Site në gjuhë të huaj

silentbrad writes "Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday. The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider. It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries. The report comes days after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices, or 'throttling' in recent months." And it's about to get a little better — reader ForgedArtificer points out that Rogers has promised to end all throttling over their network by the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

<UU> Somedays, I think why can't we have computers which just work.
<UU> But then I remember that I am a Computer Scientist.
<UU> So, yeah, I guess I understand why.
<Nirbheek> :D
Quite related to GNOME, really.

arnodf writes "The University of Hasselt (in Belgium) announced today (Google translation of Dutch original) that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced an 83-year-old woman's lower jaw with a 3D-printed model. According to the researchers, 'It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. ... The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even though some of these tools have been around for years, I have only recently started using them.
* byobu - nicer than plain screen with good defaults, for example key binding for scrolling is like in a regular terminal.* sbuild - nicer than pbuilder, defaults to overlay directory instead of tarball, hence fast by default, nice colors, build summary. I have heard about it for a long time, but the recent mention during Ubuntu devel week made me curious. It is friendlier now - no need for LVM snapshots. http://wiki.debian.org/mk-sbuild* syncpackage - which now allows syncing from Debian if you have Ubuntu upload rights. No need to burden the archive team members anymore for every sync or go the roundabout way of getting from Debian and then uploading manually without changes.* Modern Debian packaging in the form of the 3.0(quilt) source format and the new dh tools. The former allows a cleaner separation between the upstream and distro bits while the latter makes the debian/rules file much shorter and cleaner even than with CDBS, let alone with the classic debhelper way.* Twitter Bootstrap - mostly unrelated to packaging or command line stuff, but very nice regardless. CSS+Javascript UI elements that for me at least make jQueryUI superfluous, while being promoted as 'oh, just a CSS framework and style guide, not much else'.

I am currently working on a Qt-based app that needs to communicate through the serial port. Apart from all the benefits that a normal lib with a serial port implementation will bring in this case, having a Qt-based serial port lib would make even more sense, as it should be as multiplatform as possible and use the signal/slot mechanism. Also it should have a DFSG-compatible license, so I can package it for Debian, of course :-)

So I have found two libs which seemed to have the above mentioned features: QExtSerialPort and QSerialPort.

QExtSerialPort seems to be the most recommended lib in the web. It features polled and signal-based functionality; it uses Qt's standard types inheriting QIODevice. But it does not states the license in any file within the source code. The original project page at SourceForge says it's in public domain. And the newer project page at Google code says it's under the new BSD license. I have asked in the mailing list for a clarification. So far nothing has changed (although in further threads the authors showed some willing to change this). And then I got to the point of finding a bug, but I don't want to spend time to track it down and make a patch without a clear license.

QSerialPort it's another lib with more or less the same features as QExtSerialPort. It's main LICENSE file says it's under the LGPL2, but licensecheck will say that the present files are LGPL3. Also, on reviewing the code, I found some minor stuff that could be improved. Well, I could contact the author and see if [s]he would receive the patches... but his site seems down. And I could not find a real-person's name in the code so far :-/

So I made a last attempt to try to get QExtSerialPort in a suitable license. If it doesn't suceed, I think I'll have to start writing one myself. The downside: I only use Linux, so there will be no multiplatform features unless someone else contributes it. Of course, if you have another option or any idea to share, I'll be happy to know it :-)

By the way, this should be my first post on Planet Debian in english, so hello planet!

A new great tool ready for using with our beloved Lubuntu: LxScreenshot! This is another brilliant creation from the Stefano, the same author of LxFind. You can imagine what's its purpose, creating screen captures with ease and a simple interface, with timing capture (in seconds) and the option to choose the folder to save it on.    You can install this tool just by looking for it with

The Lake City library is making news for their staunch position on the First Amendment, censorship, and the right to watch porn in the library. The problem started when library patron Julie Howe found a man watching some questionable material and asked him to move to another computer. The man refused and the librarian also refused to intervene when asked saying that the library doesn't censor content. "We're a library, so we facilitate access to constitutionally protected information. We don't tell people what they can view and check out," Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Andra Addison told Seattle PI. "Filters compromise freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. We're not in the business of censoring information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Haven't tried LxFind yet? For those who doesn't know it, it will be the default file and document search tool or Lubuntu. For trying it (remember, it's not an ultimate comilation) put this on a terminal: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-desktop/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lxfind  If you already added our PPA just install the package "lxfind".

I’m so happy about this added functionality! I want to publicly thank Zoom for such a great free update.

The Zoom H1 makes super high quality recordings, and now also serves as a high quality digital audio mic while connected to a Linux computer.

Performing the Zoom H1 version 1.x to 2.0 upgrade in Linux

In short, this fails.

Something about writing the H1MAIN.bin to the Fat32 file system in Linux causes the very brittle upgrade process to fail. It will notice the file and begin the process, and end with “WRITE ERROR”. Thankfully it doesn’t brick the device.

The solution is to:

1. copy your recordings off the device
2. format the card inside the device: hold the Trash button while turning it on, then confirm the format by pressing the Record button
3. copy the H1MAIN.bin file to the root of the device’s filesystem using a Windows computer (download Zoom H1 System Software Version 2.0 and unpack)
4. initiate the upgrade: turn on the device while holding the Play/Pause button, then confirm the upgrade by pressing the Record button (twice)

Once upgraded, the mic functionality is detected and works automatically in Ubunutu (and presumably other Linux distros), and shows up in PulseAudio as both an Input and an Output. This means you also now have two audio outputs.

It even works in the Luz Spectrum Analyzer. Enjoy!

the_newsbeagle writes "Chieko Asakawa went blind at age 14, learned to program mainframe computers by sense of touch, and has spent her 27 years at IBM-Tokyo bringing personal computing and the Internet to the blind. From the article: 'By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser, mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. ... Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CR0WTR0B0T writes "Micron CEO Steve Appleton was killed in a plane crash around 9AM on Friday, February 3rd. He was flying an experimental fixed-wing single engine Lancair, which crashed in between two runways at the Boise airport."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even though some of these tools have been around for years, I have only recently started using them.
* byobu - nicer than plain screen with good defaults, for example key binding for scrolling is like in a regular terminal.* sbuild - nicer than pbuilder, defaults to overlay directory instead of tarball, hence fast by default, nice colors, build summary. I have heard about it for a long time, but the recent mention during Ubuntu devel week made me curious. It is friendlier now - no need for LVM snapshots. http://wiki.debian.org/mk-sbuild* syncpackage - which now allows syncing from Debian if you have Ubuntu upload rights. No need to burden the archive team members anymore for every sync or go the roundabout way of getting from Debian and then uploading manually without changes.* Modern Debian packaging in the form of the 3.0(quilt) source format and the new dh tools. The former allows a cleaner separation between the upstream and distro bits while the latter makes the debian/rules file much shorter and cleaner even than with CDBS, let alone with the classic debhelper way.* Twitter Bootstrap - mostly unrelated to packaging or command line stuff, but very nice regardless. CSS+Javascript UI elements that for me at least make jQueryUI superfluous, while being promoted as 'oh, just a CSS framework and style guide, not much else'.

superglaze writes "Poland has suspended its ratification process for ACTA, throwing the copyright crackdown into doubt for the whole European Union. ACTA is being handled as a 'mixed agreement' in the EU due to its criminalization clauses, so if a single EU member state (such as Poland) fails to ratify it, it is null and void across the entire union. If that were to happen, at least six of the remaining international signatories would have to ratify ACTA for it to apply anywhere in the world. Outside the EU, only eight countries — including the U.S. — have signed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My last post missed an important thing about GHC 7.4's handling of encodings for FileName. It can in fact be safe to use FilePath to write a command like rm. This is because GHC internally uses a special encoding for FilePath data, that is documented to allow "arbitrary undecodable bytes to be round-tripped through it". (It seems to do this by encoding the undecodable bytes as very high unicode code points.) So, when presented with a filename that cannot be decoded using utf-8 (or whatever the system encoding is), it still handles it, and using the resulting FilePath will in fact operate on the right file. Whew!

Moral of the story is that if you're going to be using GHC 7.4 to read or write filenames from a pipe, or a file, you need to arrange for the Handle you're reading or writing to use this special encoding too. I use this to set up my Handles:

import System.IO import GHC.IO.Encoding import GHC.IO.Handle fileEncoding :: Handle -> IO () fileEncoding h = hSetEncoding h =<< getFileSystemEncoding

Even if you're only going to write a FilePath to stdout, you need to do this. Otherwise, your program will crash on some filenames! This doesn't seem quite right to me, but I hesitate to file a bug report. (And this is not a new problem in GHC anyway.) If I did, it would have this testcase:

# touch "me¡" # LANG=C ghc Prelude> :m System.Directory Prelude System.Directory> mapM_ putStrLn =<< getDirectoryContents "." me*** Exception: <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character)

Since git-annex reads lots of filenames from git commands and other places, I had to deal with this extensively. Unfortunatly I have not found a way to read Text from a Handle using the fileSystemEncoding. So I'm stuck with slow Strings. But, it does seem to work now.

PS: I found a bug in GHC 7.4 today where one of those famous Haskell immutable values seems to get well, mutated. Specifically a [FilePath] that is non-empty at the top of a function ends up empty at the bottom. Unless IO is done involving it at the top. Really. Hope to develop a test case soon. Happily, the code that triggered it did so while working around a bug in GHC that is fixed in 7.4. Language bugs.. gotta love em.

Compilation of Linux kernel takes about an hour.

Assuming you’re using recent kernel and usual hardware available on the market at that time.

Thank you for your attention.

eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM,' Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

0 A.D. is an awesome cross-platform game that is fun, has stunning graphics and is completely open source.
There's even a PPA for Ubuntu.
It works wonderfully on both my laptops.

They are looking for a round of donations to pay for some more development work, and as of this moment they're $634 USD short. I've just sent $50 their way.
If you've got a few bucks to spare, please send some money their way. Or maybe you want to get into some development work, they have detailed instructions on how to do just that!

gbrumfiel writes "In May of 2010, North Korea made the bizarre claim that it had achieved nuclear fusion. Many, many commentators (including faithful Slashdot readers) mocked the dear leader for his outlandish boast, but could there have been a kernel of truth in the claim? Apparently some odd radioactivity was spotted by detectors surrounding the North just days after the announcement. Now, a new analysis by a Swedish scientist suggests that the radiation may have leaked from covert experiments into boosting fission warheads. The evidence is tentative at best, and many are skeptical, but it does seem that something odd was up on the Korean peninsula that spring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MrSeb writes "Thanks to a leaked video — a video that Microsoft made for Nokia — we now have lots of details about Windows Phone 8 (WP8). From deep Windows 8, Skype, and SkyDrive integration, through to the addition of NFC 'wallet' payments and BitLocker encryption, it sounds like Windows Phone 8 will be close to iOS and Android in terms of features. The interesting stuff is under the hood, though: WP8 will have the Windows 8 kernel instead of the Windows CE kernel of its predecessors. Through the Win 8 kernel, WP8 will support native code and multi-core processors. It will also have the same network stack, security, and multimedia support as Windows 8. While Win 8 apps won't be directly compatible with Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore says developers will be able to 'reuse — by far — most of their code.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It took a while to get some apt resolver bugs fixed, a few packages marked for multi-arch and some changes in the Ubuntu LXC template, but since yesterday, you can now run (using up to date Precise):

• sudo apt-get install lxc qemu-user-static
• sudo lxc-create -n armhf01 -t ubuntu — -a armhf -r precise
• sudo lxc-start -n armhf01
• Then login with root as both login and password

And enjoy an armhf system running on your good old x86 machine.

Now, obviously it’s pretty far from what you’d get on real ARM hardware.
It’s using qemu’s user space CPU emulation (qemu-user-static), so won’t be particularly fast, will likely use a lot of CPU and may give results pretty different from what you’d expect on real hardware.

Also, because of limitations in qemu-user-static, a few packages from the “host” architecture are installed in the container. These are mostly anything that requires the use of ptrace (upstart) or the use of netlink (mountall, iproute and isc-dhcp-client).
This is the bare minimum I needed to install to get the rest of the container to work using armhf binaries. I obviously didn’t test everything and I’m sure quite a few other packages will fail in such environment.

This feature should be used as an improvement on top of a regular armhf chroot using qemu-user-static and not as a replacement for actual ARM hardware (obviously), but it’s cool to have around and nice to show what LXC can do.

I confirmed it to work for armhf and armel, powerpc should also work, though it didn’t succeed to debootstrap when I tried it earlier today.

Enjoy!