Search Results: "ron"

4 June 2007

Evan Prodromou: 15 Prairial CCXV

I'm sitting in our suite in the Doubletree on Times Square in New York City, catching up with some email and generally trying to pull myself together. It's been a remarkably busy week and this is the first time I've been able to sit down to blog for a while. We moved to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac last Wednesday, and most of my time last week was taken up either packing things (clothes, computers, dishes), unpacking the same things, or taking things that I didn't want to pack/unpack to various charitable organizations. Our move-in went smoothly -- the hardest part was moving our old fridge and stove to our new house, then moving the fridge and stove and deep freeze from our new house to the old apartment for Julia and Antoine to use. The new house came with a lot of new goodies, too. We bought a new couch for our new livingroom, and a new king-size bed for our new bedroom. On top of all that, I signed us up for Vid otron cable Internet instead of our old reliable Bell Canada DSL, and it's turned out to be quite fast and easy to use. So on top of the excitement of having a new place to live, there have been a lot of new toys to play with. Thankfully, our cats and our daughter have adapted quite well to their new environment. Amita June has a new bedroom, but she's been through so much travel -- hotel rooms and friends' homes -- that she's able to sleep just about anywhere. Topaz and Xe (the cats) don't usually adapt very well, but Maj kept them in the upstairs bathroom for a few days The thing that's surprised me the most about moving into the new house is how seldom we go upstairs. All our bedrooms are downstairs, as well as the new office/den, and we seem to get a lot of our needs met down there. The upstairs area is really really nice, though: lots of light and air. But the stairs are a real energy barrier. I guess my legs are going to get stronger and I'll get used to running up and down them several times a day. Probably the biggest disappointment of the move-in was that our new paint job, which had been so lovingly planned, got pretty marked-up in certain parts of the house -- specifically, the halls and stairs. We'll be doing some touch-up painting ourselves, but it is still kind of a bummer to see all these nicks and scratches on the otherwise pristine walls. tags: moving newhouse 4690ruepontiac

Train in vain We're in New York City for the awards ceremony for the Webby Awards. Wikitravel won the Webby award for best travel Web site of 2007 -- quite an honor. We came right after our move-in, so it feels a little rushed. We're just here for about 72 hours. We'd thought about going down to visit family in New Jersey, but we really need to finish getting unpacked and settled in to the new house. We're planning on coming down for a relaxed family visit in NJ later this summer, instead -- maybe combining it with a trip to the Jersey Shore. Although there are plenty of flights between Montreal and New York, and it's only about a 6- to 8-hour drive, we decided to try something different this time. We took the Adirondack (Amtrak) train, which runs down the shores of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley. My theory was that the train trip would let us stretch our legs, read, and get some work done, and that AJ could run around and enjoy herself, rather than being cooped up in a car or airplane seat. Although the train was the slowest option (it's scheduled as a 9-hour trip), it might end up being the most comfortable. I think the results were mixed. Indeed, the trip was a comfortable one, and Amita June got to run up and down the aisles and climb all over the empty seats. However, we got stopped at the US border due to an elevated terror alert, and what was supposed to be a 30-minute scheduled customs stop dragged into a two-and-a-half hour inspection. By the time we got to New York, we were more than two hours late. Among other things, this meant that I missed the opening cocktail reception for the Webbies, which was kind of a bummer. It was dumping down rain in torrents when we finally got to Penn Station, though, so I think that the rooftop reception probably wasn't all that much fun. I got soaked trying to get us a cab, but we had a decent ride to our hotel -- the functional but unexciting DoubleTree Suites on Times Square. We had a hard time finding a hotel that would be even remotely affordable, in Manhattan, and had junior suite rooms. Suites are great when you're traveling with a toddler -- it means you can put them to bed at 8PM and then go in the other room to stay up the rest of the evening. We had a decent room-service dinner -- Caesar's, nachos, 2 Heinekens -- and crashed out. This morning I woke up to a text message from my friend Ben Cerveny. He's also in New York for a few days -- he figured out that we were both going to be here using the cool Dopplr service. I rousted up Maj and Amita June -- late sleepers, lately -- and we all went down to Greenwich Village to meet Ben at The Grey Dog. The caf had decent coffee and pretty hearty breakfasts. We stayed for about 2 hours. We ambled over to the Center for Architecture to check out a few exhibits and stretch our legs. It turned out to be a great place to bring a toddler -- not too crowded, and pretty noise-tolerant. Amita burned herself out running through the exhibits. We left Ben behind and headed back to the room for naps and computer time. I was going to try to go to the Webby event for film and video tonight, but there was some complicated signup thing I was supposed to do, and I ended up failing to do it. It's probably just as well -- Maj isn't feeling great. So we're going to just get some dinner together and call it an early evening. tags: newyork wikitravel travel

Certifi.ca re-certified For the last month I've had a TODO item on my list: New SSL cert for certifi.ca. Of course, I let it slide and slide -- definitely not an urgent item, right? Well, not until the cert expired last Sunday. Oops. It took me a while to get certifi.ca a new cert -- I wanted to get it with the name of the new corporation I've started to manage my OpenID sites, called Control Yourself, Inc. or, in French, Contr lez-vous, Inc.. (I'm not even sure if contr lez-vous makes any sense, actually.) The folks at Comodo had a hard time with the Quebec corporate registration and asked for a lot of extra documentation, which dragged things out a few days. On top of that, I got distracted by the move, so I haven't had much time to think about SSL certs. But I got the cert late last week, and ended up with another problem: when I replaced the old cert and "ca-bundle" files with the new ones, Apache mysteriously failed to start up -- at all. It just kerploded with no error log information. I was unable to find any documentation on why this would be the case. I spent some extra time debugging this afternoon, and came to an embarrassing conclusion. The program I used to feed a password to Apache (using SSLPassPhraseDialog) was giving it the password for the old key. Doh! Fixing that made Apache start up just fine. I wish I had a good way to attract Google searches for this, but maybe this sentence will work: If your Apache server with mod_ssl fails mysteriously right after startup, make sure that the passphrase is generated correctly. tags: apache certifica comodo sslpassphrasedialog mod_ssl passphrase

Creative Commons shrinks a bit Kudos to Creative Commons, who have retired their controversial Developing Nations and Sampling licenses. Critics have pointed out that all CC licenses allowed a basic universal right -- verbatim, non-commercial copying -- except for the Sampling and DevNations. I think the move has helped to focus CC somewhat. Although Creative Commons started as a way to explore novel methods for letting people share certain rights to their works, this move will set a baseline for what's an acceptable CC license and what's just not enough. As Lawrence Lessig says in the announcement: There is a strong movement to convince Creative Commons that our core licenses at least permit the freedom to share a work noncommercially. Creative Commons supports that movement. We will not adopt as a Creative Commons license any license that does not assure at least this minimal freedom at least not without substantial public discussion. It's a good idea, and I'm glad CC is taking this tack. I hope that those people who've criticized CC in the past for not having such a baseline will take the opportunity for a rapprochement. tags: cc devnations sampling creativecommons richardstallman

Funds for Standout Jobs Congrats to Montreal entrepreneurs Fred Ngo, Ben Yoskovitz, and Austin Hill. Their new high-high-end recruiting engine, Standout Jobs, just got an angel round of funding to the tune of $1.5 million. Yeah, they're only Canadian dollars (see Journal/1 Brumaire CCXV), but that means a lot more today. Fred, Ben and Austin have all done a lot to advance the local technology community. I'm glad to hear that their project is taking the first steps to success. tags: standoutjobs fredngo benyoskovitz austinhill

3 June 2007

Marco d'Itri: units(1) and the TCP windows size

How much of a link having a 100 ms latency I can use if I am using a 64 kB TCP window?


md@wonderland:~$ units -v '64kB / 100ms' Mbps
	64kB / 100ms = 5.12 Mbps
	64kB / 100ms = (1 / 0.1953125) Mbps
md@wonderland:~$

How big a window do I need to fill a 100 Mbps link having a 40 ms latency?


md@wonderland:~$ units -v '100Mbps * 40 ms' KiB
	100Mbps * 40 ms = 488.28125 KiB
	100Mbps * 40 ms = (1 / 0.002048) KiB
md@wonderland:~$

(I have just found the months old draft of this post, I wonder if there is something fundamentally wrong in it or I just forgot to send it...)

Matthew Palmer: OfflineIMAP and Deleting Folders

(File this under "Reminders for the future Matt") I use, and highly recommend, OfflineIMAP for the synchronisation of your e-mail between your daily working machine and your IMAP server (if you don't have an IMAP server available for your mail, it's high time you got one). You point it at an IMAP server somewhere far, far away, and a local Maildir, and all of your mail and folders magically get synchronised in both directions. New folder on the server? After the next run, it'll be on your local machine. Even more magical, though, is that any new mail or folders you create on your local machine will be uploaded to the server. Woohoo! Offsite Backups! (Before you GUI mail users say "pfft, my client does that all for me", I'll remind you that I don't need to chew several hundred megs of core to delete my spam) I've got some magical procmail rules (specifically, look for "ARTFUL PROCMAIL") that automatically filter list e-mail into individual folders (with automatic creation of the folder if necessary, of course). This makes mailing lists soooo much easier to handle. Of course, when I unsubscribe from the list a couple of weeks later, that folder is still sitting there, empty and forlorn. I don't mind empty directories, except that they slow down the OfflineIMAP sync run, since it asks "any new mail in here?" for every one of them. I'd just delete them from my local machine periodically, except that OfflineIMAP can't delete folders off the server if you remove them from your local Maildir (and vice versa). Instead, the folder gets re-created on the local machine, which is definitely not the result I'm looking for. I'm pretty sure this is an IMAP limitation, so I'm not criticising John Goerzen for not implementing this particular feature. However, the empty folders bother me a bit, so I decided to do something about it. Namely, I hacked up some little shell one-liners. These one-liners are all dependant on you having the same IMAP server (Courier) and folder name mapping (none) as me, otherwise there's a good chance that your file names won't match the patterns I've used. For reference, My folders on the server are dot-directories under $HOME/Maildir, and my folders all start with INBOX. on the client. Also, both sides use periods to separate folder levels. As an example, e-mail to the debian-devel-announce list gets stored in $HOME/Maildir/.lists.debian-devel-announce on the server, and $HOME/Maildir/INBOX.lists.debian-devel-announce on the client. I've got one big before you start warning: this process involves deleting things. If you're not able to verify that what these snippets are doing is correct for your particular situation, then please do not run them. Also, if running them causes all your e-mail to disappear or your cat to fall pregnant (despite being spayed and/or male), then that isn't my fault. The only warranty I give is that It Works For Me. It May Not Work For You. As a first step, make sure that your local and remote mail stores are in sync -- presumably by running OfflineIMAP. Otherwise, a folder which is empty on one side might not be quite-so-empty on the other side, and that would possibly make for sadness. Stopping e-mail from coming into your mailboxes would be good, too -- I just turned off my MTA for a few minutes, because clogging other people's queues is fun. Doing something smart with procmail would also work. On the OfflineIMAP client machine (laptop, home desktop, whatever), cd into your local mail store, and run this to generate a list of IMAP folders that don't have anything in them:

 for i in INBOX.*; do find $i -type f   grep -q $i   \
 (echo $i   sed 's/^INBOX//'); done >/tmp/empties

The contents of /tmp/empties should look something like:

 .Deleted
 .junk
 .lists.debian-devel-announce
 .lists.something-funny
 .spam

Review the list of folders it produced (just to make sure nothing really unpleasant ended up in the list), and then run:

 for i in $(cat /tmp/empties); do rm -rf INBOX$i; done

to delete all the empty folders. Next, copy the list of folders onto the IMAP server (yes, you need shell access on the server to do all of this; that's why I run a Linode), cd into your Maildir on the server, and run this:

 rm -rf $(cat /tmp/empties)

That removes the folders from the server as well. For some reason, OfflineIMAP doesn't notice that a folder has gone away, and so it doesn't remove the metadata for the deleted folders from it's cache. I'm not sure if that hurts performance or is otherwise injurious to your health. To be ultra-neat, go into $HOME/.offlineimap (or wherever your metadata dir is) on the client machine and run

 for i in $(cat /tmp/empties); do find . -name INBOX$ i ; done  xargs rm -rf

And that makes everything clean and tidy. Now, of course, someone's going to point me to a small script that finds all of your local empty folders and deletes them locally then issues an IMAP "delete folder" command on the server. But I had fun working all this out, so it's not a complete waste.

Bernd Zeimetz: hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic

hi, planet && iso8859-15 to utf8 with netatalk magic Hi, Planet!
Welcome to my blog, and thanks to Martin for subscribing me. I m not going to bother you with any details about me, if you have any questions feel free to ask me on freenode or oftc (in case you re wondering: my nick is bzed).

After a longer time of planning we ve upgraded our main file server at work: New machine, new storage (7TB - woohoo!), Etch instead of Sarge and UTF-8 for file names instead of ISO8859-15. Everything not a too complicated thing, except for renaming the about 10,000,000 files from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8 in a proper way.
In theory this is easy, as convmv happily takes care of the problem. But this did not work for us unfortunately, as we re not only providing NFS and Samba services, but also AFP (Apple_Filing_Protocol) via netatalk. Years ago you had to choose ISO8859-15 if you wanted to allow your Apple and Windows users to see the same, non-broken file names - not only because AFP didn t support UTF8 before version 3, which came out with OSX1). Normally you d think that a server would not allow a client to write a file with a file name which includes not supported characters - again, OSX and netatalk go their own way here:
Characters which are not supported by the underlying file system are character(!)-wise encoded using the CAP encoding. So we had to find a way to

convert file names from ISO8859-15 to UTF-8
replace CAP encoded characters by the appropriate UTF-8 character

Luckily netatalk ships the uniconv(1) util2) which is able to take care of this problem. It also updates the CNID3) Database at the same time. There s two things you need to take care of in case you re using the dbd CNID backend:

uniconv assumes that cnid_metad is listening on port 4700, you need to start it first. Don t run afpd at the same time!
If you ve specified external CNID dbpaths in your AppleVolumes.default (normally they re located in the root of each volume, prone to be deleted by users accidentally), you need to move the .AppleDB directory into your volume s root directory, otherwise uniconv will create a new CNID database. Just move it back as soon as uniconv is finished.

Be careful: uniconv assumes that all colons in a file name are part of a CAP encoded character. That s not a problem as long as you have only Mac and Windows clients accessing your server, as both systems do not allow colons in file names. In our case we found a number of cache files from Nautilus (which is running on our sunray/Solaris web-surf terminals as default browser) with colons in the file name. I hope no user will miss them ;-)

Including a final synchronisation of all files to the new storage, about two hours it took uniconv to convert the file names and a aunch break, we were finished after about 14 hours of work. Until now it seems that our users didn t notice the change at all, except for those who realized that they have much more free space now. Looks like a successful weekend so far! :-D

debian, linux

1) and uses a NFD variant of Unicode normalization (UTF-8#Mac_OS_X), but netatalk takes care of this and translates it into the NFC form, which is used on most other platforms 2) it s called netatalk-uniconv in Debian and shipped with netatalk 3) Catalog Node ID, another crust from old Mac OS versions

2 June 2007

Frank Lichtenheld: packages.debian.org status and development

Copy of a mail I sent to debian-www earlier today. I don't think it warrants posting to -devel-announce, but I post it here to make it visible to people not usually following debian-www. Since I seem to sense an increased stream of offers to help out with packages.d.o coming my way (but maybe that is just wishful thinking ;) I wanted to give a short update on the development of the current code and the status of the infrastructure so that nobody can claim he wanted to help but failed due to lack of information.

The code in the CVS is seriously lacking in many regards, especially update and CGI speed. It runs pretty stable though and since we excluded robots from using the CGI scripts it seems to run with at least enough speed to keep any big complaints from rising. (If anyone is interested, packages.d.o currently has about 200,000 page hits a day, with a notable decrease – up to 50,000 – during the etch freeze and a similar increase after release)
packages.d.o is currently run on puccini.d.o, this host is exclusivly used for this purpose. Adminstration is be done by group pkg_maint, current members are Martin 'Joey' Schulze and me.
The same code is also used to create the page packages.ubuntu.com, see branch ubuntu in CVS. packages.ubuntu.com is run a private server of mine and only administrated by me.
Everybody with write access to the website has also write access to this part of the CVS. The code run on packages.d.o is updated once a day during the update cron job. Since there is no staging ground for changes, any commits should be made with extreme care...
Last year Jeroen van Wolffelaar and I started to develop a new version with the goal to make dynamic page generation possible which allows for faster update of information and more flexible presentation. We coordinated our work by using a SVN repository located at svn.wolffelaar.nl.
This development was stalled several times when he and/or I had no time to actively pursue it.
In April 2007 I decided to revive the development to get the code in a state ready for deployment. Since I was by then inititated in the wonders of distributed scm, I decided to move the code to yet another repository, namely git (for cloning use git://source.djpig.de/git/packages.git) There is also a ubuntu branch there but it is in a rather sorry state atm regarding site layout.
I think the new code is currently in a state where it could be safely deployed to packages.d.o but I'm currently waiting for an etch upgrade of the host since the code has grown some dependencies on stuff only available in etch. The next possibility for this to happen is probably during Debconf.
I don't know yet how to handle the SCM stuff when the code is to be deployed.
You can try out this new code base at packages.debian.net (Might be slightly out-of-date sometimes since I don't run the cronjob as often as possible to give packages.ubuntu.com more ressources)
Bug reports and patches against this version are very much welcome, please send them directly to me (but feel free to CC debian-www if you want to have an open discussion on the matter in question).
Bug reports and patches against the version currently in use should be directed to the BTS as usual.
If there is interest we can make a little improvised BoF about packages.d.o at Debconf.

Alexander Schmehl: Report from the LinuxTag -- Part I (A bit of DebianDay and my talk)

Before I start with my report I need to fulfill my promise for those who stumble here from kushaldas.in: The URL of the web interface for the package description translation framework is for now: ddtp.debian.net (It's easy: Debian Description translation pproject). There might be some changes after DebConf, our annual conference, which will take place this month. So keep an eye on your language's team mailing list. But more about Kushal Das later. The first part of my report will cover a bit of our DebianDay and of course especially my talk ;) More will follow later. Friday was DebianDay and I attended Holger's talk about debian-community. It's a quite interesting project, trying to solve the problem, that there's not much between real DDs and the rest of the world. It's more low level than the Debian maintainers idea floating around for a while: Look around, you'll see much contributors to Debian, who are not maintaining any package. The idea is basically to have kind of bonuses for contributing to Debian, as a more direct way to say Thanks!. Have look at the website, and think how you could help to get things rolling. After his talk it was my turn. I did a Debian package building for beginners talk... Well, actually it's a workshop stripped down by the practical part leaving only the slides of the introduction. But who cares ;) Again I was surprised how many people where interested in that topic. I always thought it's kind of special and not that interesting, but the room was quite stuffed. Some people where even sitting on the floor. I neither counted how many people attended my talk, nor how many seats where available. I guess I had something between 80 and 120? Perhaps Wolfgang Borgert, who moderated DebianDay, can correct me, if I'm wrong. Since I stripped down a workshop to a talk, I needed to take special care about the timing. Well... I didn't work perfectly. I took a bit too long while answering questions, but I think all in all it was quite right. As usual I took gnujump as example; easy package, works without much tweaking of the templates created by dh_make, and if you have some time left at the end, you can show some additional stuff, like splitting of a -data package. After the talk I got some quite interesting questions; the three most interesting ones were the following:

Non English license texts: One guy asked me about non English licence texts (in his case: A Japanese license text for some special printer driver).
I asked him, to seek help by a Japanese DD, which might be okay to let the package pass ftpmaster. Sorry, but THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! I just asked J rg Jaspert, one of the ftpmasters, and the Debian Project need's (of course) a translated version of that licence, as well as a statement of the upstream author, that the translation is okay. Otherwise the translated text has no legal binding and is therefore useless.
Installation packages: Packaging non-free stuff, which you need to download yourself, is a) sadly sometimes needed, b) useful for some people who need it and c) some kind of tricky. I could help much here; didn't did anything similar, yet. So I answered to take a look at either , msttcorefonts or java-package. Question to the others: Is there some kind of common infrastructure to build an installer package upon?
The Joomla! problem: Again a thing I have no experience myself in; packaging web applications. According to the Joomla! guy I talked, too, there is a special problem with that (please correct me, if I understood something wrong; as said: webapps aren't my speciality).
There is demand for Joomla! packages, but so fare none exist. Major problem: While Joomla! is capable of running at multiple aliases, it is not (yet) capable of handling them to serve different content to them. So he wanted to be able to install Debian-Packages to different directories, where he would add different configurations of them. Short term solution could be to install it to /usr/share/ or so, and create a script, creating a symlink farm... long term solution should be to fix Joomla! ;)

So much for now; I'll write some more about the event in general, a goodie from an old friend from Treuchtlingen (rather short; the german entry is longer), and a small talk I had with an other J rg later... I'm kind of tired right now.

Wouter Verhelst: Thecus N2100 arrived

Last saturday, I fetched the N2100 which I had on order since quite a while, put in the two 500G hard disks, and powered it on. Installing Debian to a machine with no console is pretty fun, but luckily the installer makes it all rather easy (there's this thing that allows you to ssh into the running installer and from there start the installation menu; they originally wrote that for installing to an s390 box, but obviously it works for any architecture...). After installing the box, I upgraded the base system against security.debian.org and removed some software that I didn't need, and rebooted the thing. And then... ... nothing. It didn't seem to come up. As it turned out, the stuff which I removed (a horrible solution to a problem that doesn't exist) just hapepned to be responsible for loading the NIC driver module; so after reboot, the box didn't have a network interface anymore as far as the kernel was concerned. Pretty stupid, that. Luckily, fixing that wasn't too hard. Remove the hard disks, put them in another box, edit some files in /etc, put the disk back in the Thecus, boot. There. I now have a wonderfully small system that I'll use as home server, and which will replace rock in that function. Seen as how rock is a power-hungry desktop with five power-hungry hard disks, whereas goa, the new box, is an economic ARM-based system, that'll be good for the environment as well. Isn't that nice. The only downside to this is that I'll now have to do some configuration and migration work, since you can't just put a disk with Debian/i386 on it in an arm box and hope it'll work. But that's okay.

1 June 2007

Romain Francoise: Dear Google Reader,

Congratulations on your new offline capabilities, I'm sure that they'll be useful to some people. As for myself, I like to use whatever precious little time I have away from the Internet to get some rest, or catch up on the ton of dead-tree books I still have to read.

So you see, I wish you had grown a search feature instead. It seems strange that it would be so long coming, given how the search gene runs strong in your family...

Ah, well. The future still looks bright for you, and I have high hopes for our feed reading relationship. Don't disappoint me!

Love,
Romain

Matthew Garrett: Further stories of customer service despair

Orange have a fairly decent offer for "unlimited" (1GB a month or so) 3G access. I'm a pay monthly customer on an old tariff that's no longer offered, but there's no mention of any sort of limitations there and they seemed happy to add 3G access to my account. Cue two days of repeated phone calls trying to find out why my entirely 3G phone was refusing to connect to their 3G network. After going through being told it was my phone settings, poor reception, something that I could get fixed at my local Orange store or that it was because they'd entered the wrong start date(!), I finally got through to someone who was actually genuinely friendly and helpful and told that I needed a 3G sim[1]. Oh, and that they wouldn't provide me with one because of the tariff I'm on.

Fucking useless telco.

[1] Something that's clearly documented on their website. Oh, wait.

loldebian - Can I has a RC bug?: I is sunning

I is sunning, buildd cans wait

by Benjamin E. Seidenberg (astronut)

Cameron Dale: May-31-2007: HTTP Range Requests

I wasn't sure if some/many/all Debian mirrors responded correctly to HTTP/1.1 range requests for only part of a file, so I ran a test on them (download part of the etch Release file). These type of requests will be useful for downloading missing pieces from packages in the BitTorrent-like downloader that I'm writing. Here are the results of my test on the 221 HTTP mirrors:

Status	Description	Count
200	Full Data	1
206	Partial Data	208
302	Document has moved	2
404	Not Found	2
	Couldn't Connect	8
	Total	221

So only one mirror (debian.csie.nctu.edu.tw) was unable to support the range request and instead returned the entire file. It seems like using range requests will be fine, though I'll have to think about some kind of error checking for that one lonely mirror that's not like the others. There was also one mirror that responded with an old Release file. It seems like debian.ihug.co.nz has not been updated since etch was released.

Joey Hess: two random thoughts about google maps

It will be interesting to see what new forms of social engineering will come about thanks to the neat new street view feature. To be able to check, from across the world, what car someone had in their driveway (or its license plate), or what a sign on a shopfront says, is sure to be good for something criminal.
The better google maps gets, the more places that don't have all the awesome data become in a sense second class citizens. With the exception of bandwidth, the internet has so far tended to flatten these differences out, not accentuate them. So this is also interesting, though it kinda sucks to be there (google can't even resolve my house on their satellite maps).

Matthew Garrett

This thread on the Sun initiative to produce a more Linux-like distribution of OpenSolaris is interesting not so much for the technical goals, but as an insight into the community. The immediate response to the proposal? A set of complaints that it hasn't followed the correct process.

Now, to be fair, there have been other threads discussing the technical and social desirability of such a distribution already and some are still ongoing - it's not like the OpenSolaris community has ignored it entirely in favour of process fetishising. However, it's indicative of a community that's more concerned with procedure than it is with producing high quality software. What I suspect has happened is that Sun felt it was important to ensure that procedures were put in place before creating a community in order to avoid the problem of it immediately turning into low-grade anarchy. The problem with this is that if you create procedures before you create community, the people who end up enforcing the procedures tend to be the sort of people who find enforcing procedures to be the interesting part of the job rather than the ones who see them as necessary evils to enforce moderately sensible community development.

Sun's clearly stuck between a rock and a hard place here. They don't want to be seen to be directing the community too strongly, or they'd end up like Red Hat did with Fedora - you alienate your community by giving them the impression that they have no influence over the direction of the distribution. On the other hand, the rapid growth of the Ubuntu community strongly suggests that having a strong leader can ensure that people don't get too bogged down in procedure at the cost of technical progress.

I suspect that Sun made the wrong call here. Having more corporate influence to begin with might have put off some contributors, but it would also have allowed the development of a functional community at an earlier stage. Sun could then gradually withdraw (as Red Hat have been doing with Fedora) and let the community play a larger role. Perhaps that way we'd hear more about the technical contributions coming out of OpenSolaris and they wouldn't be left with just the same two cards they've been playing for a couple of years now - dtrace and ZFS.

On something of a tangent, I don't think their choice of license has helped a great deal here. Two of the areas where OpenSolaris is most behind Linux are hardware support and desktop/kernel integration. The choice of a GPL-incompatible license strongly discourages any Linux developers from working with the low-level code of OpenSolaris due to the perceived risk of contaminating the Linux codebase at some later point. That rules out a huge pool of skilled developers (I'm going to be potentially controversial here and say that I suspect Linux has a larger skillset here than all the BSDs put together, and quite possibly Solaris added to that) who are writing a good deal of advanced code. Meanwhile we're left with OpenSolaris having even worse laptop support than FreeBSD. These are people who could have added to the community socially as well as technically. Instead you've got a community led by a set of Sun staff who are paranoid about doing anything that might make it look like Sun controls the community. Score.

31 May 2007

Clint Adams: Lindsey Buckingham was nowhere to be found

In the middle of the forest on the hill is a ley, and through that ley runs a creek, and across that creek rests a weir, and by that weir stands a detached concrete wall. By that wall is a table of wrought iron, and surrounding that table are three wrought iron chairs, upon which there are no cushions. Were one to query a being seated upon one of these chairs, one might be told that it was a most uncomfortable place for one's hindquarters. In the days of yore, one Philip discovered this place, and this Philip did seek out his friend Paul to show him the glorious place that he had found. Paul was readily impressed, and the two of them appointed themselves the caretakers of this place by the weir in the creek in the ley in the forest on the hill. They built a shed next to the detached concrete wall, and in that shed they placed tools of the sort used for groundskeeping, and eventually they acquired an old riding mower that someone had been in the process of discarding, and they placed the mower also in the shed, and worried about the value of the mower in the shed, they procured a large combination lock for the door of the shed, and installed it hastily. As the trove in the shed burgeoned, Philip and Paul invited more friends to share enjoyment of their place by the weir in the creek in the ley in the forest on the hill. People would come every day and watch them cut the grass and kill the moss on the detached concrete wall. On rare occasions a guest would say, Need any help with that? and Philip would shout back, No, thanks, we've got it all under control! This golden age continued for quite some time, but as with all glorious things, one small event disturbs the balance, things spiral out of control, and despite anyone's efforts, nothing succeeds in restoring the state which many found so very acceptable. HOW IT HAPPEN: Philip had a dream about an angel on the beach. This dream plagued him day in and day out. It plagued him like the wind. Finally, sitting on the detached concrete wall, murdering some moss, he snapped. If I can't get an angel, I can still get a boy, and a boy'll be the next thing to an angel, he announced. The next best thing to an angel, he clarified. A boy'll be the next best thing. Then, to further illustrate the progress of his nervous breakdown, he leapt off the wall and ran into the forest. What? replied Paul, and continued his labors. Need any help? some guests inquired. No, we've got it all under control, Paul answered. The days went by, and Philip remained absent. Paul started to work more slowly, and neglected certain parts of their sanctuary. Soon he only showed up every other day. Hey, guys! Philip shouted, arriving to find most of the regulars there. Sorry I haven't had time to attend to things, but I've been busy. Do you need any help? someone grunted half-heartedly. Naw! Philip answered, I'll just catch up now. Thus he spake, and thus he did. Inspired by Philip's toil, Paul resumed his efforts more heartily, even though Philip disappeared again. The days went by, and Philip remained absent. Paul started to work more slowly, and neglected certain parts of their sanctuary. Eventually he was doing almost nothing at all. Is. There. Something. We. Can. Do. To. Help? asked the peanut gallery. I don't know, Paul snapped. If you want to help, ask Philip. He stormed off.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Announcing darcs-monitor 0.3.1

Darcs-monitor will send email to a specified recipient about new changes added to a specific darcs repository. It can be run as an apply posthook (resulting in near-instantaneous push emails), or periodically from Cron, or occasionally by hand, whatever seems most convenient. This new release (0.3) contains the following changes:

there is now support for the %CHANGES% and %SHORTREPO% substitutions in the template
a default template is now provided
' and " entity references in darcs changes –xml is now supported
patches with just the author email address (no real name) are now handled correctly
when multiple emails are sent, they are now sent in chronological order
emails are announced to the user

The minor update 0.3.1 brings the documentation up to date. Benja Fallenstein and Benjamin Franksen provided some of the features and bug fixes in this release. My thanks to them

You can get it by darcs at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/darcs/darcs-monitor/ (darcsweb
available), or as a tarball at http://antti-juhani.kaijanaho.fi/software/dist/. It depends on mtl and
HaXml and is written in Haskell, naturally. It has been tested only with GHC 6.6 so far. For installation and usage instructions, refer to the README at any of the locations above. Please note that this software is very new and thus can be buggy. As with any email-sending software, bugs can result in major annoyance; user caution is warranted.

Joey Hess: linux radio recorder

I dug up an old radio and threw this together tonight. It's been done before, but the scripts out there seemed overly complex and didn't use alsa. Here's how I did it:

radiorecord is a shell script to record a given number of minutes from the radio to an ogg file.
crontab to schedule when to record shows

Of course, this assumes that the station doesn't move shows around and that the times are in sync. To do this really right, I'd need a radio programming data source, and some post-processing to identify exactly where the gaps are between programs.

30 May 2007

Christoph Berg: Debconf Flights booked

I just booked my Debconf flights. Airline websites are a major PITA. Germanwings wasn't even available, "maintenance today from 23 to 2h" - sorry, no happy customer. Ryanair's appearance was the worst. I don't mind crappy html as long as it works, but why do I have to choice between "Herr" (Mr), "Frau" (Mrs), "Mrs" (!), and "Miss"? When I said I lived in "M nchengladbach" they replied with the equivalent of "Please do not use special characters like < > [ ]." Apparently I'm allowed some amount ("20kg 15kg for travel past November 2006") of luggage (except if I'm below the age of 2), but later they charge for it. Then there's a drop-down menu asking me in I which country live, but it doesn't really mention that this is really where I select whether I want travel insurance (I don't). At the end of the page I'm asked to confirm that I accept the travel insurance terms (I still don't), but that's also the checkbox for their general terms of service. That flight would have gone through Prestwick (PIK) which is apparently fairly well connected to Edinburgh, but the flight back would leave at 7.50 am. I don't think I like that. In parallel, I tried easyjet.com. They fly from Dortmund, and while looking where that airport is, I first tried "airport lounges" which was obviously the wrong place. A bit more hidden was a list of airports, but it didn't include Dortmund. Google for the rescue... Then they tell me "your total amount is 99,71 ", only to additionally add 7,50 on the next page just because I'm using a credit card - who doesn't? Of course I'm willing to fill out personal information like my address etc, but why do they want my phone number and email address? And why do they claim "you haven't entered a phone number" when I put it (rather a fake one) in the "mobile phone" field (below "home")? What really drove me crazy was when they refused to accept the booking when I left the "we like to find out about our customers [...] reason for your trip" field empty. That's a drop-down menu with the choices "Business", "Visiting friends or family and staying with them", "Holiday", and "Visiting friends or family but staying elsewhere". No, I'm not going to tell them. (I randomly selected "Business".) In the end, I booked there, but it wasn't really fun. Whatever. Meet you at Debconf :) [Update] Oh, and I had to confirm I "have read, understood, and accept easyJet's terms and conditions, including the new rules for hold baggage". Thats a minimum of 10kB legal blurb - a simple "accept" checkbox would have been enough...

Paul van Tilburg: Master Project Take 2 and 3

I just realised that I forgot to post about take 2, so I’ll combine it with this post about take 3. The past five months I’ve been busy with examining the effect of restriction on CCS with parallelism. We decided to do this in two steps. First (take 2) we considered interleaving of actions, and then (take 3) we added communication. The case with only interleaving of actions went smoothly; it worked out as a nice extension of the case without parallelism. However, when we looked at the case with interleaving and communication, it started to become troubling. I ran into all kind of complications and the risk of failure I described in a previous post seemed to come true. However, I think we managed quite well to catch a large part of the problems and describe them, and also offer possible solutions. In the end, I’m quite happy of the result. So, today I can present the final version of my Master’s Thesis: “Finite Equational Bases for CCS with Restriction”. Yay! I have just submitted it for reproduction. The final presentation of my project will take place June 5, 2007 at 10:00 in the main building of the university, HG 6.29. If you’re interested and are able to attend, consider yourself invited. I want to thank Bas Luttik for his large amount of feedback, clear explanations and guidance, without him the project wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did now. Almost finished, 6 days remaining…

David Welton: Missing rails feature: cache everything but this

It's pretty common to have a front page that has content that is very cacheable, except for a little section with something like "signup" or "my page", depending on whether the user is logged in or not. It would be very nice to have a handy solution in rails for this problem, which seems to be a fairly common question. Here's my stab at an answer: cache everything but... However, I'm not entirely happy with it because of the very hacky approach taken to make the render_as_string work - I have to fiddle with an instance variable in the controller:

controller.instance_variable_set '@performed_render', false

Not good. In the thread linked to above, Paul Gustav posts a link about a system for having two different cached pages, but that's not entirely satisfying either, because it gets you from 1 version to 2 versions, but going beyond doesn't look real appetizing. It would be a very nice problem to solve once and for all with a clean solution.

Martin F. Krafft: Information management 2.0

Dear Lazyweb: my information management is in dire need of an upgrade. In particular, I am looking for two features, the second of which is an extension of the first. So let's start with the first: Given a certain issue a job, a project, I write and receive emails, send and receive letters, make and receive phone calls, and author all kinds of documents. In addition, I may have other tidbits of information, such as bookmarks and contact information of the involved people, which are related to the issue at hand. I can store the documents and letters in folders on my filesystem, but what emails and bookmarks and contact information are isolated from the filesystem by the application through which I access this information, even though they may be stored in standard formats. I do not want to create redundant information by copying emails to the respective folders in the filesystem, not only because of the error potential in forgetting that one message which you later need. What I want is a high-level view ideally command-line based into my information, such that for any given project, I can easily and immediately access all related correspondence, documents, and data. I almost want something like a customer relation management system (CRM), except that I don't want to organise my data contact-centric, but rather issue-centric: an issue may involve nobody, a dozen other people, or be about one single person. I took a brief look at beaglefs and was briefly impressed that it did not depend on roughly 5 gigabytes of GNOME/Mono, but then also decided that it's not what I wanted, because it's too fileystem-centric and I also do not want a hundred mounted pseudo filesystems in my home directory. Beagle, on the other hand, does have half a million dependencies and plugins for almost every other application that has half a million dependencies, but it's basically unusable to people who use simple, non-graphical tools for their information management. I am going to check strigi-daemon and doodle, but I don't really expect any different. Does anyone know of a high-level tool that I could use to tie together all my information sources/types? Then, on to the second feature I want: tags. You know it, tags are web 2.0 and web 2.0 is sexy and since I want to be sexy, I need tags. They are also marginally useful and I could use them to place the link the email from a friend about Debconf7 to his name, Debian, the conference, as well as the client we're going to be visiting on the way back. Or I could associate the slides for my talk on method diffusion with Debian, the conference, and my Ph.D. research. Marginally useful but soooo sexy. Tags should be hierarchical, such that foo::bar::baz is a subset of foo and foo::bar (and a query for foo would automatically yield results for foo::bar::baz too). Wildcards should be supported, such that I could search for foo::+::baz and also find foo::bla::baz, and of course you should be able to perform the standard logical functions, such as AND/OR/NOT on them. Enrico calls this "faceted categorisation" and I would never question him on such topics. I do like the idea of a filesystem, backed by an index, but otherwise using metadata stored in extended filesystem attributes, which is what BeagleFS does. However, I'd like it to be ad-hoc, such that the query is not a mount option, but rather determined by the filesystem syscalls. For instance, the directory listing of /TAGS/foo::bar/ should contain all files tagged with foo::bar; /TAGS/-foo::bar/, /TAGS/foo::bar,+::baz/, and /TAGS/foo::+.bla::+/ could be the shell-friendly ways to encode NOT, OR, and AND. If you think about it for a minute, then it's actually not that hard and should be a weekend job to implement on top of FUSE, but it'll only really work when each filesystem node corresponds to exactly one entity. Contacts and bookmarks are trivial to implement that way (VCards and .lnk files), but e-mail is not: with the two popular storage backends mailbox and Maildir, an e-mail message is either a set of lines in a file, or a file in a directrory hierarchy. At first, Maildir may sound like the ticket, but when you consider that a message's new status is encoded in the path and not in the message's filename or content, while the filename is used to encode other status and index information, such as deleted or a message's size, it quickly becomes a nightmare this is why I consider mairix to be more or less unusable other than for quick, one-time searches. To be able to properly deal with email in the filesystem I am proposing, one would need to use mailboxes that only ever stored one message (which would be a waste of space and is not supported by any of dozens of e-mail processing or reading tools), or a new format that used only extended filesystem attributes for metadata, never location of a file or its name. And that does not exist yet, isn't debugged, let alone supported by any tools. Where to, Lazyweb? Comments welcome. NP: Gazpacho: When Earth Lets Go Update: as many have noted, of course I am looking for something like the semantic web, or closely related to it however, given the current state of things, that doesn't get us any further. Also, I don't want any of the Web or social and community stuff that seems to be an inseperable part of the semantic web or the OWL. I just want the semantics for a single-user environment. Thus, NEPOMUK, which three people have pointed to, is not what I am looking for. On the issue of one-mail-per-file, Remi Vanicat pointed me to Gnus' nnml storage:

If you use this back end, Gnus will split all incoming mail into files, one
file for each mail, and put the articles into the corresponding directories
under the directory specified by the  nnml-directory  variable.

As long as nnml is a Gnus-specific format, it's useless to me. I want to continue using standard tools like mutt, procmail, formail, and IMAP servers.

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