One of the biggest surprises that people starting to use Linux seem to run into is that you can’t rely on any particular support level from the community - everything is done on a voluntary basis and the responses will depend on a range of factors, including things like how busy the people involved are. People moving to Linux for reasons other than freedom, particularly those using it commercially, often don’t seem to notice this distinction.

You can normally help getting a response by providing as much information as possible about your problem and the steps you have taken to resolve it - this makes it very much easier for people to reply since, for example, it’s more likely that something will jump out at them.

These web pages contain some suggestions on the sorts of thing to do in your e-mail to help get the best response:

How to ask questions the smart way
How to report bugs effectively (this is targeted at end users more than developers).

With the kernel community it can also help to send direct copies of your mail to people who have worked on the relevant code since people may either miss postings on mailing lists (there is often a lot of traffic) or in some cases not be subscribed to the lists at all. This doesn’t apply to all free software projects - you should check the normal standards for a given project before doing this.

If you need guaranteed responses or more detailed responses than you are able to obtain from the community the usual approach is to work with people with whom you have a commercial relationship - for example, your chip or software vendors, or consultants you have employed.

Still, a long way to go before user space can start to rely on knowing if things are plugged in or not.

Joss is right, though - most applications should be working with a higher level user space API than either ALSA or OSS. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the embedded space where there are often vast numbers of controls that need to be exported in order to support the complex audio routing that devices like phones can have. Most of these should only be touched very occasionally when changing use case and should therefore be hidden from normal applications where they’re at best irrelevant and at worst confuse end users. They do, however, need to be exposed by the kernel in order to allow user space the flexibility to manage the audio configuration of the system at run time.

• Encounters at the End of the World: Werner Hertzog goes to Antarctica, making a film more about the sort of people who end up spending their time there than about anything else. Though there are suicidal penguins.
• Mum and Dad: If you like this sort of thing the chances are you’ll think it’s brilliant. You may, however, still agree with the other people who don’t like this sort of thing and might describe it as being sick and wrong.
• Standard Operating Procedure: I blogged about this at the time; Errol Morris covers Abu Ghraib and does it very well.
• Just Another Love Story: I really enjoyed this when I saw it, though I do agree with most of the linked review. It’s a noirish thriller with three different time periods in the story being revealed in parallel. It looks gorgeous, it’s very well executed but I’m hesitant since I think I may feel differently when I see it again.
• Good Dick: In broad terms this is a very messed up take on a romantic comedy, more messed up than I believe it’s really intended to be (if you see it, think about what’s actually going on in the story). I enjoyed it for this and the contrast with the immediate tone but it’s not for everyone.

As far as the EIFF moving to June goes… I’m not convinced. I didn’t notice any dramatic improvement in the quality of the programme and while it did avoid the rain that Edinburgh suffered in August there’s nothing quite like the atmosphere you get during the main festival.

There’s one fantasy series that I have kept up for more years than I’d care to count - a series by Steve Erikson called (in rather grand fantasy style) the Malazan Book of the Fallen. There’s a lot of good stuff in there in terms of standard nuts and bolts things that apply to all books like the quality of the writing and the world building but the main thing that keeps me buying the new novels as they come out is the way it breaks one of the most important genre standards: in these books life is just as random and potentially unfair as it is in this one.

Normally even the best fantasy presents a world where, fundamentally, everyone knows what is going on. There will be some form of challenge to the stability of the world driving the plot but this is most definitely an aberration to be dealt with. Things like magic will normally exist and while they won’t be understood by everybody the people who are expected to do so generally will. Bad things may happen but there will be some sort of rhyme or reason to it, a greater purpose beyond the immediate loss or suffering. Mostly, it’s all going to work out well.

For me all of this makes the experience much more empty than it should be - it’s harder to invest in what’s going on when at the back of your mind you always know roughly how things are going to turn out. The fact that the Malazan books avoid this is what draws me in and keeps me coming back to the series. Characters are confused, they don’t know what’s going on, they die (sometimes for no particular reason). The world is complex and messy, with several independant groups and civilizations acting by themselves with limited knowledge and abilities. All of this makes for much better suspension of disbelief and much more interest.

fatal: Entry 'include/linux/netfilter/xt_CONNMARK.h

There are several header files like this the names of which differ only in case and just can’t be represented on a filesystem that doesn’t distinguish between cases. This is most commonly seen by people attempting to build embedded Linux from Windows.

Today I’m doing that for the first time this year; summer is ending early.

What Apple Mail does here is to only enable the more complex formatting options if they add information that can’t be represented in the less complex formats. By default mails are sent in text/plain with the format=flowed option to let the reader know it can safely reflow the text and no HTML alternative is generated. If something that can’t be represented using format=flowed is included in the message then a HTML alternative is generated - transparently and without user intervention.

This is good partly because it’s nice to see format=flowed used, it’s a nice technical solution to the problem, but mostly because it’s great user interface design. Most Apple Mail users will never notice if it is or isn’t generating HTML e-mail, they’ll just see that it’s doing what they expect and won’t have to deal with an option that they probably don’t understand or have much of a view on. Other users won’t be troubled with HTML generated by Apple Mail users unless there is some content in the formatting. It’d be good to see more MUAs implementing similar behavior, at least optionally.