Tomorrow at 6:00 AM I’ll be already sitting in a train in my way to Reus, from where I’ll fly to Dublin to attend aKademy 2006 … and I still haven’t managed to write about my trip to London (Well, in fact, I wrote about my two first days at London some time ago, but I haven’t found time to complete it). I’ve been trying to get some spare time for KDE hacking for a long time but I have only managed to do a dozen commits in the last months. I expect I can get some KOffice work done in aKademy and have a chance to enjoy beer with some KDE fellows.

I’m back from Japan. Time went too fast… Met a lot of people we hadn’t seen for a while, had a great time. Only problem is that I’m totally jetlagged. Woke up at 3am this morning, and decided to actually do something after trying to sleep some more for an hour. The downside of holidays is the 4000+ mails (excluding spam) that got in my mailbox. I’ve already gone through most of the new bug reports and have been able to vote for the last GR that was issued while I was away. One of the most annoying problem that was raised during my vacation is this Firefox trademark issue. We’ve been avoiding to change the package name for a while. We got agreements to use the Firefox name when we had to drop the “Mozilla” part of “Mozilla Firefox”, and now it seems they (again) changed their mind. I really think we should go with the iceweasel name because this name is already widespread as the “debian may rename firefox this way” name. It is even in wikipedia. On other news, we bought a MacBook and a Nikon Coolpix S6 for Miki, and a (already broken) PSP as well as some books for me. I’ll write more on these in coming posts.

On a lot of systems, the Debian installation is spread over a set of partitions. This makes it pretty difficult for a package manager to determine whether unpacking a package is possible at all, since assuming the worst case would mean that all partitions have to have Installed-Size kilobytes free. However, the set of "sane" partitioning schemes is pretty small, so I think packages could list the amount of space required on the root, usr, var partitions, respectively, and the package manager would just add the numbers up if it found that some of them are on the same partition.

As you might know I publish some of my photos in my photoblog and on flickr under a Creative Commons license. A very cool example of the so-called remix culture "happened to me" recently — one of the photos I posted on flickr was used as album art for a music CD, namely J. D. Warrick's "Going, a. The Leaving". Btw., if you want to learn more about remix culture, Creative Commons etc. I can really recommend Larry Lessig's Wizards of OS 4 Keynote titled "The Read-Write Society" (OGG video: 144 MB, MP4 video: 224 MB).

TerrorBullGames has just released the board game War On Terror. The first I heard of this was a short article in a local news paper about how much the game has offended some people (quoting someone who was injured in the London bombings). A co-creator of the game Andy Thompkins said "We accept that some people think this is in poor taste and may see it as puerile. But we would say that launching an illegal war on Iraq is in poor taste".

It's not as if profiting from terrorism is anything new. Governments in Australia, the UK, and the US have profited from it at the ballot box and also used it to stifle opposition parties to get unpopular legislation approved. An example of this is the attempts of the Bush regeime to legalise torture, see the Washington Post and The Age (Australia).

Shortly after 9-11 almost every computer company that had anything to do with backups or disaster-recovery was advertising heavily. Oil companies have done particularly well with high prices, they would have done even better if the plans for Iraq had succeeded.

TerrorBullGames appears to have an aim to draw attention to the lies of politicians, which makes them better than everyone else who has profited from 9-11. Maybe if they draw enough attention to the bad things that our governments are doing they can influence the results of elections, and we can get governments that don't promote terrorism.

Here's a review of the game.

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider. Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell? Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government. I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot! Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost. Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.) I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos. Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions. Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

After take#2 at the flight (*grin*) I got here last night. Met by Carlos at the airport in the south of Tenerife, then driven up to Santa Cruz in the north. We met up with a fair-sized group of the locals and went out for pizza. I'm happy to be here; the local people are bending over backwards to include me in conversation, despite my lack of Spanish. They seem to be a really friendly group. Then across to the university at La Laguna this morning. My 90-minute talk about Debian went very well, in front of 40 or so people. I don't normally like public speaking very much, but it helps a lot when I'm talking about something I know very well. People were clearly interested in knowing more about Debian, and asked some good questions at the end. The slides from my talk and some photos will appear on-line at some point when I find a decent net connection. For the rest of my time here, people have suggested a few touristy things to do, and have offered to show me around. My thanks to Ren , Carlos and the others - it's great to be here!

Recently in my (physical) mailbox: SELinux by Example by Frank Mayer, Karl MacMillan, David Caplan. The most recent and up-to-date book about SELinux I know about, written by some of the most involved and knowledgeable people in the field. From what I've read until know it seems to be a really in-depth and easy to understand introduction, and what's more important, it covers the practical aspects of how you use, configure, and administer SELinux in real deployed systems. This should make an interesting read...

Recently I've been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error "ff ff ff ff" in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message "ff ff ff" which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it's shared secret for no reason I could determine.

A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the "ff ff ff ff" error message as appearing in the case where the "ff ff ff" error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I'm running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message "ff ff", we are still unsure of what that means.

For people who haven't used Siteminder I'll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won't restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.

Today's the "day of Genius" in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a festival to celebrate human reason, innovation, and inspiration. Something that deserves our respect and attention. My big genius accolades today are for the people who put on the Piknic Electronik Summer Sundays in Montreal. We stopped by the last one for 2006 yesterday, and it was a great time. Our friend John Usher (in town to defend his Ph.D. thesis) came along with us, but we also met friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, Lou and Candace and little Olive, Patti and Meg and Lucinda and Damian and Douglas and... lots of folks. Piknic remains one of my favorite parties in Quebec. An afternoon dance party under a giant Calder stabile on a beautiful island park in the St. Laurence River? Truly genius! I hope Piknic 2007 keeps growing and going with the mellow, friendly atmosphere that it's had in the past. tags: montreal piknic electronik party genius

Web 2.0 Conference So, I'm sad to see that the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in November is sold out. Maj and I made plans to visit SF during this time just to get to the conference, but I guess it's all filled up. Now I'm trying to track down a spare ticket or two. Anybody got a miracle? tags: web2.0 web2con san francisco miracle

R RS There's now a draft version of the Revised Report on the algorithmic language Scheme (R RS). It's not much news for folks who read the recent status report on R RS, but it's still pretty interesting. Most of the good ideas seem to have gotten into the spec, and the icky idea of doing immutable pairs seems to be gone now. Check out http://www.r6rs.org/ for a copy of the draft spec and a signup form for the discussion list. tags: r rs scheme spec

SxSW Panels and Wiki I'm pretty excited to see that the new 2007 South-by-Southwest Interactive panel voting interface is up today. I proposed a panel called Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills, to discuss different ways that private companies are creating wikis and investing in Wiki technology. I was surprised to hear that, for SxSW Interactive 2007, it's the only proposed Wiki panel! If you're thinking about SxSW 2007, or if you just feel like voting on things, please drop by and give the wiki panel your support. tags: wiki sxsw sxsw2007

Ms. P. I'm really proud of my cousin, Lisa Prodromo, who's a teacher in Chicago. Lisa's from the poor branch of the family that can't afford a "u" at the end of their name, but she's overcome that hardship and is now a really great English teacher. She's got a blog at http://www.msprodromo.com/ for her students, but I'm waiting for her to bust out with one for grownups, too. Anyways, she was just nominated for the prestigious Golden Apple award, a Chicago-area teachers award. I'm sure she's going to win. tags: lisaprodromo u msprodromou teaching chicago golden apple : What's the protocal for commenting here in your bliki? Edit now and ask questions later has always worked for me, so I'll try that. When am I got to get an introduction to the illustrious Chicago Ms. P? We're doing some scheming here in Chicago and would love to include her. --TedErnst

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID. Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:

• First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of jabber.luon.net, that is:

   msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   ...

  Note that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
• I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:

   _jabber._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
   _xmpp-client._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
   _xmpp-server._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.

• With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
• Then, I modified the address of jabber.luon.net to point to the new host and let it propagate.
• Next, I sent a MOTD (luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client¹.
• Finally, I installed a second C2S component on luon.net that connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.

It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

¹ I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <-> talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

From the debian changelogs:

thunderbird (1.5.0.5-2) unstable; urgency=low
  * new package: thunderbird-dbg
    + enable svg

Whoa, when will we start seeing SVG spam?

This post actually should have appeared two weeks ago, however losing another free domain and finding and registering a not yet domaingrabbed, short, cheap (i.e.: .de) replacement took some time. The rest of it was taken up catching up on my mail and making a couple of gnutls uploads. Anyway it was rather nice, Germany is really railway accessible and there is loads of stuff to see. I think we at least crossed all states (except for Bremen) on our ways, but left all B-entities (Bremen, Berlin, Bavaria, and Baden-Württemberg) for later visits. Highlights below: Yes, I know that the last location is not in Germany, but we made it to be on our way. ;-)

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

---

weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

---

spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

---

TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

---

literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

These drug ads are simply not to be
missed. They are somewhat eerie for their familiarity and strangeness. They seem more fabricated and less scientific that today’s ads, yet just as fantastical and culturally audacious, in the sense that they promise SO MUCH, in so little.

Webloyalty has been a minor pet project of mine for a couple of years. I posted this blog entry in December 2004 when I discovered that I was automatically signed up for a $10/month service that had no plausible benefit for me, without having ever entered my email address or credit card information to the service. Since then, I’ve posted about comments left by Webloyalty call center reps and the switch to opt-in for Marketworks merchants. My original entry has also proved to be the most popular page on this blog, receiving over 55,000 hits to date and nearly 1,500 comments. Today, I opened the newspaper to discover that Webloyalty and Fandago.com have been sued in Federal Court in Massachusetts. Here’s a copy of the complaint. I especially recommend pages 8-16, entitled “Confidential Witnesses.”

Whew. Ichthux has released, and now I can breathe again! When I joined the Ichthux development team, they had produced their “proof of concept” release as yet-another-Knoppix-remaster. At that time, I encouraged them to move away from tacking their work on as a derivate of a derivative and instead become a CDD. I argued that as a CDD Ichthux would last, while as a Knoppix-remaster, it would just be another marginal custom livecd that went nowhere. They got the message. So you may well be surprised to hear our first release is based on Kubuntu, and not Debian.

So, what’s the story here? Have you defected?

Nope. It just happens that most of the team ended up being actively involved in Ubuntu development. Also, when we first started casting about for the best way to package a livecd/install disk, it seemed to us that Ubuntu already had a head start on this.

What about being a CDD? It looks to me like that idea has fallen by the wayside.

Nope again. We’re a joint team now, and though we’ve started out with Ubuntu, we’ll be pushing changes back into Debian. The goals of a CDD are well understood by the whole team: to best meet the needs of our users, we design the system to mesh well with the parent distributions, not forking and making a derivative, but working inside those distributions to improve them for our particular subgroup of users.

Hold on now, aren’t you contradicting yourself? A CDD’s development is all within Debian, but Ubuntu itself is a derivative, and what’s worse, Kubuntu is a derivative of a derivative! Aren’t you right back where you started?

Well, on the last count, you’d be wrong. Kubuntu is not a fork. And as for Ubuntu being a derivative, well, sure it is. But the Ubuntu/Debian relationship is different from other derivatives, and although there is friction, I’m enough of a crazy idealist to believe a joint Debian/Ubuntu CDD is quite doable, benefits both projects more, and serves our users better than if we were to split up and each go work on our own.

I'm delighted to announce that registration is open for XTech WebDev London. This is a one-day training event for web developers, to be held on 31 October 2006. Our first event covers web standards, Ajax, REST and Rails, with a super-duper keynote from Tom Coates of Yahoo! You can find out more about the event on its website: speakers, schedule and benefits. What I want to do here is talk a bit about the backstory of XTech WebDev. I've been chairing the XTech web technologies conference, and before that, XML Europe, for five years. If you've ever been, you'll know it's an intense four days where the latest web and standards-based technologies are discussed. We typically hold the show in a European capital: we'll be in Paris in 2007. However, the full XTech show can be out of scope either in expense, location or duration for many. So, the idea for XTech WebDev was born. Take some of the best speakers and experience from the XTech conference, figure out what's most relevant to web developers at the coalface, and create a one-day event that's easy to get to and at the right cost. For our first event, we're featuring standards-based development, best practices for Ajax development, the REST style of developing web services, and Ruby on Rails. Along with that we'll have a keynote from Tom Coates challenging the way we think about our web applications. What we're aiming for is a convenient orientation day for web developers, which will enable you get a fix on the most important trends in web development happening right now. Although we'll be in London, we're not starting until 10am, which should leave plenty of time for people coming from further afar to be able to do the show in a day trip. I reckon it should be possible from as far away as Paris or Amsterdam, and even the north of England.... Registration is 275 if you sign up before 23 September, and space is limited, so be sure to sign up you and your team quickly. I really appreciate everybody's support as we branch out into this new event, and welcome all and any feedback and requests for future events.