costela.net

Just some quick superficial observations on the Debian/Ubuntu package distributed by Google:

• Most files are installed in /opt/google/.
• It attempts to patch /usr/share/gnome-control-center/gnome-default-applications.xml on postinst (maybe legacy compatibility? Someone with more gnome-fu than me care to explain?).
• The postinst also automatically adds a souce for updates to /etc/apt/sources.list.d and an archive key (this is IMHO the worst part)
• It includes a daily cronjob that – at least at first glance – tries to do the same things the postinst did (new apt source, archive key, etc) and some further archive configuration. The cron script is called at the end of postinst.
• A casual look at objdump suggests it’s statically linked to libv8
• On a slightly more positive note, it at least seems to successfully undo most of the changes once removed, with the exception of the added archive key and the above mentioned patch to gnome’s default apps list (that is: if there’s any situation it actually gets applied).

I understand it might be too much hassle doing it the right way (from the corporate POV), but then why not simply cooperate a bit more with the community? Hopefully they’ll accept some criticism and suggestions.
Or even better: they could simply reuse all the work being done to officially package Chromium.

UPDATE: forgot to mention that the version string (something like “4.0.249.43-r34537″) doesn’t follow policy. Not a huge deal for a non-distributable package, but in the name of forward-compatibility – if Chrome ever becomes fully open-source – it could be smart to adopt something like “4.0.249.43-0.x”.

Ever since my misadventures into ACPI-land with my old laptop I’ve been quite curious to better understand how it’s all implemented under Linux. I skimmed the ACPI spec and that may have given me some insight on how to hack together a temporary fix to the problem I had then, but it doesn’t really count as real understanding.

Since I don’t currently have the necessary time, I wrote it off as just another one of my many dead-end interests, but I nevertheless remained subscribed to the linux-acpi mailing list and the curiosity was still there, so it was a nice surprise to read a couple of posts by Mathew Garret on the subject, elucidating some bits of technicality, and I just decided to show some appreciation by posting about it! (I figure there’s not enough appreciation out there, generally speaking…)

Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get my act together and be able to contribute some code?

Fixing a stupid bug I was too hasty to notice (even though it was obvious).
Nothing to see here, move along.

Changes:

• store changed status as pref and restore at startup if it exists: avoid awayonlock messing with the last-online status if you quit while idle.
• minor tweaks and fixes to the test script

Get it, as usual, on the project page

I had to struggle a bit with the mobile stick I just got from Vodafone and thought it might be useful to write it down somewhere.

The Huawei K3520 (recognized automatically by Linux 2.6.31 as a “E620 USB Modem”) seems to work without many problems, the only hardware related issue being that sometimes, seemingly at random, the memory stick part will be loaded and sometimes just the USB modem part.

The Vodafone Germany specific configuration, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy to find online. The working config I currently have with NetworkManager 0.7.1 is:

Number: *99# (this is the default, but it warrants an explicit mention since I’ve found other examples online with “*99***1#”, and that didn’t work)
Username: vodafone
Password: vodafone
APN: web.vodafone.de (this seems to vary wildly from country to country)

The rest is either default or empty.

And lastly, taken from this LP bug, I had to change

<deny send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.PPP"/>

to

<allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.PPP"/>

in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf, to avoid the “Looks like pppd didn’t initialize our dbus module” error.

After all this the connection still needs a push to work (it rarely – if ever – works on the first try and I haven’t dug deep enough to decide if this is a Vodafone, a driver or a NetworkManager problem), but after connecting everything is shinny.

I was gonna write this as a comment to Daniel Kahn Gillmor’s post on sexism in the FOSS community, but it got a bit too big and I noticed I couldn’t log in with OpenID to comment, so here it goes.

“Do you think that the significant under-representation of women is a problem?”

I don’t think it’s a problem in itself, but it is a symptom which can point to a series of problems, with different levels of importance, depending largely on the cultural background involved. That is to say: the reason for this gender disparity may have significantly different roots depending on the place, some of which need to be addressed in completely different ways, if at all.

Off the top of my head I’d name a few:

1. Cultural favoring of men as intellectually superior in any given field, filtering women out of participation in said field.
2. Cultural/religious taboo of women as professionals in general.
3. Cultural/religious taboo of learning for women.
4. Cultural favoring of women as superior in some fields, draining other fields of prospective women professionals.
5. Cultural characterization of certain fields as non-feminine, scaring women away on other grounds than technical capacity.
6. Cultural expectations regarding pregnancy and marriage, coupled with age expectations for entry level jobs, barring entry to certain fields.

And since I’m speaking theoretically, we could also imagine a maternalist culture in which women aren’t attracted to IT because it’s “beneath their level”, preferring instead careers in politics or whatever is seen as a superior career in this imaginary culture.
This is obviously bogus, but I feel the need to make at least one Devil’s Advocate argument pointing out that women don’t necessarily need help achieving equality everywhere.

With this in mind, I’d say we can start addressing the problems where they exist and for what they are. Seems like a clearer starting point, IMHO.

Disclaimer: I’m not really active in this endeavor, partly because I’ve never believed in any particular large-scale plan to change the scenario. I’m more of a small-scale guy: changing the world one person at a time (which is ironically contradicted by the sheer existence of this post, but anyway…).

After seeing bubulle’s post on the statistics per country in Debian I started wondering about how the statistics were made. They probably take into consideration the Country field in the LDAP, but this seems a bit off since there’s a considerable number of DDs living abroad.
This hit me since I should probably count as BR, but live in DE. I’m personally skewing the statistics!

I know this is totally meaningless, but perhaps we could add a “nationality” field to the LDAP, just to make the competition a bit more precise! ;)

[UPDATE: why does the internet insist in making my posts embarrassingly obsolete?]

I had seen this Firefox* SQLite VACUUM trick on Lifehacker, but hadn’t done anything about it. Now for some reason I decided to give it a spin, but manually, since the proposed method didn’t work and I had zero patience to try and debug Firefox’s inner black magic.
Regardless, this certainly breathed some new life in the old guy:

#!/bin/sh
find ~/.mozilla/firefox/ -name *.sqlite | while read db; do 
	sqlite3 $db VACUUM; 
done

It’s no miracle, Firefox’s still a juggernaut, but it makes things sensibly snappier. No idea how long this will last, probably depends on the amount of INSERTS and DELETES that go on daily.

But I wonder why they don’t do that automatically. I thought they did and never bothered to check (still haven’t, to be completely honest). It might be to avoid a small hiccup while the VACUUM’s performed, but then again, so many people complain about Firefox being slower then molasses that I can hardly see the point.

Anyway, it’s easy to complain about other people’s work. Gotta keep reminding myself of the old “show me the code!” motto.

* Iceweasel, whatever…

This may seem obvious and old, specially for those with FOSS backgrounds, but considering the not-so-current developments*, this seemed like an appropriate time to speak my mind on the subject.

Imagine a world where all markets work the same way: you go in, browse the wares at your leisure, picking the ripest fruit, the freshest salad, and then the market simply pays a driver to take it all to your house, while you come back home in your own means of transportation, whatever that is.

You pay your way to the market, the market pays for the transport of the wares back to your house, and reverts that cost back to you in form of slightly higher prices.

In the end you’re both paying for transport, which isn’t the main product of the transaction, but is a necessary infrastructural part of it in this strange little fictional world of ours.

Now imagine you take the cab to the market, but upon arrival the driver charges not only you for the ride, but also the market for making sure you’re not mysteriously stuck in traffic for 2 hours while underway.

Sounds a bit like a sort of protection racket, right? That’s in general terms what some ISPs around the world are trying to do to alleviate for the fact that their aggressive marketing gimmicks have sold more bandwidth than they can currently profitably maintain.
And that’s why I am in favor of some form of legislation to guarantee network neutrality, particularly because I don’t believe the free-market rules will be enough to keep the ISPs from introducing small fees, which won’t be that big a problem for the big players, but could severely hamper the small guy’s ability to reach his audience. Not to mention the impact of suppressing less profitable traffic on new technologies, since new applications over new protocols become second-class citizens.
On the other hand, over-regulation can also have a stifling effect and it’s not exactly easy creating laws that protect the principle instead of the technical details, but I’m clearly for attempting it.

Just my two cents, as always.

* yes, I still read Slashdot, get over it. Does anyone in NL know if it’s really that serious? Or did the press spin a bit of FUD? My German is certainly not good enough for me to read Dutch.

After more than one problem with the old one and thanks to no small amount of luck, I got a new laptop, just six months after getting the last new laptop.

The new Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T is pretty nice and I got it at a surprise sale, so it was definitely worth it.
This time around I had – at least partially – done my homework and already knew about some possible hardware issues. Installing Debian wasn’t problem-free, but it was certainly made harder by my stubborn expedition into let’s-try-it-the-stupid-way-land (not unlike my recent run-in with dpkg):
Lenny’s kernel didn’t recognize the network cards and the daily-built installer images didn’t even boot (perhaps related to #541115), so I diligently spent the next couple of hours trying to build my own Frankenstein version of d-i with varied levels of failure. This didn’t accomplish much besides leaving me with a renewed respect for the d-i team.
In the end I gave up looking for ways to complicate things, simply installed a base Lenny system and copied a new kernel package via USB-stick (actually compiled my own 2.6.31-rc5, since 2.6.30 still didn’t correctly support the atl1c Ethernet card: recognized, but non-working).

After that slightly bumpy start, everything went totally smooth. [UPDATE: I just noticed the internal microphone wasn't working. Adding "option snd-hda-intel model=fujitsu" to modprobe's configurations fixes the issue. It also works with model=eeepc-p901, but the sound quality was worse. I filed a bug on ALSA to support this out-of-the-box in the future.]

As for the IDE vs. AHCI problems reported in the Ubuntu help site, I don’t know if it affects the Lenny installer because I switched to IDE mode before installing and back to AHCI only when 2.6.31 was already running.

My quick overview of the laptop:

Pros:

• The battery’s really nice: ~6 hours with wireless on, medium brightness and normal usage (including some quick compiling).
• The screen’s also pretty sharp and the size seems to hit my personal sweet spot between too small to use and too big to carry.
• The keyboard seems a bit strange at first, but after a few hours I’ve gotten totally used to it and now I actually find it a positive point. It’s pretty hard to find a nice keyboard on a small(ish) laptop.
• It isn’t a performance machine, but it’s a sensibly quicker and more responsive than all netbooks I’ve tried.

Cons:

• I haven’t tried it very hard, but I didn’t manage to make suspend work. Still haven’t given up on it, though… [UPDATE: suspend works like a charm with the solution found in this bug report]
• Multi-touch support doesn’t feel very usable, but perhaps it’s just hard to master (it could also be lack of tuning on the synclient settings)
• The touchpad buttons are annoyingly a single piece of plastic. That means it’s pretty hard to press both at the same time to use 3rd button emulation (in case multi-touch doesn’t cut it for you).
• Even thought the CPU apparently has the VT extension, it seems to be disabled in the BIOS (tested versions 1.04 and 1.10).[UPDATE: as seen in the comments, there are a couple of workarounds] [UPDATE #2: BIOS v1.14 seems to enable it.]
• For those whose FOSS principles matter: the wireless LAN requires the non-free iwlwifi firmware.

It may seem like a lot of cons, but I’m pretty happy with it. Perhaps it’s just my frustration with the old laptop making the new one look better, or perhaps it’s just my newgadgetophilia speaking.
Regardless, the final test drive will be next week’s FrOSCon.