No more OpenCT

I just uploaded belpic 2.6.0-4, with a few minor changes, and one major one.

The minor changes are, first, a fix to beid-register-pkcs11.html so that it tries to install libbeidpkcs11.so.2, rather than just the .so file, into iceweasel; otherwise you have to install the -dev package (or manually install the library, or change the .html file) to be able to use beid in your browser. Second, there were some typo fixes of which a bugreport had been open embarrasingly long. Oops.

The major change, however, is the fact that the debian packages now no longer have support for OpenCT as an alternative to PC/SC Lite. This isn't actually supported by the belpic upstream; and while the Debian packages did include support for such cardreaders, I do have a feeling that it was causing some problems.

So why did I include it in the first place, you ask? Well, because my very own cardreader wasn't supported by PC/SC Lite. You see, when I originally packaged the eID software back in 2004, most people didn't have an eID yet, let alone a cardreader; and the fairly common ACR38U-based smartcard readers that are thrown to people's heads these days were nowhere to be found yet. So, I googled for a smartcard manufacturer, found Gemplus who claimed Linux support for (at least some of) their models, found the distributor for Belgium, and ordered a smartcardreader. It did work with Linux allright—but OpenCT, only. Only later on did I find that belpic expects PC/SC Lite.

In itself, this was no problem; the first versions of belpic (up to and including 2.3.13) did have the OpenCT and other reader drivers still compiled in, anyway; only with 2.5 and later did Zetes choose to remove them. That's when I started patching, and that's when I discovered that problems began...

So, anyway. No more mr nice guy OpenCT. I needed to do my tax declaration, and since it'd been a while since I last tried to do some belpic stuff (since before the move, actually), I discovered that I couldn't find my cardreader anymore. So, I bought me a proper ACR38U-based one, and did my tax declarations before doing the upload. How's that for testing?

In any case, if anyone beside me was using the OpenCT bits in belpic, they're now out of luck. Go get yourself an ACR38U-based reader—they're only €15ish, anyway...

Review: Samsung YP-T10

About a month ago, I bought me a Samsung YP-T10 media player. I didn't want a device for which the Linux and/or Ogg Vorbis support was against the explicit wishes of the device's manufacturer, such as in the case of the iPod; because the more devices such manufacturers sell, the more they're encouraged to keep their systems closed. Definately not something I'd like to see.

In that regard, the YP-T10 is pretty okayish. It supports Ogg Vorbis out of the box, and it has a reasonable set of features for a portable media player. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way. The set of features on the device is simply astonishing; apart from the obvious music playback stuff, it sports an FM radio, a text file reader, a voice recorder, a picture viewer, and a movie player. Given the size and clarity of the screen, this is actually a useful way to view a movie clip, too, although not a very comfortable one. Apart from the obvious USB cable, the device also has bluetooth connectivity which can be used to send and receive files, or to connect a bluetooth headset—especially interesting if you consider the modern stereo headphones that sound just like 'normal' headphones. Once you upgrade the firmware, the device gains the ability to play a few games, and to store vCard files. Very impressive, for such a small device.

Unfortunately, not all is well. There's an RSS reader thingy on the device, which could be interesting; but it only works in companion with a Windows program, which obviously doesn't run on my (powerpc) laptop. There's only one way to charge the battery, and that's by connecting the device to a USB port. Unfortunately, that also means you cannot use the device while it's charging, since it switches to the MTP mode in which to receive files. That also goes for bluetooth, BTW -- if you're playing something, and the device receives bluetooth data, the playback is paused until receiving that data is finished.

The USB cable is a nonstandard one. Given my track record of losing cables and stuff, I'm sure I'll get in trouble at some point. Hopefully Samsung will still sell those at that point. If not, well, I guess I'll see what happens then. Another point of this cable is that it's impossible to remove it from the device while the headphones are connected; you have to push a button which is physically placed in the direction of the headphone connector, about a millimeter away from it—not very interesting if I just want to connect the device to store one or two media files on there...

The headphones that came with the device were not too bad, but the protective sleeves that came with it were too loose; after about a week or so, I'd lost both of them and had to buy me a new set of headphones. Luckily, that involves a simple standard headphone connector, so no problem there.

All these are just minor annoyances, however. I don't really need an RSS reader, anyway. What really is a problem is the lack of tag support in Ogg files; while I can at least play them, the display will show 'Unknown' for artist, album, or title for any Ogg file—which is a real PITA.

Altogether, however, I don't think the disadvantages of the device outweigh the advantages, and I've had quite some fun with it already. Having said that, given the lack of tag support in Ogg files, I don't feel I can really recommend it, at least not if you want to use it to play your Ogg Vorbis collection.

Christian,

One word: V.E.R.A.

(as in, 'dict -d vera')

New toy

While all of Belgium is buzzing over the fact that now the iPhone is being sold here, in compliance with the law against coupled sales (i.e., not simlocked), I couldn't care less. Instead, I bought me something far more useful than a cell phone that wants to be a PDA.

(occasionally, the poem is one of the better-known poems by expressionist poet Paul van Ostaijen, my favourite in the Dutch language)

This is a Hanlin V3 e-book reader. I found that I was reading way too much text on the 'net, some non-fiction, but recently also fiction, to comfortably do so. I could print, but that's not very good for the environment. I could read some of it on my YP-T10, but not all of it. Hence, the ebookreader. This thing has an e-paper screen, meaning that it does not require power usage to retain an image on the screen, and that the quality of the display is much, much better than anything an LCD screen could hope to offer. Even from an angle:

After having it for about two days, I must say I'm quite happy with it. Reading text on this device is way, way more comfortable than trying to read anything on my laptop, or something similar. Having said that, there are a few quirks with it, which I hope future firmware-updates will fix:

• the HTML parser doesn't parse HTML entities; having to read a text that goes like 'één, twee, drie' rather than 'één, twee, drie' ('one, two, three' in Dutch) is rather annoying.
• the PDF viewer misses some glyphs. For instance, it has no support for ff or fi ligatures, perhaps even more (though I'm not entirely sure about that)

These two are really serious problems, and for a device that's meant to replace a book, there's no excuse for such problems.

• The HTML parser doesn't understand hyperlinks. I have a copy of the Perl CD Bookshelf, which has helped me on many occasions in the past. However, reading it on the device is not possible, because it does not come as one file, but rather an HTML file per section in the book; and given the slower speed of the e-book's screen, navigating through 300-odd files is not feasible if you don't have a general idea what file you're looking for. Having the ability to open the index file and somehow following a relative hyperlink in that file would fix this issue, but that's not currently possible.
• The device can zoom in on text; and when you read a PDF file, it will automatically try to produce the most optimal zoom size that will still show all of the text. Unfortunately, what the device thinks is optimal and what I think is optimal is not always the same thing; in certain cases, having the ability to fine-tune the zoom would be helpful. Also, this automatic zoom assumes that every page has the exact same lay-out; a LaTeX 'twopage' layout would require you to redo the zoom on every page turn, which is wasteful.
• The positioning of the buttons could have been better; and the fact that the 'next page' and 'previous page' do not swap their function when you put the device in landscape mode is somewhat confusing.

These are mere annoyances, however. It's an ebook reader, not a webbrowser; I can live with that. And while the zoom function in the PDF files is not perfect, it mostly does the job. And the positioning of the buttons is probably something that will be different for each and every person.

I've found that just plain files are most easily read; the device does a decent job of auto-detecting headers and applying some basic markup; and if it gets confused, fidgeting with the text file until it gets it right is not too hard. In addition, the device comes with much more settings to apply to markup on text files than it does for either of PDF or HTML; e.g., one can change the zoom level in more settings, the line spacing, and a few more things.

Additionally, the device also comes with an MP3 player, but I don't really plan on using it. First, I don't like MP3 files; second, the device has not much battery—only 950mAh, which is enough for weeks because of the low power-usage of the screen—and using it for MP3 decoding is a waste of battery; and finally, I have a perfectly good portable media player, so I see no point in trying to use this device for that particular purpose.

But, well, I guess some people will like it. All in all, I do like the device. The attention to detail in the packaging is... heh. It even comes with a screwdriver to load the battery...

No more 'government'

So apparently the Belgian 'government' has failed to meet its deadline; and as a result, the prime minister has handed in the 'government's resignation to the King. I say 'government', because these people have been doing quite a lot of things—all except governing...

I must say I can't be surprised. I never liked Leterme; not before the elections, and not after. Now that more than a year has passed since his winning the elections, they have managed to accomplish exactly nothing.

Well, that's not exactly true. There's a pattern here:

• June 2007. Leterme wins the election, and starts talking. He accomplishes exactly nothing.
• August 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up. The King hands the initiative to some other people, who manage to get basic agreements about things in the course of a few weeks.
• September 2007. Leterme is put at the wheel again.
• December 2007. After months of talking, Leterme gives up a second time. The King asks Verhofstadt to form an interim government. He does so in 2 weeks.
• March 2008. Leterme gets parties to agree on some basic things, and promises "a second package of state reforms by July 15, 2008".
• July 15, 2008. Surprise: Leterme has accomplished exactly nothing, and has to hand in his resignation. A third time.

And even after that horrible track record, CD&V/N-VA is still not willing to put Leterme aside as a candidate for the prime ministry.

Now I'm sure some people will tell me that Leterme did indeed, accomplish something, such as the budget agreement of a few days ago. Well, here's a news flash: if you want to get a government set up, then not accomplishing that is pretty critical; something routine and simple as a budget is hardly noteworthy, then.

The one thing I do not understand, have never understood, and will not ever understand, is why the larger parties in Belgium feel so compelled to create "cartels" with small extremist fringe parties. They all fell into that trap; VLD (liberals) with Vivant (economic strangelings); CD&V (catholic democrats) with N-VA (flemish nationalists), and SP.A (socialists) with Spirit (left-wing something). I have no trouble understanding why the fringe parties want to do this (gives them power where occasionally they wouldn't have any), but the large parties? It only causes trouble (as the CD&V/N-VA cartel has now proven beyond any doubt); and I seriously doubt it causes them a net win in votes.

I could say that some other things about the past debâcle also puzzle me, such as the insistence of some people to get an unconditional split of BHV, thereby destroying all chances of even remotely reaching a compromise; but given the idiocy explained in the previous paragraph, I should hardly be surprised.

Sigh. I wish I had some decent politicians in this country; but the people I voted for lost seriously, and were not part of the negotiations. I guess that should mean I have to say: told you so; but then, that's not very productive either.

Here's for hoping they can still find some way out of this mess...

Debian testing

Martijn isn't too sure about Debian testing, though he doesn't go into much detail about the "not sure" bits. Well, Martijn, even though I could really use some more detail, let me make an attempt:

• Debian Testing isn't the perfect thing to use at all times. Especially right after a release, when people start uploading all kinds of crap to Debian unstable, it's probably better to stick with Debian Stable for a while. Right before a release (such as the time we're in right now), however, using testing on a laptop is probably a much better choice if you want reasonable up-to-dateness of the software on your system.
• In case you didn't know, testing does get security updates these days (since quite a few years already, actually).
• In the pre-sarge days, installing Debian almost required some magician to do it for you. These days, however, installing Debian is much easier, so if you're afraid of that, don't be. Also, the default "desktop" installation can compete with Ubuntu in many areas already, although there surely is some more work to be done.
• Debian is a bit more conservative with updates than is Ubuntu, even in the development distributions ('testing' and 'unstable'). This is generally a good thing if you don't want your system to break in all kinds of "interesting" ways right when you don't have the time (although that might still happen, though more so with unstable than with testing).
• Most of the bits that are available in Ubuntu are also available in Debian; and in Debian, in most cases they're done more thorough, because of the difference between Debian's and Ubuntu's approach to package maintenance: in Debian, every package has its own maintainer who is solely responsible for the package; in Ubuntu, maintainers are responsible for a whole lot more packages, which improves their view on the distribution as a whole, but makes it more difficult for them to follow up on the state of individual packages.

In all, I still prefer Debian over Ubuntu, mostly because of the higher attention to detail you'll find in Debian; I find that ubuntu developers usually don't have the time to pay too much attention to pesky details. This makes the system work slightly better. But, of course, YMMV, and if you decide to stay with Ubuntu because you think it works better in your particular use cases, more power to you!

On LVM volume group names

Lior blogs about LVM volume group names colliding, after he'd done an installation on two systems with 'vg00' as the volume group name, and trying to add the hard disk from one of them to the other machine. Which breaks in all kinds of interesting ways, of course.

Me, I avoid the problem altogether by just naming my volume groups sensibly.

wouter@samba:~$ sudo vgdisplay|grep 'VG Name'
  VG Name               samba
[...]
wouter@goa:~$ sudo vgdisplay|grep 'VG Name'
  VG Name               goa

... etcetera. If I ever have to put one of the disks from goa's (500G) RAID array into samba, then that'll be no problem, at all.