On entrepreneurship and Tallinn

Lars mentions in the same article that he is thinking about starting a business and that Tallinn is nice.

I agree.

Now, what if we combined both statements?

Not surprisingly, other Finns had the same idea, including former collegues of Lars and I, who took advantage of Estonia's outstandingly welcoming taxation laws, of Tallinn's luxurious variety of restaurants and coffee shops, of Estonia's comparatively more affordable cost of living and of the omnipresent country-wide wireless network.

Given this, is it any surprise that I keep on spending more and more time there?

Now, if someone on Toompea could only take a hint and realize that a québécois kes räägib eesti keelt natukane and who has been living for more than 8 years in the neighboring country very much is a local and ought to be equally welcome to immigrate as any EU national...

GNOME Network Manager annoyances

Having recently gotten around buying a WIFI card for the old ThinkPad 240x that my friend Marcus gave me and installed Dapper on it, I began to look for a simple method for selecting wireless Access Points. Someone on #ubuntu recommended network-manager, which I promptly installed. Well...

The NM version in Dapper wouldn't even cooperate with a common 8139too Ethernet card! First, it would correctly fetch the IP from the router, but then the network-manager-gnome applet would keep on spinning and only stop after resetting the IP to some 169.254.0.0 private network meant for Bluetooth and other similar networked consumer devices.

I then cautiously upgraded to Edgy, just enough packages to get a newer network-manager daemon and a 2.6.17 kernel, then tried again. Ah! It at least finally retained the dynamic IP whenever using the 8139too Ethernet card, but it still refused to connect to a wireless network whenever I switch to the DWL-G650 card. Hmm...

Just to check that the Atheros driver (AR5212 chipset appearing as ath0) was correctly loaded, I did a test by opening a terminal and manually setting the ESSID to the nearest Internet café's AP, using iwconfig, then launching dhclient3. Look, ma! It works!

Inspecting the logs revealed that connecting to a non-encrypted network with network-manager systematically fails, because NM bombards the Access Point with wpasupplicant, then sits there wondering why the AP doesn't request authentication, thus eventually reporting a failure to associate with the AP.

How do we fix this? Any Network Manager developer who is reading this that would care to comment?

GTK2 coder wanted

I'm putting together a startup with some friends. Our product is based on diet versions of GNOME components. At this stage, the missing part is a diminutive control panel, to select the keyboard map (console + X) and to toggle between left/right -handed mouse (gpm + X). This could probably be extracted from GNOME components (e.g. capplets) as well, however keeping in mind the fact that we aim for GTK2 -only applications, to avoid unnecessary dependencies normally appearing with fully GNOME -compliant software. The result shall be published as Free Software, under a license matching whichever code the product was derived from. Our budget is small, but everything you code as a part of this project is immediately contributed back to the Free Software community. If this gig interests you, please drop by my homepage for my contact info and send me a summary of your skillset.

Messidor doing Lanaudière?!

Evan, when you said "Saint-Michel-des-Anges" in this blog entry, surely you meant Saint-Michel-des-Saints?

PS: Maciej is wrong. What people speak in Québec is French, they just speak it with a heavy accent and curiously outdated vocabulary reminescent of their coastal France ancestry. Tabarnak!

USB mass storage support in Linux sucks!

After an extremely frustrating afternoon of seeing the Linux UHCI driver repeatedly shut itself down, following several successive I/O errors while accessing USB mass storage (a 512Mb Compact Flash connected via a USB card reader, in one case, and a 512Mb USB stick, in the other), I spent an even more frustrating evening surfing the Internet for a solution. Conclusion:

USB mass storage support in Linux sucks!

Several mailing lists and user forums report similar failures using USB 2.0 devices on Linux UHCI or EHCI drivers, down to the exact same error messages that I get. Some even report the whole USB subsystem going down, leaving the user without any keyboard or mouse on USB-only systems (this matches my findings on one particular hardware platform that happens to be at the core of a project I'm working on). The suspected cause, in all cases, apparently boils down to either or all these:

• The SCSI subsystem upon which USB (and Firewire) mass storage is built is utter crap that would need a complete rewrite. The issue has been known for ages, it's even a proverbial elephant in the corner that nobody wants to see, but rewriting the subsystem for a standard that barely has any real-life application left means opening a big can of worms.
• None of the Linux kernel's HCI are capable of anticipating the quirks present in some implementations of the USB hardware specifications, so they simply panic and commit suicide in syslog-flooding glory.
• There is apparently a hard-coded limit of 1000 units (blocks?) that, when exceeded, will make the mass storage driver reset itself! Doesn't sound like Willliam Gates the Third's often-mentioned "Nobody needs more than 640k" now, does it?

I can feel for the average user who is just trying to extract a few pictures off a USB stick and who simply ends up reinstalling $commercial_os in frustration. Wasting a couple of days trying to debug support for what is supposedly a well-documented industry standard should never happen. There is no excuse for a broken USB mass storage on Linux. Let's fix it!

Wengophone: VoIP done right

Via Free Software Magazine:

Dreaming about a free software competitor for Skype? Maybe your wait is over

And a very interesting alternative to Skype it indeed is!

Developed as Free Software by a subsidiary of the French telecom operator Neuf Cegetel, WengoPhone comes as either a Firefox plug-in or as a QT-based standalone application. On top of the VoIP features, it also supports other popular chatting protocols, for a seamless integration of all one's Instant Messenging needs.

Lovely! Now, when can we get a GTK2 version of that, messieurs?

Planner 0.14 released

I had the pleasant surprise to notice that Planner 0.14 was finally released last night, more than a year after development had stopped, this time under the direction of Kurt Maute. I packaged it this morning and uploaded it to Debian's repository. There's still 9 bugs remaining and help is welcome towards clarifying whether they still apply to this new release. Enjoy!

Retour sur ma semaine à Paris

In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France.

6nergies

This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl...

Xin cám ơn, ông Mai!

I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations...

Saaks mie puhuu suomee siinä videoesittelyzzä? Eiköha? Hä?

The Food

From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles ― you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap!

The Book Heaven

France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as Антон recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French.

Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura réussi à assimiler la langue de Molière avant Debconf7?

The People

Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say?

The Crossroad

Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so...

Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la région parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte expérience de la gestion de produits basés sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: leçons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak!

The Paradox

Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish).

Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

ALSA on the old GX1 Geode?

As I'm currently putting the finishing touches to "Project X", one remaining issue is ALSA support on the GX1 core inside the Geode SC2200. I'm just wondering if anybody out there implemented this already? Or perhaps someone would be willing to port AMD's old OSS driver to ALSA?

PS: I am fully aware that AMD considers the SCx200 series as an end-of-line product. However, given the plethora of GX1-based hardware out there, having an ALSA driver for it would still be worth the effort.

Brightness control on an iMac G3 under Linux

I recall Linux/PPC kernel developer Benjamin Herrenschmidt saying ages ago that it would technically be trivial to write a tool that accesses the Open Firmware device tree to adjust the iMac's built-in monitor's features (brightness, contrast, geometry, etc.). I'm wondering if anybody ever coded such a tool? Otherwise, would anyone be willing to study the Darwin source code and port it to Linux?

Networking à Paris

I'm spending next week in Paris, attending the last 6nergies event of this season, meeting business partners and interviewing with potential employers. If there's any Debian or Ubuntu developers that wanna meet for a drink and perhaps for an informal GPG key signing session, please drop me a line ASAP.

Existential politics

Those who read French and who are interested in pondering issues where existential philosophy and politics intersect might find this article on my other blog stimulating.

Alpha debian-installer bounty

From my good friend Eki:

I'd appreciate you informing people that I'm commiting a 100 euro bounty towards upgrading debian-installer images with MILO support for the Debian Etch release. I can personally help with development by testing the upgraded installer images on any of my 11 Alpha machines.

If you have MILO knowledge and are willing to produce updated debian-installer images for Etch and to submit your work to the debian-boot team, contact eki at his regular sci.fi account. Kiitos!

Falsetto à la Fox

The killer feature in Opera, compared to Firefox and other Mozilla products, is the ability to restore the content of all tabs at every browsing session; not just after experiencing a crash, but in a systematic way, whenever starting the application. I have finally found a Firefox plug-in that does that: Session Manager. Why isn't this a standard feature in Epiphany and Firefox?

Epiphany vs Firefox compatibility issues

Meanwhile, I have encountered yet another essential site (online booking for my favorite airline - this time) that blocks Epiphany but allows Firefox. Yes, I know that their webmaster is to blame for resorting to browser-agent filtering. No, I don't expect anyone at customer service to understand and to rouse their javascripting minion into fixing it. Unfortunately, it also means that I still cannot switch to Epiphany.

Even though Firefox and xulrunner are essentially the same codebase, the different browser-agent is enough to make Epiphany unsuitable for everyday use. As I recall, Rosbeh and several others reported this as being one of two reasons for shipping Firefox as their default browser, the other being a question of brand recognition: Firefox had the full-page ad in the New York Times and is multi-platform, while Epiphany is virtually unknown and GNOME-specific.

This must be fixed.

Ubuntu 606

Am I the only one who thinks of a silver drum machine, when looking at the Dapper release number?

Closed for Business: Google, MSN, Yahoo

Today marked yet another phase in my dissociation from closed business models:

I wanted to view someone's photo album on Flickr. However, because this brilliant picture sharing community was recently bought by Yahoo, the service's infrastructure has been progressively overhauled into something that forces users to have a Yahoo passport to logon.

Sounds familiar? Yup, it's the same old tired MSN recipe for shotgun marriage: buy cool service startups one by one and suddenly make them inaccessible to people who refuse to provide oral sex to their whole product line. Not surprisingly, on the same day, I got a similar invitation to view another friend's photo album on My Space, which would have required a similar MSN passport there. Perkele!

Now, which other megacorporation has been quietly adopting trend-setting companies and Free Software projects through the backdoor and progressively forcing people into their own passport model? Hintti: search engine, gay male, gay talk.

User lock-in is not a business model; it is a mentally ill infestation that shall be eradicated.

Standing in the Shadows of Birthday

From a great album that was the inspiration for this blog entry's title:

I'll be searching everywhere
Just to find someone to care.

Yes, again... *sigh* Давай!

Embeded Debian questions

Being in the process of compiling a diminutive Debian GNU/Linux -based OS image to boot an embeded device, I ran into a few problems that, I would guess, have already been resolved by other Debian developers working in the embeded device industry. My main questions are:

Obsolete (c)deboostrap package list for Etch

I notice that debootstrap's idea of which packages to install has never been updated for Etch, which currently installs pretty much the same packages as Sarge. One exemple is fetching dhcp-client instead of dhcp3-client.

Would anyone have an updated package bootstraping list for Etch?

Overcoming the footprint of a default Debian install with Busybox

Reading its documentation, it appears that Busybox can effectively replace about 80% of the packages rated with a priority Standard or higher. However, since neither busybox or busybox-static offer any Provides line, it becomes fairly difficult to figure out which packages can be safely removed without hosing the system.

Would anybody happen to have more details about exactly which packages Busybox can replace while still providing just enough functionality to boot a Debian-based system up to an X display manager? This equivalence list would need to be up-to-date with the Etch bootstrap requirements mentioned in the previous question.

Having clear answers to the above two question would go a long way towards helping me get started on this project. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide relevant answers!

Kotoisuus workgroup publishes new Finnish keyboard map

Via Michael Kaplan:

I was talking with someone the other day who is working on/with the new Finnish keyboard standard. [PDF in English]

Kyllä vain, suomalaisilla on sittenkin uutta näppäimistön oletusasettelua!

The novelty is the integration of several new deadkeys, accessible via AltGr or Shift+AltGr, that enable the composition of accented characters needed for the minority languages of Scandinavia, such as Faroese and Samé, and for those of significant immigrant groups such as Turkish and Vietnamese. Then the caron, macron and ogonek open the door to Baltic languages, while the double-accute allows writing Hungarian using a normal Finnish keyboard.

Ihanat painomerkit! Lisää! Laitetaanko saman tien consolelle ja X:lle kaikki näppäimistön oletusasettelut uusiksi?

Now, if they could only get around integrating the Russian ЯВЕРТЫ keymap on top of that, I would be such a happy boy...

PS: this post is dedicated to another Kaplan, Mr.RTL himself, Lior Kaplan, for officially becoming a DD. Congratulations!

Buzzword opportunism won't do

Being involved in no less than four different projects, all with excellent prospects for a permanent job, reminds me of why riding the Free Software bandwagon as yet another opportunistic buzzword won't do:

In three of the projects, people insist upon communicating using the closed source VoIP application Skype. There indeed is a crude port for Linux on i386 (though not for amd64, powerpc, or any other architecture), but the dependencies are broken and my friends at Skype emphasize that Linux is a non-market for them, so I should not expect any solution any time soon. Still, the people behind some of these projects regularly threaten that I'm wasting their time by "refusing" to install Skype on my computer.

Free Software promoters who don't understand what "non-free" means.

In two of the projects, the corporate homepage is made as a single Flash animation. Mentioning that Flash support is extremely broken and thus essentially non-existent on Free Software platforms is pointless: the people behind the project are Windows users and yet they insist that their project is about promoting the free circulation of ideas using Free Software.

Free Software promoters who don't understand interoperability.

In one particular project, the product follows the Googlesque model of "the Web as my application and file server". Great idea, except that ―­ once again ― the people behind the project are Windows users and they insist that the Thin Client hardware must have a standard set of applications pre-installed and some storage media, thus defeating the purpose of this business model.

Promoters of "the Web as my application and file server" model who don't understand the implications of a Thin Client solution.

In all cases, the people behind the project mean well, but ― not being Free Software users themselves ― they clearly don't understand the profound implications of the Free Software agenda; they only see it as a license-free technology to connect the masses for cheap and they evidently find it difficult to think outside the Windows PC framework.

Free Software as a business model, in a nutshell: data interoperability and the client-server model. Either get it or you're wasting my time ...and yours too. Nothing personal; just business.

PS: I sincerely hope that anybody who recognizes themselves in the above rant will acknowledge my honest concerns and embrace this opportunity to truly adopt Free Software. Just do it! It doesn't matter where you get the FOSS. Just make sure that the FOSS gets you! (inspired by a great Candy Dulfer song currently blasting through the headphones).