Evil Home Stereo

Nice. Times Online reports:

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that [...] has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth [...].

There’s no reason to worry of course:

Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. “There’s absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokeswoman said.

Nobody would ever think to link your IMEI or IMSI number to your bonus card, your gift card or even your credit card number of course. And if anybody did so, they’d probably put a notice to an easy-to-find place, like an 8pt sign at the entrance or on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.

How do you know that Linux becomes mainstream-ready? If stuff happens magically and you don’t know where to start debugging of course.

Seriously: I always had some issues accessing my digicam (an Olympus SP-700) from KDE (actually, Kubuntu): The system always first tried to access it via some magic camera device while it actually offers a standard usb-storage device. I always had to cancel the dialog which offered me to use the first one and wait for the second one to appear. Weird but it worked.

Since I upgraded to Kubuntu 8.04,  the workaround doesn’t help anymore. The second dialog never appears. Not even the /dev/sdx-device is created anymore. So it seems like I’ve actually got to start debugging that stuff. My guess is that its a weird clash between the HAL and/or udev and gphoto2. Ie. somehow gphoto2 (which creates those weird camera devices/mounts) thinks it should handle the camera while it is actually not necessary and the default handler would handle it just fine.

But debugging HAL/udev is actually not as easy as looking at some dmesg output. Looking at /etc/udev/rules.d didn’t help, seems like I’ve got to dig deeper and somehow get some debugging output from the daemons working in the background…

But I shouldn’t complain: Debugging got indeed a lot more complicated, almost as tangled as the Windows stuff. But while both systems work in 99% of all cases, in the remaining 1% I can at least have a look at the sources and grep some plain text config files.