There's been a bit of a plot in the air at church this Christmas. Mystery. Intrigue. Conspiracy. Even some good-natured holiday ribbing. And it's my fault. So let me explain. A little awhile ago, my dad and I pooled some money and purchased a nice Nikon Coolscan V negative and slide scanner. My first batch of slides to scan on this consists of 3 reels plus one box of slides from the church archives, some 600 images or so. I've got 350 scanned so far. We'll be using these in the centennial book we're working on, and I'll burn some DVD-Rs for use by the church in the future. There are some real treasures in this set. Some extremely rare color photos of the old church building (torn down in 1965), including its interior. All sorts of people in their younger days, plus photos of quite a few people that have since passed on. There were also many photos from 1983 for the church's 75th anniversary celebration. It's safe to say that few, if any, people have laid eyes on these photos in the last 25 years. About two weeks ago, I was remembering how I surprised Aunt Viola by giving her a print of a photo of the choir she directed in 1946. It occured to me how many photos are in this slide set that people would love to see. I started thinking "Hmmm....." As I was sitting there scanning, I had lots of time to think. (Each slide takes about 3 minutes at 4000 DPI). I finally decided that I could make nice prints of these images by uploading them to a photo printing service. I'd surprise a few people with an anonymous gift of photos on Christmas. Well, a "few" grew into "as many as possible", and I wound up ordering 175 prints. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ran into a problem early last week. I don't know who many of these people are, or who their relatives are that still attend our church. I needed help. I had to enlist my dad in my conspiracy -- he knows many of these people and who they're related to. With his help on Monday, we identified people in some 300 photos. I rushed to get them uploaded to Shutterfly and place an order with overnight shipping to make sure they'd arrive by Christmas. They finally did. Terah helped stuff envelopes while I sorted out the photos. Each envelope had the name of the recipients, plus "Merry Christmas!" written on it. Our names were nowhere to be found. Saturday afternoon, before the big Christmas Eve program, my brothers and I (who had heard the conersation with my dad, but were good at keeping secrets) helped me stuff mailboxes at church. We escaped without tipping anyone off to what we were doing. The Christmas Eve service came and went. I tried to listen for conversations about pictures, but didn't hear any. I was a little concerned -- hopefully people liked these photos. I knew that the moment my aunt saw her photos, she would be able to figure out it was me behind it, and would spread that, but I figured I'd remain anonymous for awhile. It's fun to keep people guessing. Well, I accidentally blew my own cover this morning. I asked my aunt about her pictures, but she hadn't opened the envelope yet. Oops. (In my defense, that's not very like her!) But it turns out that these photos have been a topic of many conversations over the past two days. Lots of 70- and 80-year-olds "blaming" each other for delivering surprise photos on Christmas. Wild speculation about who this anonymous Santa is. And where did these old pictures come from? Whose closets would still have such a thing? Plus, lots of checking to see exactly what photos each person got. (I tried to give people photos that would be meaningful to them -- friends, relatives, etc.) There was even some amateur handwriting analysis going on. Apparently nobody even suspected me at all. This was probably the most time I've put into a Christmas gift in a long time. But also the most fun and rewarding. I got to see somebody run out the church to show a picture of some high schoolers in 1965 to a friend before they drove off. This is what makes Christmas such a fun time of year -- touching someone's heart. The sort of thing that can't be found on any Walmart or mall shelf. I've never been able to give a meaningful Christmas gift to so many people before, and it is a really wonderful feeling to have surprised so many this year.

Does anybody know a mail-based tracking system which allows one to manipulate all item properties by mail? Web interface and installation ease would be nice, too. It should also contain a reminder function for email or other notifies as I tend to delay issues. But it would not be too hard to code that in if the data is easily accessable through a database. Something like Debbugs would fit my needs, but is a mess to set up properly and the data is not easy accessable as far as I remember. And it really serves another purpose And no: RT is not an option, not being modifiable by mail.

I just uploaded firefox 1.5.dfsg-3 to unstable and it should get in to archive today. It should fix issues with plugins not being found and the remaining branding issue with the about dialog box. The Mozilla trademark and branding stuff still bugs me. I understand their desire to not let anyone use their name on some broken all to hell version, but to require anyone who is distributing their software to jump through hoops to actually call it "Firefox", that no one else seems to require, seems fairly arrogant. They also seem to be more interested in the business aspects of things rather than the community that got them where they are.

Call me a grinch if you must. Merry Christmas.

I just finished setting up barok, and newwave is now doing in its final stages. barok.nixsys.be is a Macintosh IIci, featuring a 68030 processor. The machine has 10MB of RAM, and only had 40MB of disk space. To that, I added one of the 2G-disks of the AS/400 RAID array I have at the office, which is doing nothing there anymore anyway; I lowleveled that disk, and now barok runs its Debian installation on that one. It's on my desk, at the office. newwave.grep.be is a Quadra 700, which externally looks as if it is the same machine; however, this one has a 68040 processor, and 20MB of RAM, so is a bit faster. It also originally had 250MB of disk space, which is a lot for the time, but by far not enough for today. The problem of installing both of them was that neither of them has enough RAM to perform a d-i based installation (you need at least 20MB of RAM to do so, so technically the quadra has enough; but to do so comfortably (i.e., to have it finish within 24 hours), more is recommended). So I installed them using the woody installer, then upgraded their installation to sarge, then to unstable (which is what I'm really after). That took quite some time, not in the least because I wasn't always there to babysit them and make sure they weren't waiting for input. Oh, and the fact that I sometimes tripped over their power cables or accidentally hit their reset button didn't help, either. But now they're mostly up and running, and I'll be testing EMILE on them; the Quadra 950 isn't really supported, which was getting problematic...

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite. It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already. Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)). VPN I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet. Debian/Ruby It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues. For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

I just got spammed by the government. Well, almost so. I received a mail from the Belgische BrandwondenStichting. That's a Belgian Government-sponsored and -founded organisation created with the intention of providing information and prevention regarding fire and fire-inflicted wounds. Apparently, they discovered the "power" of the Internet, and sent me some email warning me about the danger of fireworks. I couldn't care less; I do like to watch the fireworks, but I don't usually fire it myself. But I do think it's worrisome that my own government start sending out this kind of things...

Free software mailing lists suck. Especially Apache’s.

• Many of them have a CRAP Web interface or worse:
• Posting limited to subscribers

For weeks I have been struggling with Apache mailing lists (apache-users and spamassassin) and now recently with mutt lists. I know with Apache lists you can use a special syntax:

You can start a subscription for an alternate address,
for example “john@host.domain”, just add a hyphen and your
address (with ‘=’ instead of ‘@’) after the command word:

But when I do it via mutt or a echo test mail users-unsubscribe-hendry=dabase.com@httpd.apache.org . I get no response from the automated mailing list manager. :( So, If I ever get subscribed it’s generally thanks to the mailing list owner. Then after lurking a bit, I try post. That never works as the return paths don’t match the email I am subscribed with. Return paths change all the time depending on which machine I sent it from. It could be anything from:

• hendry@pico.dreamhost.com (from my shell)
• hendry@laptop.dabase.com (from my laptop)
• hendry@soltecsoftware.com.au (from work)

And the first two aren’t working email addresses! If you must filter, can’t you filter on my From OR Reply-To email address FFS: hendry@iki.fi All I suggest is for Apache to start using something usable like Google Groups for user support. Does anyone else feel my frustration?

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

I today received another obvious scam. Well, basically any email from a bank referring to PIN and/or TANs (for those poor US bank customers: german banks all use one-time-passwords) is ovisouly scam. Especially when it's a really bad translation... So I wonder whether I, as an intelligent user, should maybe still go to this scammers page - and enter deliberately incorrect data. For example by calling

wget "http://202.129.53.211:8081/postbank/privat/app/submit.php?konto=$RANDOM&pin;=$RANDOM&tan1;=$RANDOM&tan2;=$RANDOM&tan3;=$RANDOM"

Yeah, they probably have to filter their data anyway. But are you sure they can tell "good" from "bad" values apart? How likely do you think I accidentally hit a legitimate users' account number and he might suffer from his account becoming accidentially locked? Does this help the banks to detect this scammer, and filter him somehow (e.g. by saying "invalid PIN" even when it's valid) after enough incorrect tries? Hmm... maybe the banks should provide an API to request invalid account numbers to submit to scammers. Then they could e.g. set a cookie or setup IP filters and fight back these scammers.

Tom Short, author of Rpad, emailed me today saying that he was running the newest Quantian inside an instance of the free (as in beer) VMware Player. And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:

Grab the VMware Player

I tried the rpm first, but the installation needs some post-installation mojo for kernel modules, networking, etc which the alien-created deb did not provide. So take the tarball, expand it and configure the player running vmware-install.pl All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.

Adapt the definition of the .vmx file

Tom sent me this Quantian.vmx file based on something from Damn Small Linux. It worked for me (TM) -- accept the suggested creation of a new uuid.

Launch vmplayer

And select the (suitably adapted) Quantian.vmx. At the bootprompt, say 'knoppix' or 'linux24' And the bootprocess should proceed. Tom reported he also needed the Knoppix cheatcode 'noscsi'. I didn't.

I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not. All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes. Update: Fixed URL for the Quantian.vmx file.

CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use. The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years. Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago. The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break. I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it. The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.

As you read this fascinating but edited-for-brevity irc log from #debian-boot, imagine yourself as a contributor to either the larger Debian project or the Debian-Installer sub-project. At what point do you begin to feel insulted?

---

<Chepre> can i talk to the chief of debian please. the whole project could earn some money
<minghua> Chepre: if you are serious, write email to leader@debian.org
<Chepre> thanks minghua. is there a way to get a "official" release created with all up-to-date modules, like for Intel ICH7 sATA-Controller...as long as i pay for it?
<minghua> Chepre: chances are small. the official release is a long process
<minghua> and it doesn't happen often
<minghua> the earliest date you can expect for next release is probably end of 2006
<minghua> so you would have a better chance to hire some people/company who knows debian and provide you an updated kernel
<Chepre> OMG? does debian have not enough coders or don't they have "fun" to keep it up-to-date? e.g. the intel ich7 is already very old
<Chepre> well, can i hire the debian-team?
<minghua> Chepre: well, there is no official "team", but sure, you can hire debian developers
<gravity> Chepre: The stock kernel doesn't support your device? Why not? Is the driver not in the mainline kernel tree?
<Chepre> no
<gravity> Why not?
<Chepre> its just a default Dell PowerEdge 850 with Intel ICH7 and it isn't supported
<gravity> Chepre: Well, did you send an installation report?
<Chepre> gravity: no
<gravity> Chepre: That'd be a good first step to getting your problem fixed for future releases
<minghua> Chepre: ah, then it's supported by stock kernel after all, did you say it only works for kernel > 2.6.12?
<Chepre> minghua: 2.6.8-2 doesnt support it
<minghua> Chepre: okay, so as gravity said, write an installation report so that people know your problem
<Chepre> well, we cant wait month or years for a fix
<gravity> Chepre: You can create a custom installer image with the updated kernel for your work
<Chepre> we have to install many server in the next weeks :(
<munghua> Chepre: then I'm sure if you offer enough money, some d-i people can provide an installer with a newer kernel for you
<Chepre> well, i already got an custom installer but its a bit buggy...i need a whole netinst with the same "quality" like the official releases got
<gravity> sounds you were at the right track at the beginning... though "chief of debian" is probably the wrong person to contact :-P
<gravity> You could send a mail to debian-boot I suppose, offering the work for what you need
<Chepre> well, i also need up-to-date software, not just only the installer :( so the "whole" debian-team has to stop current work and has to start creating a stable version which is newer than the current unstable
<Chepre> minghua: do you think 50k are enough to get a 3.3 as stable?
<minghua> Chepre: by "up-to-date software" you mean all the software, including desktop, web servers, and stuff?
<gravity> Chepre: You may want to check out an alternative source. HP, as I understand it, provides the kind of support you want. Progeny does as well. And Ubuntu has their own full derivative with this sort of thing
<Chepre> minghua: right, as long the software is not a beta :)
<gravity> Chepre: The whole Debian team is not the kind of project that'll do this for you
<Chepre> so the debian-team dont want to earn money?
<Chepre> gravity: i know, open source :) ... but i think the guys making a new "official" release for me whould be very happy getting up to 20.000 us$ for one month of work
<gravity> Chepre: It would violate a lot of principles and the stable release policy to do an official debian release. You could get what you need with a name other than debian though, with some of the companies I listed above
<Chepre> where is the problem? i give you the money and you give me an up-to-date release which is only for my company, not for public
<gravity> I know I'd quit the project if there was an official Debian release for cash
<minghua> and there are like what, 10,000 packages in sarge now?
<gravity> Chepre: That's what those companies are for. Debian doesn't work like that
<gravity> Chepre: If you want to talk to individual debian developers for that, you can do that too
<Chepre> hmm, ok....now i know why the d-i doesn't recognize smp or 64bit systems

---

Now imagine yourself as someone who is trying to install Debian on twenty thousand stock machines for work and it's not working. At what point above did you begin to feel alienated? (Assuming that "Chepre" is not trolling,) Neither side in this exchange is particularly meaning to insult the other, both are doing what is right and obvious from their perspective. Two ships passing in the night, two trains speeding down a track, I don't know. It's a shame we can't deal better with this sort of thing. I would be truely interested to see how other free software projects deal with it differently. The rest of this is my attempt at some analysis and is probably not very useful.. A few mistakes Chepre made:

• When trying to communicate with someone, it's helpful to try to understand their motivations. Maybe these people are not highly motivated by money. Maybe spending 1% of your budget to buy the right someone a computer exhibitng the problem would be more effective.
• If a coder asks if you're filed a formal report of your problem, and you haven't, and you don't understand the underlying problem and rebuff their attempts to get a grip on it, escalating the issue to upper management will not make them your friend.
• Trying to pre-solve your problem by setting requirements like "it can't be a beta" and "it needs to be a 3.3 release" and "it needs to be newer than the current version" will only result in the wrong problem being solved, and smart people will not want to get involved in such a process. If you plan to hire someone to solve a problem it makes more sense to give them a broad vision of the problem to be solved, some example use cases, and let them, not you, solve the problem. That's what you're hiring them for.
• Not doing basic background research. And letting it show.

A few mistakes the channel (irr-)regulars made:

• Not recognising that "it will be done at the end of 2006" is not an answer a user wants to hear, and not pointing out alternatives such as last month's beta release or today's daily build.
• Assuming that when a user asks for a release, they necessarily want what we consider a "stable release". Perhaps they want a release that has some form of support and is free of showstopper bugs; what Debian terms "stable" is not the only release that necessarily has those characteristics, depending on how it will be used. (In other words, holy penguin pee (aka "official") might be more plentiful, and more symbolic, than you think.)
• Not pointing Chepre to the Debian consultants page. (Minor, but it's possibly the best place to have mentioned.)
• Getting offended. And letting it show.

Tom Short, author of Rpad, emailed me today saying that he was running the newest Quantian inside an instance of the free (as in beer) VMware Player. And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:

Grab the VMware Player

I tried the rpm first, but the installation needs some post-installation mojo for kernel modules, networking, etc which the alien-created deb did not provide. So take the tarball, expand it and configure the player running vmware-install.pl All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.

Adapt the definition of the .vmx file

Tom sent me this http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/computers/linux/debian/quantix/Quantian.vmx file based on something from Damn Small Linux. It worked for me (TM) -- accept the suggested creation of a new uuid.

Launch vmplayer

And select the (suitably adapted) Quantian.vmx. At the bootprompt, say 'knoppix' or 'linux24' And the bootprocess should proceed. Tom reported he also needed the Knoppix cheatcode 'noscsi'. I didn't.

I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not. All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes.

I am a new maintainer. To celebrate, I uploaded Audacity 1.2.4b to sid.

I'm still alive, thanks for asking. Though it doesn't feel too much like it. The stress at work is rather improving than lowering. But I sort of managed to reach an important step last thursday finally with the bind-to-pdns transition we are doing, so I thought I could present me with some gifts. Interestingly I just were at the bank in the morning to withdraw my christmas money... So I thought I could go to the cinema again. The people with which I was in the cinema before didn't ask me lately to join them anymore, so I have to kick my ass myself anyway. So I drove to the cinema complex, and being not too late was able to go a bit shopping, too. I presented me with three (or four, because one was a double) CDs: Mike Oldfield "Ommadawn", Garbage "Bleed Like Me" and Kylie Minogue "UltimateKylie". Besides I usually prefer albums to Best Of Albums I thought the Kylie double CD was a good deal nevertheless. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the movie I watched, finally. Of course people who read the book will miss the Veela, the Leprechaun, Dobbie!! and various other things. But appart from the usual cutting you get with longer books the movie itself wasn't too bad. I really enjoyed it, especially because I met two friends right before going in and got the promise to go with them to Narnia today. Yeah! Friday was very special, too. I was invited to some christmas party, at viennAventura. I really enjoyed the evening, I fully support their concept. Take a look at the nice christmas flash Diana did for the website as long as you have the chance to!
After some glogg, helping to write a christmas picture story including the photo shooting and decorating their christmas tree with handdrawn glitter balls I went happily home. I took my dog out for a walk, and when we were around the corner I heard my cat cry for me! After a week being outside and almost already thinking of never seeing him again I heard him crying for me like hell! It was sooo great to hear him, I went over to him, picked him up and took him home with me again. Of course I wasn't able to do any work that weekend but only cuddle with him all the time. Fortunately for him he was in a very cuddly mood himself, too. ;) Guess he missed me too.

Only if the attack's for the benefit of the sysadmin or their employer, as far as I can tell. All-party Parliamentary Internet Group had links to legislation/regulation:

• the Computer Misuse Act 1990 doesn't make this explicit;
• Cybercrime Convention says a person can be held liable for crimes committed for their benefit made possible by lack of supervision (Article 12) and also lets you be slapped for withholding evidence;
• the EU Framework Decision on "Attacks Against Information Systems" echoes this (Article 9).

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute didn't let me find any cases with computer misuse AND supervision. Using "lack of supervision" alone finds common sense use only. So it seems to hinge on supervision. I hope that you have to do something pretty obviously daft to fall foul of a court on that. I guess that you shouldn't let a server managed by you run totally unattended, but if you take normal precautions (firewall, logcheck, intrusion detection and so on and actually review them), the admin should be OK whatever. If someone's just using your computer as a jumping-off point for random attacks, I don't see how that's for your benefit either. I think that wording might be to discourage evil businesses having teams trying to deface competitor sites and so on. There's probably a bigger danger from copyright and trademark infringement accusations IMO. I am not a lawyer. Check the above yourself or consult a lawyer about it. If you do and have updates, can you let me know, please?

I am making arrangements to go to New Caledonia on my travels from Saturday. So I won’t be packaging imminent releases of:

• Maradns 1.2
• Wordpress 2.0

Sorry. I am pissed with Debian the last couple of days. Boiling. Yes I’m stressed, yes Debian is my scapegoat. My unstable system is completely b0rked. :( I tried. Honestly. I tried. I am running the 2.4 kernel which no matter how many modules I insert can’t seem to get X running with mouse support. I expected perhaps I need to dpkg-reconfigure xserver but then that reported I had a broken installation. WTF! Thanks mate. Paging around the end of virtual consoles in 2.4 which I have to do now, also does not bloody work. If I go off the edge it gets stuck. ALT+arrows don’t work. CTRL+ALT+F-keys don’t either. Nightmare. Reboot. Fsck errors. Fuck. dpkg -i of a 2.6.14 kernel just bombs out too while trying to make a mysteriously complicated initrd. I can’t really debug this problem as I don’t have Internet connectivity with my laptop either. Internet connectivity problems aren’t to do with Debian. That’s Australia’s fault. To add to my miseries I’ve caught a cold. I’ve also been playing around with sed all morning, trying to parse Debian LDAP output. Nightmare. To think I wanted to do my Debian New Maintainer stuff this month. Moray got back to me last month (or the month before that?) saying he was too busy (again). I’ve written to debian nm frontdesk for another AM and I’ve yet to hear from them. Oh well, I’m going to roast my ass in the tropics for a while and try forget computers ever existed.