticipated by some, would be to have (not so) soon a new generation of motherboards capable of holding and handling bigger firmwares and – as a consequence – having the chance to flash the firmware and moving part of Linux directly in the firmware. That may help to have instantly-on (like TV’s !) full blown operative systems.

And has you probably already know, Canonical is helping out Google with ChromeOS. And that’s money to keep things going and further develop Ubuntu, at least in part.

Will Richard Stallman be happy ?

No, Google is no fool and perfectly knows and state that ChromeOS is no real alternative to the existing operative systems. It is just part of a long (loong) term strategy to change computing paradigm (we’re talking about 15-20 years at least). And Richard does not like that kind of shift.

But hey, he will probably be able to get an opensource firmware replacement for his BIOS much sooner. How cool is that ?

ps: not only Google requires Ubuntu to build Chrome, but they probably based it on it, or on a similar system. I mean, they use debian packaging !

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!