Planet WUGLUG

mprisshell

2008-08-23T07:58:44+00:00

I've written a small bash CLI interface to MPRIS players, available at http://files.fredemmott.co.uk/mprisshell.sh.

It's currently rather limited in functionality:

Usage: mprisshell.sh [command]
Commands:
  play                          Start playing the current track
  pause                         Pause the current track
  playpause                     If a track is playing, pause it; otherwise, play the current track
  next                          Skip to the next track
  previous                      Skip to the previous track
  incVolume [percentage]        Increase the volume by 10%, or the given percentage
  decVolume [percentage]        Decrease the volume by 10%, or the given percentage

It sends the above commands to the first MPRIS-capable player found; this includes the latest git head of YANIHP, Amarok 2, Audacious, and others. It's meant for normal users, not developers, for example as a program to bind to media keys.

Olympics

2008-08-21T01:04:12+00:00

I’m not interested in the Olympics at all – never gotten into it. I do like tables of numbers however! It struck me that everyone was going on about Britain doing well – which I neither deny, or want to detract from. What I was vaguely interested was in, was who was doing well in comparison to their population.

The following table scores countries performance by 3 points for Gold, 2 points for Silver and 1 for Bronze – which is entirely arbitrary, but I felt a better approach than the listings for official tables (Ordered by number of Gold Medals). if there is a scoring system somewhere, I’d love to know about it. These numbers are probably already out of date, since they use the figures from mid afternoon today, before I fell asleep. The population figures are taken from Wikipedia, and are all the most recent normative figures/estimates – rather than relying on aged, albeit positive, figures (eg a census).

i haven’t bothered formatting it particularly well, since as I say its already out of date. But I thought it might be interesting to someone else anyway. I’ll most likely try to write a complete version, once the olympics are actually finished, with more sanitized presentation. Ideally I’d like to be able to get better population figures, but that sounds like actual effort. A comparison with past events would also make excellent future work.

Score/Pop Country Gold Silver Brz Total Population Score
1.04166666666667E-05 Malaysia 0 1 0 1 192000 2
6.63227708179808E-06 Jamaica 4 3 0 7 2714000 18
4.43568260226713E-06 Slovenia 1 2 2 5 2029000 9
3.94649603771798E-06 Bahrain 1 0 0 1 760168 3
3.74286516328249E-06 New Zealand 3 1 5 9 4274800 16
3.72967328062062E-06 Estonia 1 1 0 2 1340600 5
3.2718981482412E-06 Australia 11 12 13 36 21394309 70
2.0639834881321E-06 Belarus 2 3 8 13 9690000 20
2.03617995610366E-06 Slovakia 3 1 0 4 5402273 11
2.003999983968E-06 Denmark 2 1 3 6 5489022 11
1.90186382655002E-06 Mongolia 1 1 0 2 2629000 5
1.88343622475672E-06 Norway 1 2 2 5 4778500 9
1.86368477103301E-06 Cuba 1 6 6 13 11268000 21
1.82025028441411E-06 Georgia 2 0 2 4 4395000 8
1.6655562958028E-06 Armenia 0 0 5 5 3002000 5
1.58102766798419E-06 Netherlands 4 5 4 13 16445000 26
1.50037509377344E-06 Trinidad & Tob 0 1 0 1 1333000 2
1.30390362336661E-06 Great Britain 16 10 11 37 60587300 79
1.19008657879861E-06 Lithuania 0 1 2 3 3361100 4
1.17842693098346E-06 Switzerland 2 0 3 5 7637300 9
1.15349832973442E-06 Czech Republic 2 3 0 5 10403136 12
1.12822142473682E-06 Finland 1 1 1 3 5318105 6
1.06295027754813E-06 Azerbaijan 1 2 2 5 8467000 9
1.04708780014445E-06 Bulgaria 1 1 3 5 7640238 8
1.03682813536828E-06 South Korea 8 10 6 24 48224000 50
8.97397547113371E-07 Panama 1 0 0 1 3343000 3
8.96146569750075E-07 Hungary 0 4 1 5 10043000 9
8.42951627545065E-07 Kazakhstan 1 3 4 8 15422000 13
7.9298442018845E-07 Romania 4 1 3 8 21438000 17
7.75516750076078E-07 France 4 12 14 30 64473140 50
7.16467590718801E-07 Ukraine 5 5 8 18 46059306 33
7.05673370563687E-07 Germany 11 8 9 28 82191000 58
6.89636561532073E-07 Canada 2 6 5 13 33350900 23
6.74207805828152E-07 Zimbabwe 1 3 0 4 13349000 9
6.58616904500549E-07 Croatia 0 1 1 2 4555000 3
6.54150695186072E-07 Italy 6 7 7 20 59619290 39
6.5111083306267E-07 Sweden 0 3 0 3 9215021 6
5.99060250660904E-07 Russia 13 14 18 45 141888900 85
5.64227948091029E-07 Kyrgyzstan 0 1 1 2 5317000 3
5.24746727712203E-07 USA 26 27 28 81 304909000 160
4.79563175494705E-07 Austria 0 1 2 3 8340924 4
4.7224303662557E-07 Poland 3 4 1 8 38115967 18
4.62379150903741E-07 DPR Korea 2 1 3 6 23790000 11
4.55897357966264E-07 Spain 3 5 2 10 46063000 21
4.40917107583774E-07 Latvia 0 0 1 1 2268000 1
4.35862790393584E-07 Singapore 0 1 0 1 4588600 2
4.26234748787895E-07 Kenya 2 4 2 8 37538000 16
3.58840943751682E-07 Greece 0 1 2 3 11147000 4
3.52416007518208E-07 Japan 8 6 9 23 127690000 45
3.04321363359708E-07 Serbia 0 1 1 2 9858000 3
2.9050062941803E-07 Tunisia 1 0 0 1 10327000 3
2.55735788396902E-07 Uzbekistan 0 2 3 5 27372000 7
2.04918032786885E-07 Dominican Rep 0 1 0 1 9760000 2
1.88270733314506E-07 Portugal 0 1 0 1 10623000 2
1.61733786187935E-07 Cameroon 1 0 0 1 18549000 3
1.51860288534548E-07 Togo 0 0 1 1 6585000 1
1.4991379956525E-07 Ecuador 0 1 0 1 13341000 2
1.48456057007126E-07 Tajikistan 0 0 1 1 6736000 1
1.38048715354864E-07 China 45 14 20 79 1325619000 183
1.36930028755306E-07 Israel 0 0 1 1 7303000 1
1.30434782608696E-07 Chinese Taipei 0 0 3 3 23000000 3
1.21617512921861E-07 Netherlands Antilles 0 1 0 1 16445000 2
1.19307040845362E-07 Chile 0 1 0 1 16763470 2
1.1333651128911E-07 Turkey 1 2 1 4 70586256 8
1.00983325128438E-07 Ethiopia 2 1 0 3 79221000 8
9.92508373110794E-08 Argentina 1 0 1 2 40301927 4
8.86053517632465E-08 Algeria 0 1 1 2 33858000 3
7.93169264367393E-08 Thailand 1 1 0 2 63038247 5
6.73959053393058E-08 Colombia 0 1 1 2 44513090 3
4.266621156041E-08 Brazil 1 0 5 6 187502000 8
4.17966717310301E-08 South Africa 0 1 0 1 47850700 2
3.74944344198908E-08 Mexico 1 0 1 2 106682500 4
3.68391969055075E-08 Afghanistan 0 0 1 1 27145000 1
3.5773438372257E-08 Venezuela 0 0 1 1 27953701 1
3.45382878507255E-08 Indonesia 1 1 3 5 231627000 8
3.20266461696131E-08 Morocco 0 0 1 1 31224000 1
2.28898426323319E-08 Vietnam 0 1 0 1 87375000 2
1.41852458633624E-08 Iran 0 0 1 1 70495782 1
1.3295043607743E-08 Egypt 0 0 1 1 75216000 1
3.5182811648466E-09 India 1 0 1 2 1136918800 4

Ogg/Vorbis on N810

2008-08-19T20:59:29+00:00

There's easily findable tutorials on how to build the vorbis codec in scratchbox; however, you don't need to :)

Just add the chinook extra's repository, then as root, apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ivorbis (integer-only decoder). This package works fine on diablo.

Maemo scratchbox on amd64 multilib

2008-08-17T15:21:28+00:00

Regarding TSDgeos' post, if you have working 32-bit multilib, you just need "linux32 sh installer-goes-here.sh". If you don't have that binary in your distribution, the source is in the slamd64 source archives among other places. Thanks to Andi Kleen for writing this incredibly useful little launcher back in 2002 :)

It's also useful for various games installers.

Akademy

2008-08-17T11:49:24+00:00

Firstly a big thank you to Trolltech^WNokia, and all of the team who organised the event - probably the best one I've been to so far.

As for what I did there:

Drank lots of Belgian Beer :)
Learned about new stuff in Qt, KDE, and Linux graphical stuff in general - in particular, Zack Rusin's talk on Gallium3D seems very promising
Added MPRIS support to YANIHP - so it now support the same D-Bus interface as Amarok, VLC, Xmms2, and others
Added a tray icon to YANIHP
Received a free N810 from Nokia...

...which led to:

Surprisingly few changes were needed:

Added a compile-time option to make it so that left-clicking on the tray icon pops up the context menu, instead of hiding/showing YANIHP - I'll later make this apply to all context menus, where appropriate
Added a compile-time option to hardcode data and music paths - otherwise YANIHP uses QDesktopServices::storageLocation - which seems to think that /usr/share/mime/data/ is a perfectly suitable location to store non-root user data on the N810...

Here's how to get it running:

Install taglib (1.5), libqtcore4, libqt4-sql-sqlite, libqt4-phonon on the device, and the corresponding -dev packages in scratchbox
Also install cmake in scratchbox
Build YANIHP in scratchbox, as normal, with the following options:
- EMBEDDED_FIXED_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.yanihp - this changes where the database, coverart, and lyrics are stored
- EMBEDDED_FIXED_MUSIC_PATH=/media/mmc2/Music - this just changes the default location, the user's asked if they want to change it
- EMBEDDED_USE_FIXED_PATHS=ON - enables the above two options
- EMBEDDED_LEFT_BUTTON_CONTEXT_MENU=ON - makes it so that left clicking on the tray icon shows the context menu instead of showing/hiding YANIHP
- WITH_Mpris_PLUGIN=OFF - not strictly neccessary, but I doubt you've got use for it
Copy it across :)

There's a few caveats:

It's only currently usable with the CleanLooks Qt theme - with small font sizes and so on, not with GTK support.
Phonon-gstreamer doesn't appear to support manually switching between gstreamer audio sinks - in particular, there's no mp3 codec as such - instead, you need to connect your audio source to "dspmp3sink" instead. Alternatively, you can use another phonon backend.

I'm not uploading packages, as I've got no idea how to make a "good" debian package.

Re: Prisoner's Dilemma

2008-08-15T07:17:41+00:00

Seems no-one responded to the simpler problem either. I guess the solution is to produce programming related problems instead of logic/maths related ones.

Well, here's the answer: There's 8 possible arrangements of hats. Assuming true random distribution, just by writing down the possibilities we see that: If you see 2 hats of the same colour, the chances are that yours is the other colour (3/8 instead of 1/8). So upon seeing two hats of one colour, you should guess the other colour - and if you don't, you should pass. This gives the team a 3/4 chance of success, since in every arrangement someone sees two hats of the same colour. The key is that you're actively betting against the two "all hats the same" possibilities.

There's a clear counter to this strategy, though - just give everyone the same colour hats. However, we can alter the above strategy to involve a uniform random element to prevent this. Call our people X, Y and Z and write a hattage as a 3-tuple with 0 and 1 as the colours. Then the strategy above is just betting against the two opposite hattages (0, 0, 0) and (1, 1, 1). You can just arbitrarily pick a hattage and its opposite to produce a new strategy, so for example picking (0, 1, 1) and (1, 0, 0) we find that the strategies are as follows:

X: If I see two of one colour, I pick that colour.
Y: If X has 0 and Z has 1, I pick 0. If X has 1 and Z has 0, I pick 1.
Z: If X has 0 and Y has 1, I pick 0. If X has 1 and Y has 0, I pick 1.

The possible hattages are:

(0, 0, 0): X wins, Y, Z pass.
(0, 0, 1): Y wins, X, Z pass.
(0, 1, 0): Z wins, X, Y pass.
(0, 1, 1): All three lose.
(1, 0, 0): All three lose.
(1, 0, 1): Z wins, X, Y pass.
(1, 1, 0): Y wins, X, Z pass.
(1, 1, 1): X wins, Y, Z pass.

Thus, once again we have a 3/4 chance of winning! Thus if the tablers secretly agree on a random hattage and its opposite before they are given hats, they will win more often than you'd expect.

This kind of strategy can be extended to higher numbers of people but since no-one was really bothered by the 3 person case, I won't detail the higher numbers here. It's available on the interweb anyway.

I'll try to come up with some interesting computational problem for my next one.

AmeCon

2008-08-15T06:59:01+00:00

Oh, hi there.

Spooks Code 9

2008-08-11T17:00:34+00:00

So, last night saw the first couple of episodes of the new BBC drama, Spooks Code 9. I’ve always quite enjoyed watching the usual Spooks series (even if only to play the game of which lead character is going to get killed off next), so I figured I’d give this new one a shufty.

The premise for this series is that a nuclear bomb has gone off in London during the 2012 Olympics, and the series follows a set of agents recruited in the aftermath trying to do what the Spooks lot usually do, stopping terrorists performing their nefarious deeds. The episodes are shorter than those of the original series, clocking in at 50 minutes rather than an hour, and accordingly there seems to be less that happens in the episodes.

So far the plots in the episodes haven’t been particularly enthralling, although they have set the wheels in motion with the requisite long-running plot. Unfortunately this, along with a number of other things in the first two episodes, have been rather clichéd.

I’ll probably still end up watching the other episodes in the series (if only because I’ve set my BT Vision box to record the series) and perhaps it will get better, but I’ve not really got high hopes after this first pair of episodes.

The Thinker

2008-08-09T10:28:16+00:00

Masochism

2008-08-05T14:05:32+00:00

For my first trivial bit of coding while I'm here, I patched the debconf IRC bot to announce nicknames as well as the real name of new arrivals (a feature request from madduck). I'm hoping to resist wasting time adding lots of features to it - the code is awful.

This morning I went running at 8:30 - in theory there are going to be group runs in the morning and afternoon sometime, but for now I went on my own. It was quite nice with the ocean views... the local runners seem to wear tracksuit tops at this time of year, though.

Argentina

2008-08-04T23:10:22+00:00

I arrived in Mar del Plata yesterday - DebConf this year is all in one hotel (with a nearby hotel for overflow accommodation next week), which makes everything very convenient. When they're not serving meals, they're usually serving coffee and cakes in the hacklab.

There were some teething troubles with the networking today, so I took a walk down the beach. Mar del Plata reminds me of Llandudno - it's a popular beach resort in the summer, but it's winter at the moment. Not that I've ever been to Llandudno in the winter, come to think of it... but imagine a cold summer day in North Wales. There's a run-down pier and everything. The big difference is that Mar del Plata is a huge city - I walked a couple of miles down the coast today, and the buildings were just stretching on. Oh, and everyone speaks Spanish.

When I got back, the network was fixed (yay), so I messed around getting SIP calls working. Outgoing works pretty well now, but I've yet to see whether my UK number is going to ring my mobile. I should have voicemail set up now, so people can leave a message instead of just not getting through to me.

At some point I'll stop settling in and do some packaging or something - but as a holiday, it's quite relaxing.

Vital Statistics

2008-07-31T23:43:09+00:00

I finally registered with a GP's surgery in Rugby today (that is, Thursday). This went fairly smoothly once I managed to decipher the way to Waiting Room 2.

I am 180cm tall, and weigh 75kg. This gives me a BMI of 23.1, which is normal. I didn't get the numbers for my blood pressure, but apparently it's fine. :)

Womad

2008-07-30T01:50:22+00:00

Writing about web page http://womad.org/festivals/charlton-park/

Background Information

This is my 6th year going to WOMAD which happened over the weekend just gone. It originally started off just my Uncle, then I started going with him, and for the last 3 years, inclusively, Dad has come along as well. I’ve always meant to write notes on the festival, both because every year people ask me what its like and I go “oh quite good – I enjoyed whatshisface’s set”, well no longer! This year I actually wrote some notes whilst I was there and on the way home in the car, so I thought I’d publish them on my blog.

General Comments

The lineup this year wasn’t as good as the past festivals I’ve been to – I appreciate that last year was a 25th anniversary, so had a very strong lineup, but this didn’t even really compete with previous years before that. I still enjoyed it, and will probably go again, but it give me pause for thought.

The weather was very hot – despite the Met Office predicting a small amount of rain. Last year the weather had a really negative impact on the festival – there was huge amounts of mud all over the place, and since the soil in the local area is clay it began so stick to boots like glue. Just walking between tents had become a difficulty. This year – the heat was quite draining, energy wise, but much preferred to the rain.

WOMAD has a vaguely interesting history, since essentially it began as a way of Peter Gabriel marketing so called ‘world music’ to a UK audience. Fortunately that audience managed to attract a boatload of hippies who succeeded in bringing a rather nice atmosphere to the festival. This leaves it in an interesting position of both being one of the most commercial festivals around (everyone who plays has some relationship with Real World Studios) and simultaneously one of the most leftwing.

There follows a listing of most of the sets I heard during the festival (though some I left early to ensure good positioning for preferred sets). The rating is a rough guide (out of 100) as to how much I enjoyed the event. Please note its hard not to enjoy a gig so < 60 is basically epic failure. The description is my notes from the day and may be incredibly inaccurate/complete rubbish.

Friday

Tashi Lhumpo Monks
30
Tedious + Repetitive religious ceremony, establishes some atmosphere, but fails to provide any real drive or interest.

Rumberos de Cuba
50
Traditionalist rumba outfit parading african influence bequeathed to Cuba. Basic evidence of griot techniques include narrative driven lyrics and expositional dancing.

Kenge Kenge Orutu Systems
60
Upbeat Kenyan group mix traditional instrucments with a more modern structure. Probably more interesting for dancier folks. Excellent audience involvement.

Billy Cobham + Asere
70
Veteran percussionist Cobham teams with a cuban outfit to produce a jazz and Son Cubana influenced fusion. Cobham provides surprising subtlety to his performance (at past gigs I’ve noted a tendance to dominate the proceedings). Strong soloing added a touch of class to the performance.

Toumani Diabate
85
Great set.
Diabate started this performance with two quite intimate Kora solos, showcasing his ability to communicate emotion through his instrument. The remainder of the set he was backed by his talented band, including his Kora playing son. Strong solos all round.

Bedouin Jerry Can Band
65
Several instruments consist of reused equipment from the 6 day war. Song structure involves more traditional arabic folky work. Simple rhythms, fat men dancing, plenty of facial. Good fun, but not the most sophisticated outfit.

Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee
0
Combined flutist/beatbox is as shit as it sounds, but the kind of collab that womad organisers seem to have a hankering for. I am perenially unimpressed by beatboxers. It seems like an incredibly easy to learn skill, something I really need to sit down for a week and learn purely to point out how shit they are. My main problem is their replication of very simple dance tunes and distortion. When someone has a beatboxer who can perform Mahler’s 5th symphony please come and talk to me.

Flute playing had merit but showmanship overode musical talent – The guy spent as much time shouting ‘give it up for x’ where x is an accompanying musician as he did playing his instrument.

Rachid Taha
70
Excellent mandolute + sax soloing raised this set from mediocrity to quite an enjoyable event. strong ambience to music and good showmanship from Mr. Taha carried through. Basic rhythms and simplistic song structure.

Speed Caravan
65
Electric Oud playing offered something a little different. DJ backing gave atmosphere (think Leafcutter John in Polar Bear) whilst shredding on an oud sounded really good. Strong rock sensibilities to composition gave a different setting to the oud and darabouka (which was also accompanying) which I haven’t heard through a more traditional setting.

Even band has an achilles heal – here it is their friendship with MC Spex, ex asian dub foundation, who came in one song and basically destroyed my enjoyment of this set. In my opinion promoting your latest outfit’s absence of talent by invading someone else’s gig is incredibly rude, no matter whether they asked you to perform or not. If it hadn’t been for this, I would have given an enjoyment rating of 8.

Malam Mamane Barka
80
Only living Biram master brought an african blues sound to the evening. Harplike sound of his unique instrument offers the soul of a nomadic existence to the audience. This is the cure to that tit Spex.

Terakraft
60
Admittedly I was tired by this stage of the evening, but this was an incredibly boring set. The whole Etran Finatawa & Tinariwen sound seems really staid to me at the moment. No real cockups, but really repetitive.

Saturday

La Cor de La Plana
55
Occitan singing + drumming, quite simple – but really rhythmic performance.

Monobloco
40
Lively + Upbeat samba collective failed to impress me. Uninteresting instrumentals and several Covers. Filler

Wasis Diop
55
Last minute booking, for a slot TBC’d on the programme. Uninventive trio, but solid set. Main focus of the songs seemed to be lyrics, which might have been more appreciated by someone with a better understanding of the French language.

Dengue Fever
65
Interesting 6 piece, strong sax + guitar soloing, clearly charasmatic cambodian lead singer. Awesome beard on lead guitarist.

Eddy Grant & the frontline Orchestra
75
I really enjoyed this, when on paper it should be something I’d hate. Pop twist on classic calypso and saco song structure. Not the kind of thing I’d normally listen to. Superb showmanship and crowd interaction.

Sufi Evening (Sheik Taha/Monajat Yulchieva)
60
Asif Ali Khan (highlight of this mini-lineup) was cancelled. Focus on Qawwali, a kind of sufi religious song driven music. Bit disappointed that with all the ouds and daraboukas around there was little in the way of instrumental interest.

Sunday

Little Feat
70
Eclectic country outfit offer interesting fusion with strong jazz and funk influences. Interesting solos, cool set. Its a shame their original band leader has been dead 30 years.

Ernest Ranglin
65
Siam tent was packed, so didn’t really see him properly. This sounded like a really good set, but the heat reduced my enjoyment and sapped my energy. A lot of instrumentals and soloing livened up the reggae.

Bassekou Kouyote + Ngoni Ba
75
Good set, griot storytelling, but subtler and more focus on the ngoni rather than the raucus riot of dance driven effort that seems to be used by many other groups.

Orchestra Baobob
70
Good set, very old school senegalese music group. Nice horns section.

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80
80
I really enjoyed this set – certainly a lot more than I had originally expected. Having heard recordings of his father’s gigs with this group, I was interested in hearing Seun Kuti’s work. Certainly a good performer, though a lot of compositions seem to be from his father’s day – so its hard to give credit for them. Even though the band lead has passed from generation to generation, the commentary on african politics seems as relevant as ever. I recall Femi-Kuti’s enjoyable gig from a couple of years ago and this has a very similar, afrobeat sound.

Quotes/Puns

A food stand calling itself ‘Pie Minister’
Little Feat, when trying to encourage audience participation stated, “Just try to sing like Bob Dylan. Hold your nose and talk.”
The moto of the Workers Beer Co, “Thirst Amoung Equals”

Eclipse on the Eee

2008-07-28T17:00:35+00:00

So, it seems that something (I’m not sure what, I haven’t really investigated at the moment) has broken with my desktop as it now refuses to boot. Fortunately I have my Eee, which I already know works perfectly fine for things like web and IM. This left me wondering; how useful would it be for development.

So, as I’ve recently done a bit more work on Choob I decided to have a look at getting a development environment for this, using Eclipse, set up. This wasn’t exactly easy, given the limited set of packages available by default for the version of Xandros on the Eee, but I’d already worked around this following some instructions on the internet elsewhere - enabling me to install subversion.

The next challenge was finding enough space to install both Eclipse and the JDK in, as preferably these would both want to be on the local machine rather than any additional storage. In the end I opted to (rather than uninstall something like Open Office) move some of the contents of /usr/share (for things I rarely use) onto my SD card and just link to them. Hack-tastic.

So, I was set, all that remained was to use Eclipse. As the Eee is quite low-specced, I had anticipated plentiful performance problems, however I was pleasantly surprised. Start up time is a couple of minutes, which is quite standard, and once going it runs quite well. Occasionally some actions (usually where a amount of building is required) will take a while, but on the whole it’s perfectly usable - provided I’ve got the external monitor and keyboard plugged in. I’ve yet to try it on the Eee’s standard setup, but I suspect it’s not particularly great, although I’m sure I’ll end up doing this at some point soon.

I still have a blog!

2008-07-27T10:47:00+00:00

What do you know, I still have a blog, despite not posting to it in a little under a year. Since the last post I moved to London, got a job, and became British.

Currently I am living with acehole and fred. fred lives in the living room, but it's OK as he moved in with an xbox, Rock Band, and a sizable amount of alcohols, many of which have already been consumed. He also brought the entire Next Generation with him. Energize!

In a week I am going to go to Ukraine to see the family.

Also I'm just starting the process of getting a new computer.

Now that I remember about this blog again, I plan to post to it more in the coming weeks. Yay.

Caption competition

2008-07-23T16:46:30+00:00

Answers on a ~~postcard~~ blog comment.

Bonus points for anything involving “Debian Cat”, or “Om nom Novell nom”, etc.

DDoS attacks - why do they work?

2008-07-23T16:08:29+00:00

So, 4chan is under a massive DDoS attack right now, causing it to be completely inaccessible. This doesn't exactly bother me as I rarely use it. But it does bring me to wonder: How can such an attack persist?

DDoS attacks are a result of many small internetted machines sending large amounts of data to the target until it crumbles. This data presumably gets routed through a number of routers: The breached computer's ISP, their upstream, large hubs, the victim's upstream, the victim's ISP and finally the victim.

Obviously when this sort of thing happens there's a block at the recieving end, presumably as far up as they can go to save the costs of recieving all the spam. My question is why can't the blocks happen at the sending end?

DDoS attacks must be readily recognisable with minimal inspection. It seems most routers nowadays use connection tracking and it's pretty unlikely anything can make a connection to the target under all this abuse, so one is led to suspect that all this data is sent via SYN or maybe RST packets over TCP, UDP spam or ICMP spam. The thing is, all of these things should be expected to be of a fairly low volume. UDP is used for DNS and gaming, which shouldn't be too high bandwidth, ICMP is used for basically nothing so can almost certainly be safely limited, and it's pretty rare for a machine to need to make more than 10 connections per second, so a burst of 100 and an average of 15 ought to sort that out.

Not only is it useful to stop the spammage, but it must also be useful to be able to mail customers with "we suspect you've been rooted" when traffic consistently breaches these limits, with cutoffs threatened after a week or so without adequate explanation.

So, like I say, why doesn't this happen? Is it just too hard to track the data? Am I wrong about connection tracking being common?

Re: Prisoners' Dilemma

2008-07-23T15:56:13+00:00

So still no solutions.

It occurred to me that I don't have a proof that the following is optimal (though I'm pretty sure it is, as it stores useful data of length n into blocks of length n, in the sense that it allows every prisoner to infer the previous box by looking at any box). It's optimal for small numbers, anyway.

Before being called in, the prisoners number themselves arbitrarily without the warden knowing (in order to beat any tactics the warden may have). Prisoner i₁ enters the hall and opens box i from the left. He transforms the name in that box to the number i₂ of the prisoner with that name, and then opens box i₂. Repeat until name is found.

To compute the chance of success for this strategy, we need to appreciate that what we're doing is picking a random 1 to 1 map from {1, ..., n} to {1, ..., n}. In other words, a permutation. Permutations split into cycles of repeated application, for example {1 -> 2, 2 -> 3, 3 -> 1} is more normally written (1, 2, 3). Find the input number and output the number to its right to apply the map.

The prisoners must succeed if all cycles in the permutation are of length less than n/2. We just need to apply a counting argument. There's n prisoners, so n! permutations (number of ways of picking n objects from a stack of n, without repetition and with ordering). On a set of i objects, there's (i-1)! i-cycles.

To count the number of permutations with an i-cycle (i≥n), we need to pick i elements (n choose i, or n!/(i!(n-i)!)), then find the number of ways they can form an i-cycle ((i-1)!), and the number of permutations on the remainder ((n-i)!). Multiply them together and you get n!/i, so the probability of a permutation containing an i-cycle is 1/i. Since we're only talking about cycles larger than half the length, if such a cycle exists, it's also the largest, so the probability of the largest cycle being of length greater than n/2 is (for even n) the sum, from i=n/2 to n of 1/i.

The integration rule tells us that this is less than the integral from n/2 to n of 1/i, which basic integration tells us is ln(n) - ln(n/2) = ln 2, which is about 0.7. In other words, using this strategy, our prisoners can win just under a third of times they normally would, and by the arbitrary rules, survive.

It turns out that this is too much of a hassle for the warden, especially since his apparently mathematically minded victims aren't dying, so he's now picked a new problem (for which answers can be found online, as this also is not an original problem). He groups the prisoners into tables of 3, and places black or white hats on their heads. They have long peaks, so prisoners can't see their own hat colour. The challenge is that the prisoners around the table must either guess their hat colour or pass.

If they any prisoner guesses incorrectly, the warden will not feed any of them. If at least one guesses correctly and the rest guess correctly or pass, they get fed. If they all pass, the hats are re-picked randomly and they can have another go. Servings are reduced, so the prisoners will die if they don't eat strictly more than half of all mealtimes. Can they survive? If so, does the warden have a tactic to defeat this survival by picking hats in a nasty way?

Ode to Depression

2008-07-18T14:34:29+00:00

Hearing consistently bad economic news at the moment, I thought I’d share some of Noel Coward’s words.

They’re out of sorts in Sunderland
And terribly cross in Kent,
They’re dull in Hull
And the Isle of Mull
Is seething with discontent,
They’re nervous in Northumberland
And Devon is down the drain,
They’re filled with wrath
On the firth of Forth
And sullen on Salisbury Plain,
In Dublin they’re depressed, lads,
Maybe because they’re Celts
For Drake is going West, lads,
And so is everyone else.
Hurray-hurray-hurray!
Misery’s here to stay.

There are bad times just around the corner,
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it’s no good whining
About a silver lining
For we know from experience that they won’t roll by,
With a scowl and a frown
We’ll keep our peckers down
And prepare for depression and doom and dread,
We’re going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag
And wait until we drop down dead.

BTS bot improvements

2008-07-17T01:14:17+00:00

A little while ago I completely rewrote the #debian-devel-changes IRC bot so it was actually maintainable. At the same time I added some commands suitable for developers, but I didn’t really advertise them anywhere. Here goes.

!bug <bug-number>: Print a one-line synopsis of the specified bug. The parser is fuzzy and will find the bug number embedded in URLs, etc.
!madison <source-package>: Print a colourful rmadison output for the specified package.
!qa <source-package> !overview <source-package>: Prints the URL of the Debian PTS entry for the specified package.
!changelog <source-package>: Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/changelog file for the specified package.
!copyright <source-package>: Prints a URL containing the most recent debian/copyright file for the specified package.
!bug_graph <source-package> !buggraph <source-package>: Prints the URL of the bug graph for the specified package.
!buildd <source-package>: Prints the URL of the non-experimental buildd status of the specified package.
!popcon <source-package>: Prints the URL which contains the popularity-contest data for the specified package.
!dehs <source-package>: Prints the URL which contains the Debian External Health Status of the specified package.

Some notes:

Using these commands is easy: “/msg BTS <command>” on irc.debian.org or simply “<command>” on a channel that the bot is lurking on.
Please don’t spam channels with data from the bot – use a private message. This particularly applies to #debian-devel-changes.
If you are communicating with the bot in a private message, the leading exclamation mark is optional.
If you would like the bot to lurk on other channels, please ping me on IRC after gaining a consensus on the channel in question.

As always, patches and suggestions welcome. (Source).

Nouveau nVidia drivers now available in Debian experimental

2008-07-16T12:12:13+00:00

You can now try the “Nouveau” free software nVidia video drivers from Debian experimental.

If you would like to try them:

Ensure you are using Debian sid.
Add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
Run:
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo m-a update
- sudo m-a a-i drm
- sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and specify the nouveau driver in the Device section.
Restart X. You will need to remove the binary nvidia kernel module.

Editing your xorg.conf may be as simple as the replacing nvidia or nv with nouveau; nouveau won’t be chosen automatically over nv yet. If your xorg.conf has collected a lot of cruft over the years, see this wiki page for some pointers on what you can remove.

For the status of the drivers with your particular card, please see upstream’s compatibility matrix. My experience has been positive; I have been using them for about two months on my dual-head 8600GT (NV50) setup with only a few small issues and a generally superior Gnometris experience.

Some notes:

If you find bugs (unrelated to the packaging), please report the problem upstream and not in the Debian bug tracker.
At request of upstream, we are not providing 3D support. Please do not ask for it, as a wontfix tag often offends.
Bonus points are awarded for removing the non-free nVidia driver; although installation of xserver-xorg-video-nouveau will remove nvidia-glx, purging nvidia-kernel-common and nvidia-kernel-source should remove all the module-assistant generated kernel modules. rms would be proud.

Many thanks to:

Matthew Johnson (mjj29) for uploading.
Julien Cristau (jcristau) for advice.
Christopher Halse Rogers (ROAF) for his Ubuntu packages.
The rest of the XStrikeForce, who do rather a lot of work you don’t really notice.

Blizzard wins lawsuit against WoWGlider.

2008-07-16T12:01:00+00:00

So, it's only been 5 months since my last blog post? That's actually less than I thought it was, and yet scarily a rather long time. Still, nothing like WoW to get things going again, right?

As anyone who actually plays WoW will no doubt know, Blizzard recently won their case against MDY, the makers of the WoWGlider botting software. I was particularly intrigued by a post made by Donnelly (the guy who originally wrote the software) in which is refers to William Patry (author of this here blog post) as "Google's Senior Copyright Counsel and pretty much accepted to be The Man when it comes to copyright". If Patry is "The Man", why do his arguments make no sense?

Although Patry's post is an interesting read, there are a few points that I really do have to wonder about. The first thing that started to ring alarm bells was his assertion that "WoWGilder did not contributorily or vicariously lead to violating any rights granted under the Copyright Act". While he's certainly entitled to that opinion, one feels compelled to point out that, given that the court just ruled that the exact opposite is true, he probably shouldn't so forcefully state it as a fact, especially when he makes no attempt to address the specific points of law on which the ruling was based.

He then continues: "To get to its result, the court had to first find that WoW, even though sold over the counter, was licensed not sold." As much as I might disagree with it, it has been so long established that software is licensed that by now it's almost beyond questioning. Thankfully, this time he does provide a basis for his argument, the recent Vernor v. Autodesk case. (I'll confess that I was only peripherally aware of the Vernor ruling until now, but I made a point of reading up on it.) Regardless of the specifics, I found it somewhat baffling that Patry would express surprise at the court's decision to follow a well-established (tried and tested on numerous occasions) Ninth Circuit precedent instead of an apparently contradictory ruling from a lower court. Even if we were to consider the specific nuances of the Vernor precedent, that case dealt specifically with distribution, whereas this case (bizzarely, considering the claim of copyright infringement) deals solely with usage, so it's entirely possible that the decision would have been the same.

Lastly, I was all about ready to disagree with his assertion that "there was in fact no provision in the license that barred use of WoWGlider", except that I discovered, to my surprise, that it's true. The provisions barring the use of automation software lie solely within the ToU agreement (arguably where they belong), and not in the EULA. Given that the ruling so unexpectedly relies on such software being a breach of the EULA, one can't help but wonder if a future update will correct this oversight. And yes, I actually read the sodding EULA.

Half Life 2 Linux Server Builds

2008-07-15T17:00:43+00:00

So, recently I was playing around with building a server for a Half Life 2 modification using Valve’s instructions on their wiki. The instructions all seem quite simple, you take the VC++ project file, a makefile that you customise slightly with some locations of things certain libraries (like the xerces ones) and then some libraries from the official Linux dedicated server.

All sensible enough so far, until you find out that the only way to get the libraries that it needs from the server is to download the whole server and install that using their application for this (which takes two passes at the same command to do that for some reason). This pulls about 780MB of stuff down onto the machine, including all of the HL2MP maps, textures, models and sounds (apparently it needs some of these in case you want to run a pure server without people having their own custom sounds and whatnot). All in all the libraries that I wanted were no more than 35MB of this, so it was a little bit frustrating.

You then get to the build process, which first compiles a util (vcpm) to read the vc++ project file and use that to make a makefile for the mod itself. This is all well and good and all done in one fell swoop with a simple ‘make’. Unfortunately if, for some reason, you want to do a clean build of the mod - ‘make clean’ won’t help you. That just cleans up vcpm, leaving the server objects there waiting for you to do it manually.

The whole compile process was also very slow, although that could be my machine (it is 4-5 years old now) and produces one hell of a binary. I’m pretty sure that this is down to it linking statically with a lot of libraries, including some of the c/c++ ones, although I have yet to verify this or follow the guide on the wiki that suggests you can cut 5MB off the binary with some magic. Perhaps in future builds I’ll look at getting that done, but for now I’m just happy that it compiled.

Having done this with gcc-4.1 (4.2 just plain doesn’t work, but then isn’t claimed to on the wiki) I found that crashes occured for other people, hardly good. So I dug out gcc-3.4 and had a bash with that, only to find that errors were soon the scourge of my life again, some of them seemingly in the Valve code - great. Fortunately a bit of digging around in the documentation turns out that it’s a known thing where gcc-3.4 won’t inline functions unless you give it a -O option. This fixed it was clean sailing and I had a nice compiled version.

Unfortunately this version also segfaulted, so it was off to the debug build and to see what was going on with it. This proved rather useless, as the engine produces a stack trace without any symbols (even after the mod is compiled with them) so I’ll need to have a rummage around what’s going on at some stage, probably something to do with my system configuration compared to that of the server. Nothing is ever simple eh?

Re: Prisoners Dilemma

2008-07-14T12:04:45+00:00

OK, since no-one even replied to that prisoner's dilemma, I guess it's time to produce some clues. We'll name the prisoners P1 through Pn and boxes B1 through Bn. We'll also, to avoid complications, assume the warden is going to arrange the boxes purely at random (so we don't need to cope with the warden just putting P1 in B2 and P2 in B1 for the 2 prisoner case, for example).¹

How do two prisoners play our game? If they both pick randomly, their joint chance of success is 1/4. However, if P1 picks B1 and P2 picks B2, they're either both correct or both incorrect, each with a 1/2 chance. This must be optimal or there'd be some one-prisoner strategy which is better than just picking one box.

What does this tell us?

The prisoners each need to pick different strategies.
The prisoners could do with knowing each other's strategies.

What follows is a description of the 3 prisoner optimal strategy and big clues on optimal strategies, so stop reading if you don't want to know more.

OK, so let's try that knowledge on 3 prisoners. The 'obvious' strategy for prisoner Pi is to pick box Bi, then B(i+1 mod 3). If he gets any wrong the prisoners fail no matter what they pick, so they may as well assume he was right and the remaining arrangements are:

(1, 2, 3)
(1, 3, 2)
(2, 1, 3)
(3, 1, 2)

Referring to "prisoner i succeeding" as Si, this tells us that P(S1) = 2/3 and P(S2|S1) = 3/4. (3 of the 4 possibilities have a 2 in B2 or B3). However, we're left with the following:

(1, 2, 3)
(1, 3, 2)
(3, 1, 2)

In other words, P3 has no more information than P1 did, so P(S3|S2,S1) = 2/3 and the overall success probability is P(S1,S2,S3) = P(S1) * P(S2|S1) * P(S3|S1,S2) = 1/3. Can we do better?

The first box P1 picks doesn't matter (you can just re-number the boxes so that it's always B1), but for his second box, he's able to give information about the contents of his first box. How? By picking a different box depending on its contents. Let's say P1 picks B1, then if B1 = P1, stops, if B1 = P2, picks B2 and if B1 = P3, picks B3. There are once again 4 'sucess' arrangements:

(1, 2, 3)
(1, 3, 2)
(2, 1, 3)
(3, 2, 1)

Taking into account that P1 played this way, can we improve P2's strategy? We can see B2 is clearly a good box to start with as 2/4 of the remaining arrangements boxes have P2 in them. Also, if B2 = 3 then B3 = 2 and if B2 = 1 then B1 = 2. This means following the obvious strategy, P(S2|S1) = 1. P3 can follow a similar strategy so that P(S3|S1,S2) = P(S3|S1) = 1 and P(S1,S2,S3) = 2/3.

So, what do we know now?

Each prisoner's second (and presumably subsequent) box picks had better depend in some way on the contents of what he already picked.
Slightly deeper, looking at the results above, if one prisoner gets it wrong lots of prisoners should.

¹ You can get around any strategy the warden produces by simply numbering the prisoners randomly after the box order is chosen, so that the warden doesn't know the prisoners' chosen ordering. (It doesn't have to be the same numbering as the warden used to call them in.)

GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008

2008-07-13T19:48:45+00:00

On Thursday and Friday, I took time off work to visit Bristol for the GNU Hackers' Meeting 2008. Around 20 people attended - obviously these were all people contributing to GNU, but (surprisingly) I didn't feel too much like I was surrounded by giants. Instead, it was all quite relaxed; most people there seemed rather like me - with a mild caffeine addiction, permanently short of spare time, and just trying to improve their small projects as best they could.

The impression I have of the GNU project after this meeting is one of a disparate organization with many small contributors; it is clear we have massive communication problems, both internally and externally. From the outside, I suppose GNU looks like a monolithic, perhaps US-centric project, with the strong leadership at the top controlling the direction of all these sub-projects. In reality, these sub-projects are more or less autonomous. There may be some checking at the centre that no two GNU programs are directly competing to solve the same problem, but the maintainers are largely on their own, struggling to build up whatever community of contributors they can. The feeling of isolation is much greater than in Debian, for instance - there, although package maintainers generally have some sort of authority over "their" packages, you will get bug reports filed if you are not following Debian policy, and you are expected to observe common freeze periods around releases. There are no real equivalents in GNU.

So naturally, considering the amount we had in common, this meeting was always going to be a success. It was very well run by Brian Gough, and there was just the right amount of structure versus "corridor time" (although everything took place in a single room, except for lunch/pub). There were a few talks from people about the projects they were working on - for instance, a nice game called GNU FreeDink, although I need to fix a segmentation fault to progress any further in level 2, and a very impressive sound generation program called Psycosynth.

It was suggested that a UK-only GNU hackers' meeting could be organised sometime, which I think would also work very well. Simply meeting up like this every once in a while was quite inspiring; I much prefer developer-oriented meetings over user-oriented meetings, and this was one of the best.

OpenJDK in Debian main

2008-07-13T19:46:56+00:00

After much anticipation, the free-as-in-freedom version of Sun's Java JDK has arrived in Debian's `main' section. There are still a few bugs in the packaging, but these will be ironed out before the lenny release. Various other useful packages still need to adapt to its presence, but many will be able to move from the `contrib' section into `main' as well.

Going forward, this makes Sun's Java platform quite attractive for developing future free software applications. There is a reasonably performant implementation now available in most distributions, that will receive security updates, has a good team of developers behind it, and already has a large community of people with skills in the language. If static versus dynamic typing becomes an issue, Jython might offer a nice competing implementation of Python. We might one day get to see what this `Groovy' thing is all about. In terms of GUI applications, Andrew Cowie's new java-gnome 4.x bindings will allow truly native integration with the rest of GNOME - or stick with plain Swing for cross-platform portability.

This also brings the Java/.NET competition to free software. Mono has been playing catch-up with both Microsoft's implementation of .NET and with Java - it has enjoyed some success with Gtk#, which has provided much more compelling rapid development than the old java-gnome bindings and gcj. MonoDevelop is trying to compete with Eclipse and NetBeans, and probably has a better-integrated GNOME UI editor. Still, if the potential for rapid application development is as great as is claimed, it can't be very long before the various successful Gtk# applications (banshee, f-spot, tomboy) have Java counterparts (unless people are happy with the C equivalents). The most difficult part of the process is finishing off any required library bindings (such as to gstreamer and libgphoto2).

It will be interesting to see whether Java free software developers bring with them the same bad habits that have been seen with many Windows-based C# free software developers. When you want to use a library, bundling a binary-only copy of an unstable version is not really the right thing to do. At least many Java .jar archives also contain source code, and there are quite a few home-grown Java hackers who might understand about how to play nicely with distributions using proper dependency-management systems.

One thing that strikes me is that, while Mono has been around for quite a few years now, I can't think of any big non-graphical applications that are built on it. (Beagle is perhaps the exception - it does make use of a Gtk# GUI, but the main program is the indexer.) Java might benefit from a network effect, as projects such as Apache Tomcat are also widely used. (Let's not mention Choob at this point.) There are a few non-GNOME graphical apps waiting in the wings (like freecol and robocode). The scaremongering over possible patent infringement in Mono (or the Windows.Forms libraries), while probably unfounded, cannot help its cause.

But of course, ruling out something catastrophic like a patent infringement suit, free software projects very rarely die - they just fade away into obscurity. Both platforms are likely to be around for some time yet.

Election Update 2

2008-07-12T15:35:27+00:00

Follow-up to Election Update from True Contradictions

Mississippi

The elections here are somewhat complicated by the resignation of former senate, Trent Lott, which results in two elections happening simultaneously.

The normal election will be fought between Republican incumbent Thad Cochran and Erik Fleming. Both of these men have made mild position switches. Fleming used to support Lyndon LaRouche, but has since rejected such notions. Cochran originally states of McCain, “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.” He now supports McCain. Fleming is currently a Mississippi House of representatives member, and has previously unsuccessfully run for the Senate seat of Trent Lott. Polls have Cochran ahead 60:35.

The other election is being fought as a result of the resignation of Senator Trent Lott last year. The republican governor, Haley Barbour, appointed former house of representatives member Roger Wicker as his temporary replacement. His Democratic opponent, Ronnie Musgrove, was the former lieutenant Governor and Governor of Mississippi, during whose time in office he banned Gay and Lesbian adoption, the pay of Mississippi teachers fell to 49th lowest level of all the states and claimed that there was, “no freedom from religion”. The polls have these two politicians in a tie.

North Carolina

Elizabeth Dole has been sitting senator since a 2002 special election. A former member of the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, challenger for the Republican nomination in 2000 and wife of former Senator and republican candidate Bob Dole, she has excellent connections, name recognition and fundraising potential. Her opponent – Kay Hagan is a Lawyer and member of the State Senate. Dole is currently enjoying a 10 point lead in the polls.

Nebraska

Centrist Republican incumbent and opponent of the Iraq war, Chuck Hagel, has decided not to seek reelection. In a fascinating piece of trivia, courtesy of wikipedia, “Hagel has a tradition of wearing costumes to work on Halloween, usually masquerading as colleagues or other notable political figures. He has arrived at work dressed as Joe Biden, John McCain, Colin Powell, and Pat Roberts in past years.” This leaves the field open between the two candidates both running for the position.

Mike Johanns is the republican candidate – a former governor who stepped down to act as US secretary of agriculture. He is highly popular in the state, having won the gubernatorial election in a landslide. Scott Kleeb (tagline: “Nebraska’s brand of change”) is a rancher and ironically professor of history and provides the democratic contender. Johanns, as one might expect, is polling 15-20 points ahead.

New Hampshire

Currently New Hampshire is represented by the father-sun duo of John H. Sununu and John E. Sununu. It is the father, a former 3 term governor and White House chief of Staff, who is up for re-election. His opponent is Jeanne Shaheen, also a former governor. This is a re-run of the 2002 election, in which Sununu narrowly won, however, the political momentum has swung away from the republicans and towards the democrats in subsequent years. Consequently Shaheen leads in the polling by 10-15%.

New Jersey

Dick Zimmer is a former US House of Representatives member, and former member of the New Jersey legislature. He had unsuccessfully run for the Senate in 1996, and was drafted for the current race after Anne Estabrook withdrew, having suffered a mini-stroke. Frank Lautenberg currently holds the seat up for election, and has held 4 non-consecutive terms of office. He is one of the most liberal members of the Senate. Age is an important issue in this election, with Lautenberg having passed his 84th birthday, but its a double edged blade for the republicans, due to their presidential candidate and the relatively high proportion of electorate who are over 65 in New Jersey.

New Mexico

Another republican incumbent retiring leaves the door open for more democratic gains in New Mexico. With the support of popular Governor Bill Richardson and a rising democratic tide the party is confident of making gains here. Their candidate is Tom Udall, a former member of the House of Representatives for the state and cousin of Mark Udall mentioned earlier. The taking of this seat is another test of the Western strategy pushed by Howard Dean. His opponent, Steve Pearce, has a similar background in the House, but is sitting 15-20% behind in polling.

Oklahoma

Incumbent Jim Inhofe is skeptical on global warming, cites the Bible as backing for his position on everything and has claimed that 9/11 was devine retribution for the US failing to defend Israel. He is also one of only 12 senators who opposed cutting interest rates on student loans. His opponent Andrew Rice is a member of the state Senate and largely behind in the polls, albeit with a large percentage yet to make up their minds.

Oregon

Republican Senator Gordon Smith is up for re-election, his moderate view may continue to hold their appeal in these hard times for the republican party. The democratic challenge comes in the form of Jeff Merkley, the second cousin of the Udall cousins. Gordon Smith is currently the only elected Republican official in the state, and is currently holding onto a narrow lead in the race – which is considered highly competitive.

South Dakota

Tim Johnson is the Democratically aligned sitting senator from South Dakota, who holds quite a conservative voting record, such as repealing the ban on semiautomatic weapons and welfare reform. The 2002 election saw him claim a very narrow victory in a republican leaning year, and is a pretty strong candidate for re-election. His opponent, Joel Dykstra, is currently sitting in SD House of Representatives, and not a big name candidate. Trivia: Johnson was the only member of the senate to have a son in the military at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Texas

Single term republican incumbent John Cornyn has been ranked as the 4th most conservative US Senator. His democratic challenger is Veteran Rick Noriega, a member of the Texan House of Representatives. The low approval ratings of Cornyn make this a potentially interesting election, despite him being ahead of Noriega, that has potentially a large number of undecided voters. Obama is also looking at campaigning with the Texas senate and house challengers who are competitive.

Virginia

Incumbent republican John Warner is retiring, leaving an open race between two former Governors: Jim Gilmore and Mark Warner (no relation). This is generally considered the Senate seat most likely to change hands from Republican to Democrat. Polling puts Warner 25% ahead of Gilmore, and with a widening gap as polls become more recent. As well as national momentum – the state is slowly swinging democrat, they have won the last two gubernatorial elections in 2001 and 2005, and Jim Webb took George Allen’s senate seat in 2006.

Political Observations

2008-07-12T09:33:59+00:00

A few things have come to mind this week, all to do with Inconsistency.

All the people/newspapers who a few years ago were outraged at the imprisonment of Tony Martin are now backing imprisoning everyone who carries a knife. So apparently you shouldn’t go to jail if you shoot someone with a gun, but if you just carry a knife you should.
On last week’s Question Time the audience appeared to clap everything people said. This meant that they would clap a point by one of the commentators, and then applaud an exactly opposing argument by another panelist. This suggests both that the panelists were making strong arguments, and that the audience was full of idiots.
It was commonly noted that during the G8 meeting politicians undertook an 8 course meal, whilst simultaneously talking about Global food shortages, and in Gordon Brown’s case telling people not to waste food. The latter isn’t hypocritical, assuming Mr. Brown finished his meal.

Election Update

2008-07-10T22:42:54+00:00

I haven’t blogged in a while, and haven’t blogged about US politics in ages, so here we go.

Presidential Election

Obama finally put Clinton to bed. This has been inevitably basically since super Tuesday when Clinton blew her load and didn’t really get much of a win. Whats interesting has been the national polling of Obama against McCain. During the latter phases of the primaries Obama was heavily campaigned against by Clinton and also was undergoing Wrightgate, and consequently fell behind McCain in the national polling. This was up to 5% and over 100 EC votes at some stages.

During June, the month following Obama’s primary victory, he made a considerable comeback. Polling showed him gaining against McCain nationally, taking tracking polls averaged from key pollsters late last month had him over 150 EC to the good. Since then coverage has been more negative towards Obama, commenting on his movement towards the centre, and polls have fallen back.

Senate Elections

Since primary season is over, a lot of senate races have become clear, so here’s a brief summary of a few of them.

Alabama
Two term senator Jeff Sessions seems to be strongly leading (65-35) his democratic opponent, Vivian Figures, in nearly all polls. Despite democratic strength in the current electoral cycle, some places are still out of reach for them.

Alaska
Ted Stevens (whose claim to fame is being the oldest republican in the senate and stating that, “The internet is like a series of tubes”) is having a hard time, despite his position as a longrunning incumbent, against Begrich. In some polls he’s still ahead, others behind. Steven’s senility is probably a campaigning drawback, hopefully he’ll be out of office come November.

Colorado
Mark Udall is looking to take this seat for the democrats, and is polling about 10% ahead against Republican opponent Schaffer. This fits in well with Howard Dean’s strategy of hitting hard in the western states, traditionally a republican stronghold. There might be some synergy between this campaign and Obama’s national effort in Colorado.

Iowa
Tom Harkin will retain his senate seat, continuing Iowa’s swing to the democrats over the current election cycle.

Kansas
Two term incumbent Pat Roberts has a 10% or so margin above his democratic opponent, Jim Slattery. I don’t really know much about the candidates or polling issues here.

Kentucky
Mitch Mcconnell, current senate minority leader, holds a narrow lead over his democratic challenger, proving that even high ranking republicans aren’t impossible targets. He’s a stalwart conservative on nearly all issues. Interesting the libertarian party candidate is Sonny Landham who is a former porno actor who also starred in Predator. Despite his high profile, I doubt that he will really impact Mcconnell’s re-election bid too much, and Mcconnell is apparently fundraising well, so will probably be re-elected.

Louisiana
Incumbent Mary Landrieu is being challenged by a defectee to the republican cause, current State Treasurer John Kennedy. Landrieu is currently maintaining a razor-thing lead. I imagine the result of this will go down to the wire.

Massachusetts
Early on in the election season it looked like John Kerry was going to be strongly challenged, but the polls have slowly slipped his way, as one would expect of a leading democrat in a democratically leaning state in a democratically leaning year. He’s currently miles ahead of his republican opponent Jeff Beatty and his re-election looks like a sure thing. Part of Beatty’s problem is that few locals even know who he is, polling data suggests that 44% of them have no opinion of him.

Michigan
Jack Hoogendyk, Michigan house of reps member, is running against 6 term incumbent Carl Levin. He’s behind in the polling, and was the only republican running for the position. In 1996 Levin was opposed by Ronna Romney, who is Mitt Romney’s sister in law.

Maine
Susan Collins, centrist republican incumbent, is leading democratic challenger Tom Allen in polls, but by a narrowing margin. Joe Lieberman has stated that he might campaign for her.

Minnesota
If you thought the pornstar running in Kentucky was interesting, this is a minefield. The incumbent is Norm Coleman, a strong Bush supporter was one of the people who accussed Galloway of abusing his relationship with Saddam Hussein. Al Franken, well know comedian, SNL alumni, author, etc. is running against him, with a strongly leftwing agenda, note the title of one his books, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”. Currently Al Franken is behind in polls, though I’m sure his campaign is entertaining. On 9th July Jesse Ventura, former professional wrestler and governor, announced that he may run for office. Now Ventura bear Coleman in his 1996 election campaign, his entrance into the the campaign makes what the wrestling community might call a ‘3-way dance’. On his previous election effort Ventura won on the back of the Reform party ticket, its unknown who would back him this time. Ventura claims organised religion is a shame, has made numerous comments about drunken Irishmen, heavily invested in mass transit during his period as governor, is now massively bald, supports gay and abortion rights. He is generally fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Its already amusing, and if Ventura runs it will become hilarious.

I’ll leave it at that for now. Perhaps I might get round to finishing off the rest of the alphabet at some point in time.

My first days at a (not yet open source) company

2008-07-10T20:44:33+00:00

As of Monday, I'm now working for Mendeley (with Mike Arthur), a startup in London with a C++/Qt4 client app. Unfortunately, it's not open source yet, but it's due to be once the code has been cleaned up.

The work is mostly fun (well, as much as working on someone else's code can be :p ), and the atmosphere is great (they're also still recruiting).

At the moment, I'm staying with Antz and Acehole in Hammersmith, and travel to the office is only around 35 minutes each way - and:

Additionally, thanks to Antz's nagging^Wpursasion, I now have a Jabber/"GoogleTalk" account: jabber@fredemmott.co.uk.

Samba, UTF-8 and UNIX extensions

2008-07-09T10:57:56+00:00

So, many people know that rather than using RAID on my fileserver (primarily because speed is of little importance, and data I care about is replicated), I just have a /mnt/media directory with 10 mounted drives in it. I then have a nightly "union" script which creates a softlink-based directory structure for all items in these discs, assuming each has a common structure and no overlaps.

I then share this as a read-only share "media". This causes one important issue with Samba - it defaults to enabling "UNIX extensions", which share softlinks as-is, hence enabling me to access no files. Therefore, I have to turn them off.

Of course, in doing so Samba was bound to break. In this case, I found that it was unable to share files with UTF-8 in their filename on cifs mounts correctly (they would give "file not found" even though they were listed or just not list at all). More annoyingly, smbclient would be able to access the files fine.

The solution I finally found was to set under global in smb.conf:

dos charset = UTF-8

And for the client, pass the iocharset=utf8 to the cifs mount command. All now seems happy.

Prisoners' Dilemma

2008-07-07T23:54:04+00:00

OK, so I keep seeing other people post intriguing puzzles, and there's at least one I have that I guess most people who'll read this haven't seen. I know there is a solution.

So, there's a bunch of prisoners (a few hundred), each with a unique name¹. They have a sadistic warden who is in charge of feeding them. The warden is somewhat lazy and wishes to cut costs, so he challenges the prisoners to a puzzle before they can be fed.

For each of the 3 alotted mealtimes, he will put each prisoner's name into a box, then shuffle the boxes, placing them at random along the back wall of the mess hall. The prisoners will then individually and randomly be called into the hall and allowed to nominate a box for the warden to open and read the contents. Each prisoner may continue to nominate boxes until either the warden reads his name or he has nominated half or more of the boxes. He will then be led out into the yard, with no contact with the yet-to-enter prisoners. The warden closes all of the boxes and calls in the next prisoner - every prisoner is presented with the exact same box arrangement.

Clearly if the prisoner touches the boxes in any way, leaves any notes behind, or attempts any form of communication whatsoever with his yet-to-enter comrades after he's entered the hall, the warden will have them shot.

Only if every prisoner finds his or her name will any of them be given meal tickets. If any one prisoner fails to find their own name, no prisoner will get a ticket. On the plus side, the warden is offering to give two tickets each if they do succeed. The prisoners are a hardy bunch and only need to eat once every few days on average to survive. Meal tickets can be hoarded and redeemed at any time, and the prisoners generally have a few spares lying around as they're used for trade.

The prisoners' job is to either come up with a strategy (the warden promises not to listen to their plans, but of course can try to predict them) which can keep them alive, or demonstrate to the prison authorities that the warden is a sadistic bastard - in which case they'll be able to get a new warden (who'll probably give them another sadistic game next week).

Obviously if you know the answer offhand, don't post it immediately. Some people may want to think about it. :)

¹ Also, they can't change their names. Thankyou, Sticky.

Misunderstandings that've resulted in edits: Prisoners need to win as a group, not just individually. Meal tickets are completely transferrable and the prisoners need only ensure that the tickets stay afloat on average. Boxes are not removed from the mess hall even if a prisoner finds his name.

gnu-standards in Debian

2008-07-04T19:09:12+00:00

An update to Debian's gnu-standards package is now in incoming. This package contains the GNU Coding Standards and the Information for GNU Maintainers document. It is now in the `main' section rather than `non-free', so is officially part of the Debian system.

This has taken several months; at the end of December I asked whether the maintainers' document could be relicensed. RMS evidently approved, because the licence was changed in January.

Then there was the small matter of updating the Debian package; I prepared an update, but wasn't quite clear on whether I was preparing an NMU or a normal upload, so stalled for a while. Last month the package became orphaned, so I quickly grabbed an ITA, and started working again. KiBi was very helpful with pointing out all the remaining cruft in the package, and he generously sponsored the final result. Then we just had to wait for it to get through the NEW queue.

Hopefully it will migrate to testing before the freeze.

Slamd64 12.1

2008-07-02T15:20:46+00:00

Slamd64 12.1 has now been released (and was uploaded late last week), with many improvements and a new logo (thanks to Marc Carson). For full details, see the release announcement.

Tied to the Office

2008-07-01T17:00:04+00:00

As part of my job I’m required to get outage alerts when something breaks, in case I can be of use in helping fix it. These are sent out via SMS, and I recently had the option of either getting them to my normal mobile phone or ordering a company Blackberry. Given the intrusive nature of them, I opted for the Blackberry so as to keep them separate from my personal life, despite the obvious attachment to the office at all times.

Of course, with the Blackberry comes more than just another device to receive text messages on, as I can now use it to keep up on my work e-mails when not in the office/at my PC. This I’ve found to be a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand I can read the important messages on my way into the office on the train in the morning, allowing me to hit the ground running when I do actually get to my desk. On the other hand, however, is the bit where the Blackberry gets its “Crackberry” nickname - it’s addictive; the little blinking light telling me that there’s another message for me to read.

Still, I’ve had it for just under two weeks now, and it’s proven useful with keeping on top of work stuff and also having other useful features. As I’ve got the 8800 it has GPS, and combined with Google Maps this can be quite useful for finding places and getting directions when you’re not too sure where you’re going. I’m not going to bother going into the features of the phone, as I’m sure this has been done to death elsewhere on the internet; Google Maps is just one thing that I find myself using occaisionally.

All in all though, as far as devices go it’s pretty good. I’m just having to be careful to stop it slowly taking over most of my life as it starts to weld itself permanently to my hip.

The things I do for Debian

2008-06-30T20:24:01+00:00

Blue and White G3 PowerMac on eBay, collection only: £10.
Train fares to and around London: £26.
Fixing an annoying PowerPC f-spot bug: priceless.

It weighs 13kg, apparently, and my arms still ache. Thanks to Anton and Dan for letting me stay at their place on Saturday night, and use their fast net connection to download Debian packages.

Licence club

2008-06-27T00:13:31+00:00

The first rule of licence club is, you do not talk about licence club.
The second rule of licence club is, you DO NOT talk about licence club.
If a copyright holder says stop, gets confused, is bought out, the licence is over.
Only two parties to a licence.
One exclusive licence at a time.
No CDDL, no Jörg Schilling.
Licences will go on as long as the copyright is enforcable.
If this is your first night at licence club, you have to hire a lawyer.

openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 inclusion

2008-06-24T17:43:45+00:00

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions regarding the inclusion of KDE4 in openSUSE 11.0 that are leading to a great deal of anger on the mailing list.

KDE4.0 is the default in openSUSE 11.0. It is being forced upon users.

Not true. Both KDE3.5 and KDE4.0 (and GNOME) are offered when installing from the DVD or netinstall. There is no default. The KDE4.0 description is

KDE 4.0 is the most recent evolution of KDE. It comes with many new KDE technologies, but is less mature than the other desktops.

While KDE3 is described as

KDE 3.5 is the previous generation of the K Desktop Environment. It is mature and stable.

which I personally think is a fairly good description. This is only shown on new installs, if a user is upgrading an existing installation then he or she will remain with his or her existing desktop. Users are not forced or even suggested to change from KDE3 to KDE4.

Novell forced the inclusion of KDE4.0 was forced upon the openSUSE community for [insert conspiracy reason here]

There have been dozens of “Novell did not listen to the users” comments which are wrong for several reasons.

The topic was discussed at length in various media which are all open to everyone.

Bugzilla
IRC Project Meeting , and at the KDE team meetings too.
Project mailing list, here, and several other threads.

The result of these discussions is what we have in openSUSE 11.0. They were not ignored, in fact they led to the inclusion of the KDE3 option clearly in the installer.

The second problem with these statements is they assume that everything that happens in openSUSE is a direct result of Novell policy. The openSUSE community is made up of many people including many who work for Novell. The decision to include KDE4.0 was made by the community and particularly the KDE team. There is no evidence that there was a Novell policy that KDE4.0 must be included in openSUSE 11.0. In fact, the descision was delayed until as late as possible when it could be made on technical merit.

KDE4 should not be included until it is ready.

How do you define ready? KDE4.0 is already ready for some users. Whether it is ready for you depends upon what featureset you use. I will not be switching myself until certain features are implemented.

There are good reasons to begin the move to KDE4.0 early.

People can move over when KDE4 is ready for them.
openSUSE specific tools and integrations can be ported to KDE4 gradually.

So far this process is something like this.

openSUSE 10.3 : KDE3 the only prominent option in the installer. KDE4 was available for testing. The openSUSE tools are KDE3 based.
openSUSE 11.0 : KDE3 and KDE4 are both prominent options in the installer, with a warning that 4.0 is not mature. Updater applet has been ported to KDE4. YaST has a Qt4 UI.
Future : KDE3 may be dropped when KDE4 is good enough to replace KDE3 for the vast majority of users.

The current state of KDE4 migration is available on the wiki

There is no point filing bug reports against KDE4 because the developers know what is wrong with it.

Few people will have exactly the same configuration as you, or use the same featureset, so will not run into the same bugs/missing features.
Both upstream bug tracker, and the openSUSE bug tracker allow you to search for duplicate bug/enhancement reports before you file. You can find out for yourself whether anyone else has reported your issue.

This argument just seems to be “I’m too lazy to report issues, but quite willing to rant about them instead.”

Including KDE4.0 will lead to bad reviews.

This might happen. However, so far reviewer’s quibbles have been with entirely different issues. In fact there have been several positive reviews of the openSUSE shipped KDE 4.0.

There should be a KDE3.5 installable livecd.

This was not produced as there were insufficient resources to produce and test three installable livecds. Someone can always step up and help produce one.

Summary

openSUSE is not forcing people to switch to KDE4. Users can switch to KDE4 when they wish. Both are included on openSUSE 11.0.
If you find bugs in or are missing functionality in KDE4 please file bug reports so it can be fixed.
If you have an opinion regarding when the timescale for moving to KDE4 you are free to get involved and influence the decisions. You do not have to resort to insulting developers on the mailing lists to be heard, in fact insulting developers so is a good way to ensure that people disregard your opinion.