Planet ALUG

Yesterday I went to the theatre.

There are several local pro-am dramatic groups in the area, and during the winter they tour the small towns. Every little town has a building used for social and leisure purposes, and each one boasts a stage with curtains and a lighting rig of sorts. The one in Saint-Dizant-du-Gua is called the Foyer Rural, and its hall is quite a size. With a population of only about one-and-a-half thousand, it seems a big place to fill, but somehow people do turn out from not just the town but the surrounding hamlets.

This performance was not expected to draw much of an audience, but even so they had to go and fetch a few more chairs. And why did the Association Culturelle think it wouldn't be popular? Because it was a revue of sketches, recitations, and songs by Les Buzotias d'Jhonzat, a troupe which performs in the Charentais dialect (known as Saintongeais in other parts of the region). Surprisingly, there were plenty of young people there, which is encouraging for the future of the dialect; the troupe itself has several child actors.

I went along out of linguistic interest and a desire to Support Your Local Culture, hoping not to fall asleep, and was surprised and pleased at how much I followed. Websearches for historical information and linguistic analyses of Charentais haven't turned up much: there are vocabularies, and a few recordings on Youtube, but a dearth of information about how and why. It's interesting to see that Cajun and Quebeçois have roots in Saintongeais, though.

Curious points:

* The 'jh' is an aspirate, which is like a softer version of the Spanish 'j' (jota).
* Where the second sound of a word in Latin was 'l', it has changed to 'i', as it has in Italian (bianc').
* The final syllable which in modern French contains '-ai' or -'oi' has retained the early pronunciation '-ouai'.

I must admit that most of what I understood was helped by the acting. They had some very good bits of business and a few pieces of clever tech.

by sunflowerinrain (noreply@blogger.com) at February 14, 2011 02:02 PM

M'friends mentioned that there are small lemon trees for sale at a reduced price in the garden-shop in Pons and that they were thinking of getting one. I know I shouldn't be spending money at the moment, with windows still to pay for, but I've wanted a potted lemon tree ever since seeing Ginette's which appears to be permanently covered in fruit. So of course I said metooplease.

It's arriving tomorrow. It's quite small but already fruiting. It will have to live in the salle for the moment, until the cold nights are over.

M'friend referred to it as 'he' so perhaps it/he should have a name. I'm not sure a tiny lemon tree presents as male, though.

[Update]
It has been named Darcy (or Darcey), with thanks to Oxford Reader. You can think of it as an elegantly handsome Austen character or an elegantly beautiful Principal Ballerina.

Ten lemons on such a tiny plant!

by sunflowerinrain (noreply@blogger.com) at February 12, 2011 06:55 PM

There’s a lot of exciting activity going on around libraries at the moment. One of them is the OpenBiblio Principles, which are:

1. When publishing bibliographic data make an explicit and robust license statement.
2. Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.
3. If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Definition (opendefinition.org) – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.
4. Where possible, explicitly place bibliographic data in the Public Domain via PDDL or CC0.

Happily, our co-op has decided to support these principles. I feel that the third one is particularly important: non-commercial clauses lock out many cooperatives and social enterprises from sharing and helping.

If you’ve got an idea for an app using open bibliographic data (you can enter the idea or a prototype app), you’ve just about got time to enter the OpenBiblio Challenge before it closes on 17 February and win some money. Good luck!

by MJ Ray at February 10, 2011 05:55 AM

Gardening today. Oh, joy! Baby lizards scampering over the walls, and bumblebees lumbering around the early flowers. It's so good to see the daffodil and lily-of-the-valley leaves growing tall, and the rosebushes covered in new growth.

Shame about the bluebottles getting into the house, but I feel kindly even toward them in the warm sunshine.

by sunflowerinrain (noreply@blogger.com) at February 09, 2011 04:47 PM

The regular monthly board of SPI (Software in the Public Interest, the contributor-run non-profit which supports debian, drupal and many other projects not beginning with the letter d) is on IRC this evening at 20:30 UTC in #spi on irc.oftc.net. If you need an Internet Relay Chat client, check what’s available in your package manager, or you could do worse than adding Chatzilla to Iceweasel or Firefox.

The agenda has been posted and the reports really ought to be included by the time this blog post appears. Come along and see FOSS project support infrastructure do its thing, then maybe chat a bit afterwards.

by MJ Ray at February 09, 2011 05:56 AM

Via Kottke:

In CASINO ROYALE, James Bond is the Bond girl.

Heh. Been done. In The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross , in fact. Though arguably Casino Royale predates Jennifer Morgue, given the book Casino Royale was written 11 years before Stross was born. Oh hell, I don't know. Everything is a remix anyway, right?

Either way - if you're in IT, go read the "Bob Howard — Laundry" series (starting with The Atrocity Archives ), as Stross' humour and ability to tell a yarn is unparalleled.

See also: Books.

by savs at February 08, 2011 11:10 PM

On Friday Nokia is going to have a big day, and is rumoured to be announcing all manner of strange things.

We've heard tales of Nokia chopping senior staff, analysts recommending a switch to WP7, horrible results, credit rating warnings, talks of ditching Ovi or adopting Android, and now comes the story of moving Nokia's HQ to the US.

Switching to Windows Phone 7 is surely not going to happen. I was actually a big advocate of this 6-12 months ago, as I was seeing positive reviews of the platform in development and it seemed to make sense. However the disaster of WP7 in the marketplace (selling less phones in a quarter than Apple sells in a week) and the number of OEMs already producing outstanding WP7 hardware means this would just be a race to the bottom for Nokia.

Switching to Android is hopefully not going to happen. This has never made sense. Why would Nokia exchange one user experience disaster for another, when they can polish their own platform until it shines without having to hand control to Google? It's a worse proposition than WP7: not only competing in a race to the bottom with OEMs, but also entering a software race against teams around the world who have a two year headstart on them.

Which brings us neatly to the move to the US. I think there's a lot of truth in the story, and as of yesterday the Nokia jobs website bore this out with a large number of MeeGo postings in Palo Alto and Mountain View (job site kremlinology has long been a trick used to devise Apple's plans in advance).

There's two obvious possibilities I can think of.

It could be that Stephen Elop is looking to get some fresh thinking and fresh blood into the company, and the only way to do that is to move location. With the massive numbers of redundancies being announced regularly, Nokia (as with any responsible company) is duty-bound to reemploy staff elsewhere within the organisation if possible. But what if Nokia doesn't want to keep those staff around? Simple:

LOCAL CANDIDATES PREFERRED. NO RELOCATION PROVIDED.

Move the centre of gravity for all your exciting development elsewhere, prevent existing staff from relocating.

The second reason I can think of for moving to the US is somewhat more alarming. What if this is a cargo cult move? Many people still do not understand the reason for Apple's success in the marketplace. Maybe Elop figures that moving development to the US is sufficient. By mimicking these west coast companies (and trying to poach as many staff as possible from Apple), Nokia's fortunes will somehow magically be revived.

This could be disastrous. Nokia will end up competing for talent with companies that are currently way cooler. Apple. Google and Facebook. Any number of hot startups. So Nokia would end up in an expensive fight for talent whilst trying to mimic more successful competitors without truly understanding the reason for that success.

A less obvious outside chance is the favourite rumour I heard at FOSDEM: Nokia partnering with HP to deliver WebOS phones to the US market. It's tough to see which mobile OS has sufficient wow factor to win over the Americans, though.

Whatever happens, Friday will be a very interesting day. But first we have to get through Wednesday!

by savs at February 08, 2011 09:21 AM

I did my first upgrade of a lenny box to squeeze today; a test server in work. All went pretty smoothly but I had a handful of things I had to frob manually that I thought I'd write up here:

• collectd SNMP plugin needs MIBs or it won't start: installed snmp-mibs-downloader from non-free
• autofs starts before nis (#470573): added ypbind to the Required-Start: line in /etc/init.d/autofs and re-ran insserv
• NFS automounts now using NFSv4 instead of v3 and user/group mapping setting everything to nobody: Set NEED_IDMAPD=yes in /etc/default/nfs-common and ensure Domain in /etc/idmapd.conf is set to the correct domain name (look in /var/log/daemon.log for lines from rpc.idmapd saying "does not map into domain" to find out what this should be if you don't know).

I think that's pretty smooth overall; kudos to all those involved. I've a few more boxes to upgrade, but they're all more likely to have people complaining at me if there are hiccups so they'll have to wait until I have a suitable block of time set aside.

February 08, 2011 05:55 AM

(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?)

I think of myself as reasonably pragmatic in my approach to Free/Open Source software. I don't get worked up over which set of language people want to use. I use devices that require binary firmware to be downloaded to them (because just because I can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist). I have non-free in my sources.list.

And yet, talking to other Linux users these days, I realize I'm much more of a Freedom nut job than average. I want the source, be it for a driver, a minor widget, or a full app. I don't buy nVidia. I will sacrifice a degree of functionality in order to get Free. And while I think WINE is an excellent piece of software, I think the best end result is that it's no longer necessary, not that it's a perfect implementation of the ABI.

How does any of this help justify my use of Linux in the work place? As previously mentioned, I'm a developer. Most developers don't operate in a vacuum; they have to inter-operate with other ecosystems. And usually somewhere along the line there's a failure to document exactly how something is handled, or an ambiguity about what exact choice might be taken. If I have access to the source then I can check that out for myself. If I don't, I have to guess. As an example, a long time ago I was involved in writing a serial console driver for QNX. There came a point where the behaviour wasn't quite as we'd expect. Although the organisation had a license for the source, I wasn't allowed to look at it. Instead I had to come up with a series of suitable questions that someone who could look at the source could answer without violating any NDAs. If I'd been able to look at the source directly we'd have all saved a lot of time. And that's an example where someone could look at the source, rather than having to make a bunch of guesses and instrument tests to see which was right.

Access to the Linux source has helped me in other commercial contexts too. At Black Cat we were able to take advantage of patches like grsecurity in order to tighten up shell account boxes. I wrote the IPv6 support for l2tpns, because we had access to the source and could. I've been able to look at the source to understand exactly what SCSI responses are sent in certain circumstances too (or understand exactly what the error that a user land test program was getting back meant).

Also I'm a big believe in Linus' Law. I do think that good Free software is much better than proprietary software (there's some really bad Free software out there though, I'm not disputing that). The fact that smart people can look at it and scratch whatever their itch is means that we get a gradual process of improvement that can't be ignored. Equally as long as someone has an interest in the software, end users can't be left high and dry by organisations abandoning still users applications. I think that should be a powerful driver to business to look towards Free software.

(Before my more astute readers point it out; yes, I am employed writing non-free software. See the first sentence. One day I'll find a job working on Free software that ticks enough of the other boxes to be viable.)

February 07, 2011 01:44 AM

When I returned from England I sent off the acceptance of M. Babin's quotation for insulating the roof of the Atelier (which is the back half of the house, and used to be a haybarn and stable). Three days later I was startled to get a call from the friend who had recommended him, saying he'd be over the following morning to clear out the wood and chipboard and old beams and ancient electrical rubbish, so that the scaffolding could be put up in the afternoon ready to start work the next day.

I'd thought it would be a couple of months later. Panic checking of savings accounts! And oh woe, the pound had nosedived again. There was no choice but to empty the savings and transfer it all, at a depressing exchange rate.

For two weeks there has been scaffolding inside the house (yes, the ceiling is that high) and I've had to get up before sunrise to let them in. They have finished now, and there is a big gloriously empty space with an echo which is a bit over the top. When the sun shines I can open the shutters, and then it becomes golden-warm. The view to the west is lovely.

Now all it needs is the music.

by sunflowerinrain (noreply@blogger.com) at February 05, 2011 11:33 AM

There's a tractor in the garden.

Neighbour Denis looked at all that old wood from the Atelier-space (beams and planks and such) and offered to put it through his big saw next time he was cutting up their firewood. He thought there was enough to last through the spring without having to buy any more logs. Excellent! The wood had been moved into the little-house-across-the-lane; he collected a load of it, the saw did its noisy work, and then he brought round a load of woodburner-sized pieces of pine and aged oak. To get the wood to the storage area on the terrace he had to drive the tractor and trailer over the mint lawn. It smells wonderful out there.

... I drove my tractor through your mint-lawn last night
Oo-ar-oo-ar ...

by sunflowerinrain (noreply@blogger.com) at February 05, 2011 11:33 AM

I'm off to FOSDEM next weekend, so I've got my aged EeePC 901 out of the cupboard. It's the only laptop I have that can stand up to really long days without a power socket. I'm trying out a selection of the 'state of the art' in netbook distributions.

Based on a comment on my ubuntu netbook edition review, I thought I'd give Ubuntu 11.04 natty  a go. Fortuitously, alpha 2 was released just yesterday.

I'm a little wary - I tried 11.04 on a desktop machine at the start of the week with less than stellar results: I was able to crash the window manager within a dozen mouse clicks. Let's hope the alpha 2 build is a little more stable.

Remember how I was moaning about getting bootable USB images? Well, same experience with ubuntu 11.04. I tried writing it using image-usb-stick (which incidentally worked just fine for fuduntu), but of course it didn't work. I had to resort to firing up Ubuntu on another machine and using the startup disk creator again. TEDIOUS!

It also turns out that there's a nasty user experience flaw in the startup disk creator, that makes it too easy to select the wrong ISO to burn: it has a list of ISOs in a window only a little wider than one line.

So I booted the installer, clicked "Install Ubuntu", went through the usual process of setting up the wifi connection. Again I was prompted for a keychain password. If this is to be thrown away on reboot, why not set a blank default and stop prompting the user?

And then ... the installer crashed. There was some screen corruption at the top of the screen, and then the X server appeared to restart and drop me into the live image. The X restart was confirmed during the "Report Problem" process. I small hiccup with the report a problem is that it asked me twice if I wanted to send the gdm logs (I said yes both times).

I clicked "Next" on the installer, and a browser popped up with a Launchpad login prompt. I suspect this was actually a result of the "Report Problem" process, but it was a bit confusing.

As with fuduntu, I got an error about the installation partition being too small, and root needing to be more than 2.3gb -- which makes me wonder how Ubuntu was trying to partition the 4gb, given swap shouldn't take much space up.

I unfortunately hit 'back' to repartition, but the partition tool wasn't able to work with the screen size. At this point I opted to quit and restart installation. Ok, it's alpha, no big deal:

Second time around, the X server didn't crash. I made sure to select "Erase and use the entire disk", but again I got the partition error. I went back to the drive partitioning, and for some reason, 2.1GB had been allocated to swap:

That's crazy drive allocation .... and at this point, the X server crashed again.

Third time around, I was sure to select "Specify partitions manually". Weirdly, the default allocation here was 3.8bg to / and 234mb to swap - I assume left over from a previous install. But, ... you guessed it ... boom. X server died again. More booms than a Steve Jobs keynote.

I think I'll wait a little longer before giving Ubuntu 11.04 another try!

by savs at February 04, 2011 02:31 PM

I'm off to FOSDEM next weekend, so I've got my aged EeePC 901 out of the cupboard. It's the only laptop I have that can stand up to really long days without a power socket. I'm trying out a selection of the 'state of the art' in netbook distributions.

Based on a comment on my ubuntu netbook edition review, I thought I'd give fuduntu a go. It's not something I've tried before - and I haven't much used Fedora.

Installation was a mixed experience. Fuduntu comes as a live image that you can boot and use and run the installer from. The installer was quite technical, and fraught with problems: at one point the mouse froze so all I could do was use the keyboard to navigate. It offered the option to install on NAS (really?). It didn't like the 4gb SSD I had, I had to manually repartition it without swap in order to install. Even more annoyingly, when repartitioning I accepted the default filesystem type (ext4), only to be told that I needed to select ext3 in order to install. Why wasn't the correct default selected?

The post-install setup of my user gives me the option to authenticate over the network, and to tweak home directories etc. Powerful, but unnecessary? On the plus side, this is the first distro that told me my password was too weak.

I was also given the option to synchronise time over network - isn't this the right thing to do by default? And why do I have to pick an ntpd? Again, too much technical detail. As I read this morning on Allan's blog, settings kill kittens. I couldn't agree more.

As with all the other distributions, my wifi connection had been forgotten after installation. I think I need to raise a bug and contribute a fix to all the installers to get them to cache the wifi password on the installation target during the install, as this seems like such a simple and user-friendly improvement to make. I like the circular ticker that indicates connecting, a bit nicer than the ubuntu animation. Maybe this is a Fedora thing.

One thing that surprises me about all the netbook distributions aside from MeeGo: none of them ship Chromium.

This is not a user interface redesigned for netbook limitations, it's a full-on desktop UI - possibly with smaller fonts selected by default. I'm not familiar enough with Fedora desktop to say home similar this is to Fedora out of the box. There's an obvious trade-off here between easy access to functionality and the minimal amount of screen space being taken up by task bars, menu bars, status bars, etc.

Software update appeared to have hung, but I guess it was just parsing package lists or something. Pleasantly surprised there were only 18 updates (~ 40mb), far less than with any of the other distributions I've tried.

Everything else seemed to work - webcam, suspend on close, etc.

The boot speed was disappointing, though. There seemed to be a long wait with a flashing cursor before anything much happened, and then I wasn't logged-in automatically which meant another delay typing in the password. See the boot video.

jupiter looks interesting, and a quick play suggests this is a nice easy way to optimise battery. It's available as a PPA for Ubuntu, so I'll have to try it out on some of the other netbook installations.

Fuduntu could use some site-specific browser apps (GMail, for example). Weirdly searching in "Add/Remove Software" for Prism or Chrome or Chromium failed to come up with anything useful. Perhaps the Fedora users out there could tell me what I should be looking for -- or maybe Fedora users prefer not to use site-specific browsers.

Conclusion? It actually doesn't look bad ... I'd be tempted to keep this for a while.

by savs at February 04, 2011 01:40 PM

I'm off to FOSDEM next weekend, so I've got my aged EeePC 901 out of the cupboard. It's the only laptop I have that can stand up to really long days without a power socket. I'm trying out a selection of the 'state of the art' in netbook distributions.

I've tried the easypeasy netbook distribution a few times over the last few years, starting back when it was Ubuntu Eee. I like the idea of a cut-down distribution that has a kernel tuned to your device, but leveraging the benefits of bigger platforms like Debian and Ubuntu.

The reality has been a bit mixed, though.

On the one hand, we have a boot splash screen, reasonable boot speed, the heavily customised user interface with big bold icons optimised for a netbook device, split into sensible categories with some great design. A friendly, colourful desktop that pays attention to the limitations of the device - so reasonably-sized scrollbars for example.

On the other hand, we again have the grub bootloader waiting for 10 seconds and boot speed wasn't brilliant. See the boot video. The wifi connection keeps getting forgotten on every reboot, and it took an eternity updating the system after installation and first boot (it seemed like a good few hours to download and install all the packages). It also seemed to fail to suspend when I closed the lid.

Perhaps unfairly I didn't spend much more time playing with easypeasy - I know it's got some good stuff in it, and it looks polished, and it is usable - but it is a minor fork of a larger upstream project, so how current is it and how long will it be maintained for? Time to move on and check out the competition.

by savs at February 04, 2011 01:29 PM

In a few hours I'll be hopping on the Eurostar to Brussels...

This year the schedule is as good as ever, and I already have the usual dilemma of which talks to attend. I've managed to narrow it down to some of the following, and which ones I end up seeing will depend very much on what room I'm in, how busy the other talks are, and what I hear during the trip. I hope all the talks get videoed this year so I can catch up on the ones I will inevitably have to miss. I'm also looking forward to catching up with the usual crowd of friends!

Saturday

13:00-14:00 ZFS

13:00-14:00 Arduino

14:00-14:15 Coreboot

14:20-14:35 flashrom

14:00-15:00 mk-configure

14:00-14:30 IcedRobot

14:00-15:00 XMOS Multicore Embedded

14:45-15:30 Gallium ... 2d rendering libraries see also Gallium3D. OpenGL/ES, EGL, Cairo, Qt...

15:00-15:30 GNU Parallel also at www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

15:00-16:00 OMAP3 into FreeBSD

15:40-16:10 GNU Autotools

15:45-16:30 Qt and Qt Quick

16:00-16:30 HP and Community Linux

18:00-19:00 Booting flashless system

18:00-19:00 Mancoosi see also www.mancoosi.org/

18:00-18:45 KDE Multimedia see also Phonon

18:30-19:00 Rise and Fall and Rise of Java

Sunday

09:00-10:00 Barebox

09:30-10:00 Rollback

10:00-11:00 Linaro

11:00-12:00 cross-distribution installation app store prerequisite?

11:00-12:00 Qt tales from embedded trenches

11:00-11:50 Django

11:45-12:30 Project Bretzn see also Bretzn, introducing bretzn, bretzn.com/? Cross-desktop app store...

12:00-13:00 MeeGo

12:30-13:00 IndyDroid dynamic languages on dalvik on android

12:30-13:30 Sharing package description across distros app store prerequisite?

12:30-13:30 dealing with policy violations see also piuparts.debian.org

13:00-14:00 OpenBricks see also www.openbricks.org/

13:30-14:00 Cross-distro app installer

14:30-15:00 Fast x86 boot

15:00-16:00 EFL

15:00-16:00 Automated testing of distros

15:30-16:00 Package dependency browser

16:00-16:30 APT dependency pseudo-boolean optimization

16:00-16:30 One source for all binaries

16:30-17:00 OBS Flexible worker pool

by savs at February 04, 2011 11:49 AM

The Kindle is great, but one of the things you really want from an electronic book is rock-solid stability. Since getting the Kindle, I've noticed quite frequently upon opening it that it was back to the home screen and had lost my place in the current book I was reading. This seemed to be typically during my commutes, so I'd typically lose 30 minutes or more and have to page through until I found where I'd got to. Not a nice experience.

I spent quite a lot of time googling and trawling the Amazon support forums for "kindle crash", "kindle reset", but could never find a conclusive solution. Some people advised upgrading to the latest firmware, but that didn't help.

Then I started seeing reports about problems with the covers, for example Kindle Giving You Trouble? Amazon Has You Covered, How a Leather Cover Crashes the Kindle, and Amazon offers refunds or replacements for problem-causing Kindle covers. I had the Burgundy Red Kindle Leather Cover so it seemed entirely possible this could be the cause - and in fact I take the case off when at home and haven't noticed a single crash without it.

So today I got in touch with Amazon and reported the problem, and an hour or so after emailing them they called me back. They were polite and helpful and confirmed there's a problem with the case.