Petter Reinholdtsen

Half a year ago I wrote a bit about OfficeShots, a web service to allow anyone to test how ODF documents are handled by the different programs reading and writing the ODF format.

I just had a look at the service, and it seem to be going strong. Very interesting to see the results reported in the gallery, how different Office implementations handle different ODF features. Sad to see that KOffice was not doing it very well, and happy to see that LibreOffice has been tested already (but sadly not listed as a option for OfficeShots users yet). I am glad to see that the ODF community got such a great test tool available.

Jeg flikket litt på OpenStreetmap.org i går, og oppdaget ved en tilfeldighet at det er en rekke noder som representerer overvåkningskamera som ikke blir med på kartet med overvåkningskamera i Norge som jeg laget for snart to år siden. Fra før tok jeg med noder merket med man_made=surveillance, mens det er en rekke noder som kun er merket med highway=speed_camera. Endret på koden som henter ut kameralisten fra OSM, og vips er antall kamera økt til 165.

Kartet er fortsatt ikke komplett, så hvis du ser noen kamera som mangler, legg inn ved å følge instruksene fra prosjektsiden. Hvis du vet om noen flere måter å merke overvåkningskamera i OSM, ta kontakt slik at jeg kan få med også disse.

The last few days I have spent at work here at the University of oslo testing if the new batch of computers will work with Linux. Every year for the last few years the university have organized shared bid of a few thousand computers, and this year HP won the bid. Two different desktops and five different laptops are on the list this year. We in the UNIX group want to know which one of these computers work well with RHEL and Ubuntu, the two Linux distributions we currently handle at the university.

My test method is simple, and I share it here to get feedback and perhaps inspire others to test hardware as well. To test, I PXE install the OS version of choice, and log in as my normal user and run a few applications and plug in selected pieces of hardware. When something fail, I make a note about this in the test matrix and move on. If I have some spare time I try to report the bug to the OS vendor, but as I only have the machines for a short time, I rarely have the time to do this for all the problems I find.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post. Here is the simple tests I perform on a new model.

• Is PXE installation working? I'm testing with RHEL6, Ubuntu Lucid and Ubuntu Maverik at the moment. If I feel like it, I also test with RHEL5 and Debian Edu/Squeeze.
• Is X.org working? If the graphical login screen show up after installation, X.org is working.
• Is hardware accelerated OpenGL working? Running glxgears (in package mesa-utils on Ubuntu) and writing down the frames per second reported by the program.
• Is sound working? With Gnome and KDE, a sound is played when logging in, and if I can hear this the test is successful. If there are several audio exits on the machine, I try them all and check if the Gnome/KDE audio mixer can control where to send the sound. I normally test this by playing a HTML5 video in Firefox/Iceweasel.
• Is the USB subsystem working? I test this by plugging in a USB memory stick and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
• Is the CD/DVD player working? I test this by inserting any CD/DVD I have lying around, and see if Gnome/KDE notices this.
• Is any built in camera working? Test using cheese, and see if a picture from the v4l device show up.
• Is bluetooth working? Use the Gnome/KDE browsing tool to see if any bluetooth devices are discovered. In my office, I normally see a few.
• For laptops, is the SD or Compaq Flash reader working. I have memory modules lying around, and stick them in and see if Gnome/KDE notice this.
• For laptops, is suspecd/hibernate working? I'm testing if the special button work, and if the laptop continue to work after resume.
• For laptops, is the extra buttons working, like audio level, adjusting background light, switching on/off external video output, switching on/off wifi, bluetooth, etc? The set of buttons differ from laptop to laptop, so I just write down which are working and which are not.
• Some laptops have smart card readers, finger print readers, acceleration sensors etc. I rarely test these, as I do not know how to quickly test if they are working or not, so I only document their existence.

By now I suspect you are really curious what the test results are for the HP machines I am testing. I'm not done yet, so I will report the test results later. For now I can report that HP 8100 Elite work fine, and hibernation fail with HP EliteBook 8440p on Ubuntu Lucid, and audio fail on RHEL6. Ubuntu Maverik worked with 8440p. As you can see, I have most machines left to test. One interesting observation is that Ubuntu Lucid has almost twice the framerate than RHEL6 with glxgears. No idea why.

As I continue to explore BitCoin, I've starting to wonder what properties the system have, and how it will be affected by laws and regulations here in Norway. Here are some random notes.

One interesting thing to note is that since the transactions are verified using a peer to peer network, all details about a transaction is known to everyone. This means that if a BitCoin address has been published like I did with mine in my initial post about BitCoin, it is possible for everyone to see how many BitCoins have been transfered to that address. There is even a web service to look at the details for all transactions. There I can see that my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b have received 16.06 Bitcoin, the 1LfdGnGuWkpSJgbQySxxCWhv8MHqvwst3 address of Simon Phipps have received 181.97 BitCoin and the address 1MCwBbhNGp5hRm5rC1Aims2YFRe2SXPYKt of EFF have received 2447.38 BitCoins so far. Thank you to each and every one of you that donated bitcoins to support my activity. The fact that anyone can see how much money was transfered to a given address make it more obvious why the BitCoin community recommend to generate and hand out a new address for each transaction. I'm told there is no way to track which addresses belong to a given person or organisation without the person or organisation revealing it themselves, as Simon, EFF and I have done.

In Norway, and in most other countries, there are laws and regulations limiting how much money one can transfer across the border without declaring it. There are money laundering, tax and accounting laws and regulations I would expect to apply to the use of BitCoin. If the Skolelinux foundation (SLX Debian Labs) were to accept donations in BitCoin in addition to normal bank transfers like EFF is doing, how should this be accounted? Given that it is impossible to know if money can across the border or not, should everything or nothing be declared? What exchange rate should be used when calculating taxes? Would receivers have to pay income tax if the foundation were to pay Skolelinux contributors in BitCoin? I have no idea, but it would be interesting to know.

For a currency to be useful and successful, it must be trusted and accepted by a lot of users. It must be possible to get easy access to the currency (as a wage or using currency exchanges), and it must be easy to spend it. At the moment BitCoin seem fairly easy to get access to, but there are very few places to spend it. I am not really a regular user of any of the vendor types currently accepting BitCoin, so I wonder when my kind of shop would start accepting BitCoins. I would like to buy electronics, travels and subway tickets, not herbs and books. :) The currency is young, and this will improve over time if it become popular, but I suspect regular banks will start to lobby to get BitCoin declared illegal if it become popular. I'm sure they will claim it is helping fund terrorism and money laundering (which probably would be true, as is any currency in existence), but I believe the problems should be solved elsewhere and not by blaming currencies.

The process of creating new BitCoins is called mining, and it is CPU intensive process that depend on a bit of luck as well (as one is competing against all the other miners currently spending CPU cycles to see which one get the next lump of cash). The "winner" get 50 BitCoin when this happen. Yesterday I came across the obvious way to join forces to increase ones changes of getting at least some coins, by coordinating the work on mining BitCoins across several machines and people, and sharing the result if one is lucky and get the 50 BitCoins. Check out BitCoin Pool if this sounds interesting. I have not had time to try to set up a machine to participate there yet, but have seen that running on ones own for a few days have not yield any BitCoins througth mining yet.

Update 2010-12-15: Found an interesting criticism of bitcoin. Not quite sure how valid it is, but thought it was interesting to read. The arguments presented seem to be equally valid for gold, which was used as a currency for many years.

Via en blogpost fra Simon Phipps i går, fant jeg en referanse til en artikkel i Washington Times som igjen refererer til en artikkel i det fagfellevurderte tidsskriftet Journal of Transportation Security med tittelen "An evaluation of airport x-ray backscatter units based on image characteristics" som enkelt konstaterer at pornoscannerne som kler av reisende på flyplasser ikke er i stand til å avsløre det produsenten og amerikanske myndigheter sier de skal avsløre. Kort sagt, de bedrer ikke sikkerheten. Reisende må altså la ansatte på flyplasser se dem nakne eller la seg beføle i skrittet uten grunn. Jeg vil fortsette å nekte å bruke disse pornoskannerne, unngå flyplasser der de er tatt i bruk, og reise med andre transportmidler enn fly hvis jeg kan.

With this weeks lawless governmental attacks on Wikileak and free speech, it has become obvious that PayPal, visa and mastercard can not be trusted to handle money transactions. A blog post from Simon Phipps on bitcoin reminded me about a project that a friend of mine mentioned earlier. I decided to follow Simon's example, and get involved with BitCoin. I got some help from my friend to get it all running, and he even handed me some bitcoins to get started. I even donated a few bitcoins to Simon for helping me remember BitCoin.

So, what is bitcoins, you probably wonder? It is a digital crypto-currency, decentralised and handled using peer-to-peer networks. It allows anonymous transactions and prohibits central control over the transactions, making it impossible for governments and companies alike to block donations and other transactions. The source is free software, and while the key dependency wxWidgets 2.9 for the graphical user interface is missing in Debian, the command line client builds just fine. Hopefully Jonas will get the package into Debian soon.

Bitcoins can be converted to other currencies, like USD and EUR. There are companies accepting bitcoins when selling services and goods, and there are even currency "stock" markets where the exchange rate is decided. There are not many users so far, but the concept seems promising. If you want to get started and lack a friend with any bitcoins to spare, you can even get some for free (0.05 bitcoin at the time of writing). Use BitcoinWatch to keep an eye on the current exchange rates.

As an experiment, I have decided to set up bitcoind on one of my machines. If you want to support my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to the address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b. Thank you!

Martin Bekkelund ved friprog-senteret har skrevet følgende korte oppsummering rundt datalagringsdirektivet, som jeg videreformidler her.

Det pågår i disse dager en intens diskusjon om innføring av Datalagringsdirektivet (DLD) i norsk rett. Kanskje har du gjort deg opp en mening, kanskje er du usikker. I begge tilfeller ber jeg deg lese videre.

Samtlige fagmiljøer, både i Norge og EU, har konkludert med at DLD ikke bør innføres på nåværende tidspunkt. Den tekniske kvaliteten på direktivet er dårlig, det griper uforholdsmessig inn i personvernet, det har store mangler og viktige spørsmål som hvem som skal ha tilgang og hvordan data skal lagres er fortsatt uavklart.

• EU-ekspertene sier at konsekvensene av å benytte vetoretten er minimale
• Juristene påpeker at direktivet er i strid med EMK
• Datatilsynet sier direktivet får store konsekvenser for personvernet og at direktivet er irreversibelt
• Teknologene sier at sikker lagring ikke er mulig, at det er svært enkelt å omgå og mulig å manipulere data og produsere falske beviser
• Pressen sier nei av hensyn til kildevernet
• Det er store interne stridigheter i EU. Blant annet har den tyske forfatningsdomstolen funnet at måten DLD er innført på er i strid med tysk grunnlov
• Alle de store operatørene og tilbyderne sier nei, av tekniske og personvernmessige årsaker

Jeg liker å tro at jeg er en hyggelig fyr. Jeg har et rent rulleblad, og med unntak av to fartsbøter har jeg aldri vært en byrde for samfunnet. Det akter jeg å fortsette med. Det er mange som meg, lovlydige, pliktoppfyllende borgere som aldri vil utgjøre en trussel mot noe som helst. Vi synes derfor det er trist og sårende at all vår atferd skal overvåkes døgnkontinuerlig.

Understøttet av faglige vurderinger kan du trygt si nei til DLD.

Ta kontakt med meg hvis du har spørsmål om DLD, uansett hva det måtte gjelde.

Denne teksten er å anse som Public Domain. Spre den videre til alle som kan ha nytte av den!

Siste melding fra Nettavisen er at regjeringen planlegger å fremme sitt forslag til implementering av datalagringsdirektivet i morgen, i ly av fredprisutdelingen for å få minst mulig pressedekning om saken. Vi får snart se om det stemmer.

A few days ago, I was introduces to some students in the robot student assosiation Robotica Osloensis at the University of Oslo where I work, who planned to get their own 3D printer. They wanted to learn from me based on my work in the area. After having a short lunch meeting with them, I offered them to borrow my reprap kit, as I never had time to complete the build and this seem unlike to change any time soon. I look forward to see how this goes. This monday their volunteer driver picked up my kit and drove it to their lab, and tomorrow I am told the last exam is over so they can start work on getting the 3D printer operational.

The robotic group have already build several robots on their own, and seem capable of getting the reprap operational. I really look forward to being able to print all the cool 3D designs published on Thingiverse. I even got some 3D scans I got made during Dagen@IFI when one of the groups at the computer science department at the university demonstrated their very cool 3D scanner.

On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux development gathering in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen, will hold its General Assembly for 2010. Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388 people registered as members. Last year 32 members cast their vote in the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to vote this year.

In the latest issue of Linux Journal, the readers choices were presented, and the winner among the multimedia player were VLC. Personally, I like VLC, and it is my player of choice when I first try to play a video file or stream. Only if VLC fail will I drag out gmplayer to see if it can do better. The reason is mostly the failure model and trust. When VLC fail, it normally pop up a error message reporting the problem. When mplayer fail, it normally segfault or just hangs. The latter failure mode drain my trust in the program.

But even if VLC is my player of choice, we have choosen to use mplayer in Debian Edu/Skolelinux. The reason is simple. We need a good browser plugin to play web videos seamlessly, and the VLC browser plugin is not very good. For example, it lack in-line control buttons, so there is no way for the user to pause the video. Also, when I last tested the browser plugins available in Debian, the VLC plugin failed on several video pages where mplayer based plugins worked. If the browser plugin for VLC was as good as the gecko-mediaplayer package (which uses mplayer), we would switch.

While VLC is a good player, its user interface is slightly annoying. The most annoying feature is its inconsistent use of keyboard shortcuts. When the player is in full screen mode, its shortcuts are different from when it is playing the video in a window. For example, space only work as pause when in full screen mode. I wish it had consisten shortcuts and that space also would work when in window mode. Another nice shortcut in gmplayer is [enter] to restart the current video. It is very nice when playing short videos from the web and want to restart it when new people arrive to have a look at what is going on.