Strange day today. It began pretty badly for me, being quite sick after a bad night. Even some swimming in the pool didn't really help and I was feeling pretty bad to begin the day. I first went to Jim Getty's BOF about the One Laptop Per Child project. Interesting talk, but maybe a bit quick and a bit too fast talking for me (Jim should attend Meike sessions about talks even with his great background in doing talks, I'm afraid). Then I moved at about 11:00 to the Tower where I actually stayed up to 19:00. There I attended a few deep and dense talks and BOFs. Keith Packard about X.org was good, though here again I would advise native speakers of English to pace a little bit down and think about their non native audience, especially when using few slides. Interesting questions and discussion in this BOF, really. Steve and Andi about release management were perfect. They made their points very clear and we now exactly know what we have to do to releas on time. I woul dlike to deserve a special mention to Andi who made huge efforts to improve his talk skills, slow down when talking and all that kind of stuff he probably did benefit (again) from our wonderful alphascorpii speaker training sessions. While everybody was going to lunch, I quietly stayed in the tower, visiting the local bathroom at regular intervals. I used this occasion to try my laptop setup for the video beamers. Actually, in short, it sucks. It appears that I'm only able to do 1024x768 at 60Hz if I want to have both my laptop display and the beamer. In that case, the beamer display sucks. Otherwise, with only the beamer, it's perfetc, but of course not really convenient. I think I'll use Javier's laptop for our talk. The afternoon was filled with two workshops. The first by Frans Pop about D-I internals did obviously not teach me many things but I was of course proud, just like he was, to see the graphical installer receive a big applause from the audience. His demo went well (I know that Frans likes really well done work) and He kept his audience fairly well awaken ! We ended with Javier's workshop about security bugs. Here, a perfect knowledge of the topic and a very well prepared demo (having tried that once, I'm really admirative). Javier was sometimes a bit fast on some topics and I will certainly have to slow him down for out Saturday's talk but indeed he made it well. Kudos ! After many hesitations, I finally decided to come at the "formal dinner", a Debconf tradition (and I can't miss stuff like that). Even though I'm not a party man, I enjoy these moments where all Debconfers share fun. Of course, as many have already written in their blogs, this was a really special dinner with many events, most of them being good stuff...and one of them being a real shame (the person responsible for starting that one does not even deserve to be mentioned and, no, I'm not talking about Holger or Ana in case someone would have worry). We came back quite early (Feeling better, I didn't want to play with my luck and try all the dishes) and I even had an opportunity to exchange a few words with Erinn, which I most often have no occasion to do. Back to the hacklab and a very intense hacking session, mostly talking with Otavio, Grisu and Nicolas to prepare this morning's BOF about i18n infrastructure....which will happen in 1h now, so I should stop blogging..:-) Strange...but great day. This is Debconf, dudes...

The night started great. Tables arranged in a swirl, happy geeks gathered around a good meal, it was going to be a great formal dinner.

Then came AJ and his megalomania. Well, it was kind of fun at the moment, although I still haven't cooled down after seeing his contribution to the Java in non-free thread. He even compromised himself by showing up hand in hand with Ted Walther.

After that, Ted tried to spoil the dinner, and almost managed to do it. Please people, correct me if I'm wrong as I was a few meters away from the incident and didn't follow everything. It seems the person Ted is calling a "local businesswoman" was a prostitute. As he doesn't want to name people, I'll do it: when learning that, Holger tried to throw Ted out of the building. Unfortunately some people stopped him from doing it. Holger, thanks a lot for having the courage to give this guy what he deserves, and already deserved before the provocation, when most people (including me) just stand still when facing such unbearable behavior.

Of course Ted tried to act as a martyr, as shows his blog entry. Ted, I do hope things won't be "resolved to your satisfaction". And anyway, you won't need to denounce the people who deserve to be awarded instead. Why have you come to Debconf for, anyway? Uploading broken versions of your packages, or writing stupid and provocative blog entries?

Then, the mariachis tried to improve the ambiance but only managed to prevent people from talking to each other. The real fun came from the rain, which fell so hard it entered the building in a magnificent cascade, leaving us eating and walking in a few centimeters of water. Another great moment was the power outage, during which we were lightened by camera flashes.

The food had so much success that I didn't have time to taste more than one dish before everything was wiped out. Still, despite Ted and despite the lack of food, this was a great evening, one of those I won't forget for sure.

I'll upload pictures later, but in the meantime you can have a look at Barry Hawkins' blog.

I’m moving to a new studio apartment in June, about 200 metres to the west from where I currently live. This naturally causes a snail mail address change. While very few people need my snail mail address, it’s listed in some of my free software as an alternative contact point, so I’d better get the word out on the change. (I will, of course, update the addresses in my software as I release new versions.) My current address is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Helokantie 1 A 16
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

My new address, which becomes valid in the beginning of June, is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Sienitie 2 B 27
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

(Some post offices may require a country prefix in front of the postal code; use “FI-40640″ in such a case.)

A Coronation Surreal, just surreal. A Cascade An unbelievable rain came, and eventually overwhelmed the roof and came down the wall like a waterfall. A Calamity Imagine a black square here. The power went out, and we all just rolled with it. It was kind of fun, actually. A Cleanup In the spirit of community, numbers of Debian people collaborated for a quick cleanup.

Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.

OK, so let's start with something simple: Debian. Simple in the sense that there probably won't be too many surprises for me as a Debian developer (or for most readers of Planet Debian). For other people this might be interesting, though, and some facts are probably interesting to one or the other experienced Debian user/developer, too... Hardware A few words on the hardware I'll be installing all these OSes on. It's a cheapo (200 Euros) x86 PC (Intel Celeron, 2 GHz), 80 GB IDE hard drive, 256 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9200 SE graphics adapter, Realtek PCI ethernet controller, CDROM, USB, and all the other standard stuff. Nothing fancy, really. Install

1. First, I downloaded a Debian sarge 3.1r2 CD image, burned it on a CD, and booted from that.
2. An installer menu showed up, where you can press F3 for boot options. I chose "expert26", which will ask me more questions and give me a 2.6 Linux kernel instead of 2.4.
3. The installer (newt-based, i.e. not graphical) will now start to boot a base Linux system.
4. Now, you can choose your language (used in the installer), country, region, and keyboard layout.
5. You'll be asked which additional kernel modules you want to load (default: all), and whether you want PCMCIA support. Also, you can choose which extra installer components should be loaded (LVM, PPP, serial, IrDA, ...).
6. Your hardware can be automatically detected (my Realtek card was successfully detected, the "8139too" kernel module was then loaded).
7. The network was successfully auto-configured via DHCP within seconds.
8. Now you can choose a hostname and domain name for the box. I used "hydra" as hostname (guess why), and "local.domain" as domain name.

Partitioning Now the funny part starts: partitioning the disk. As I will be installing >= 10 OSes, this needs a bit of consideration. I have chosen to create a 10 GB (primary) partition for a Redmond OS I'll be installing later (for games, testing, proprietary software I'm forced to use, and similar things). This will be the first partition and I marked it bootable, as Windows might choke otherwise. For the rest, I reserved 5 GB for each OS — that should do. So the next two (primary) partitions are 5 GB each. I'll leave these empty for now, as I might encounter obscure OSes which must be installed on primary partitions. Let's hope it won't be more than two ;-) As you can only have four primary partitions, I then had to create a logical partition, which will "contain" any further partitions. The next three (secondary) partitions are 1 GB each, intended to be used as swap. One of those I marked as swap in order to use it for Debian. Other Linux installations will be able to reuse this one. The other two are reserved in case I encounter OSes which have another form of swap and cannot use Linux swap partitions... The rest is easy: create twelve 5 GB partitions => lots of space for more OSes. Here's the resulting fdisk output:

Disk /dev/hda: 81.9 GB, 81964302336 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9964 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
      Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
   /dev/hda1   *           1        1216     9767488+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda2            1217        1824     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3            1825        2432     4883760   83  Linux
   /dev/hda4            2433        9964    60500790    5  Extended
   /dev/hda5            2433        2554      979933+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
   /dev/hda6            2555        2676      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda7            2677        2798      979933+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda8            2799        3406     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda9            3407        4014     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda10           4015        4622     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda11           4623        5230     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda12           5231        5838     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda13           5839        6446     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda14           6447        7054     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda15           7055        7662     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda16           7663        8270     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda17           8271        8878     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda18           8879        9486     4883728+  83  Linux
   /dev/hda19           9487        9964     3839503+  83  Linux

Install, continued

1. The Debian partitioning tool allowed me to do all of the above via a friendly menu. As it does not modify the partition table until you say "done", I could revert many changes, and play around with different layout ideas until I was satisfied.
2. Next thing you can choose is the Kernel flavor (386, 686, smp).
3. You may now configure and install GRUB, the bootloader. I installed it at "(hd0)", the master boot record of the hard disk.
4. Soon the CD ejects, and you have to reboot.
5. After a restart (which also shows whether GRUB works fine), you can now choose your timezone, and decide whether you want shadow passwords (say yes!).
6. Now enter the root password, and decide whether you want to create an additional user account (say yes, and enter a different password here).
7. You can now configure apt, e.g. tell it which sources you'd like to use (CDROM, FTP, HTTP, ...). You'll be asked whether you want to install software from Debian's "non-free" archive. After choosing a mirror (and proxy settings, if you like), you can (should!) also say yes to the question whether you want security updates...
8. Finally, you may now choose "tasks" (desktop, web server, file server, ...) your machine should be able to perform; this will influence which packages will be installed. You may choose "manual package selection", of course, if you want more control. I used "desktop".
9. That's about it. You'll see a few more application-specific questions (configuration of MTA, ssh, fonts, X11, gdm, and others), and after that you'll be left with a GNOME login window.

Security I collected some (partly) security-relevant information after that.

• Portscan from another box:
  

  PORT    STATE SERVICE
  22/tcp  open  ssh
  111/tcp open  rpcbind
  113/tcp open  auth
  785/tcp open  unknown
  

  Not good. A default install should not have any ports open, IMHO. There are more daemons running: exim (port 25), and famd (port 771) for example. Those are fine however, as they only listen to the loopback interface and are not exposed to the Internet (eth0).
• Some permissions:
  

  drwxrwsr-x   3 root staff  4096 2006-05-17 22:48 /home
  drwxr-xr-x  11 uwe uwe     4096 2006-05-18 23:19 /home/uwe
  drwxr-xr-x  10 root root   4096 2006-05-17 23:43 /root
  drwxrwxrwt   8 root root   4096 2006-05-17 23:41 /tmp
  /dev:
  crw-rw----  1 root video    10, 175 2006-05-17 23:13 agpgart
  crw-------  1 root root      5,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 console
  crw-rw----  1 root audio    14,   3 2006-05-17 23:13 dsp
  brw-rw----  1 root floppy    2,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 fd0
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   7 2006-05-17 23:13 full
  brw-rw----  1 root disk      3,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 hda*
  brw-rw----  1 root cdrom    22,  64 2006-05-17 23:13 hdd
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem      1,   2 2006-05-17 23:13 kmem
  crw-rw----  1 root root      1,  11 2006-05-17 23:13 kmsg
  crw-r-----  1 root kmem      1,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 mem
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   3 2006-05-17 23:13 null
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      5,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 tty
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,   0 2006-05-17 23:13 tty0
  crw-------  1 root root      4,   1 2006-05-17 23:24 tty1
  crw-------  1 root tty       4,   2 2006-05-17 23:13 tty[2-6]
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,   7 2006-05-17 23:13 tty7
  [...]
  crw-rw----  1 root root      4,  63 2006-05-17 23:13 tty63
  crw-rw----  1 root dialout   4,  64 2006-05-17 23:13 ttyS*
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   8 2006-05-17 23:13 random
  cr--r--r--  1 root root      1,   9 2006-05-17 23:13 urandom
  crw-rw----  1 root root      7,   1 2006-05-17 23:13 vcs*
  crw-rw-rw-  1 root root      1,   5 2006-05-17 23:13 zero
  

  Most of that looks sane to me (a "chmod 700 /home/uwe /root" would be nice, though), but maybe it can be tightened/secured a bit more? Ideas?
• Default users and shells:
  I installed some more popular applications (apache, mysql) to have more data.

  root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
  daemon:x:1:1:daemon:/usr/sbin:/bin/sh
  bin:x:2:2:bin:/bin:/bin/sh
  sys:x:3:3:sys:/dev:/bin/sh
  sync:x:4:65534:sync:/bin:/bin/sync
  games:x:5:60:games:/usr/games:/bin/sh
  man:x:6:12:man:/var/cache/man:/bin/sh
  lp:x:7:7:lp:/var/spool/lpd:/bin/sh
  mail:x:8:8:mail:/var/mail:/bin/sh
  news:x:9:9:news:/var/spool/news:/bin/sh
  uucp:x:10:10:uucp:/var/spool/uucp:/bin/sh
  proxy:x:13:13:proxy:/bin:/bin/sh
  www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
  backup:x:34:34:backup:/var/backups:/bin/sh
  list:x:38:38:Mailing List Manager:/var/list:/bin/sh
  irc:x:39:39:ircd:/var/run/ircd:/bin/sh
  gnats:x:41:41:Gnats Bug-Reporting System (admin):/var/lib/gnats:/bin/sh
  nobody:x:65534:65534:nobody:/nonexistent:/bin/sh
  Debian-exim:x:102:102::/var/spool/exim4:/bin/false
  uwe:x:1000:1000:,,,:/home/uwe:/bin/bash
  identd:x:100:65534::/var/run/identd:/bin/false
  sshd:x:101:65534::/var/run/sshd:/bin/false
  messagebus:x:103:104::/var/run/dbus:/bin/false
  hal:x:106:106:Hardware abstraction layer,,,:/var/run/hal:/bin/false
  saned:x:109:109::/home/saned:/bin/false
  gdm:x:104:110:Gnome Display Manager:/var/lib/gdm:/bin/false
  mysql:x:105:111:MySQL Server,,,:/var/lib/mysql:/bin/false
  

  Not too good, IMHO. Almost all system accounts have a valid shell instead of /bin/false or /usr/sbin/nologin. Most of those should not need one, and security-wise it's a lot better to not give them a valid shell. The good news is that many daemons (ssh, mysql, etc.) don't have a valid shell. Uh, why is "Debian-exim" capitalized? Update: That's why.
• Setuid/setgid files:
  

  # find / -type f \( -perm -4000 -o -perm -2000 \) -exec ls -ld ' ' \;
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root tty 9784 2005-09-18 09:04 /usr/bin/wall
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 22872 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/newgrp
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root shadow 34488 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chage
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 28056 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chfn
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 28088 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/chsh
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root shadow 16696 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/expiry
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 34904 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/gpasswd
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 26616 2005-05-18 08:33 /usr/bin/passwd
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 34488 2002-01-18 09:13 /usr/bin/at
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root tty 7992 2004-11-01 20:29 /usr/bin/bsd-write
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root crontab 26872 2004-07-28 22:44 /usr/bin/crontab
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 9860 2004-06-04 17:21 /usr/bin/dotlockfile
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 18136 2004-12-01 08:29 /usr/bin/traceroute.lbl
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 809836 2006-03-10 12:19 /usr/bin/gpg
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 7764 2006-01-31 01:48 /usr/bin/mutt_dotlock
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 24184 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lpq
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 22232 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lprm
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root lp 24440 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/bin/lpr
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 44024 2004-12-12 20:35 /usr/bin/mtr
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root mail 71640 2005-03-01 16:37 /usr/bin/procmail
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 12712 2005-03-01 16:37 /usr/bin/lockfile
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root ssh 57304 2004-11-28 16:33 /usr/bin/ssh-agent
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 10894 2004-06-04 12:02 /usr/bin/fileshareset
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5144 2006-01-15 14:37 /usr/bin/kgrantpty
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5588 2006-01-15 14:37 /usr/bin/kpac_dhcp_helper
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 98488 2006-03-20 23:03 /usr/bin/sudo
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root plugdev 19096 2005-05-18 15:47 /usr/bin/pumount
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root plugdev 26680 2005-05-18 15:47 /usr/bin/pmount
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root nogroup 45600 2005-09-08 07:32 /usr/bin/kdesud
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 575192 2005-05-24 09:18 /usr/bin/kppp
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 544332 2005-04-08 15:53 /usr/bin/gpg2
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 34872 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/same-gnome
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 57152 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnomine
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 65752 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnome-stones
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 70296 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/mahjongg
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 48952 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gtali
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 36652 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnotravex
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 94200 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnobots2
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 28776 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnotski
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 42584 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/glines
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 61944 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnibbles
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root games 78096 2005-03-02 19:20 /usr/games/gnometris
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 5668 2006-04-02 15:32 /usr/lib/pt_chown
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root mail 10940 2006-03-13 14:30 /usr/lib/evolution/2.0/camel/camel-lock-helper
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root utmp 9144 2005-03-09 18:21 /usr/lib/libvte4/gnome-pty-helper
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 13304 2005-09-06 15:13 /usr/lib/apache/suexec.disabled
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 668568 2006-04-11 14:33 /usr/sbin/exim4
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 265880 2005-05-05 19:32 /usr/sbin/pppd
  -rwsr-xr--  1 root dip 29420 2004-09-30 04:13 /usr/sbin/pppoe
  -rwxr-sr-x  1 root lp 32248 2004-07-27 23:48 /usr/sbin/lpc
  -rwsr-sr-x  1 root root 7860 2005-09-02 00:44 /usr/X11R6/bin/X
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 35512 2005-05-18 08:33 /bin/login
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 23416 2005-05-18 08:33 /bin/su
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 68440 2005-09-18 09:04 /bin/mount
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 40920 2005-09-18 09:04 /bin/umount
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 30764 2003-12-22 23:18 /bin/ping
  -rwsr-xr-x  1 root root 26604 2003-12-22 23:18 /bin/ping6
  -r-sr-xr-x  1 root root 15000 2004-06-28 20:39 /sbin/unix_chkpwd
  

  Quite a bunch, I'd say. The games are "only" "setgid games", but I'd really, really remove them on any production machine which should be halfway secure. Some of those binaries probably need the setuid/setgid bit (su, passwd, ...), but others probably don't. Maybe we should ship more of that non-setuid per default and add a note to the READMEs which tells the admin how he can make the apps setuid if he should want that?

Ok, so that's it for Debian stable. Unstable is 99% the same, except that you do a "vi /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade". I'll do that later maybe, compare the findings, and report notable differences here, but it shouldn't be too many (I guess). Not today, though, I need some sleep now. Comments, suggestions, flames? Update 2006-05-19: Updated "why is Debian-exim capitalized?" info as per comments, thanks!

Unsurprisingly lots of stuff has happened in the last 13 days since I last blogged. So much, that there were days where I wrote more emails than I read - and I haven't wrote many...

Also not unsurprisingly, debconf6 has been/is really a lot of fun - despite all the problems we have and had. Having met lots of nice people again (and some for the first time) will be the joyful memories I take home. I have hoped to be able to do (a little) more debian (not debconf) work, but well.. it is, as it is. We can and will learn for next years.

Also I really want to thank all those many people who gave their hands and/or brains and help get and keep debconf6 running. Muchas gracias!

Now my three short stories: on tuesday someone on IRC said "AAAARRRRGGG fucking stream!" and I replied "i'm happy about (bad) status reports, but 'ARRRGG fucking stream' makes me wanna say "streams are optional. STFU!" which then lead to "well, I didn't mean it that harsh. the streams are actually pretty cool. just too bad that the connectivity seesm to be to bad. I'm actually pretty impressed by video and sound quality."

I can understand that people at home get frustrated by interrupted streams, but we've allways said streams are optional, we do it for the first time and we had a hell more of problems than we thought off. And screaming on IRC (over and over) doesn't really make me wanna work harder.

This morning, some of the power plugs in the main auditorium didn't work. We then went to the fuse box and everything looked ok. Well, it took us some time to find out, that this main fuse box had not all fuses for the big room, there is another fuse box in the audio booth with has fuses for some (5%) of the power plugs in the main room in the tower. Arg. (Oh, and in case you wonder, yes, we have asked the hotel staff about this. They couldn't help.) So one switch of the fuses has moved a little and turned off. Arrrg. Now it's duct taped and should work till the end of the conference. Hopefully.

Story number three is my favorite: someone wanted to have wired access in the tower so plugged a cable into the hub which goes to the network panel which link to the network jacks under the table. The small switch we use has 8 ports and 9 jacks, one extra uplink jack. This broke one out of two APs in the tower and unfortunatly it was the 802.11g AP to which more clients can connect. Yay. So far so bad. Then I duct taped the entrance to the little server room in the audio booth (picture will be uploaded..) and put up a sign saying noone should enter without coordinated with me.

(BTW, then of course the AP needed some more power cycling to come back to life, but that's still not the whole story.)

The whole story is that after I duct taped that room completly some idiot(s) again plugged cables into the switch to get the net working for him or herself - of course without checking with the videoteam. Thank you very much! As I we didnt have enough issues already. Luckily this didn't cause new problems but I'm still shaking my head.

So, to summarize and to make it clear, I'm not frustrated, just stressed out, so much that I couldn't even stand people asking me to jump into the pool after lunch. It was just another request to me and I wanted to decide for myself what I do in my break. Finally I jumped into the water and was happy again :-)

Leaving to formal dinner now without reading this blog post before

My blog has apparently become a canonical source (at least by PageRank) for the Webloyalty Scam (see also this update). It’s been about 18 months since I first posted about it—since then that page has gotten over 40,000 hits and over 1,000 comments. Perhaps the best testimony about this company comes from its own employees. At least two people purporting to be Webloyalty Call Center Representatives have posted comments to that entry; in both cases, the IP addresses resolved to a Connecticut location, so it is at least plausible that these people really work for Webloyalty. Here’s the most recent comment, posted from 69.183.205.129:

WOW!! The level of stupidity on this board is incredible. You people don’t get it, do you?? Webloyalty didn’t sign you up for anything. You signed yourselves up. The details are right there, in plain sight, in normal sized text, right in front of your faces. It details EVERYTHING, including the cost of the service and the billing cycle. The problem is that all of you idiots chose not to read it. You saw “free”, and figured “gee, something free for me? golly, I must be special”. WRONG!! YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, YOU’RE JUST FUCKING LAZY AND STUPID!! YOU SIGNED YOURSELF UP! NOTHING HAPPENED AUTOMATICALLY!! THERE WAS NO SLIGHT OF HAND OR MISLEADING WORDING!! The bottom line is you’re all a bunch of stupid, lazy, crybabies who don’t want to take any responsability for your actions. NONE! Well, thats what you get for being stupid and lazy. LEARN TO TAKE RESPONSABILITY FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS. DON’T POINT THE FINGER AT OTHERS AND CALL THEM “THEIVES” AND “SCAM ARTISTS” AND BLAME THEM FOR YOUR OWN STUPIDITY. YOU ALL MAKE ME SICK!! FUCKING CRYBABIES!!!!

And here’s another for a few months ago:

comment: I’m a rep in the call center at Webloyalty. I have no pity for any of you people. You’re all suckers, plain and simple. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that nothing is free? When all of you idiots made your purchases on whatever website you did business on at the end of your transaction there was an offer asking if you wanted to save $10, or get award miles, or whatever. When you clicked on that link you were not automatically signed up. What happens is that you’re brought to the Reservations Rewards website. On that website it tells you that you are on the website for Reservations Rewards. You see, you can tell that because the banner at the top of the site says “Reservations Rewards”. Unfortunately you were too stupid to notice or remember. It then gives you instructions on how to redeem your “reward”. At that point you are instructed to enter you email address in twice and click accept. Now you have to manually type in the email twice in those boxes. No cut and paste is allowed. Then it tells you to click accept. Now, if you had any fucking brains in your head you would have noticed that right above the box where you enter your email mail address its says, in regular sized type, in plain sight, right out in the open, that entering your email twice will act as an electronic signature and that by clicking accept you are accepting that the website you just made a purchase on can share the billing information with Reservation Rewards. Also in the big box next all of this it gives the exact details of what you are signing up for, again in regular sized print, in plain sight, right out in the open. If you are too stupid to take the time to notice all of that then you deserve what you got. which was a membership in a overpriced bullshit ptogram.
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Webloyalty depends on idiots like you to not notice this stuff. To be blinded by the idea that you are getting something for “free”. To not look at you credit card statement so charges go through every month. Its unbelievable the amount of dummies out there that fall for this stuff. Even if you do catch the charges eventually, and get a refund they still made money off of you by collecting interest on your money when they had possesion of it. Stay a member or cancel its win-win for webloyalty.
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So, anyway I hope all you dummies learned a valuable lesson and wont fall for this again. I’m sure many of you will, though. You’d be shocked at how many people are repeat members where they canceled the service a while back but fell for the scam again a few months later.
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Perhaps the funniest thing about my Reservation Rewards entry is that I get emails every day or two from people asking me how to get them to stop taking their money. There are, in fact, over 1,000 testimonials (including my own entry) explaining exactly how to get them to stop charging. Every few months, I receive an email from someone furious at me for charging them all this money. I wonder who these people are who get as far as doing a Google search to find my entry, but can’t seem to figure out that I have nothing to do with the company.

It feels like (probably because it is) about 2 years since I last had a good fiddle around with Debian's installer. It's been fun to have another play in the last week or so. I've been on a mission to vanquish the ISC DHCPv2 packages, and I can't do this until the installer stops needing to use the udeb for dhclient. Previously, the dhcp3-client udeb had been way too big for the job (apparently it's the OMAPI stuff that gets linked in, I'm told by David Hankins from the ISC). Matt Zimmerman had thrown around the idea of using ipconfig from klibc-utils quite some time ago, but it's taken me this long to get the spare time to look into it further. Hacking the netcfg udeb to support ipconfig as a DHCP client was relatively trivial. dhcp.c wasn't too hair raising, and so I rebuilt the installer with my modified netcfg udeb and a udeb I made from the klibc source package, and it worked. However, it's not as simple as that (it never is). There's a couple of special cases as I discovered when hacking dhcp.c in netcfg:

1. with the DHCPv2 client, it adds a dhcp-class-identifier attribute (vendor-class-identifier in DHCPv3) set to "d-i". ipconfig is extremely lightweight. It can't add custom attributes, and apparently this attribute does cool stuff in relation to preseeding (although I haven't got a good handle on exactly what yet).
2. The other problem is related to a bug (I even remember it - #239591), where the hostname is optionally sent in the DHCP request. ipconfig doesn't appear to support that either, although in theory it should. One of the ways of invoking it includes providing the hostname, so I filed a wishlist bug regarding that, after emailing the upstream author.

So, my work in this instance is probably all for naught, but it was fun anyway, and it's something I've been meaning to do for absolutely ages. It is also hopefully a moot point, as apparently the space issues aren't so bad any more, so in theory the dhcp3-client udeb will now fit. The next dhcp3 upload will provide a dhcp3-client udeb again, so we'll see what happens on that front...

Day trip. Six busses full of Debian developers, maintainers, and supporters toured the area around Oaxtepec today. We clambered over several Mexican pyramids and a ruined mountain-top city. Walking in the main entrance I immediately felt that it was very familiar. I identified the pool where they purified themselves before entering the complex, and several altars. Some of the things the archaelogists called "altars" looked more like bed platforms. I told the guide maybe they were both; ancient religions were known for their homosexual sex rites. Then we saw the palace of Cortes in the city of Morelos. It is a very swank city, fun to walk around and shop. We got back at 10pm, tired but satisfied. Bought a t-shirt that says "100% GUAPO". The Hispanic contingent at Debconf went wild. They may give me some photos to post soon. Lisp redux. Kevin Mark read my summary of Peter van Eyndes presentation yesterday, and sent in this email:

Hi Ted, you seem to be having fun at Debconf! Saw your post about a book by Peter Seibel. Strangely enough I attended a meeting at lispnyc with him this week. They shot video which hopefully you can see. Checkout http://www.lispnyc.org/home.clp cheers, Kev

Well, thanks Kev! At lunch yesterday, a fellow developer, whose name I forget, told me that OCAML is far superior to Haskell in terms of performance because it is "statically typed at compile time" or something. I thought that was a characteristic of Haskell as well. I mentioned the benchmarks that Haskell is currently winning, and he brushed this aside. Which may be appropriate; optimizing for benchmarks isn't the same as optimizing for the general case. Food. We had lunch yesterday at a restaurant. I hate zucchini, but their zuchini stuffed with quesa (cheese) was delicious. I haven't found birria (shredded goat meat) in the market here yet, but the restaurant had some. At the end of the meal a vendor came into the restaurant with some crisp, deep fried confection called "churros", coiled like a big hose. Its cross section looks like a five point star. For P10 the vendor broke off four pieces, 5 inches long. Knut shared his with me; it was like a donut, only crunchy. John Sokol. John Sokol, part of the original 386BSD team, arrived late Tuesday night. Carrying 80 pounds of luggage, he not only took the Metro, but he walked up the mile longer hill from the resort entrance to the conference. The Metro is nice, but it has a lot of stairs. I was tired after traversing it; I could not have walked up the hill if I tried afterward. He brought a VOIP phone with him, but it gives an error saying his account has been compromised. It is probably looking at his Mexican IP address and blocking it. So John and I have no way of phoning the outside world.

On the long bus ride back from the Mexican pyramids, I got to think about a long standing problem. If Israel's laws forbade prostitution, why didn't Israel's greatest judge enforce those laws? We've all heard the story of King Solomon and the two harlot's, where he finds the real mother by threatening to chop the baby in two. Since the laws of Israel carried a death penalty for adultery, why didn't Solomon enforce it? People today equate prostitution with adultery, but the Bible does not. Not always. As the wisest man who ever lived, a walking embodiment of true justice, Solomons judgement deserves a deeper look. Here is the text of the whole incident:

1 Kings 3:16-28 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house. And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear. And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king. Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other. Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof. And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him, to do judgment.

Whoredom, harlotry, prostitution; they defile the land. When Judah thought his daughter-in-law Tamar had become a harlot, he ordered her to be burnt. The problem was not with the sex for pay, but with violation of Judah's property rights. Tamar had been bought and paid for, and belonged to his family for the purpose of increasing their manpower. Biblically, sex for pay is fine. A ketubah (marriage contract) guarantees a woman a certain financial allowance in return for performing her sexual duties. The problem is that prostitution lowers the birthrate of the population, thus reducing its manpower, thus reducing its brainpower, thus reducing its ability to protect and defend itself. The connection between prostitution and lower birth rates isn't obvious to the layman, so just take it for granted right now.

Leviticus 18:20,28 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife, to defile thyself with her. That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. Leviticus 19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.

Prostitution can fall into two categories; the woman is still the property of her father, or she belongs to a husband. Widows, divorced, and single women fall into the category of belonging to their fathers; they have a right to return to the family home and be supported there. How would a father prostitute his daughter? If he treats her harshly, refuses to marry her off to a suitable husband, does not feed or clothe her, train her or discipline her, she may well turn to whoredom to support herself. Look closely at the story of the two harlots. They say they have no man. They fall into the category of single women. Sex with a single woman is not adultery. Adultery carries the death penalty, but as single women, their prostitution was to be regulated by different laws. If a girl took up the prostitution trade, and then got married under false pretenses, pretending to be a virgin, the penalty was death. However no death penalty is indicated for the circumstance where the woman and her family were up front about her past. A man taking a wife needs to be able to accurately assess the risks of disease and future infidelity.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel's father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her; And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him; And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.

Suppose a single woman was to work as a whore. What is the penalty? For the girl, no penalty at all. If she is a virgin turning her first trick, the man has to pay a hefty fine of fifty shekels to her father, who has the choice of giving her in marriage or not.

Exodus 22:16,17 And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins. Deuteronomy 22:28,29 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.

When she is no longer a virgin, her father either allows her to be a prostitute, violating the law at Leviticus 19:29, or he doesn't allow her. If her father allows her, then he becomes liable for her behavior and she is not punished, as described in Hosea 4:13,14 quoted below. If her father doesn't allow her, she is again subject to the death penalty, as set forth in the next set of verses:

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

In the case of Solomon's two harlots, there is no evidence at all that their father disciplined or otherwise acted to prevent them from their trade. Perhaps their father was dead, but in that case his responsibility to his daughters would have fallen on his next of kin. It really is a matter of family responsibility, not of persecuting individuals. There is one remaining corner case; what of the married woman who becomes a prostitute? What if the two harlots had been married after all? It is a principle of the Torah that it must be applied equally. You cannot hit one party with the full penalty then let another get off free for the same crime. It is better to err on the side of mercy, so if you do not convict one, you should not convict another. This is violated daily by un-Godly governments who selectively enforce their laws to "make examples" of people. Such selective enforcement is neither fair or just. In Solomon's case, assuming the women were married, the other parties to the crime of adultery were missing. Without them, there was no way to proceed. This is why Jesus was able to say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The two witnesses rule also comes into it; before a person can be put to death two witnesses to the crime are required. Solomon's two harlots had no witnesses against them. When people engage in false worship, and use the services of whores, God will not punish the women who turn to adultery and infidelity. He will punish those who are responsible; the men, who failed to take their patriarchal prerogative in setting a good example of just, fair, respectful, and temperate behavior.

Hosea 4:13,14 They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.

If you have any Torah questions, feel free to write in to ted AT reactor-core DOT org.

I've been managing servers professionally for some years now. Support is one of the most important things when you are managing computers for work. You don't need support to help you out with a printing problem or an e-mail problem. You need support because every minute the machine fails to power up, your company may lose twice the value of the entire machine. Or even more.

My first day job managing servers involved Dell hardware. What a nightmare. I've never had a good experience with Dell support, ever.

First off, Dell support never puts me straight through to an intelligent support rep. I don't care whether I get to the Indian call center or someone in Texas. The first support person I speak to at Dell has less computer aptitude than my grandmother. One conversation I will always remember went like this:

Me: We have a disk in our array that went bad on our Linux server. The red light on the disk itself is on. Please send us a replacement.

Dell: Have you tried rebooting?

Me: No. This is a production server. The reason the disks are redundant is so I don't HAVE to. Besides, the light ON THE MACHINE ITSELF is on.

Dell: Ah, OK. Have you run scandisk?

Me: No. This is a Linux server, as I told you, and scandisk wouldn't see a problem anyway since this disk is in an array and the array is still up.

Dell: OK, great. How about you download the diagnostics .exe from our website...

Me: Can't. We don't have Windows on this machine. You did say you support Linux when we bought it.

Dell: Ah. Can you right-click on My Computer...

Me: NO. This runs Linux, and the BAD DISK LIGHT ON THE MACHINE IS ON.

Dell: Ah, OK. I wonder if the problem really is that you have a bad disk.

Me: Could be!

Our first HP server purchase happened to be at a time when HP had undercut Dell by several thousand dollars. I liked the hardware, but it wasn't anything that much more special than Dell.

But what I really like is the support. I haven't had to call HP support often, but when I do, I am almost always speaking to a live, experienced person within 5 minutes.

With only one exception, all the HP support people I've talked to have been very experienced. They all sound like they've been working with HP hardware since the late punched card era. They know what is going on and assume that I do too. The HP people don't make small talk (it *really* ticks me off when someone obviously in Calcutta or something asks me about the weather in Kansas, because you *know* they are reading it off a screen and don't care). But that's fine. I'm not calling them to talk about the weather, I'm calling them because my server is down.

We had a bad disk in an array on a HP server once. That conversation went more like this.

HP: Server support. Serial number please?

Me: [gives it to them]

HP: OK. What's the problem?

Me: The array dropped a disk. The failed disk light is on and the controller logged a disk error.

HP: OK. That's a 146GB SCSI, right? 15KRPM or 10K?

Me: 15K.

HP: OK. Is 1PM tomorrow good to send out the replacement?

Me: Fine.

HP: OK, your case number is xxxxx. Can you give us directions to your location?

Me: Sure...

So recently we got in our MSL4048 tape library. A very nice unit. And faster than most *disks*. 48 Ultrium3 tapes -- 400GB native each -- very nice. And a barcode reader built in.

So anyway, one small problem. When you open up a magazine to put tapes in, you can close the unit back up. It says "scanning", but it doesn't notice that we've changed tapes until we give it a command on the operator panel (yes, this tape drive has a LCD screen built in). This can be worked around, but is annoying and is just waiting to cause confusion. Plus it's not how it should work.

So I call HP support yesterday.

Turns out this MSL4048 is a brand-new unit. Had only been on the market a few weeks. Our support rep has never seen one or taken calls about one, and they haven't even given him all the HP technical docs yet. But no matter, he is willing to try to help us out.

He calls me back twice yesterday with tips and questions after speaking to colleagues. He asks intelligent questions, doesn't bother with the "are you sure you're putting the tapes in the right way around" or the "is the power cord securely plugged in" crap, and generally doesn't waste my time. He called me back about four times more today -- they duplicated our setup in their lab, right down to the exact firmware version, but didn't have the problem. Two of those callbacks were apologizing for taking so long, and explaining that they were learning about this machine as they went along. So a HP rep will be out to our location shortly.

Now THAT'S what I call service. No blaming it on someone else, no trying to make me do stupid troubleshooting things, and returning calls.

My *one* bad experience with HP was one time we put a new internal tape drive in the machine, and it was acting flaky. I got the only not-very-experienced HP rep I ever had spoken to that time, and they tried to blame Debian for what turned out to be a bad SCSI cable. (The symptoms weren't very similar to what I'd expect for a bad SCSI cable, and the cable had been working fine.) Oh HP, you donate to Debian -- why don't you support your hardware under it?

(In fairness, that is the ONLY time they have flinched when I said I run Debian, though it does make them hesitate sometimes)

Lisa has been thinking for a short while that she’d like to get a Motorola RAZR phone. We were AT&T Wireless customers, which now makes us a weird type of Cingular customer where we not only have our AT&T plan, but also special AT&T customer service representatives (which I’ll get to in a bit). So we went into our local Cingular store and she asked about getting the shiny new black RAZR, and they said that it wouldn’t be a problem, they’d just need to upgrade our service, and since we’re on the same plan and the service is changing, I’d need to upgrade my phone as well. AT&T Wireless has a email-to-SMS gateway and gives every phone its own email address, yournumber@mmode.com. Since AT&TWS only charges if you send a message but not if you receive a message, I use it all the time (mostly for stock quotes but also for various other things). So in an average month I probably receive 30-50 emails on my phone, as well as the occasional spam, all of them free. Cingular has the same service, yournumber@cingularme.com. But unlike AT&TWS, Cingular charges you both for sending and receiving messages. (”Text, Instant, and Multimedia messages are charged when sent or received, whether read or unread, solicited or unsolicited.”) So my 30-50 messages a month are going to cost me $3.00-$5.00 a month. Of course, I could always get a package, which will limit those 50 messages to just $3.00. Or I could get a $20 package that lets me receive 2500 messages. That’s not the point. The point is that once that limit is hit, it goes back to $0.10 per message, regardless of the plan. That means that some evil person can send you thousands of messages and you could end up owing hundreds of dollars. The only way to prevent that is to call Cingular and turn off the E-Mail Messaging feature from your service. (You can use the Message Center to “Create block and allow lists to limit e-mail messages received” and “Control what times of day your phone can receive e-mail messages.” Also it looks like you can block email containing some spam attributes. But none of those things guarantee that you’re not going to get a bunch of junk.) I tried calling Cingular to confirm this, and when I entered my phone number, it redirected me to AT&TWS customer service, who confirmed that AT&TWS does not charge for receiving text messages, and confirmed that Cingular does charge for receiving messages, but did not have an answer for how Cingular deals with spam. In fact, they didn’t seem to have a lot of information about the Cingular service at all, other than how to “upgrade” my account to a Cingular account. I had to call Cingular sales, who also didn’t know the answer to how to prevent abuse; but they were able to transfer me to Cingular customer service, who confirmed that yes, I really do have the potential to get screwed if I don’t turn off E-Mail Messaging.

I had a wonderful little entry written up talking about how I’m going to become a godfather, and how I switched web browsers, and other meaningless stuff, when it got eaten. I was nearly done with it too. I don’t know exactly what caused the crash, but I do know that it took down the entire screen process, and all the windows with it. This happens to me probably once a week. It only happens to me on DreamHost’s shell server though; it doesn’t happen to me on any of the other computers I run screen on. They all run Debian, but DreamHost is the only one that runs sarge; all the others run etch. So I blame you, Debian, and will keep blaming you until I actually look into the issue enough to figure out where the problem is. Also, I continue to hate LiveJournal, even after I’ve stopped using them. Lately they’ve started tinkering with what cookies they send and when, and which ones you need in order to read protected entries. When you request the RSS feed for a LiveJournal blog, first it redirects you to a place where it checks your ljmastersession cookie, then it redirects you to a place where it sets your ljdomsess.ljuser cookie, then redirects you back to the original page you requested. This works fine in standards-compliant browsers but in half-hour hacks that you put together yourself it sends you through an infinite loop of redirects. So I had to spend another half hour working to fix that fun problem. (It really wasn’t a problem for me, other than I wasn’t able to read LJ users’ blogs for a while; the UI still worked fine, since everything is done with libnbio.) I should have just used curl, and would have except their non-blocking IO API is crap. And in other obscure software news, my viwp plugin is occasionally broken, so I’ve stopped using it, which pisses me off. I don’t like the WordPress web authoring UI for a variety of reasons (largely because it’s just a textarea), and it’s not convenient for me to use a GUI tool, and I didn’t see a TUI tool worth using. So at some point I’m probably going to have to figure out why viwp is buggy and fix it. Until then I blame WordPress.

The 2006 Tour of Britain will be calling at Glasgow (29 August), Castle Douglas, Blackpool, Liverpool, Yorkshire, West Midlands, Rochester, Canterbury, Greenwich and central London (3 September). This year, the tour takes the chance to road-test some of the Tour de France and Olympic routes, so the London stage is a bit more than a tiny circuit in Westminster. [cont with links]

I signed up for a ZoomIn API Key (not that it seems to be needed atm…) the other week and finally got a chance to have a play this past weekend. My test case was to build a map of all the CRCnet sites and the links between them to use as a plugin in the CRCnet Configuration System. Either as a dynamic status display (colouring links to show traffic loads and status etc) or as a network planning tool to get a feel for the relationship between existing sites and potential new locations. Obviously the lack of topographical information makes the second case far less useful than it could be, but I think even in 2D it would still be a useful tool. Getting the points onto the map was relatively straightforward, but adding any sort of hover event to them was another matter. The GEvent class currently only supports the click event and markers are not added with any other identifying attributes (such as an ID or Name) which could be used to hook an event into them. After a quick squiz at the Terms and Conditions, I grabbed a copy of the API javascript and after unobfuscating it (basically just adding back in line breaks and running in through indent(1)) started to have a squiz at what was happening. The API code is very nice and clean and it wasn’t at all hard to work out what was going on. Mozilla’s Venkman javascript debugger absolutely rocks for this sort of work. It allows you to step through all the scripts on the page line by line and quickly get a feel for the flow of the code. Adding support for the hover (onmouseover) event doesn’t look like it would be too hard, but the T&C didn’t explicitly mention whether I was allowed to actually modify the API code, so I choose to simply create a CRCnetMarker class (see below) that creates GMarker object and then pokes id attributes onto the internal objects of that class before returning it. Then once you’ve called addOverlay you can use the basic DOM functions to hook in an onmouseover event handler on the ID of the marker.

var CRCnetMarker = function (sitename, point, icon)
 
    var marker = new GMarker(point, icon);
    marker.icon.id = "crcnet_container_" + sitename;
    marker.icon.firstChild.id = "crcnet_icon_" + sitename;
    marker.addEventListener = function (eventname, handler)  
         b = document.getElementById(marker.icon.firstChild.id);
         b.addEventListener(eventname, handler, false);
     
     return marker;
 
var marker = new CRCnetMarker(new GPoint(2704685.21,6367057.51), "mph");
map.addOverlay(marker);
marker.addEventListener('mouseover', hoverHandler);

That worked like a charm and I now have nice little info boxes popping up next to each node when you hover over them. I also discovered in the process of implementing this that Prototype and ZoomIn do not play nicely together. It appears to be Prototype’s fault as it messes with the Array type by adding new methods (like each for enumeration) which break the builtin for (i in array) syntax when the array contains non-numeric keys (like each). This has been reported in the prototype bug tracker as breaking Yahoo Maps but the comments don’t seem to offer much hope for Prototype’s behaviour changing anytime soon which is a pity. The next roadblock was a lack of support for drawing lines! This put the kibosh on the whole animated network status idea. Trolling through the source again reveals a GPolyLine class that appears to be semi-implemented, so hopefully support for drawing lines is coming very soon. The only other thing I found slightly annoying was having to supply all the co-ordinates in NZGD49 format. Most of our GPS information for CRCnet is stored in WGS84 format (as that’s what our older GPS unit puts out). NZGD49 has been deprecated in favour of NZGD2000 (which is near enough to identical to WGS84 for normal use) so I’m not really sure why ZoomIn is still using NZGD49. Maybe that’s all TerraLink can supply? Some quick googling turned up the proj library (apt-get install proj in Debian) which provides the cs2cs utility which can convert from WGS84 (aka NZGD2000) to NZGD49 to feed to ZoomIn. The magic peice of information is the transformation parameters which LINZ helpfully provide. Punching those (I chose the 7 parameter version) into cs2cs via a command line like

echo "$lat $long" /usr/bin/cs2cs +proj=latlong +datum=WGS84 +ellps=WGS84 +towgs84=0,0,0 +nodefs +to +proj=nzmg +datum=nzgd49 +ellps=intl +towgs84=59.47,-5.04,187.44,-0.47,0.10,-1.024,-4.5993 awk ' print $1" "$2 '

performs the magic conversion. The conclusion?
Overall I think ZoomIn rocks and it’s really cool to see a small NZ company filling in where Google and friends have failed miserably. The biggest weakness at the moment is definitely the API, which doesn’t really allow you to do much more than add points at this stage. Given that ZoomIn is still relatively young the leanness off the API is understandable. Given the API a few more months to mature and fill out and I think we’ll be able to create some really cool applications on top of the ZoomIn platform. Screenshot:

Today I continue my backlog-clearing series of link lists with ones about blogging and podcasting, including style, technicalities and legalities. If you blog or podcast and want to learn from others, I hope you'll enjoy some of these: [continues with links on my site]

I was staying over at dcoombs's place on Friday night, which was very gracious with him. It also meant that I got a ride to the aeroport on Saturday morning, so that I could catch my 8:05 flight. After going through security, I waited for a bit and read a book. Then we boarded and waited on the tarmac for an oil filter change. No kidding. We took off and I soon fell asleep, as I was quite tired. By the time I woke up, we were flying over sunny Mexico. We landed at the aeroport, picked up my baggage, went through customs and ended up in the terminal. It was full of people with signs looking for their loved ones. I made my way past them and followed a sign that looked like it was for taxis. Along the way, I saw an HSBC and poked my head inside. I was slightly disappointed that nobody was speaking Chinese. I bought a flat-rate taxi fare to the Terminal de autobuses in Tasque a. The taxi driver, Bito, loaded my suitcase in the car and we were off. His English was non-existant so we spoke to each other with our hands. The rest of the time, I spent staring out the window. Mexico City is bright and colourful! Everything has vibrant splashes of colour. There are huge fleets of old Volkswagon Beatles driving around, many of them operating as green taxicabs. We drove past shops and stores and the signs were hand-painted and awesome. When we got to the poorer communities, I started seeing tags on buildings, but then we drove past these huge murals spray-painted on large walls. He let me off at the terminal and I bought a ticket to Oaxtepec. This was done through plenty of pointing and reading off of computer teminals. Then, I went out Gate 3 and walked into a mass of people. Now, I'm used to people queueing up, but this was not a common concept here. I tapped someone on the should and asked how I could get on my bus. Giacomo introduced himself and tried to explain the system. But he eventually just talked to the ticket collector who let me on the same coach. I discovered that he had family who lived in Hamilton and invited him to look me up if he ever visited Montr al. When we got to Oaxtepec, I staggered off the bus and picked up my luggage. Then I got un-carsick by sitting down on something stable. I was standing outside the front gates of the Centro vacacional Oaxtepec IMSS. I considered the long hike up a big hill, and then hired a cab that took me up to the Recepcion building where I got checked in. I dragged my luggage to the room and met Blars there. I picked out a bed amongst the five still available. I had finally arrived.