Search Results: "cas"

21 August 2006

Aigars Mahinovs: Dell Next Day service - 10.5 days turnaround

I previously mentioned that my brand new Dell Inspiron XPS m1710 notebook broke down just a few weeks after I got it. It took from Wednesday to Friday to arrange for pick-up n the notebook. The DHL guy came to my house on Monday morning and picked my laptop up. He said that the official line on these is that I will get it back in a week, but usually they get them back in a couple of days. On Tuesday I received an SMS saying that my laptop has arrived to repair centre and then another saying that it has proceeded to repair. Nothing happened on Wednesday but on Thursday I received another SMS, again saying that it proceeded to repair. On Friday I finally called back on the XPS support line and got an answer that my laptop is fixed and currently is being tested and that I will most probably get it back on Monday as Dell does not use the delivery option to deliver on Saturdays. And finally today at 11.00 in the morning a DHL courier knocked on my door with my notebook in hand. There was a note in the package saying that the CPU has been replaced. All in all - 10.5 days from first report until the laptop is fixed. I assume that is the worst case scenario. The techs on the phone were competent, but did not have the information about what I went trough in their online diagnostics wizard and did not have the information about emails that I sent them. One tech answered me on the phone, but another answered my email. There could be more integration there. Also I could not find any way to see more details about the progress of the repairs on Dell website - that should be easy to provide. In an ideal world, in cases when it is clear that the problem is in hardware, but not in the hard drive, it would be great if Dell could provide a temporary replacement laptop for the time of repair and put the hard drive of my existing laptop into the temporary replacement notebook, so that I an contiue working like nothing happened. It might not be the same spec, but it must be easy to swap the hard drive in, so I suppose that means that the same model is required. Note: just as I was starting to write this post, a Dell Customer Advocate commented on my previous blog post. They sure deserve some plus points for that :)

Gunnar Wolf: Caps Lock becomes useful again! / Is this a farewell, my dear Window Maker?

I have always hated and despised the Caps Lock key. Not only it is useless to anybody who works writing code, sysadmining, or plainly writing real text, but its mere existence has degraded the work quality of millions of people's work. Suddenly, IT GETS NORMAL TO WRITE LIKE THIS - It's just a magic spell that allows you to get rid of those old-fashioned rules about the language, about where to write in which case. Even worse, in Spanish some people tend to think that uppercase letters do not carry accents, so they produce text that is, um... Lets say it is readable, but that's often an overstatement.
[switch context]
I have been a happy and loyal user of Window Maker since 1997, when Juan Pablo Romero pointed me to it (BTW, I found Juan Pablo's homepage after searching for some links to post here and finding his, very old and probably unmaintained, WindowMaker page), back in the time where one of my favorite webpages was Window managers for X - clear sign that I didn't really like anything I had been using. And with WMaker, I was happy for (WOW) almost ten years. I still am. But after last week's ugly XFS corruption episode, I decided to follow the trend among some Debian people, and installed ion3.
My impression so far, with two and a half days of usage? I LOVE IT. It is the only WM I've met that really comes from a different point of view, stating that what most so-called modern WMs offer is just counter-productive. It just stays out of your way, not providing any visual distractions, and limiting to providing screens and frames to organize your windows. It acknowledges that its target audience (in my life I'd never set up ion3 for my mother ;-) ) usually hates using the mouse if unneeded, and that there is little point in wasting screen real estate with docks and desktops with functionality. It just sits there waiting for you to command its working via the keyboard - of course, the mouse is also an option, but not the natural one.
Anyway, I won't discuss the beauty of ion3 here - mostly because I have only scratched the surface so far. I have loved it, let me tell you. A little more on this in a couple of lines... Just for my Spanish-prefering friends, I found this piece of text explaining what ion3 is about: Ion3: Rompiendo con los entornos gr ficos convencionales
[merge contexts]
My only grudge is that in its default configuration, ion3 becomes the 0wn3r of Meta. What is Meta? What some people call "the Alt key". That key that is not Ctrl, but has become a controlling key. And I'm a heavy Meta user - Remember that my favorite way of interacting with the computer is Emacs. Yup, the nice OS without a decent editor, nicknamed after "Escape-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift". Rob me of my Meta, and the gained productivity might as well go down the drain.
Here comes the link to my first paragraph: Ion3 is very configurable. No, it's not configurable - it's programmable. The configuration files are pieces of Lua, a full programming language. Of course, this means you can do mostly anything with it... But you have to do it in the end. Editing ion3's behaviour is not just clicking on selectors - You can take a dive to get the feeling. It looks quite easy, but I yet have to get around it and start poking the configuration.
After mourning my lack of Meta, I came across a very useful post in Gregor Hermann's blog. Gregor, I owe you a beer or three - You not only gave me back my productivity, you also gave use to the most despised key in my keyboard. Two lines into XModmap, one line into a couple of Ion3 files (I have yet to be sure it is needed in all of them), and I now have a perfectly useful CapsLock key, which is the key I will manage my WM with. It just rocks! It stands in nobody's way, and I am sure I'll very soon grow used to it.

Uwe Hermann: Encrypted SMS Solutions?

Dear Lazyweb, I was recently thinking about SMS encryption (you know, the short messages sent from your cell phone). Or MMS encryption for that matter. Are there any Free Software solutions to implement such a thing, based on well-known crypto primitives and proven implementations thereof? From a quick glance I could not find anything usable, only lots of commercial, closed-source "solutions" which cost money and are basically crap. I was thinking about hacking together a small Java application (so that most modern phones can run it) which basically asks for a password and pipes your text through AES before sending the SMS. On the receiver's side, you enter the same password and get to see the plaintext. That's pretty much it. If you want something more elaborate you can use public-key crypto (basically embed GnuPG or similar into the application), but the above should be fine for most uses. Anyways, I do not want to start implementing something like this if there are other, more mature projects out there which do the same... Why you'd want to do this (other than simple paranoia, or the fact that governments and other institutions are spying on everyone these days, whether they're allowed to or not)? Well, one good reason for SMS encryption is when you're using some kind of SMS gateways, e.g. a website which gives you 2-3 free SMS per month if you sign up with them and give them tons of personal data. That alone is crappy enough, but you don't want their admins to be able to read and store all your SMSes in addition (which consist of simple plain-text, transmitted though HTTP in this case!). Neither should any local or remote scriptkiddy who knows how to use a sniffer be able to read your private SMSes. Solution: Write the text in your favorite text editor, pipe it through aespipe (for example), cut'n'paste the result in the web form of the SMS service. The receiver does everthing backwards and you're done.

Joachim Breitner: Smart URLs

Since Lucas has published his list of search engine shortcuts, I'll do that too. Maybe someone finds a useful addition for himself. I'm leaving out those that are predefined by Galeon and not used by me.

20 August 2006

Lucas Nussbaum: Who is using Debian s and Ubuntu s development versions ?

Scott J. Remnant claimed that it s the development community that use Debian testing or unstable. This doesn’t match my personal experience (I know many people running Debian testing/unstable who aren’t interested in Debian development), however I needed a better way to check this than just “my personal experience”. So I tried to answer the following question : Are normal users using Ubuntu edgy and Debian testing/unstable, or do they stick with Ubuntu dapper and Debian stable ? Simplified summary: (read below for details)
Ubuntu users:
…Ubuntu dapper (stable): 96%
…Ubuntu edgy (development): 4%
Debian users:
…Debian sarge (stable): 24%
…Debian testing/unstable (development): 76%
Detailed process: First, I did a poll on #ubuntu@irc.freenode.net using a CTCP VERSION query, and looked at people using Xchat and Ubuntu (Ubuntu is displayed in CTCP VERSION replies). I got 288 replies from Xchat users, 197 of them were using the Xchat package from Ubuntu. 189 (96%) of them are using version 2.6.1 (the version in Dapper), 8 (4%) of them are using versions 2.6.4 or 2.6.6. Then, I did the same poll on #debian@irc.oftc.net. I got 85 replies from Xchat users, and filtered out 15 of them because they weren’t from Debian users for obvious reasons. 17 users (24%) are using versions 2.4.0 or 2.4.1 (Debian sarge), 53 users (76%) are using versions 2.4.3, 2.4.4, 2.4.5, 2.6.1 and 2.6.4 (Debian testing/unstable - v.2.6.4, the current version in testing/unstable, has 41 users on its own). Statistically speaking, this isn’t very good, so I compared those results with another source of information : Debian popularity contest. 3002 submitters are using v.1.28 of the popularity-contest package (version in sarge) while 9682 submitters are using v.1.33 (version currently in Debian testing/unstable). That accounts for respectively 24% and 76% ! Same as above ! (OK, this is not so good, because I haven’t considered the intermediate versions here, while I did above)
Of course, those numbers are huge approximations, and are subject to a lot of hypotheses and questions, amongst them: I didn’t run the same poll on #debian-devel and #ubuntu-devel because I received some unpleasant comments already, and don’t want to run into angry Debian or Ubuntu developers (I’m still waiting for DAM approval after all :-)

19 August 2006

Simon Richter: Gaining motivation from looking back

Yesterday I refactored a bit of old code that still had its class names written in CamelCase and where the const keyword came before the type name (yes, my coding style evolved over time. I was pleased to see that I didn't have to change much otherwise; the code is exception safe, which makes my life a lot simpler in the new project, portable (developed on gcc, works equally well on Visual Studio) and is generally easy to understand with lots of clearly named generic functions for common tasks, and complex algorithms composed of simpler ones where possible, and documented where not. I guess I

Erich Schubert: Giving up on SELinux for sarge, maybe even Debian altogether.

I'm giving up on backporting SELinux to sarge. Too many changes are needed in too many apps to make them really compatible with SELinux. Nothing serious, but just lots and lots of small things. For example, the amavisd-new package will need a cronjob modification. This has already been resolved (somewhat) for unstable, but it means I would need to provide a modified amavisd-new package or a backport. I hope that when etch gets released end of the year (and I actually believe this will happen), many issues will already be resolved. But it depends of course on many people using SELinux in different settings. My most-annoying-issue with SELinux on Debian: cron bug #333837, open for some 300 days now. The debian cron package will backup e.g. /etc/shadow, which actually sounds like a quite inappropriate place for this task. And of course it's all in one file named /etc/cron.d/standard, instead of e.g. /etc/cron.d/backup-key-system-files or so, which I could then label backup_exec_t or something else to assign the special privilege of reading shadow files... It's bugs like these, unhandled for 300 days, together with having the impression of being the only one trying to get SELinux running and receiving basically no support by the SELinux upstream "community" (which is almost exclusively "enterprise", it seems). It's pretty much like everybody wants you to not use SELinux. Or in my case, not enable people to use SELinux on Debian, since I'm not just "joe average user", but actually trying to add SELinux support to the Debian distribution (which would help Ubuntu to get SELinux, too. The Ubuntu people seem to have given up on SELinux already).

David Welton: American Economics Association

It's obvious from my writings that I have developed an interest in economics, which developed out of a curiousity about the workings of free software business - how were we to make money creating free software? While that's still an open question, the tangent has been a fascinating one that I'm glad I followed. My work with the Tcl programming language further encouraged my interest as I sought to reconcile the language's extremely high quality and versatility with its falling popularity. If the answer wasn't a technical one, it had to be some squishy, human factor... economics and marketing. In any case, one of the things that has frustrated me about economics compared with my native territory of free software is the relative paucity of on line information, and almost total lack of quality sources of feedback (discussion groups or the like where serious discourse is the rule, rather than quackery or debates that quickly degrade into political rants). Not having the time, nor at present the inclination to sidetrack to the point of pursuing a degree in economics, which is the most obvious way of coming into contact with a lot of thought on the subject, at the recommendation of professor Stephen J Turnbull, I signed up to the American Economic Association, which sends out several hefty academic journals every quarter. Some of the math is a bit daunting, but there is quite a bit of material on various topics, and I think many others (there seem to be a fair amount of open source people with at least a passing interest in business and econ) who want to see something "closer to the metal" would find these journals worth their while, and it's not very expensive to sign up.

18 August 2006

Carlos Villegas: Insserv reordering and repeated init-scripts (SoC2006)

Some time ago I posted having obtained a 2 second time decrease in the boot time using insserv reordering. In that occasion, I had already deleted some repeated init scripts from the insserv modified /etc/rc2.d directory. Recently, I had problems using insserv as I thought the major change was just to change the order of some of the init-scripts (stop-bootlogd, sysklogd, klogd). Now, from a system starting in 53 seconds I got a 2 second improvement by using the same script order used some time ago. Besides, I thought I shouldn't bother to delete the repeated init-scripts as /sbin/init is supposed to ignore them. Nevertheless, by removing the remaining repeated scripts I got a further 2 second time improvement, i.e., a 4 seconds improvement! The bootcharts and init order are available at the project webpage.

17 August 2006

Roland Mas: Bits about Alioth

A few small things happen on the Alioth front. I mention them as small in comparison to the bigger job of atually migrating to the new box, but they may have some significance to you. bzr support: costa.debian.org AKA svn.d.o AKA arch.d.o can host bzr repositories. The procedure is, as usual, to file a support request asking for the creation of the repository, or nag us on IRC (#alioth). Please allow for 24 hours after the project creation, since the group isn't created on costa straight away; more on that below. Read/write access is done with 
bzr checkout sftp://<user>@arch.debian.org/bzr/<group>/whatever
(or bzr branch if you'd like), and anonymous read-only access is 
bzr branch http://arch.debian.org/bzr/<group>/whatever
git support: same procedure. Developer checkout becomes 
git clone ssh://<user>@costa.debian.org/git/<group>/whatever/.git
and anonymous becomes 
git clone http://arch.debian.org/git/<group>/whatever/.git
I'm told there are more efficient ways to do anonymous access, so stay tuned. Update: git-daemon is now installed, and anonymous users can therefore do 
git clone git://arch.debian.org/git/<group>/whatever
User/group and authentication data replication: as you may know, the authoritative source for these data is the PostgreSQL database on alioth (haydn.debian.org). From this database, the LDAP tree used for auth on haydn is regenerated every hour, and the PostgreSQL database used for auth on costa is regenerated by a cron.daily script every day at 06:25 UTC. That script takes 10-15 minutes to run, however, during which authentication would be down on costa, because it would first grab the data from haydn, then drop the database, then recreate it with the new and relevant data. It has come to my attention that you can rename databases, though, so the script has been fixed (create gforgenew, then rename gforge to gforgeold and gforgenew to gforge, then drop gforgeold), and the daily downtime should be down to a few seconds at most. As usual, in case of problems, come and see us on IRC, and submit a support request on the siteadmin project. Or mail us at admin@alioth.debian.org. Also, don't forget the Alioth wiki page!

16 August 2006

Manoj Srivastava: Burninating spam

It is funny that people say that no one has written software that does Beysian filtering in order to reject Spam at the SMTP level, just when I felt like writing up my mimedefang setup. I am of the school of thought that the only acceptable method of dealing with spam is to reject it at the SMTP protocol level. To accomplish this, I run crm114 and spamassassin from my mimedefang-filter, which runs as a milter while my sendmail is processing mail. I also do conditional grey listing, more on that below. The reason for running two different Spam detection mechanisms is that while one or the other is often fooled and mis-categorizes mail, the score or confidence level of such mis-categorization is low, and the mechanism that is not fooled enables the combined system to do the right thing in most cases. I tend to quarantine and keep even the messages I reject for about a month, and do spot checks, so out of roughly a 800 mails a day volume, I get about one or two spam messages a day, and did not ever reject a mail I manually would classify as ham in the 6 months n which I double checked every decision taken by my system, and in the spot checks I continue to perform. While this is not as good a record as the author of crm114 reports, it is good enough for me. The grey listing: since I try to be conservative, and opt to lean towards not discarding any email that is legitimate at the expense of not trapping all spam, and since I do not discard any mail I accept unread based on an automated decision, I was getting more Spam than I cared for still. So, I added the grey listing layer – but only for mail that were not ambiguously spam or viruses (which are rejected), or ham, which are accepted for delivery. Most of the Spam that was slipping through came from the grey area. So, I implemented grey listing only for these mails. Grey listing happens on a triplet of the class C domain of the senders IP, the sender, and recipient. A grey listed email encounters processing problems, and is temporarily rejected with a 503 for 30 minutes, and then retries are allowed through for 4 hours, in which case the triplet is white-listed for 35 days (catches monthly announcement messages). Known Spam resets the white-listing, and retrying past the window does too. Doing it this way, known good correspondents suffer no delay, unambiguous mail from strangers flows right through, and I improve my filters based on the results all the time, so my discriminator improves. My filter is available for examination. See also the older posting, like the time honoured tradition of /., this posting is a duplicate.

Lars Wirzenius: Random thought: TDD doesn't eliminate debugging

Martin, I know about TDD, thanks. It is great for preventing all the kinds of bugs you expect to make (or make again), and can write test cases for. Been using it for years. It's part of what I meant when I said "every now and then a bug slips through, and then I'm screwed". It doesn't, however, help, when something really unexpected happens. For example, who would have expected beforehand to write a test case for the Pentium floating point bug? Not just a test case of whether floating point arithmetic works at all, but a test case specifically for the small number of special cases in which the original Pentium failed. It's for the unexpected cases where you really need your debugging skills. That's what the book is good for.

Evan Prodromou: 28 Thermidor CCXIV

I spent most of the day today putting polishing touches on the OpenID MediaWiki extension I took to Wikimania a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to work on, but spending a lot of time with Jonathan Daugherty of Janrain Inc., David Recordon of Verisign and David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios let me know that there was still a lot of work to do. Needless to say, helping kate of Wikia and Travis of wikiHow step through the installation and testing also was a humbling experience. "No... don't do that... Ouch... No, I didn't think of that... Uh, I'll definitely get to that later..." Probably the most painful moment was having about 4 people all at once exclaim in horror that I was storing searchable data inside a blob in the database. "Uh, see, it was just easier that way..." Harsh stares for Evan, you can believe. So today I've been sanding a few of the rough edges and doing some optimization (indexed columns -- what a concept!) and otherwise fudging with the code to make it work better. Jonathan had done some quick hacks at the conference, and I've been adding in his patches as well. tags:

Tha Grill Maj, Amita June and I went out to dinner at the Tha Grill on rue Laurier and St. Laurent this evening. We had some anniversaries to celebrate, so it seemed like a good day to go out for dinner at a new restaurant. The Grill is at the portal between Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal hipster neighborhood and foodier-but-also-hipster Mile End. It's got huge, open windows on St. Laurent and we got to sit right off the sidewalk, perfect people-watching spot. The room is big and airy with pleasant wood details and lots of Thai statuary -- all in natural wood tones. It's a very nice room. The food was great, too. We got crab claws in curry sauce, and a green curry, with papaya salad and fried squid as appetizers. It was all done very nicely. Most pleasant was the proprietor coming to our table with small, heart-shaped slices of melon d'eau (watermelon) for Amita June. Les enfants sont sacr s en Tha land, he gave as explanation: that is, children are sacred in Thailand. Ah, if that were only the case everywhere. It's hard to see summer slipping away in Montreal -- especially since we're off to Wikisym this weekend, and by the time we come back it will be a few days into September. Such a good place to be when the sun is warm, really. tags:

15 August 2006

Mario Iseli: OpenLDAP, LUG-Seeland, School

Today was a strange christian day here in Kanton Solothurn and I didn’t have to work, so I had a lot of time to prepare my presentation for next Friday about OpenLDAP. First of all I prepared the stuff for the school which begins tomorrow, so my holidays are now definitely past :-( . I was excited that I didn’t receive my timetable by snailmail so I had to google and found it finally. Poorwise i have now to stand up very early in the morning, my train goes at 07.07 in the morning. Now to OpenLDAP, fortunately Mathias Weyland, the president from the LUGS, gave me a book about OpenLDAP from O’reilly, I really like it: It’s quite informative and sometimes the author is making some jokes. Priska Rubischon already bothered that i have to tell something about netgroups and autofs, this was completely new because I newer worked with NIS (and netgroups etc.) and neither with autofs (in most cases I use samba and libpam-mount). It’s not so difficult as i thaught. OpenLDAP in Debian comes with nice schemas which help to migrate from NIS to LDAP, so I had a look at those schemes and the chapter about netgroups in the book. Also autofs is not complicated, for example, if you want to share /home to the clients you have to prepare a NFS-Server which shares this directory and configure /etc/auto.master and /etc/auto.home on the clients. These two files can lookup where and how it can mount /home. On my testing-infrastructure I just used netgroups for the NFS-exports, so I have now an example what they’re for. After all I realized that my speech will also be about “How do I plan a network in a company”, so I realized that the security of LDAP is also very important. Fortunately OpenLDAP can be secured quite hard, it supports SASL and KERBEROS_V4 authentication mechanisms! When I would realize now a network i would do the following: I still ask me how i can protect my netgroups so that nobody can plug computer “x” out and plug in his computer, take the IP of “x” and mount the NFS-shares. Kerberos as user authentication would be a solution, but I don’t really like it. As I already told I prefer libpam-mount, with it’s help it would be possible that every user gets his share mounted maybe over smb. Now I will search for a solution how i can properly secure NFS, so it does only allow connections from users@boxes authenticated with LDAP and not user@host-which-can-be-faked. If you have an idea feel free to write it down here in my blog! In the evening I went to “Biel” by train to join the LUG-Seeland meeting. Beat Fasel explained me a lot about genetical biology, his work and the evolution, this was very interesting. Later we talked about the future of our community, I will prepare bylaws for the next meeting which we will sign. Other ideas were about preparing an install event and a mailinglist because we don’t have communication over the internet and this is quite complicated if we want to organise something in teamwork.

Thom May: Apache 2.2 finally hits debian

Yup, the long wait is finally over and thanks to a cast of thousands 2.2.3 is now in experimental. I’d like to extend thanks to Mark and Canonical for sponsoring much of the original work, and also the sprint at the start of this year that got most of the remaining work done. What we really need now is lots of upgrade reports so we can figure out how much automated help a 2.0->2.2 upgrade can reliably provide, and also where. I’ve been running these packages in production for some time so I’m not that concerned about overall stability, but I’ve not been using some of the weirder modules. We also need to get third-party module packages to stage updated packages into experimental built against 2.2

Gunnar Wolf: FUSE vs. GnomeVFS?

Aigars: I agree with Womble's comment in your blog. Maybe GnomeVFS is just way too much? Maybe it could be substituted by an on-demand FUSE-based mounter and unmounter? It seems to me it'd be saner to get all the relevant file manager GUIs (or plainly UIs, maybe even some overpowered shells) to be able to interpret an URL request as just a call to said script and a local filesystem operation? Mounting via FUSE in a protected, per-user area, and then just unmounting after a given inactivity timeout.
Yes, I know GnomeVFS is able to do all that and more. But as it's always the case with Gnome and me: I doubt most of the times you need all the "all that". And probably there are saner ways to implement it than via yet-another-layer-for-yet-another-already-solved-thing.

Zak B. Elep: Be Thankful

(Or, Why a Broken Video Card is a Good Thing™.) Yesterday, my nVidia geForce4mx-440 video card broke its advanced rendering stuff (OpenGL, accelerated X, et al.) forcing me to use its VESA mode for X. Of course, this wasn’t much of a pain for me since I don’t do much rendering or gaming nowadays (only for some parish projects,) but for my folks (who use this desktop when I’m away, of course ;) this was a major problem. Well, at least for my Mom. The breakage of the video driver meant that the Windows installed alongside my Kubuntu system could not start up normally; one had to press F8 at boot time in a splitsecond to catch the elusive Windows menu that allows, among other things, logging in to Windows under Safe Mode or VGA mode. The result would be to get inside a 640×480 desktop, with barely much room for movement; while its certainly possible to adjust to 800×600, the fact that one had to do that meant an extra step in using what really is a 5-year-old-and-hopelessly-outdated operating system. Not to mention the occasional flickers of the screen and random image corruption. Then, a bit later, Windows finally gave up. Neither the safety of Safe Mode or the vega of VGA mode can save the user from the horror. A monitor with its status lights blinking, blinking, blinking… Mom would be in a panic. And she has classes tomorrow, and she needs to print some things NOW!!!  Ok, said I, System Administrator of the Desktop revan. I’m going to do something. And do something I did. I promptly logged in to Kubuntu, cleaned up one of its partitions that used to hold /usr/local/ (a hangover from my old Debian install, and cp -pa‘d my way, backing up what’s in C:\Documents and Settings\ as well as some other important files. Then… I was a bit stumped. What else I could do? Reinstall Windows? Yeah, right. That could work, but then again I need to go through the hoops all over again, activating the damn thing (knowing full well that Windows Product Activation ceased some months ago) and grabbing the stuff needed to have a working system (office, internet, etc.) Of course I can simply use OpenOffice.org, but I figured if, I installed OpenOffice.org for Windows, then why shouldn’t I install yet another GNU/Linux system as well? That lead me to the idea of simply extending my /home setup in Kubuntu to cover the old Windows partition, but I figured too that this is awkward. Then I remembered that Mom was nagging me to install Edubuntu some time ago, after having heard that is was really neat as an teaching system. Of course! This is the perfect time. The opportunity finally presented itself. So, I finally fragged /dev/hda2, formatted it using ReiserFS, and promply installed Edubuntu. Teh Ende Result: Sweet. Well, my revan’s finally Windows-free, for the first time since it got to our home in August 2003. A fitting birthday change, indeed. Thanks to my b0rked video card. And Edubuntu! :D

Carlos Villegas: System reinstalled and testing preload again (SoC 2006)

Currently recovering from a disk failure with lots of data lost (i'll backup more often now), I'm trying to tackle with the inconsistencies sketched in the previous blog: preload and parallel booting hotspots don't perform as before. I guess the discrepancies came from playing too much with the boot process.
The new system has originally a boot time of 52 seconds and the installation of preload 0.4 on a freshly installed system gave 1 second longer boot time during the first reboot and came back to the original time after 4 reboots and goes back to 53 seconds afterwards.
The bootchart is available on the bootcharts section of the project webpage for two preload configurations.

Besides, unverbose booting was tested. Well, simply verbose was changed to "VERBOSE=no" and "VERBOSE=quiet" just making the system slower! What could this be? Manual tweaking may be probably needed. The bootcharts for the different cases are available on the bootcharts section of the project webpage

Finally, a laptop testing system was prepared for comparison. It has also a fresh debian sid installation on an external USB hard drive. The results using the laptop test bed were similar for unverbose booting although the boot time seem to be unconsistent! Around 2 second changes without networking and higher with networking. I _guess_ a possible reason is by using an usb hard drive.

Evan Prodromou: 27 Thermidor CCXIV

I went up today to visit Kasper Souren, AKA Guaka, who's visiting wt:Montreal for a few weeks. Kasper and I have been in touch for several years -- he's been involved with Wikitravel almost as long as anyone -- but we just met in person a couple of weeks ago at Wikimania. He's just returned from South America, and will soon depart for the West Coast of North America and then off to Mexico. He's quite a traveller. Guaka's here to help out with the CouchSurfing Project, an excellent wt:hospitality exchange program that lots of people say good things about. There are apparently bunches of CouchSurfers in Montreal right now helping out with technical issues, content, support, and other great Website-errific stuff. Of course, the local CS community is practicing the ethic and sharing their homes with visitors. I'm not 100% sure how it works, CouchSurfing runs on a very collective model, and a lot of people are devoting their time to this get-together. I went to visit this afternoon, partly to catch up with Guaka, and partly to visit the collective. We talked a lot about the difference between Wikitravel and hospitality exchange -- how anonymous the sharing is for an information-oriented project like a wiki, versus the very intimate person-to-person nature of home sharing. I also talked for a while with Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing and a very nice guy. We all discussed how to let CouchSurfers copy and distribute Wikitravel guides, possibly customizing them for CS needs, and also for linking back to WT to update and improve the data on our guides. I'm pretty jammed on the whole CS thing -- I'm going to sign up quite soon. Should be fun. tags:

DekiWiki I'm interested to see how this OpenGarden thing works out for MindTouch. I saw a story about their Wiki product on Port 25, which I have to admit I read pretty regularly. Every once in a while there's something I should probably know. OpenGarden is MindTouch's Open Source initiative, including a wiki engine called DekiWiki, built on the .NET technology, and a wp:REST-based Web app framework called Dream. Apparently the whole thing runs fine on top of Mono, which means theoretically I could install it. But I haven't really done a lot of Mono web stuff before -- no idea how well it works. Also, have you noticed how people involved with Mono say "MOH-NOH", like the actual original Spanish pronunciation? Unlike everyone else, who calls it "MAH-NOH", like mononucleosis? That's a weird thing. OpenGarden has a MediaWiki conversion tool, which is almost a necessity for any wiki engine trying to compete in 2006. They might want to try lobbying those guys at the Mono Project... who appear to be using MW as their main site engine! Anyways, I'm going to give this DekiWiki a try. Who knows? It could be fun. I don't know about their overreaching claims for the GPL, but it can't hurt for a local install, right? I seem to remember there was a Scheme language plugin for .NET somewhere, too... By the way, I'm still bullish on JAMWiki, the MediaWiki-workalike using Java Web Services. But I like to experiment with new software, too. tags:

SocialText Speaking of commercial Open Source Wiki software, I was really glad to see that SocialText has released a FLOSS version of their flagship product. SocialText has been such a good corporate citizen in the wiki and FLOSS world. Not only were they instrumental in the launch of BarCamp, but ST employs some of the smartest wiki minds in the world today (like Seb and Sunir). And, of course, Ross Mayfield's blog is a great clearinghouse for wiki business info. ST has made a business model in training companies in the WikiWay. I think that makes a lot of sense, and they show a lot of commitment to the idea by demonstrations like this. tags:

Fired from Technorati for my UFO beliefs So, I was having some random and unpleasant 500 Server Error errors with this blog recently, and apparently Technorati has given up on my site in frustration. No matter how often I do an update, and then ping, it still doesn't refresh my recent articles. I'll have to figure out some tricks to get back in Technorati's good graces. I like the service a lot. tags:

Aigars Mahinovs: Why? Oh Gods! Why?


$ mv .ssh/ .ssh.old/
$ python
>>>import gnomevfs
>>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" )
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
gnomevfs.AccessDeniedError: Access denied
>>>
$ ssh aigarius.com
The authenticity of host 'aigarius.com (85.254.216.40)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 6d:29:c0:f3:d0:84:c9:a9:d9:4c:7e:e3:1a:18:a2:e2.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'aigarius.com,85.254.216.40' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
aigarius@aigarius.com's password: *******
[...]
aigarius.com$ exit
$ python
>>>import gnomevfs
>>> gnomevfs.get_file_info( "ssh://aigarius:password@aigarius.com/home/aigarius" )
<gnomevfs .FileInfo 'aigarius'>
>>>
 Of course, this is mentioned nowhere in the sparse documentation. Please keep me away from the person who wrote GnomeVFS and its Python bindings. Bloodshed might ensue. Bug reported Why can’t someone write a nice, light, working network file transfer protocol abstraction library that would be independent of any desktop environment (bonus) and a working X server (I am looking at you, GnomeVFS). Something that would simply provided all file and folder manipulation operations in sync and async ways in such way that those operations work completely uniformly across all supported protocols. Support for at least ssh and ftp is essential, webdav, nfs, rsync and other protocols that allow writing files to remote locations and http, https and other protocols that only allow read only access to remote files would be very welcome. The library should be in C with bindings in C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP and also a command line processor that would allow all commands to be used in a shell script.
Why something like this can not be written and obsolete the GnomeVFS and those KIOslaves. Freedesktop.org, I am looking at you, please! Update: Apparently I only need to “import gnome.ui” and execute “gnome.ui.authentication_manager_init()” and my application will automagically get a proper authentication dialog in this case. Unfortunately it is not documented anywhere that I could find. :P

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