Planète Béranger has raised the ABI issue surrounding Fedora and RHEL’s recent upgrade to Firefox 3. In short, RHEL 5.2 ships with Firefox updated to the new xulrunner-based Firefox 3, but its Eclipse and libswt3-gtk2 is still at 3.2, which depends on the old gtkmozembed interface.

This seems like a good argument in favour of adopting Debian-style package naming, when it comes to libraries: append the ABI version to the (sub)package name containing libraries that are linked to from other packages. So the old Firefox 1.5 would have a libgtkmozembed18 subpackage, that can be shipped with RHEL 5.2 without shipping the rest of Firefox 1.5 (technically speaking, the ABI version is 1.8.x.y, as prior to XULRunner 1.9 the ABI is ever-changing, but packages already handle this by depending on the specific version and release number anyway)

This is already done from time to time in the RHEL/Fedora world, in the form of compatibility packages, but making it the default would avoid this kind of breakage, where a package /has/ to be updated (due to upstream EOL) but parts of it are needed downstream.

Tim Bray’s revised Wide Finder project [ongoing.org] has been ongoing for a few weeks now, and I’ve finally took the time to design and prototype an implementation.

What
The goal is to evaluate the performance of middle-of-the-road, not embarrassingly parralelizable tasks on modern-day multi-core hardware. Such as the Sun T2000 servers. Fittingly, the task is to parse a multi-gigabyte web server log file and compile some aggregate statistics.

Design
The solution I came up with for the earlier iteration of the contest, coded in different versions (C++, OCaml and JoCaml) is fundamentally sound, though rather unoptimized (picking up two-and-a-half different languages in one weekend is a good way to find out how much there is to know about, say, C++ stream buffering). With the benefit of hindsight, and given that we are several weeks into the project and there are strong implementations already [wikis.sun.com], the idea is to find an unexplored niche.

Short recap of the main implementations:

• OCaml: Fernandez is ahead of the pack again, the only solution in the 7 minutes
• make+C+awk+sh: Perl is dead, but shell scripting is enjoying a renaissance with parallelizable tasks. 8 minutes
• Java-based solutions: in the 13-17 minutes range are the various JVM solutions, from Java, Groovy and Scala to Fan, an interesting Ruby-like language for the JVM. Reminds me of .NET’s Boo.
• Python, Ruby: in the 20+ minutes range. Python multiprocessing is not that efficient yet; I believe an improved Stackless Python solution might be forthcoming

I dabbled with a Common Lisp solution; it works and appears to be competitive, when tried on a partial log file. Exploring the available options for parallelism, however, revealed the disconcerting fact: no freely-available Common Lisp compilers have good multi-threading, or even multi-processing (without shared memory) on Solaris! Even worse, the SBCL incompatibility with GCC 4.3 means that even the Linux version on my Fedora machine is several months old, and does not have the threading library.

So it’s back to Java. Perusing the blogs of the Java and Scala programmers, it appears that the common complain is .. regular expressions. So the hunt was on for a good regular expression library. Joni, a port of the Ruby Oniguruma regex library to the JVM used by the JRuby project, appears ideal: low-level and supposedly very fast. Until one hits the total lack of documentation. So that’s off the table. Ended up using dk.brics.automaton, which appears to perform well enough, even when parsing Unicode strings.

The nice thing about using Java is that, if you hit a performance brick wall, chances are that many other people have been there before you. The problem I have, the need to have random access within a file (so different threads can start at different offsets (Java’s RandomAccessFile is good for this) combined with the need for buffered I/O (BufferedReader is good, but there is no RandomAccessReader !) is solved by the nice folks at Biojava.com. Great!

On my system (2 GHz Core 2, 2 GB RAM, 5400 rpm HDD, Fedora 9 x64), Ruby takes about 2.2 seconds, while my Java implementation running on OpenJDK 1.6 (64-bit) takes about 1.6-1.7 seconds with 1 thread and 1.4-1.5 seconds with 2 threads. Close to the 1.2+ seconds time that Alex reported for Python, but hey, we’re paying the Java start-up cost here.

Will update when I get an account on the test server. 40GB dataset, here I come! In the meantime, time to look for opportunities to use a JVM-based language better suited for the task. The Java code is a tad bit verbose.

Unlike the commercial OSes (and commercially-supported Linux distributions), community Linux distributions tend to have fast-paced release cycles. Notably, Fedora and Ubuntu releases every 6 months.

Every OS upgrade entails several decision: do you do a clean install, or upgrade your current installation? Do you start with a clean home directory, or re-use your previous one? Any combination works fine, though my personal preference is to do a clean install and use a clean home directory, having archived the older directory. I think of it as house-cleaning — and it’s nice to experience the desktop as it ships out of the box, before customization (naturally, I then restore my music database, my address books, browser and e-mail client profiles, etc. This is not Memento!)

So, now that Fedora 9 has been released, what needs to be added to / changed from the base setup? As it turns out, not that many:

Compositing
Some people swear by Compiz; I personally find Metacity much more usable (Compiz does not support cycling through all windows of a given application — Ctrl+F6 in Metacity; Cmd+~ in OS X). Metacity now has a compositing manager that’s turned off by default; turning it on involves either using gconftool-2 (only for advanced users) or gconf-editor, and setting the /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager key to true.

The support in the stable version is a bit flaky still; the metacity package in Rawhide is much better behaved and appears quite stable. Upgrade by issuing yum –enablerepo=rawhide update metacity. As of the moment it does not pull in any other Rawhide package so you can rest easy.

Try pressing the volume up/down/mute keys on your keyboard (if you don’t have a multimedia keyboard, change the bindings in System->Preferences->Personal->Keyboard Shortcuts) and be amazed at the translucency coolness (no, this is not bling). The brightness pop-up windows have not been changed yet, alas.

Firefox
Ever cursed Firefox’s font rendering in silence? Type about:config in the address bar, and add the following boolean keys:

font.FreeType2.autohinted = true
font.FreeType2.enable = true

Keyboard
For the English-speakers among us specifically, and those who use the US keyboard layout in general (it’s the standard layout in Indonesia, for instance), the occasional times when one has to type an accented character is rather annoying.

There are various work-arounds — launch the character map (under Accessories), add the Character Palette applet to the panel (so that it consumes RAM even when you don’t use it!)…*or* you can just fix your keyboard layout. The die-hard command-line junkie would be able to tell you what option to pass to setxkbmap to achieve this. The rest of us can just use System->Preferences->Hardware->Keyboard. In the “Layouts” tab, select “Layout Options”. The option you want is “Compose key position”; I use Right Alt, but Caps Lock haters will rejoice to know that, yes, you can use that dreaded key as your compose key as well. To type an accented character, now the only thing you need to do is hit the Compose+accent followed by the letter you want to accent (using shift as necessary, e.g. for ^).

While you’re here, you might want to change the Alt/Win key behavior, and map either Meta, Super or Hyper to one of your Win-keys. The GNOME default is inexplicably for the Win-key to be a normal key and not a modifier (so it cannot be combined with other keys).

Coming up: Applications
Et voilà! You should have a nice-looking, and more importantly, functional desktop right now. In the next instalment, I’ll comment on the applications I use. Until then, à bientôt!

• It looks gorgeous
• It runs Linux, and showcases what can be done with more vertical integration
• Nokia has been improving their interaction with the developer community
• Video camera and Skype (no Skype video support yet, though)
• Rhapsody subscription service
• New: Now with GPS, spacious internal storage, and sliding keyboard built-in!
• New: More video codecs, Flash 9, Mozilla-based browser

So commercial software providers (Skype, Real Networks) will provide Linux ports if they judge that the userbase is big enough. Which is good news.

The same thing applies to Nokia itself, naturally, and sadly in this case, they do not think there is demand for Ogg Vorbis playback.

So if, like me, you find the product attractive, but have a personal collection of Ogg Vorbis files (or FLAC, which transcodes seamlessly to Vorbis), then this is what you can do:

• E-mail Nokia about it
• Inform outlets that stock the tablet (e.g. Best Buy, CompUSA)
• Sign this pledge and pass it around

All the software for the new device (minus GPS — though perhaps it’s the same software that comes with the GPS kit for N800? Oh, and the ambient light sensor) will run on the N800, so holding back won’t be that painful.

As reported by Linux Weekly News, Microsoft has just announced version 1.0 of their Adobe Flash competitor, Silverlight.

An interesting development is that they are also working with Novell to bring the technology to Linux (to be known as Moonlight). Moonlight supposedly will be GPL’ed, with the exception of the binary codecs needed for playback of proprietary Windows Media formats.

So Linux is still a second-hand citizen (version 1.0 is out, and development on the Linux port is just announced?), but this might be interesting for those of us (read: most Linux desktop users) that have been waiting for a decent Flash playback (forget authoring) solutions. Still no x86_64 support after all these years, forcing people to stick to 32-bit browsers (or use nspluginwrapper). And unless Adobe has changed things since acquiring Macromedia, anyone who has merely used the Flash plugin is tainted and can’t work on Flash reimplementations!

(From this interview [lwn.net] with principal developers of Swfdec and Gnash)

Rob: The Adobe EULA for Flash forbids anyone who has installed their Flash tools or plugin from working on Flash technologies. This has had a chilling effect on the development of free Flash players, since a developer must either choose to decide that Adobe won’t sue them over this, or to do what Gnash does, which is a slow and inefficient, clean room, reverse engineering project.

As I argued, Novell would most likely require copyright assignments on contributions to Moonlight, and thus the use of GPL is not going to hinder Microsoft benefiting from community contribution (interesting, from a once anti-GPL company). The framework is conveniently written in C# as well, so it’s not going to directly benefit the Gnash and Swfdec projects (Flash), but depending on how clearly Novell marks up their code for patent-encumbrance, it could still either benefit or act as a time bomb for Flash projects..

Naturally, I’d still advise anyone to refrain from using Silverlight/Moonlight unless it’s being used as a container for standard (H.263/4) codecs. WMV is an abomination dating back to the AVI days — note how most HD- and BD-DVDs are encoded in H.264, not VC-1 which is basically WMV.

As Linux Weekly News reports, Microsoft’s general counsel has intensified the company’s sabre-rattling against Open Source projects, this time putting numbers on the alleged patent infringements in the Linux kernel, desktop projects and Open Office.

Conveniently left out is the one-sidedness of this smear campaign. Microsoft could take all their time to look at open-sourced code, but on the other hand, Microsoft’s code is sacrosanct. One wonders if Microsoft’s “Shared Source” licenses and EULAs allows the licensee to sue Microsoft for patent violation? One would suspect otherwise.

The patent system is broken. And it’s a matter of incentives. As I wrote in response, the US Patent and Trademark Office grants overly-broad patents without checking carefully for prior art. Thus Microsoft’s claim is probably true in a very twisted way: nobody can write anything meaningful without violating some patent that one of the big tech companies (IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc.) holds. Any company with a legal team worth their salt would play the system and file for as many patents as they can, no matter how dubious. Some even boast about it (Steve Jobs, about Apple’s iPhone). The culprit is thus the patent system, not the owners of the dubious patents (who are ethically responsible to their shareholders only. Corporate law is also very flawed, but that’s the subject of another post), and certainly not the authors of the infringing software.

Regardless of whether software patents is a good idea or not (I personally think it’s not), the USPTO and Congress have a serious conflict-of-interest problem here. Granting more patents earn them more money, and examining patent applications carefully cost them money. Plus, they don’t lose anything for patents that are overturned. The Justice department should charge USPTO for the time wasted by patent challenges, if the patent ends up overturned because of USPTO’s fault. That way they’d have an incentive to be more careful.

There was a Slashdot story a few weeks ago, on HP voiding your warranty if you install Linux. Linux geeks responded with an outrage, predictably, claiming that ever since CRT monitors come with safeguards that prevent the screen being fried through out-of-range settings, there is no way that a piece of software could destroy a hardware, and even if that’s the case, then it’s a bug in the hardware design itself.

In the case of the woman mentioned in the story, Linux is clearly not at fault — the keyboard was just broken, and the tech support person was too clueless (or the support regulations structured in such a way) to notice. However, there could be valid cases where the combination of crappy hardware and running Linux *would* ruin your hardware. I know, because it just happened to me.

The recipe is as such:

1. Broken ACPI implementation (hello, HP! To be fair, the most recent dv2000, dv6000 and equivalent Compaq lines are probably fixed; by the lack of complaints), so that Linux’s ACPI subsystem cannot control the fan and CPU voltage properly
2. A CPU that runs hot (first-generation “mobile” Turion 64)
3. 2 years of frequent use, tolerating occasional crashes due to overheating
4. OMG!!! LINUKS KILLZ ME PC!!

I guess the writing is on the wall when I had to remove my second memory module to keep the laptop running at all. The poor fans must be getting to their end of life. And today, after a freeze while the laptop was on battery power (previously almost unheard-of, it’s normally stable if running at 800 MHz, which it does when unplugged), it just never woke up again. The power indicators would be on, the optical drive would operate properly, and the AC indicator too, but apart from that, zilch. Nothing displayed to the screen, no error beep, nothing.

One begins to wonder whether the buggy Microsoft ACPI AML compiler was actually intentionally buggy. After all, if you load Windows onto your machine ”as it is intended”, you’ll be using a Microsoft-written AML interpreter, and everything would be just fine. If you use the Intel reference AML interpreter, well, … Very disturbing indeed. The same way Microsoft abused its IE market share by intentionally not making it standards-compliant, making life a nightmare for web designers and thus the easy way out is to only support IE ..

RIP, HP L2000 “Lance Armstrong special edition”. It’s ironic that a record winner of an endurance cycling race, who also happens to be a cancer survivor, would lend his name to a buggy laptop with poor noise insulation and heat issues that didn’t even last two years. I was planning to replace it with an HP dv2000t once the Santa Rosa models are out (late April — early May), but after this, I wonder. I’ve never had a laptop dying on me before; my previous write-offs are either due to inexpert disassembly (Vaio C1) or drop damage (Vaio C140). Perhaps I’ll get a Macbook after all, though my Apple purchasing track record is notoriously bad (I’d buy just before a new model is launched – I barely managed to cancel a Dell laptop purchase when the Powerbook G4 12″ was released, and I jumped the gun and bought the Sony C140 — now with a broken LCD — and before it even arrived, the Core 2 Macbooks came out).

Could I wait this time for the don’t-know-when Santa Rosa? Come on, Apple, update the line before Leopard comes out!

Update - 2007/04/16 - OSnews has an article on a Bill Gates memo showing Microsoft’s intention to cripple ACPI. You’re not paranoid if people really are out to get you! And shame on that abusive monopolist — this is straight out of The Corporate, folks. It figures that after screwing over DR-DOS in a very similar way, they’d try the same trick again.

Periodically, I’d scour the Internet for French-language streaming media broadcast. Unfortunately, despite the European Commission’s much-publicized anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the French’s famously anti-American attitude, when it comes to Internet broadcasting they are all in hock to Microsoft.

Case in point: France 24, the French answer to CNN and BBC. While most Anglo-American site would at least offer you a choice between Real and Windows Media (I don’t see QuickTime used much), most French sites, including the aforementioned, serves only WMV. This, at a time where the BBC is even sponsoring the development of an open-source video codec, Dirac [wikipedia.org].

The site’s design also feels rather sluggish, and the aspect ratio is wrong unless you go full-screen. Alors…

Those using Mac OS X or ROX Desktop might wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, they have had application bundles since the beginning. Everyone else will probably be wondering “what are application bundles anyway?”. First, then, a primer.

If you think of an application as an object, a thing, then you want to be able to treat it like any other object (say, a document): you can copy it by drag-and-drop, move it to another location, run it by double-clicking, and when you don’t need it anymore, drag it to the trash. This works if you’re on the aforementioned system, but not for everyone else:

- Windows applications write to system directories, and the default Registry setting is normally set up only once, during installation
- Unix applications are installed all over the file system

Even with package management (e.g. RPM+yum, DEB+apt, Smart, emerge) the situation is far from ideal:
- application still cannot be dragged-and-dropped
- can’t run an application without installing (for trying it out, for example)
- if you don’t have the original package you can’t recover it from the installed files (I don’t believe the package database holds the pre-/post-install scripts, only the pre- and post-uninstall ones)

And even OS X’s implementation is not ideal: there’s no way to declare dependencies, so a lot of applications just bundle all the libraries they can’t expect the user to have installed already. ROX is ahead here with their integration of the 0install system: you first download an almost-empty application bundle, and the first time you run it it triggers 0install, which can pull in the main body of the application, and install the dependencies too.

For some reason ROX’s installation system has not caught on yet with the major desktops (neither Nautilus nor Konqueror, the two main desktops’ file managers, handle launching ROX AppDirs, the most basic prerequisite for interoperability; for some reason the talks with the XFCE project did not go anywhere either). But now at least another project is picking up the idea, and were it to be successful, would see application bundles available to millions of users. Who? Why, the One Laptop per Child project.

(J5 blogged about it several weeks ago, but I didn’t get to that post until now. Mea culpa.)

I don’t know how it’s implemented there, but as I commented, it could possibly go like this:

App.xo
|– deps.xml
|– info.xml
|– binary
|– icons/
|– libs/
|– share/

with the application directory monitored for changes; drop a new application in and Nautilus will scan deps.xml for any prerequisites that’s not yet installed and offer to install it.

That way we can have OS X-style ease-of-use without their application bloat (since a lot of the .app bundles there just ship all the libraries they can’t assume the use.

2006-11-25 19:09 EST Update: Here is the specification for the bundles. No dependency tracking yet, unfortunately.

… keeps the bugs away. And what’s this patch, you might ask? Why, it fixes Liferea’s font selection (Liferea’s a feed reader for the GNOME desktop). Previously it would use the application font setting for its HTML viewer, with this patch it uses the document font setting instead, bringing it in line with other applications.

No more squinting when looking at small text, or finding your desktop space taken up by extra-large application menus!

The Tuesday after E³ Expo, we get not one but two much-awaited announcements. Nokia finally demonstrated the OS 2006 upgrade for the Nokia 770 tablet, and Apple came out with the MacBook (sorry, Mac OS Rumors).

Alas, the Nokia announcement is still vaporware (I’d happily beta test the new firmware, since the latest update actually broke timezone support, and the full-screen virtual keyboard sounds like a nice improvement over the half-sized version one has to carefully peck with a stylus right now). And to make matter worse my tablet’s wireless actually died yesterday! Thankfully it’s still under warranty, and Nokia didn’t actually announce a hardware upgrade, as was speculated.

The Apple announcement, on the other hand, is welcome. There are concerns about the integrated video (can’t be worse than the also-integrated, 700-fps-in-glxgears ATi in my HP right now), and the price premium charged for the black case, but so far it’s looking good. I’ll let the early adopters work out all the issues with this and get the next model with OS X 10.5 and 64-bit Merom CPUs..

I finally got fed up of my Sony Ericsson K700i losing random phone numbers (well, not random - it’s always the phone numbers I’ve used recently, which thankfully means that most of the time, searching for unrecognized phone numbers in the call history list works) to do something about it.

There are some HOWTOs and forum discussions out there, but most of the ones that refer to Ubuntu refer to earlier versions, and a lot of the steps mentioned are probably not needed anymore.

As it turns out, these are all you need:

apt-get install multisync libmultisync-plugin-irmc-bluetooth libmultisync-plugin-evolution

Modify /etc/bluetooth/hid.conf . This is the crucial step! In /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf, change the local device class from

class 0×3e0100;

to

class 0×100100;

Now set up multisync and follow the instructions - should be quite straightforward. The only thing to note is that by default, Multisync does not preselect any calendar, address books etc., since you can have more than one. Make sure to pick the ones you want to sync.

My Nokia 770, pre-ordered on Nov 14th, finally arrived this Thursday, shipping after exactly one month (to FedEx’s credit, the 3-day shipping ended up taking 1 day). I had an exam in the morning and a paper due later that day, so it wasn’t until Friday that I laid my hand on it.

First impression? It’s smaller than expected - about the same dimension as a PDA, rotated 90° and stretched slightly along the width. And the screen is crystal-sharp!

On the downside, application load times are on the sluggish side, and the OOM killer kicks in a bit too often, wspecially when browsing Flash-heavy sites.

Some third-party applications are on the unstable side - the WebCore-based mini browser crashes whenever one types into a password field; the ScummVM game Beneath a Steel Sky does not display an icon in the task bar, making it impossible to kill without first installing X Terminal. Hail killall!

Need to set up my Linux box for Maemo development over the break, so I could start porting Quarry. Chess is great, but sometimes one feels like Go or Reversi…

This post typed on a 770

… is the first release of a Linux distribution in a long time that I could cheer until my voice becomes hoarse (ha!) without going to very technical explanations. In other words, a lot of things Just Works™

Software installs/updates and power management.. the latter is probably an eye-popper to a veteran Linux laptop user, and the former, even Red Hat never managed to get right out of the box (while Debian never managed to get pretty-looking). The thing that prompted me to write this, though, is removable media support. Plug in a USB drive (in my case, the TunePlug from Magnatune, with 10 MP3 rock albums bundled) and up it pops on your desktop, with the correct volume label. Naturally suspicious, I did a quick directory listing of /media and, to my pleasant surprise, the mount-point was dynamically created with the same name.

I was impressed enough to start looking at fixing my desktop’s loud fans (to no avail, but I chanced upon Shuttle’s new BTX line, the XPC i-series. Gorgeous, alas, it’s for Intel CPUs.. and I’m not a fan (pun intended) of the Pentium 4’s design, even with the bolt-on 64-bit support). And looking at the notebook situation in Intel land.. which led me to humbly revise my opinion of Dell. Their Inspiron 700m is.. ooh!

Pity about the battery life though. Let’s see what Fujitsu could do with the new AMD Turion..