Atom feeds per-topic

Just a quick note for those interested in subscribing only to my blog articles pertaining to a specific topic that the following Atom feeds are available:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Estonia
• Finland
• Immigration

Invandringskonsult

In close to 11 years of living in Europe, I've accomplished plenty beyond working in the high-tech sector: I've also been fairly active in Immigration Policy, especially on aspects that affect migrant labor. Because of this, I keep on getting more and more requests to produce statements or to appear on panels to discuss issues pertaining to migrant labor and to immigrants' integration.

The hot topic of last week was Swedish language for immigrants, the crux of the issue being that even though Swedish has an official language status in Finland, in practice, it is pretty much impossibly for immigrants to register their kids at the Swedish language school, to claim public services in Swedish or, even more so, to request labor training in the Swedish language at the Employment Office.

The weekly newspaper Helsinki Times, in collaboration with the media think tank Magma, recently conduced a survey of the immigrant population, to find out how much they know about Swedish culture in Finland and about the Swedish language.

It was in this context that the Helsinki Times and the national television's Swedish programming (FST) asked for an interview with yours truly, because I have recently visited the Ministry of Employment and Economics with a concrete proposal to facilitate the availability of labor training in the Swedish language.

This FST webcast, starting at 16:03 minutes into the show, and the above Helsinki Times article provide more details about the context and about my proposal to the Ministry.

Debian CUPS transition in progress

Since Lenny was the first Debian release to feature CUPS under its new package naming strategy, I started going through 'rdepends' results to see which packages in Squeeze still present dependencies for *cupsys* packages.

Much to my amazement, there's quite many.

If you are the maintainer of a package that still has those dependencies, please fix them ASAP. Alternately, if you're aware of any favorite package that does, please do not hesitate at filing a patch to help the maintainer update their debian/control.

Comes June 2009, transitional CUPS packages will be removed from our debian/control.

Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth

Lately, I've been pondering how to solve one annoying aspect of the FreeDesktop, namely how to eject the piece of bloat called Firefox from the picture and get myself a fast web browser that I can rely on and that yet offers a similar UI experience based upon native GTK2 widgets rather than XUL components.

Just to investigate possible options, I tested Epiphany, Galeon and Konqueror. My conclusions were than a Gecko-based Epiphany or Gaelon is incredibly fast and that Konqueror offers a similarily efficient experience albeit using QT, rather than GTK2 widgets.

Why is Firefox so bloody bloated then, if it uses the same Gecko engine as Epiphany and Galeon? The only possible conclusion I could come up with is that its crappy XUL implementation, rather than leverage existing native GTK2 or QT widgets, tries to reinvent the wheel with its own UI toolkit running as a gigantic RAM blackhole.

One option that I wanted to investigate but found too deficient was a Webkit-based port of Epiphany. Unfortunately, at its current stage, the GTK2 port of Webkit simply isn't mature enough to consider, although the fact that Webkit has been succesfully ported to a number of platforms and constitutes the basis for Safari on Mac OS suggests that the potential is significant.

That only leaves one single aspect on which Firefox wins hands-down: its UI concept; it just works well, whereas Epiphany simply has a UI concept that is utterly inadequate, because it is too crude, lacking basic necessities such as a session saving feature that also works when purposely unloading the application, rather than only as a crash recovery measure. Simply put, Epiphany's premise that a browser should never be closed and thus ought to always remain open in the background of a desktop session is utterly flawed; it doesn't work like that in real life and Firefox acknowledges this, while Epiphany stubbornly doesn't because someone wreaked Havoc in our desktop paradigm.

Anyhow, to me the solution is clear: regardless of which rendering engine it uses, Epiphany's UI concept needs to become more like Firefox, before it can truly gain acceptance as the default browser among Linux distributions.

Here's hoping for the best...

Life sometimes has extreme ways of waking people up and making them realize what matters for them. I'm going through such a phase right now in my romantic life. I won't discuss what happened here, but suffice it to say that I haven't felt so depressed in a long, long, long, long time.

The good news is that life has proven to me once again how having good friends who truly care for me makes a whole world of difference. The big slap in the face that life gave me over these last few days was a harsh lesson, but I think that it was worth it. Of course, it helps that people like Gilles, Jaana, Henni, Pia, Linda, Arno and Sailesh beleived in me enough to support me through this rough spot in my life. Although their advices were vastly different, they all pointed in a very positive direction and gave me the strenght to carry on.

I also must thank my beloved Anastassija; what she did was cruel beyond beleif and yet, if her few SMS from the last 24 hours are any indication, there's still hope after the storm. I'll be seeing her tonight again, after a few days of separation and I prepared her a truly romantic evening. It ain't much, but I hope that it truly succeeds in bringing the point accross that Love is stronger than everything and that even the unforgivable can be forgiven, over time, if everyone involved has enough faith in each other's future as a couple.

Tonight, I truly could use the prayers of a million voices to support me and Anastassija in this difficult time. Life slapped me hard and I got the message... I think... and whatever happens after tonight, I need to know that I gave it my best shot and that, whatever her and I decide, Life can only take a turn for the better from now on.

Uninformed shoppers blaming Ubuntu: a brief TODO list for Canonical

My own perception of the debacle about the end-user who decided to cancel her college enrollment because she could not get Microsoft products to install on Ubuntu is three folds:

• Canonical and Dell evidently need to improve their marketing efforts, because the user didn't realize what she was purchasing. Knowledge of what Ubuntu is and how it can interact with the rest of the world clearly wasn't passed on in the form of a small printed User's Guide that should have come with the newly purchased laptop computer. Additionally Dell most definitely needs to make emphasize the same information in its online shop to help customers make an informed decision (and, no, eschewing the problem by obfuscating or removing non-Microsoft alternatives to the purchasing options isn't the right answer).
• The newspaper that reported on the story really needs to do its homework to more accurately report what is Ubuntu and, perhaps, participate in the efforts to educate the masses about non-Microsoft alternatives in the Operating System market. Educating the Press to enable this might require hiring a dedicated person at Canonical to work with the non-industry Press.
• The girl in question really needs to get a hold of herself, the sooner the better. Her hasty withdrawal from her enrollment was clearly unwarranted and her attitude of crying wolf and blaming everyone else for her own failure at making an informed purchase speaks volumes.

Personally, I think that Canonical needs to hire an individual that understands the above three aspects and, most of all, how to remedy them, as its next OEM channel Manager, if they truly want to increase Ubuntu's market penetration.

Geode X.org driver fix for GX2/CS5535 released

After a rather hectic holiday season, I returned momentarily to pending Geode X.org driver issues. The current status:

• On Debian, 2.10.1 is in Testing and Unstable, while 2.11.0 is in Experimental. For those who need 2.11.0 right away, the experimental package builds as-is using Lenny dependencies. For everyone else, I'll probably get around producing a proper backport once Lenny is released.
• On Ubuntu, 2.9.0-1ubuntu2.5 just entered Hardy-updates with cherry-picked fixes for DCC support on GX2/CS5535 hardware. Meanwhile, Intrepid has 2.10.1 and Jaunty has 2.11.0, with a backport of the later having been requested for Hardy-backports.

I'm especially interested in hearing from users of GX2/CS5535 hardware to see if these recent uploads finally fixed DDC probing for them or not. Just respond to relevant existing bugs or, if necessary, open new bugs to report any regression.

xf86-video-geode 2.11.0: last call!

With yesterday's release of version 2.11.0 of the X.org driver for the Geode GX2/LX, a whole cycle was wrapped up for many of the developers involved:

• Jordan Crouse was among the unlucky ones who recently lost their job at AMD. The same layoff also affected Coreboot developer Marc Jones and other Geode specialists (see Jordan's blog article for details).
• Several members of the OLPC project are also moving on, now that most Linux kernel and X.org patches have been merged upstream.
• People like myself who were working in the thin client industry on Geode-based products are also moving on.

As such, remaining bugs and our milestone goal to merge back support for older GX1 Geodes might never be taken care of. From this perspective, we welcome active participation of new developers with access to a wide variety of Geode hardware to contribute and, eventually, take over upstream maintenance of xf86-video-geode.

Available for a new job

A couple of years ago, I started what has probably been the best job I've held so far, as a Business Development Manager for Artec Group where I focused on marketing and selling the ThinCan LTSP client.

During that time, I used a combination of Guerrilla Marketing techniques to spread the word about this cool Estonian embedded platform in its LTSP client configuration and defined an extremely tight market-oriented focus that saw this relatively obscure electronic design start-up rise to the forefront of the LTSP hardware market and also brought the company commendable notoriety in the Coreboot community, thanks to its Programmable LPC Dongle, a low-cost ROM emulator that can be used to bootstrap various embedded hardware and test firmware images.

Looking back at close to 3 years with Artec (if we include the stint I did at Linutop), I most fondly remember how I managed to bring the Estonian and Turkish nations closer together in collaborating on Innovation. On my first visit to Turkey, I had noticed that very little is know about Estonia in Turkey, even though both countries have a collaboration that dates back to the 1920's, so my tactic was to introduce Estonia's achievements as a whole, to establish confidence in Artec's offering. It worked:

Among other things, my idea to organize an Estonian ICT Conference during the visit of Estonian PM Andrus Ansip in Turkey created a lot of extremely positive buzz that resulted in Estonia being mentioned as a trendy country in a prime time Turkish TV series. During this time, I've also made a lot of contacts among the Estonian and Turkish business communities and, more surprisingly, among the Estonian diplomacy who, much to my amazement, welcomed my ideas for better promoting Estonian interests abroad with great enthusiasm.

Come December 2008, my time at Artec will become a page in my employment history. While the Thincan remains one of Artec's key products, current marketing and sales resources are focused on new markets and new technologies that completely fall outside my core expertise, which is why the company decided to let me go.

I thus welcome offers from interested parties in Coreboot or LTSP markets. Other refreshing offers from outside the box - such as in business diplomacy - are equally welcome, as I've been pondering a career change for a long time.

Still more Old Skool goodies to send to a good home

Debian Developer Peter De Schrijver dropped by tonight and left with the Atari stuff, but there's still more stuff left.

Atari TT030, Atari Stacy, iMac and SCSI devices for sale

As the title of this blog post indicates, I've got some hardware to sell.

SBM that adds USB boot support?

Having recently demoted my old ThinkPad 240x to Debian/Testing testbed, I wanted to re-install Debian from scratch on it, to make sure that I would have a clean reference system to work with.

However, this being a very old ThinkPad model, there is no CD-ROM drive to speak of. The only external means of booting is with an optional floppy disk drive. Sure enough, there exists a nice helper called SBM (included in the utility folder on all Debian CDs since several releases) that adds CD-ROM boot support to any BIOS.

Instead, My idea would be to perform the reinstall using the USB stick version of Debian-Installer, bootstrapped by SBM on the floppy disk. Does anybody know of an SBM release that adds USB boot support? If not, is there any other tool that performs a similar trick?

another Tux bites the dust

At the dayjob, we've been evaluating various OS options for a customer project. Without going into details, it involves installing embedded software on a ThinCan for a special usage case. The basic needs are simple: graphic environment to run a custom application (OS neutral), plus a few drivers for hardware attached to the ThinCan. That's it. Nothing to excited about.

Comparing various team members' proposals to implement the OS base was the real shocker: no matter how optimized the software base and compiler options, no matter which build environment was used (Thin Station, Open Embedded, Gentoo, etc.), we couldn't get a performance that was remotely usable:

• Boot time goes well over a minute, which is way too slow.
• The graphic environment is sluggish, to say the least. True enough, distributions like Thin Station come with rather outdated versions of everything, but still... that slow?!
• Refactoring IceWM to provide clean 95-ish functionalities using current XDG standards would require a fair amount of work. By the time we'd be done, IceWM would probably gain a thick footprint like XFCE progressively did.

Then came the proposal from our team's lone Windows guy: XP Embedded. Booted in less than 10 seconds, has a graphical environment that is usable out of the box and integrating the customer's application was a breeze. Heck, the demo is practically a finished product already and took just a couple of hours to assemble! To make matters worse, the total we'd be paying in licensing fees, for all the Windows components we choose, would amount to far less than what it would cost to polish either of the Free Software -based proposals.

Before anyone goes and puts on their asbestos suit, I'm already aware that the point of Free Software is to keep people employed and to make the community at large benefit from everyone's code improvements by contributing patches to upstream. Please keep in mind that, in contrast, business requirements are to get results at a reasonable cost, reasonably fast and to produce a well-polished product. The Free Software community has finally conquered the challenges of the desktop and was already on the server ages ago, but we ain't quite there yet on embedded devices, I'm afraid.

While I personally refuse to run anything else than Ubuntu on my laptop, let's face it, in the above case, the savings in time=money were obvious and the resulting product quality, even at demo stage, spoke for itself. Thus, another Tux bit the dust.

Québec government sued for buying Microsoft products without any public call for tender

As per the original press release:

In Quebec, access to public markets is the rule while contracts attribution without invitation to tender is the exception. A public market should be transparent, fair and most importantly, open to all. The solutions as well as the propositions must be evaluated objectively on known and accepted criteria. Furthermore, the regulation implies that public markets have to enhance the local economic development as well as the Quebec technologies.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec.

Much to my surprise, news about this lawsuit have spread as far as Vietnam! Something tells me that this court case might have lasting repercussions...

Dear Lazyweb: constructive homelessness

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm a permanent resident of one country, but I'm representing the interests of another one as a part of my job. Anyhow, I'm constantly traveling, so I cannot consider myself as having a residence anywhere in particular.

Still, the health insurance and taxation offices of the country where I'm registered as a resident are constantly annoying me with requests for additional clarifications about "working abroad" (trying to imply that I might have relocated to the country where my employer has their head office), which is a complete waste of my time, because the previous explanation is never good enough for them and they keep on twisting every word I say.

I was thus wondering if someone ever found a way to not have any official place of residence anywhere and still be able to get visas for the countries they need to visit and also be able to rent apartments in the countries that they visit the most frequently without ending up with residence permits for each of them, so as to avoid the above mess with multiple jurisdictions?

This question is not about evading taxation. It's about finding a solution to avoid wasting time constantly filing paperwork just because the bureaucracy cannot understand a situation where someone's lifestyle doesn't fit the traditional model of living and working in exactly one city.

brainstorm: new LPC dongle design

One of our most popular products at the dayjob has been our Programmable LPC Dongle. It has seen widespread use as an embedded hardware development and debugging tool and is particularly popular among Coreboot developers as a ROM emulator, because of its low price and because we publish the FPGA code under the LGPL.

Unfortunately, our current LPC Dongle product is nearing end of life, because some components are no longer available.

We're currently designing a brand new Programmable LPC Dongle and, noticing the plethora of improvement ideas we already received from the Coreboot community, we decided to widen the scope and invite a larger group of hardware developers to tell us what features they want to see in our next-generation Programmable LPC Dongle.

Anyone interested in participating in this brainstorm is welcome to send me their ideas to first-middle.lastname@artecgroup.com by September 1st 2008. While we cannot guarantee that every idea submitted will be used, we will definitely be reading all the feedback we receive.

Ah, the wonders of e-commerce!

After excruciatingly long months of waiting for all pieces of the puzzle to fall into place, I am pleased to announce that the dayjob finally rolled out its very first online shop!

The process of putting this together has been quite an experience: I had to learn about the wonders of payment authorization gateways, different taxation jurisdictions, etc. For instance, we have to deal with 4 taxation jurisdictions:

1. Estonian corporates and individuals: always add 18% VAT.
2. Other EU individuals: always add 18% VAT.
3. Other EU corporates: can be exempted from VAT, if their EU tax registration number is valid. Otherwise, add 18% VAT.
4. Corporates and individuals from outside EU: always exempted from VAT.

As much as we looked around, we could not find any e-commerce site engine that can handle all the intricacies of dealing with EU corporate customers who may or may not have a valid EU taxation exemption number so, for now, our online shop only handles cases 1, 2 and 4 properly.

What can you find on our online shop?

• Our acclaimed LTSP client hardware solution, the ThinCan.
• Our really cool Programmable LPC Dongle, which is an Open Source tool for developing and debugging firmware running on devices attached to an LPC bus. I mentioned Open Source, because we publish the FPGA code and Python scripts needed to access the LPC Dongle under the LGPL.
• Various other products which we happen to sell in the Baltic market.

Anyhow, I'm really happy to finally see this online shop deployed. So many people had wanted to purchase a ThinCan using a credit card or from countries for which shipping costs were difficult to determine and we unfortunately could not easily accommodate them. This is now resolved. Enjoy!

xf86-video-cyrix and xf86-video-nsc: it's dead, Jim

It had to happen sooner or later:

The X.org drivers for the old GX1 variants of the Geode chips formerly made by Cyrix and NSC no longer build against the current X.org release. Given the imminent release of X.org 7.4 (server core 1.5), this essentially means that users of older Geodes will have a nasty surprise, the day they upgrade to Ubuntu/Intrepid, which ships with core 1.5. Soon after, the release immediately following Debian/Lenny will be affected too.

There is a planned milestone to eventually reintegrate support for older GX1 products into the clean and up-to-date xf86-video-geode framework, but this will unfortunately come too late for those upgrading to Ubuntu/Intrepid, unless...

...unless someone volunteers to copy gx_* files inside xf86-video-geode and graft GX1 support into the resulting gx1_* files. If you have access to Cyrix/NSC GX1 + CS5530 or AMD SC hardware and a reasonable knowledge of the X.org codebase, your contribution would be most welcome.

O: planner -- project management application

This one had been a long time in the making, but here it goes: I'm orphaning Planner. Why? Because upstream hasn't been too active in ages, save from a few random bug fixes, and because the GCC 4.3 transition at Debian has exposed yet more bugs that make it FTBFS. The package had been marked as RFA for a while, but I decided that I'm not gonna wait any longer; O it is. Hopefully, an experienced GNOME maintainer will take over and revamp the upstream code into a usable shape. If not, then I guess we just found another dead package in the archive. So be it.

HOWTO build a clean LTSP boot image that includes the latest updates

Thanks to Oliver Grawert and Michael Haas for this idea!

1. Check your LTSP server's sources.list

   Ensure that the server has the relevant APT sources to fetch the latest updates:

   deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-security main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   #deb-src http://fi.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy main universe restricted multiverse
   
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main
   #deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/q-funk/ubuntu hardy main

   In this example, the Finnish Ubuntu mirror for the Hardy suite is used. Change this as necessary. Notice that all source package lines are purposely commented out.

2. Build a boot image using that sources.list

   Build the image using the following command:

   ltsp-build-client --copy-sourceslist --accept-unsigned-packages

   This builds the image using the repositories found in the server's sources.list. Accepting unsigned packages is necessary, because the PPA is not digitally signed.

The above method is a good way to check what would happen on a clean install, if any particular package were updated to a newer proposed release that is currently sitting on someone's PPA.

Enjoy!