I was investigating elserv breakage with emacs-snapshot package, since wysihtml depends on functioning elserv, and the bugreport had been idle for 3 months.325449.I've found out that elserv.el is the one causing the error message.The expression (push ?\ decoded) no longer seems to work with emacs-snapshot, and (push ?\\ decoded) seems to work instead.This same code is used in muse-el and emacs-wiki in cgi.el.Hmm..This was wrong, I found out.(push ?\decoded) is the right solution.?\is a space escaped with a backslash and emacs22 didn't like the next token being without a whitespace.

Reading old email can be entertaining sometimes:

"I've done this before, in various forms, and most of the time it follows the same predictable route: 25% of the time you get a really good committee and it's a blast for all involved; 25% you get a diabolical committee and it stands a chance of dying; half the time you get an average committee and it continues as it was before. The whole "committee" idea has some fairly major pitfalls to avoid: cliques, irrelevance and legality to name but three. [...] I think we should NOT form a committee."

-- Me, to alug, in April 1999 which makes all the crap from Debian-UK Society zealots like:

"While people like MJ Ray like bureaucratic bondage[0], it was felt by everyone else that the best constitution would be the simplest possible."

-- Scott James Remnant, to debian-project, in August 2005 even more obviously laughable. I didn't want a complicated constitution. I want either a minimally-complete constitution, or not to join it. They allow neither. Annoyingly, the Debian-UK Society is still claiming many DDs became members without consenting (which violates article 20 of the universal declaration of human rights), still seem to have permission to use the "Debian" trademark and still seem to be a business selling CDs and t-shirts. Violating a human right may mean they're breaking our Human Rights Act - quite remarkable for a small club. Also, I've seen nothing that suggests that they have notified the Inland Revenue, which I think can get them fined lots, so donations may be at risk. Tomorrow is International Human Rights Day (which centres this year on torture). DUS is a piffling matter, so it should be easy to deal with, but there seems to be lies, bigotry and ignorance in the way. Freedom to associate is one of the most practical human rights. It lets us act on our support or opposition to things. Defend it. I support debian but I oppose the way it's doing business in the UK. Do you support attempted conscription into an odd-looking UK business?

I smiled at "Things I thought" from Bagel Belly Blog more than I have for a while. Much truth there. The Bagel Belly is back on form. Sam Hocevar asks "Is there a task organiser that does not suck?" which I think is interesting - the program is not the organiser. The user is the organiser. The program can only help (or hinder!) not organise. Sometimes obvious is just plain wrong. I used to think it was obvious to answer my messages at the start of the day. I found I lost whole chunks of the day that way. For me, long reading is usually an evening activity, so I guess my mind associated it with going to sleep afterwards. I didn't notice that reading personal email is fine, when I reply to a high proportion of it and act on it. That starts my day with action and I continue being active through the day. Reading mailing lists and newsgroups isn't fine, as I read most of that and don't reply. I switched to reading only personal email in the morning and leaving lists and newsgroups until later in the day, unless there's something obviously interesting. It's made a big difference. Is there a need to rethink email? Bob Geldof rails against emails:

"Geldof said he dreaded seeing lots of e-mails in his inbox, as they imposed an agenda on him, and disrupted his own plans for the day."

This doesn't surprise me in general (is there a less likely email fan?) but does he have a point? Over time, I've moved to treating emails as letters, essays or at least office memos. It's easy to treat them as conversations, but they are not, in so many ways. You can say things in conversations that will haunt you if you ever write them down. In conversation, people accept that sometimes you'll make comments without proper review and reflection, but it's assumed that you have considered your emails, even though most people don't seem to. This is part of why I think the Debian private email "declassification" proposal is unethical if applied to past messages. People didn't expect to have such a wide audience. Similar musings from techdirt, the Register, the Inquirer and Business Week Maybe see also thread patterns from see shy jo which could help you skip though low priority email sooner, and Online forum usage and other addictions, from Steve Pavlina. I wondered if the problems were new to online. Forums can be a bit like newspapers, but while you get a whole day to read a newspaper and there's one hell of a lag on the letters page, you can get a forum update by clicking at any time (even though new editions may be smaller) and your talk-back appears instantly on most forums. - Then someone reminded me about "news junkies" who buy all the newspapers and watch or listen to rolling news. Maybe this isn't a new problem. How was it solved in the past?

The flight to Edinburgh went just fine. I believe it’s my first time flying 10 minutes ahead of schedule because everyone was already in the plane. I left on 12:35 CET, landed on 12:35 GMT, so no time lost :). After arriving I was dying for something to eat (which I took with me in my coat but it wasn’t really reachable in the plane). So I ate, got some money and took a taxi to the Heriot-Watt University campus. The university campus I got dropped off on the campus at the main reception. There I was able to store my luggage and I was kindly directed to the Mountbatten building, home of the school of MACS. There I met Fairouz Kamareddine and two of my direct colleagues: Manuel Maarek and Krzysztof Retel. Fairouz quickly arranged that I got registered as a HW(Heriot-Watt) student, got my MACS account, the accommodation, etc. With keys, luggage and instructions I took off to the Lord Thomson Hall to find my room. At 17:00 I was completely settled in already. I met my (all Chinese) four kitchmates (yes, it’s a strange word) and went back to the university refectory for dinner. My room is a quite small, at least, smaller than I am used to (about half the area), but it has a bathroom (with shower), gets cleaned weekly and all the heating is included… so I am not complaining. I must say that the people on campus are very nice. I can ask anyone if I need to know something and I always get help or a kind reply. There are really a lot of foreign students here (about 25%) who all share the same fate.

Apparently Microsoft has pushed back the beta Test of their upcoming Internet Explorer 7, which was expected to be released today. So Microsoft doesn't deliver. Again. The XBox 360 apparently has heat issues and is crashing a lot for some users. Also it has been said that Microsoft is losing quite some money with each unit sold - they are aggressively trying to obtain market share. "Vista" was stripped of all the interesting features, apparently all that is left is a prettier UI with tons of effects (and requring a DirectX 9 capable graphics board). The big feature enhancements like WinFS will not be included and will take at least one more year to be ready for beta... "Windows Live" and "Office Live" (which are neither Windows nor Office) don't live up to their names either: They are just web-based add-ons, even supporting Firefox, and offering pretty much the same as Yahoo and other portals do as well as an online version of SharePoint apparently. They are a meagre attempt of Microsoft to be not totally left behind by Google when it comes to web applications. Heck, these could (and probably are!) be from some other company that Microsoft just bought. The new office version of Microsoft fancies again mostly a new UI, that will be very different and probably confuse users a lot (especially if they have to alternate between office versions); Microsoft also has the reputation of breaking it's own file format again and again; the new office will use an incompatible file format again. The UI also doesn't help people to give their documents a more semantic meaning (for efficient processing by automatic tools such as desktop search engines), but will be more visually-oriented than ever (i.e. styles such as "headline" which do add a semantic meaning are degraded as "quick styles", whereas the bold- and underline buttons are more prominent than ever - good bye, corporate design!) Microsoft has been promising lots of new stuff recently, but has it showed any? Where is Microsoft Windows for Supercomputers? They are totally under control by Unix and Linux. Linux is gaining on Mobile phones and embedded devices. When was the last time you read about WinCE? Heck, even the WiFi network at Microsoft is now powered by Linux...

The All-Party Internet Group (APIG) will conduct an inquiry into Digital Rights Management and invites written submissions of 1000 words or less by 21 December. This is a great chance to make legislators think about the problems introduced by the recent ill-considered DRM laws and we can offer them some possible improvements. I think I will be asking for: 1. establishment of "fair circumvention" when DRM is being used to restrict what should be fair dealing or other vital acts - you can't make DRM systems "fail safe" but you can give some hope of recovering after they "fail closed"; 2. legislation to ensure that DRM system owners are held responsible for computer misuse (Sony?), privacy invasion and monopoly effects resulting from their DRM systems, which will help limit distortion; 3. requiring collecting societies to allow members to leave, rather than letting us see more reports about why some artists aren't using liberal licensing yet. If you can write a structured response to some or all of their questions, please do so. At worst, let's hope we can avoid the likes of the recent French proposal that could ban free software here... (Part of this item first appeared in an email to the fsfe-uk list on 5 December.)

1. Open Emacs & compose an email to public mailing list.
2. Save to temporary file.
3. Run spell-checker because you’re paranoid, and also slightly clumsy.
4. Paste message into new mutt window.
5. Give it a quick re-read to make sure it is legiable and relevent.
6. Notice a couple of unclear sentences.
7. Edit them on the fly inside the email program.
8. Send the message.
   • Wait five minutes for the mail to arrive back from the list and cry at all the spelling mistakes due to the editing in step #7

Conclusion? Write the day off, and go to the pub …

In Debian, we work on developing a unix-style operating system, and when the project was getting started, the obvious way to deal with delegating powers to various people was naturaly to use standard unix permmissions on our master server. So the list administrators were the only people who could write to the list configs and archives, the BTS admins were the only ones who could write to the BTS, the archive admins were the only ones who could manipulate the archive, the build daemon admins were the only ones who could modify various bits of that stuff, etc. As time went on, these services were split off to seprate machines and in some cases access to the machine running a service was limited to the maintainers of that service, again in a way that would be familiar to unix admins everywhere. But as time went on and things like revision control systems became available, Debian also began to make some choices that didn't involve unix permission or host based security. The best example of this is the Debian bug tracking system, which allows anyone to manipulate any bug status in any way without any authentication at all. It works because the BTS keeps a record of all changes, and informs interested parties about changes, so vandalism or accidents can be reverted. Aside from spam, vandalism in the BTS is such a rare problem that I cannot think of an example. Thus the Debin BTS partakes somewhat of the WikiNature, although it predates the wiki by a long time. The archive itself only uses unix permissions at its core, while the upper layers do not partake of them: Any maintainer can upload any package and superscede data in the archive automatically, although actual unix write permissions are very limited. The archive administrators use archives of old versions of packages, automated checks, and forced manual review of certian classes of packages (such as NEW) to limit this so that Developers don't make messes. Social norms are used to avoid other problems. The Debian website is in an interesting period in its history. It's been maintained in a way that mostly avoids unix permissions for a long time, by keeping it in CVS and building it automatically. However, for reasons that I suspect have never been adequately explored, not all Debian developers can commit, you have to be in the webwml group. Though gaining access to the webwml groupo is trivial for any Debian developer. But the most interesting thing is that Debian now also has an official wiki, which is open to editing by all, and that increasingly it is used for at least the more fluid and development-based website stuff. For example, the debian-installer home page is a thin stub giving the essential information and links, and mostly linking to the wiki for the rest. The debian-installer project itself occupys another point on the scale between locked down unix permissions and free modification by all. People have to get an alioth account and demonstrate basic competance to get debian-installer write access, but don't need to be Debian developers or spend more than an hour or so to get access. Once you have access, you can change anything in svn (and everything is in svn) we don't limit write access to parts of the project. We avoid malicious commits through patch review. I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year). Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. This can range from simple cases such as a cron job that only one person can look at and modify[1], to various data files that could perhaps be kept in svn, but aren't, all the way through to stuff like the Debian keyring. I would love to see a full list developed, although many of the things that remain are obscure little corners like certian blacklists in the BTS, bits of the buildd infrastructure that only a half dozen people know about, etc. The challenge, then is to find ways to open things up to everyone, without throwing security out the window. It has to be done a piece at time, and some of the pieces that are left are the ones most resistant to this change. I hope that people can keep this progression away from unix permissions in mind while working on Debian infrastructure. (If I ever ran for Debian Project Leader (which I won't), this would be one of the areas that I would be sure to investigate basing my platform on. Speaking of which, it's nearly election season again, isn't it?)

---

[1] The best solution I have found to this common problem so far is simply to keep the cron job in svn with everything else, and if someone modifies it, review it and update it via semi-automated means (some simple command). There are probably better ways to do it.

In 1999 I went to LinuxTag as a Debian representative after the project has received an offer to staff a booth there. I took over the maintenance and organised the first Debian meeting in Germany. I also gave two talks during this event, one of them was even repeated on the second day. We've had a lot of fun and since this was the first meeting of Debian affiliated people in Germany, it was very interesting to connect faces to mail addresses and to learn more about the people behind a name. This LinuxTag was the last such event that took place at the University Kaiserslautern. Free projects such as KDE and Debian have been offered a booth in one building from which one could reach the lecture rooms, while company booths were located in the Mensa building with their own professional booths. It was a warm weekend and the Jolt people have supported us with cool and caffeined drinks. We had the opportunity to use a lecture room for sleeping with other project members. Klaus Knopper was supporting the network and supervised the security team, and hence, had the unfortunate job to move away all project members from their booths, out of the building or into the lecture room. I've heard, that he had a hard time, and still believes that Debian people don't need sleep. I guess we should have moved him into the lecture room for a sleep instead. This '99 LinuxTag was quite a real success. It took place at the rise of the dot com era and all people were happy about the event. There were about 7,000 visitors in total on both days. The city of Kaiserslautern has called the university several times since there were no free hotel rooms anymore. Former events happened more or less unnoticed by locals, but not anymore in 1999. After the show was over, we dismantled the booth, moved away our own equipment and left the place. However, I made the "mistake" to notice that the LinuxTag people, who have provided us such a great opportunity, still had work to do since they had to dismantle the booth system and clean the ground floor. My biggest "mistake" was that I didn't run away and have a nice evening but decided to help and ask other booth members who were still around to do the same. Having cleaned up the location quite fast was not the only result. Oliver Zendel, who was in charge of talking to the community and who offered Debian the booth, spoke to me afterwards and wondered whether I would be interested to join the team. Well, I knew how to organise stuff, can talk to people, know quite some people in the community, the LinuxTag people were a cool team, so why not. So for the event in 2000 I was in charge of the projects exhibition. In 2000 we also had to move out of the university of Kaiserslautern since 7,000 visitors were already too much for that small university and city. That's why we eventually moved to the Stuttgart fair. That was an interesting experience. It was also interesting to see how such an event can be organised by a team of friends and how the acceptance in the business world was. In Stuttgart we were able to use a small office (max. 15m ) for the entire team as working space. Two computers were installed which we were allowed to touch but not to install a real system on. Hence, Klaus brought Knoppix CDs. This was the first time that I learned about the Knoppix Live CD. Together with my notebook we've had three desks and could work. However, today I really wonder how this could have worked with so many people, but apparently it really did. Due to the need and my experience in both talking to the press and being the press I joined the LinuxTag press team and even held the final press conference, while my colleague held the opening press conference. So after all projects were happy, the show went fine and most of the office jobs were done, I prepared a press release together with others and maintained the final conference. This was also the first time LinuxTag has organised a business congress as a special extra program for business representatives. It was also the time I experienced the need for several supporters for various tasks. In that year, a dozen supporters were paid as "security" who also drove the shopping for us. Hence, I already acquired some people who supported us as volunteers. That was also the time when Benny joined the team. In 2000 the exhibition boomed and there were a lot of large dot com company booths, which was very nice because LinuxTag arose from a students association and became more and more professional, a platform for both companies and projects. It was organised just like a Free Software project and worked non-commercially. Despite several flame wars and disputes, which seem to be normal, it was organised by friends who believed of a higher goal. It was very nice and gave me a warm feeling when looking at what we have achieved. However, I had nothing to do with commercial interests, income, acquisition, invoices etc., so I may have missed a lot. This year, LinuxTag was planned to take place in one exhibition hall, but there were so many companies interested in running a booth that a second exhibition hall was later rented as well. That's why there were two adjacent halls instead of one large location. In 2001 we were using a different exhibition hall, a larger one due to the strong demand in 2000, but still at the Stuttgart fair. This time I was also in charge of the supporters and already dispatched jobs during the event. From time to time I also maintained the shuttle service to the airport to pick up speakers or take back speakers, which I've also done in 2000. This time we've had a larger office in which all of use fit and which was a nice working atmosphere. We were also able to provide more booth space to Free Software projects. In that year I've automatically taken over the office and communication with the outside world, collecting and distribution information. I don't think this was planned, but it just happened since I was able to do the job besides my other obligations. I also gave a talk about Debian, even though others in the team considered me insane for doing that as well. With a lot of help by the local user group, we were able to offer project members a cheap sleeping opportunity. The LUG acquired a gym hall during the night an cooked in the student's office "Hellblaues Nilpferd". After I've picked up Hans Reiser I went there for a snack with him before dumping him at the hotel. It was a nice atmosphere. One of the lead people for this effort, Hubert Kai er, was suddenly overtaken by death two weeks ago. In 2002 LinuxTag moved to Karlsruhe and thus to a new fair where everything had to start again from zero. We had to get acquainted with the local company and their representatives and learn how the new fairground works. The fairground was more interesting since there was a large open area between the conference site and the exhibition hall. Looking at past years, it was used by visitors. Thanks a lot to Jochen Topf from GUUG and members of the local user group KaLUG a lot of community events happened during LinuxTag. They maintained an Internet caf in the conference building and organised the legendary KaLUG party which has become a regular LinuxTag event. In addition to that I've also worked more and more and took over more areas where I noticed help was needed and that I could manage it. So it happened that I took over more work at and before LinuxTag which finally resulted in two months of work were I don't remember a day on which I've worked less than 8 hours for LinuxTag in 2005. In 2002 I worked on the coding marathon and delegated the tasks and support during LinuxTag to two other people, so it will run independent of me. Since I was the first of the team to arrive in Karlsruhe, I also built up the office and the storage. Due to the large distance I had to leave Oldenburg the day before I want to arrive in Karlsruhe, so that I was at the fairground at last at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Before the event a lot of issues had to be negotiated with various parties, which required quite a lot of work. Until 2004 the entire team was working in their spare time without getting paid for their LinuxTag work. The higher goal was the impulse and all of us had neglected one issue or another that wasn't important for LinuxTag. We've had some external service providers at least since 2002. The acquisition became a difficult task for students who liked to work until the morning and get up at lunch time, since many companies expect a partner that is available for them from 9 to 5. That's why Charter was eventually hired and this year ergomedia. For press work newthinking was hired. This year the social event was also organised by them. However, having two people from the board of directors being paid by the association for their LinuxTag work from April, and external service providers that were also paid, was something I considered problematic if not unfair, looking at how other people commit to LinuxTag and don't get a monetary compensation. Several people still worked a lot on LinuxTag in their spare time and had to live from something as well. It caused resentment in the team.

I've come back from foss.in in Bangalore, India which I attended as a representative of the Debian project. Foss.in is the event formerly known as Linux Bangalore. It has broadened out to cover all aspects of Free and Open Source Software and is the largest such event in South Asia. I'm told almost 3000 people attended this year. I arrived on the morning of Monday the 28th. The conference organizers put up myself and other speakers at the guesthouse of the Indian Institute of Science. The accomodations were spartan but comfortable. They got considerably less spartan by the next day which was when I figured how the hot water tap worked. I shared my room with Kartik Mistry of Gujarati l10n fame. The first day of the conference was on Tuesday the 29th. The conference was taking place for the first time in a new venue, in several large canvas tents in the grounds of the Bangalore Palace. There were some technical difficulties; when we arrived on site in the morning, there was a line of people atleast several hundred long, waiting to register. Undoubtedly, some of them must have given up and gone home, but the fact that so many people persevered is a testament to the high level of energy surrounding the event. The talks began late too but everyone I spoke to seemed to take it goodnaturedly. I had planned to give two talks. One my standard half-hour "What is Debian?" song and dance. If you went to Debian Day at Helsinki, you already know what that's about and a 90 minute workshop on "Creating Debian Packages." Both were scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. Owing to the earlier delays, the first of these which was slated for 2:30pm didn't start until 4pm. The organizers actually asked me to roll both talks up into one supertalk which was not a problem for me. However, I made one fatal mistake. At lunch time I had noticed one of the food stalls was selling an inviting-smelling cheese pizza. Now, I've been to India enough times to know, "phirangis" simply don't eat dairy-based food in India unless they have some time to acclimatize to it first. I even said as much as I was eating the pizza. Somehow I rationalized that the cheese was pasteurized and well-cooked so the rule wouldn't apply to me but boy was I wrong. I first noticed signs of distress three-quarters of the way through "What is Debian?" I struggled valiantly to the end but then had to excuse myself to head off to the latrines and perform a hard reset of my gastro-intestinal tract. A couple of minutes of vomitting later, though a bit wobbly, I felt well enough to return and start talking about creating Debian packages. I didn't have slides for this one, I just used my laptop to show the innards of binary and source packages, all the various files in the debian directory, debhelper, debconf, and the lifecycle of package maintainence. Unfortunately wi-fi didn't seem to be stretching as far as my location so I couldn't show such nifty things as apt-get source and pbuilder but hopefully my descriptions of these things were impressive enough. There were lots of good questions from the sizable audience and I think we went over 90 minutes. Apart from some BOFs, I didn't really have any formal commitments for the rest of the conference so I spent it holding court at a table in the expo area. I was constantly busy demoing Debian, answering questions, and signing keys. I met Vaidhyanathan Mayilarangam who is a Debian developer, though inactive at the moment. He is going to start getting involved again soon. On Saturday the 3rd, I met the two currently active DDs, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan, and Ganesan Rajagopal. Throughout the days of the conference I also met many other figures on the Indian Free Software scene and made a lot of new contacts. That's it for now; in future blog entries I'll write about some of my impressions of the prospects and problems of Debian and Free Software in India. It remains for me to thank: Branden for authorizing funds for my plane ticket, Atul Chitnis and the other organizers and staff of foss.in, Mahesh Pai and Prasad Kadambi who assisted me in navigating Bangalore, and all the other friends of Debian, new and old, I met during my trip.

Delays suck. I’m actually skipping ahead here, I’d meant to blog about updating the dak codebase into shape for whatever changes were coming up first, but it turns out I’m not in the mood for that. Besides which, most of this entry is preprepared. In the last few entries we went over the background for updating our security infrastructure to make it possible to have security team members that don’t worry about vendor-sec issues (process, overview, NIv2 aka NINJA, queue-build issues), all the while skipping fairly lightly over the question of what has to actually happen. That happens to be the way I prefer to work, lots of background tinkering, then spend as little time on actual implementation as possible; it has it’s drawbacks, but hey, I like it. Anyway, the second last step is working out in detail what’s going to happen. The delay in question was trying to get the security team to sign off on it, but unfortunately they’re busy enough that that looks like it’ll being an indefinite delay, so I’m going with the “well, ftpmaster maintains the dak/katie infrastructure for the security team, so in the end it’s our call on what’s best anyway” line of thought, and just plunging in. Fortunately the current and final plan should make pretty minimal changes to how the existing security team operate anyway, even assuming a massive testing security operation happening in parallel with them – so the downside risk is already pretty minimal. (And it was, afterall, developed in consultation with Joey, and then shopped around a few folks who’ve been doing security work for testing and kernels) What is that plan, you may well ask. It’s something like this: First, let’s restate the idea:

Concept Allow two teams to exist, the current security team as the “vendor-sec subteam”, and the full team which can expand to also include the testing-security people and others interested and able to help out with security work but who do not have access to vendor-sec.

Then, we want to think about the processes that are involved at a global level. First for uploads that can’t be made public until some later date, and can only be worked on by the “vendor-sec” enabled security team.

• Source upload to queue/unchecked (as now)
  • Upload is authenticated etc
  • Upload is moved to queue/embargoed
• Upload is autobuilt
  • Logs are sent to a procmail address
  • Logs are forwarded (by procmail) onto the vendor-sec subteam
  • Logs are signed and sent back
  • Binaries are uploaded to queue/unchecked
  • Binaries are moved to queue/embargoed
• Uploads (source + binaries) are approved from queue/embargoed by
• running amber
  • Uploads are moved into the archive
  • The archive is mirrored
• The approver issues an advisory

And likewise for issues that don’t need so much secrecy:

• Source upload to queue/unchecked-disembargo (new directory)
  • Upload is authenticated etc
  • Source+version added to unembargo table
  • Upload is moved to queue/unembargoed
• Upload is autobuilt
  • Logs are sent to a procmail address
  • Logs are forwarded (by procmail, after checking unembargo table) onto the full team
  • Logs are signed and sent back
  • Binaries are uploaded to queue/unchecked
  • Noting that the source is in the unembargo table, Binaries are moved to queue/unembargoed
• Uploads (source + binaries) are approved from queue/unembargoed by running amber
  • Uploads are moved into the archive
  • The archive is mirrored
• The approver issues an advisory

Processes are great, but they have to be supported by proper information handling, so it’s worth looking at what the above actually means for the on-disk structures, too. This is particularly important, since filesystem level security is mostly how we wall off vendor-sec stuff from other users of the system (whether they’re also working on security issues, or doing, eg, web page maintenance or something equally random). Voila:

queue/unchecked, queue/unchecked-dismebargo
    world writable
    accessible only by katie
    contents automatically cleared every 15m
queue/embargoed
    writable only by katie
    accessible by vendor-sec subteam
    amber allows packages to be ACCEPTed
    [...] allows packages to be REJECTed
queue/unembargoed
    writable only by katie
    accessible by full team
    amber allows packages to be ACCEPTed
    [...] allows packages to be REJECTed
queue/accepted
    packages only sit in accepted briefly while amber is running

And finally, to sum things up, this is what a member of the security team should expect to actually do to release an advisory:

• Upload package to queue/unchecked (or queue/unchecked-disembargo)
• Wait for build logs to be sent to your address
• Check and sign those build logs
• Check the final packages in queue/embargoed (or queue/unembargoed)
• Run amber over the packages to accept them
• Fill in the template advisory generated and send it to the -announce list

The differences between that process and the current one used by the security team is pretty minor, ttbomk: currently uploads sit in queue/accepted not queue/embargoed, and currently the security team ignore the template advisories amber generates preferring to make their own – aiui, this is mostly due to delays in actually receiving the advisory template since amber mails it instead of leaving it somewhere convenient on disk. Anyway, that’s what the plan looks like. We should see how well it survives contact with the enemy, or at least reality, remarkably soon. (Of course, I guess “political issues” could always foul it up completely anyway, particularly going by the fact that it’s been more or less the only problem raised by the folks I’ve passed this on to… Oh well, reconstruct that bridge when we get to it, I guess)

With Planet Scheme and more referrals, I seem to have gained many new readers recently, so here's a quick description of this blog. I'll post before noon each day if I'm in the office (where the computer that I use for writing is), usually at least Monday to Friday. I post about: scheme programming (also in scheme.rss), gnu/linux free software support (also in hacks.rss), koha development (also in koha.rss), creativity and copyright (also in affs.rss), running a non-traditional business, bicycling, events around Lynn, Norfolk and other events I take part in. If you would like to contact me about it, I prefer trackback: some posts include trackback URLs (and others aren't hard to guess); or my email info is linked from the top of my blog page now. Stuart wonders how to track use, reuse and repurposing - from when I was writing for "real" publications, I'd say that the same problem is faced by anyone doing a news release. All you can do is monitor the outlets and see where it goes. If you're lucky, you'll get pinged, but I think that happens only for about 1 in 10 or less. Anyone know real numbers for that? Can anyone expect audience statistics to be sorted out when even the copyright aspect of online syndication is still being figured out?

For me this year's event was the most successful and wonderful LinuxTag I've eve been to. I've worked during LinuxTag as much as I could and did my best to make it the best event ever. If I commit myself to something, I try to work properly and generate proper results. This was the same for LinuxTag. As a result, this year I had many tasks to work on. First of all I managed the community and free projects so that they had an opportunity to present themselves to the broad audience during LinuxTag. This required months of communication with members of all attending projects and negotiating their needs. It also required to gather information about the various parts of LinuxTag that also affected projects. Since it is boring having to answer the same questions all the time I decided not doing that anymore and once started to maintain an FAQ that intends to contain all important information for exhibiting projects. Last year I've also added an location plan with information about shops and restaurants nearby and this year I contributed a map for getting to the AKK where the legendary KaLUG party was organised. Being responsible for the projects I was required to decide which project are suited to get a sponsored booth, its size and its location. This year we have had the opportunity to use the ground floor of the conference building in addition to the regular exhibition ground, so that we've could use about 700m in total for the projects exhibition. I've worked nearly two entire weekends to get the booths assigned properly and to have proper graphics. For the conference building I also created the "official" booth map, booth naming, booth signs and booth numbering. One weekend was planned, the other was an accident since we had to rearrange some booths. Exhibiting projects and other community and Free Software oriented projects also had the opportunity to use two workshop rooms for workshops, BoF sessions, meetings and talks. For these I maintained the schedule and negotiated with the speakers and projects, and also acquired moderators for both rooms for the entire time. The people who organised the Accessibility booth people managed to get green light for building a large booth and a so called forum, which is an open talk area, but without any support. Since they couldn't fill in all slots and you can't dismantle a forum in the middle of the show, I've taken over its maintenance and schedule and managed to complete it with interesting talks, setting up, looking for moderators and dismantling. One of these talks I've even held on my own. Fortunately, a DJ contacted us and was able to provide his PA, boxes, microphone and stuff. Without him, the forum would have been an utter disaster. To support the projects we had to build up the network in the main exhibition hall for them on our own. Otherwise it would have cost us several thousand euro, which we didn't have. So I had to draw plans containing the cables we had to lay, calculated the length and decide where to deposit switches and stuff. On the day before the show opened, several supporters went around with a large ladder laying the cable. In the conference building this was done by the KaLUG. I've also coached the supporters during LinuxTag, and was even present at a special short meeting for and with supporters in order to reflect the past day and talk about the next day. This year was the first time I really had the time to attend the meeting and thank our supporters. Before the show started I've also negotiated food arrangements with a restaurant and a colleague so that we had lunch during the show. I ate from it as well, but didn't manage to eat every day unfortunately. Most additional signs of A4 and A3 size that we used during LinuxTag in order to help visitors and officials to find their way were designed and printed by me. Many of them were the result of last year's aftermath. Most of them were fixed with adhesive tape by our supporters. The Coding Marathon was supervised by me as LinuxTag representative. It was organised by HP, intel and Red Hat and, of course, negotiated with the acquise team of LinuxTag. The Coding Marathon was a half day programming session for visitors. The resulting code is released under the GNU GPL and winners were awarded with prizes at the end of each day. This required me to attend several phone conferences, name one or two interested people from "LinuxTag" who would propose a task and head the marathon during one day. Last year already, when I took over this job, With p2 and Arne I've already found two competent people, and this year also added Alex Schmehl for a task I proposed. Naturally, it was not possible for me to moderate the Coding Marathon during LinuxTag due to other obligations. When I arrived at LinuxTag the week before it officially started my first job was to build up the office and prepare the rooms so that the entire "team" could work inside properly. The first office should be used by supporters for general requests and customers, with a desk for me as well. The next room was meant to host the speakers office and the other rooms were intended to be back offices or private rooms. In order to be able to work properly in the office I've also brought with my some of my network equipment and set up the office LAN, server and printer. I had already experienced cable problems last year, that prevented us to use 100MBit/s switches, so that antiquated 10MBit/s hubs had to be used. I've also supervised our daily shopping tours and collected demand for various items from others. The most important items were fluids since it was quite warm during LinuxTag and collapsing core members and supporters are no fun. Other food had to be fetched as well. A lot of other items had to be purchased as well, in order to run LinuxTag and be able to fix or improve various areas. One or two supporters were taking the car for the shopping tours. When I arrived in Karlsruhe the HP booth was already being built. The other, smaller booths followed on Monday. Hence, on Monday and Tuesday I also supervised the building of the booths. It's important that somebody is around for questions, both from booth builders and from officials of the fairground. One also has to check if the booths are built properly and that they don't cause a risk for the exhibition hall, neighbour booths, smoke detectors and stuff. Issues should be corrected as soon as possible so that they don't become problems later. As soon as I arrived I also took over our own storage area and maintained deliveries for booths that haven't built up yet. Several companies negotiated with me before the show so that I knew which deliveries to expect and could move them to their respective booths as soon as they were built up. This year the first X.Org developers conference took place right before LinuxTag as well. I negotiated with both the X.Org people and the fairground people so that this developers conference could really take place. Unfortunately the plans and acknowledgements were sent out quite late so we were in a hurry getting everything set up and organised. Since we experienced network problems this year, they had not network as well, so did we in the office. Two days without a network connection. Pure horror. On Thursday the legendary KaLUG party took place. The location had to be prepared for the party, for which several supporters went there before the party has started. It was planned that I attend the party, so I went there at about 1 a.m. For some reason I didn't manage to leave the fairground earlier, and on the way to the AKK some of my friends who were also supporters were on their way home, excusing themselves for leaving before I arrived. Eumh... When I arrived at the party I first checked the situation and saw loads of uncleaned pots and stuff. Since nobody was cleaning them, I jumped into the mobile kitchen and started cleaning before I even ate or drank anything. That was fun, though a bit unplanned. The social event on Friday was organised by Claudia from a service provider who got some support from me before the show and during the show. Several supporters helped her clean the area that was unused for several years. During the evening I only gave away free tickets for the supporters and moved inside afterwards, always looking around if everything was ok, negotiating with her, of course. Very well managed, I can only say. This year I gave three talks during LinuxTag. Usually I only give zero or one during such an event, due to my other obligations. However, this time I felt, that I should make a maximum use of LinuxTag, anticipating the future. Hence, it started with Debian Security held during this year's Debian day, followed by Howto LinuxTag on the following day and finally Debian Internals together with other Debian developers. After the last talk I had about two hours to calm down again and initiate the general dismantling. Fortunately I've already planned a lot before the event because after my final talk I was a bit exhausted and needed to calm down and get into LinuxTag organisation again. Dismantling is the most parallel work at LinuxTag because all booths are dismantled at once and many people are running around with arbitrary stuff. One really has to take care of ones own stuff or it gets lost faster than one can shout. During the evening the entire fairground was cleaned, from all conference rooms the audio and video technique was removed again, all bottles and glasses were moved back into the office, the movable walls collected and moved back to their owners, the Internet caf was dismantled and computers moved back into their respective boxes. Some exhibitors had to use extra storage space temporarily. The Community forum in the conference hall had to be dismantled and chairs stacked properly. The same goes for tables and chairs used by the projects booths in both, the exhibition hall and the conference building. The network for projects had to be removed again, cables and switches secured. All additional signs had to be removed again. Since we have used some durable signs that could be used for future events again these had to be removed carefully and secured again. We've also ordered a container for paper since a lot of paper had to be thrown away and throwing away large amounts of junk is expensive. This way we were able to get rid of paper stuff a bit cheaper, but had to take extra care so that only paper went into this container. Hence, we needed a supporter who stayed with the container until it was fetched again. When the internal LinuxTag party in the office was nearly over, I came back into the office with all other areas finished, ready to start dismantling the office - usually the colleagues don't let me because they want to party and don't have any obligations anymore. That sucks a lot. So, again the internal party went on nearly without notice by me, but I'm used to that. This year I had already taken this into account and organised some stuff for an after work party (contrary to the other while-others-work party) outside of the office with supporters, friends and some team members that were still sober. This night we went to bed after 5a.m. and hence had a chance to get a quick breakfast already (we didn't use it, though). It was when we thought "Yes, this was a hell of an event!" I usually went to bed at 1 to 3a.m. and got up again at 5 or 6a.m. so that I was able to work on the important stuff that I committed myself to, and so that I was able to chat with friends and supporters in the evening. That was something I really missed on past events. Last year I probably wouldn't have spoken to Alfie if he hadn't placed himself into my way as a brake block. Thanks Alfie! This year such a maneuver wasn't required. In order to be able to work on so many areas during LinuxTag I tried to optimise the workflow and the processing as much as I could. I also used several sheets and paper to write down stuff for later processing so that my brain was kept clear and I don't become insane (or more insane, for what it's worth). That worked quite well and all areas I worked in worked fine as well, since I had time to talk to people even during the day. Even after my talks I wasn't flooded by phone requests like last year. After the event I had to drive some 750km back, after having only little sleep. Getting to Karlsruhe is always the easy part. Driving back is exhausting because I'm usually quite exhausted and in need of a lot of sleep. I won't disclose how long it took me to reach Oldenburg but it was faster than last year.

* 1. General Public License. This program is free software, and may
* be redistributed or modified subject to the terms of the GNU General
* Public License (version 2) or the GNU Lesser General Public License,
* or (at your option) any later versions ("Open Source" code).

* 4. Notices. User hereby agrees not to remove, alter or destroy any
* copyright, trademark, credits, other proprietary notices or confidential
* legends placed upon, contained within or associated with the Software,
* and shall include all such unaltered copyright, trademark, credits,
* other proprietary notices or confidential legends on or in every copy of
* the Software.

Mmhmm.

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. NO GPL INCOMPATIBILITY. NO PROBLEM. ENTIRELY HAPPY. NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, CERTAINLY NO COPYRIGHT ISSUES WHATSOEVER

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C"

#endif

(Note: kernel module code)

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)
#define get_zeroed_page get_free_page
#define try_inc_mod_count(mod) ((mod && !(mod->flags & MOD_DELETED)) ? __MOD_INC_USE_COUNT(mod), 1 : 0)
#endif // LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)

#if defined(CONFIG_ALL_PPC) && !defined(CONFIG_PPC_PMAC) && (LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,0))
#define CONFIG_PPC_PMAC
#endif

ENTIRELY COMPETENT CODE WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN THE LINUX KERNEL CODING STYLE

Note to Fedora Core 2, 3 and 4 users:The default stack size in original FC2, FC3 and FC4 kernels is only 4K. Because some drivers require more stack space to operate properly, we recommend using a kernel with a larger stack size if you experience problems or crashes. You can either rebuild your own custom kernel, or get one of our replacement "stk16" kernels provided for your convenience through the distribution-specific Fedora Core 2i, 3 and 4 links above.

Or you could fix your drivers. Oh, except you can't, because they're actually chunks of the Windows one wrapped in code like the above.

This is truly an excellent piece of work.

Remember, kids, you're only paying $19.99 for code of this quality!

Linuxant are possibly worse than Orkut. And Fujitsu Siemens.

So, I’m heading back out to Israel for work, and it turns out I have a 12-hour (!) layover in Amsterdam. I’m arriving at 8AM next Tuesday (Dec. 6) and won’t depart until 7:45PM. That gives me a full day to see the city. If any Debian people would like to meet up in Amsterdam that day, please drop me an email.

I'm looking for good vegan sushi in Montr al. I'm looking for fairly standard things that I'm used to find in Japanese places in Vancouver, and some of the nicer places in Toronto. It should have things like Natto, Kanpyo, Ume Shiso, Shitake, and Inari for their rolls. It would be nice to order a bowl Edamame to share, or to get a bowl of steamed rice. Anyone know of some? If it also meets the constraints of 1) Being accessible by M tro 2) The rice is done reasonably well, then I will cheerfully take you out and buy dinner for both of us. Interested? Email me jbailey@raspberryginger.com (Fine print limitations: 1 per restaurant, first come first serve for a particular restaurant; one per month; I'll pay up to for your meal; a limit of 12; No promises after a year, if we move from Montr al, or if I suddenly find myself unemployed, dead, allergic to rice, etc.

The worst possible condition of a walkway is created as follows:

1. Let snow fall on it
2. Use a snowplough to clear it up
3. Rinse, repeat.
4. Pack the remaining snow tight
5. Let the temperature be a few degrees above zero Celsius, then let it fall slightly to negative degrees
6. Let it rain water.

The result: smooth, wet ice. What we call ’skull condition roads’ here in Finland. We had that, minus the final rain, and it was very slippery. I was careful, and didn’t fall (but that’s just luck). In other news, chinese cabbage is very juicy indeed.

Seems I despaired too soon about not being able to get good-looking fonts in Emacs. Thanks to Duncan Mak I've been able to compile and install an Emacs with anti-aliased fonts on Ubuntu. Here's the recipe:

• Get the XFT_JHD_BRANCH of CVS Emacs, see XftGnuEmacs on the Emacs wiki, and this page from Deling Ren.
• Get a further patch, from this mailing list post
• Get the emacs-snapshot-debian directory from this arch repository and use it as the debian directory inside the Emacs source tree

Then I had to edit out the build instructions for the -nox variant of Emacs, as it didn't build properly, and to be sure, added this to the Emacs-gtk confflags section of debian/rules :

  emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

After that, fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b in the source directory, and some time later, Emacs packages with anti-aliased fonts. There are some limitations: you need to set the font in your ~/.Xresources file like this:

  Emacs*font: Monospace-8

You may also want to fiddle with the Xft.dpi and Xft.hinting X properties to get the fonts to match your desktop environment. OK, so it's a bit of effort, but worth it. Hopefully this patch will mature and make its way into future Linux distributions.