Well, I suppose I should be happy that mksh is actually used

• [tg] Correct shf buffer I/O routines to avoid a memory corruption bug discovered by Waldemar Brodkorb and other bad effects
• [tg] Fix NULL pointer dereference during iteration loop when checking for alias recursion; discovered by Michal Hlavinka

That s OpenADK (Waldemar s fork of FreeWRT, which is Waldemar s fork of OpenWrt), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, respectively. Popcon in Debian and its derivates is also pleasant. I could use some help bugfixing this though:

	(sleep 3; exit 12) &
	bgprocpid=$!
	sleep 6
	# background process is done by now
	wait $bgprocpid
	# POSIX mandates that, since $! was asked
	# for, wait is to reply its errorlevel

Somehow, JF_KNOWN is never set and I can t debug this with gdb(1). (There s also a dashism in some *buntu start scripts that does pretty much the same except it uses wait %1 there. In fact it doesn t even seem to use $! no idea whether we can support that at all in a POSIX shell which dash clearly isn t without keeping track of background processes forever.)

The cherry-pick command in git allows you to copy commits from one branch to another, one commit at a time. In order to copy more than one commit at once, you need a different approach.

Cherry-picking a single commitSay we have the following repository composed of three branches (master, feature1 and stable):

$ git tree --all
* d9484311 (HEAD, master) Delete test file
* 4d4a0da8 Add a test file
  * 5753515c (stable) Add a license
  * 4b95278e Add readme file
 /
  * a37658bd (feature1) Add fourth file
  * a7785c10 Add lines to 3rd file
  * 7f545188 Add third file
  * 2bca593b Add line to second file
  * 0c13e436 Add second file
 /
* d3199755 Add a line
* b58d925c Initial commit

The "git tree" command is an alias I defined in my ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
tree = log --oneline --decorate --graph

To copy the license file (commit 5753515c) to the master branch then we simply need to run:

$ git checkout master
$ git cherry-pick 5753515c
Finished one cherry-pick.
[master 08ff7d4] Add a license
1 files changed, 676 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 COPYING

and the repository now looks like this:

$ git tree --all
* 08ff7d4a4 (HEAD, master) Add a license
* d94843113 Delete test file
* 4d4a0da88 Add a test file
  * 5753515c (stable) Add a license
  * 4b95278e Add readme file
 /
  * a37658bd (feature1) Add fourth file
  * a7785c10 Add lines to 3rd file
  * 7f545188 Add third file
  * 2bca593b Add line to second file
  * 0c13e436 Add second file
 /
* d3199755 Add a line
* b58d925c Initial commit

Cherry-picking a range of commits
In order to only take the third file (commits a7785c10 and 7f545188) from the feature1 branch and add it to the stable branch, I could cherry-pick each commit separately, but there is a faster way if you need to cherry-pick a large range of commits.

First of all, let's create a new branch which ends on the last commit we want to cherry-pick:

$ git branch tempbranch a7785c10
$ git tree --all
* 08ff7d4a (HEAD, master) Add a license
* d9484311 Delete test file
* 4d4a0da8 Add a test file
  * 5753515c (stable) Add a license
  * 4b95278e Add readme file
 /
  * a37658bd (feature1) Add fourth file
  * a7785c10 (tempbranch) Add lines to 3rd file
  * 7f545188 Add third file
  * 2bca593b Add line to second file
  * 0c13e436 Add second file
 /
* d3199755 Add a line
* b58d925c Initial commit

Now we'll rebase that temporary branch on top of the stable branch:

$ git rebase --onto stable 7f545188^ tempbranch
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
Applying: Add third file
Applying: Add lines to 3rd file
$ git tree --all
* ec488677 (HEAD, tempbranch) Add lines to 3rd file
* a85e5281 Add third file
* 5753515c (stable) Add a license
* 4b95278e Add readme file
  * 08ff7d4a (master) Add a license
  * d9484311 Delete test file
  * 4d4a0da8 Add a test file
 /
  * a37658bd (feature1) Add fourth file
  * a7785c10 Add lines to 3rd file
  * 7f545188 Add third file
  * 2bca593b Add line to second file
  * 0c13e436 Add second file
 /
* d3199755 Add a line
* b58d925c Initial commit

All that's left to do is to make stable point to the top commit of tempbranch and delete the old branch:

$ git checkout stable
Switched to branch 'stable'
$ git reset --hard tempbranch
HEAD is now at ec48867 Add lines to 3rd file
$ git tree --all
* ec488677 (HEAD, tempbranch, stable) Add lines to 3rd file
* a85e5281 Add third file
* 5753515c Add a license
* 4b95278e Add readme file
  * 08ff7d4a (master) Add a license
  * d9484311 Delete test file
  * 4d4a0da8 Add a test file
 /
  * a37658bd (feature1) Add fourth file
  * a7785c10 Add lines to 3rd file
  * 7f545188 Add third file
  * 2bca593b Add line to second file
  * 0c13e436 Add second file
 /
* d3199755 Add a line
* b58d925c Initial commit
$ git branch -d tempbranch
Deleted branch tempbranch (was ec48867).

It would be nice to be able to do it without having to use a temporary branch, but it still beats cherry-picking everything manually.

Another approachAnother way to achieve this is to use the format-patch command to output patches for the commits you are interested in copying to another branch and then using the am command to apply them all to the target branch:

$ git format-patch 7f545188^..a7785c10
0001-Add-third-file.patch
0002-Add-lines-to-3rd-file.patch
$ git am *.patch

Update: looking forward to git 1.7.2According to a few people who were nice to point this out in a comment, version 1.7.2 of git, which is going to be released soon, will have support for this in cherry-pick:

git cherry-pick 7f545188^..a7785c10

One thing I noticed having started to use gnash is that the BBC's iPlayer website (UK-only, I believe) gives a message like "You do not have Flash player installed" - not merely complaining about the version, but actually not recognising gnash as a Flash player at all. Cue some digging. The BBC's pages use glow, an in-house JavaScript library (available under the Apache 2.0 License) to detect whether Flash is installed. The documentation was really easy to follow - I had a test page going quicker than you can say "Hello, World!" The bottom line is, glow uses this regex:

var regexFLASH_VERSION = /^Shockwave Flash\s*(\d+)\.(\d+)\s*\w(\d+)$/;

and gnash uses a description like this:

Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.
Gnash trunk, the GNU SWF Player. Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,
2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Gnash comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may
redistribute copies of Gnash under the terms of the GNU General Public
License. For more information about Gnash, see
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash.
Compatible Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.

Note the dollar sign at the end of the regex. Indeed, rebuilding gnash without all the notices at the end of the description lets you see the iPlayer UI. (It doesn't actually play anything, don't get your hopes up.) Interestingly, different parts of iPlayer require different minimum versions of Flash. Clips of radio programmes tend to be more liberal with what they will accept - right down to version 7. Most TV streams and clips require at least version "9.0 r115", and I've heard they use SWF verification. I'm not sure how legal it is to implement that, although apparently code exists.

On python stable APIs

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

In Debian testing:

/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/sqlalchemy/types.py:547: SADeprecationWarning: The Binary type has been renamed to LargeBinary.

In Debian Lenny:

ImportError: cannot import name LargeBinary

I was starting to think that SQLAlchemy wasn't too bad, since I've been using it for 6 months and I haven't seen its API change yet. But there it is, a beautiful reminder that SQLAlchemy, too, is part of the marvelously autistic Python ecosystem.

This is just a reminder that we will have a small bug squashing party in Berlin. It will take place on monday 19th july starting at 16:00 with open end in the rooms of B ro 2.0 in Neuk lln. You have to organize your accomodation by yourself if you do not live in Berlin. More information is available in the Debian Wiki. Please register there if you are planning to attend.

Since a couple of days, the mere act of launching Firefox is sufficient to get my Dell D430's CPU to overheat to the point of shutting itself down, within a few seconds of launching the application. Two questions:

• Who the heck are the bastards that designed a laptop with such poor ventilation?
• Who the heck are the bastards that coded such a hideous piece of bloated browser?

I know that I've previously vented out frustration over Firefox's shortcomings, but now this application-specific CPU overheating crap is just too much. Dammit!

This is a followup on my previous work on merging all the computer related LDAP objects in Debian Edu. As a step to try to see if it possible to merge the DNS and DHCP LDAP objects, I have had a look at how the packages pdns-backend-ldap and dhcp3-server-ldap in Debian use the LDAP server. The two implementations are quite different in how they use LDAP. To get this information, I started slapd with debugging enabled and dumped the debug output to a file to get the LDAP searches performed on a Debian Edu main-server. Here is a summary. powerdns Clues on how to set up PowerDNS to use a LDAP backend is available on the web. PowerDNS have two modes of operation using LDAP as its backend. One "strict" mode where the forward and reverse DNS lookups are done using the same LDAP objects, and a "tree" mode where the forward and reverse entries are in two different subtrees in LDAP with a structure based on the DNS names, as in tjener.intern and 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa. In tree mode, the server is set up to use a LDAP subtree as its base, and uses a "base" scoped search for the DNS name by adding "dc=tjener,dc=intern," to the base with a filter for "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" for the forward entry and "dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa," with a filter for "(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)" for the reverse entry. For forward entries, it is looking for attributes named dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, afsdbrecord, keyrecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord, kxrecord, certrecord, dsrecord, sshfprecord, ipseckeyrecord, rrsigrecord, nsecrecord, dnskeyrecord, dhcidrecord, spfrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entries it is looking for the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. The equivalent ldapsearch commands could look like this:

ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
ldapsearch -h ldap \
  -b dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no \
  -s base -x '(associateddomain=2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa)'
  dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord soarecord ptrrecord \
  hinforecord mxrecord txtrecord rprecord aaaarecord locrecord \
  srvrecord naptrrecord modifytimestamp

In Debian Edu/Lenny, the PowerDNS tree mode is used with ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no as the base, and these are two example LDAP objects used there. In addition to these objects, the parent objects all th way up to ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no also exist.

dn: dc=tjener,dc=intern,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: tjener
arecord: 10.0.2.2
associateddomain: tjener.intern
dn: dc=2,dc=2,dc=0,dc=10,dc=in-addr,dc=arpa,ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
objectclass: top
objectclass: dnsdomain2
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
dc: 2
ptrrecord: tjener.intern
associateddomain: 2.2.0.10.in-addr.arpa

In strict mode, the server behaves differently. When looking for forward DNS entries, it is doing a "subtree" scoped search with the same base as in the tree mode for a object with filter "(associateddomain=tjener.intern)" and requests the attributes dnsttl, arecord, nsrecord, cnamerecord, soarecord, ptrrecord, hinforecord, mxrecord, txtrecord, rprecord, aaaarecord, locrecord, srvrecord, naptrrecord and modifytimestamp. For reverse entires it also do a subtree scoped search but this time the filter is "(arecord=10.0.2.2)" and the requested attributes are associateddomain, dnsttl and modifytimestamp. In short, in strict mode the objects with ptrrecord go away, and the arecord attribute in the forward object is used instead. The forward and reverse searches can be simulated using ldapsearch like this:

ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  '(associateddomain=tjener.intern)' dNSTTL aRecord nSRecord \
  cNAMERecord sOARecord pTRRecord hInfoRecord mXRecord tXTRecord \
  rPRecord aFSDBRecord KeyRecord aAAARecord lOCRecord sRVRecord \
  nAPTRRecord kXRecord certRecord dSRecord sSHFPRecord iPSecKeyRecord \
  rRSIGRecord nSECRecord dNSKeyRecord dHCIDRecord sPFRecord modifyTimestamp
ldapsearch -h ldap -b ou=hosts,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no -s sub -x \
  '(arecord=10.0.2.2)' associateddomain dnsttl modifytimestamp

In addition to the forward and reverse searches , there is also a search for SOA records, which behave similar to the forward and reverse lookups. A thing to note with the PowerDNS behaviour is that it do not specify any objectclass names, and instead look for the attributes it need to generate a DNS reply. This make it able to work with any objectclass that provide the needed attributes. The attributes are normally provided in the cosine (RFC 1274) and dnsdomain2 schemas. The latter is used for reverse entries like ptrrecord and recent DNS additions like aaaarecord and srvrecord. In Debian Edu, we have created DNS objects using the object classes dcobject (for dc), dnsdomain or dnsdomain2 (structural, for the DNS attributes) and domainrelatedobject (for associatedDomain). The use of structural object classes make it impossible to combine these classes with the object classes used by DHCP. There are other schemas that could be used too, for example the dnszone structural object class used by Gosa and bind-sdb for the DNS attributes combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, but in this case some unused attributes would have to be included as well (zonename and relativedomainname). My proposal for Debian Edu would be to switch PowerDNS to strict mode and not use any of the existing objectclasses (dnsdomain, dnsdomain2 and dnszone) when one want to combine the DNS information with DHCP information, and instead create a auxiliary object class defined something like this (using the attributes defined for dnsdomain and dnsdomain2 or dnszone):

objectclass ( some-oid NAME 'dnsDomainAux'
    SUP top
    AUXILIARY
    MAY ( ARecord $ MDRecord $ MXRecord $ NSRecord $ SOARecord $ CNAMERecord $
          DNSTTL $ DNSClass $ PTRRecord $ HINFORecord $ MINFORecord $
          TXTRecord $ SIGRecord $ KEYRecord $ AAAARecord $ LOCRecord $
          NXTRecord $ SRVRecord $ NAPTRRecord $ KXRecord $ CERTRecord $
          A6Record $ DNAMERecord
    ))

This will allow any object to become a DNS entry when combined with the domainrelatedobject object class, and allow any entity to include all the attributes PowerDNS wants. I've sent an email to the PowerDNS developers asking for their view on this schema and if they are interested in providing such schema with PowerDNS, and I hope my message will be accepted into their mailing list soon. ISC dhcp The DHCP server searches for specific objectclass and requests all the object attributes, and then uses the attributes it want. This make it harder to figure out exactly what attributes are used, but thanks to the working example in Debian Edu I can at least get an idea what is needed without having to read the source code. In the DHCP server configuration, the LDAP base to use and the search filter to use to locate the correct dhcpServer entity is stored. These are the relevant entries from /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf:

ldap-base-dn "dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no";
ldap-dhcp-server-cn "dhcp";

The DHCP server uses this information to nest all the DHCP configuration it need. The cn "dhcp" is located using the given LDAP base and the filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpServer)(cn=dhcp))". The search result is this entry:

dn: cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: dhcp
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpServer
dhcpServiceDN: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no

The content of the dhcpServiceDN attribute is next used to locate the subtree with DHCP configuration. The DHCP configuration subtree base is located using a base scope search with base "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" and filter "(&(objectClass=dhcpService)( (dhcpPrimaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)(dhcpSecondaryDN=cn=dhcp,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no)))". The search result is this entry:

dn: cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: DHCP Config
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpService
objectClass: dhcpOptions
dhcpPrimaryDN: cn=dhcp, dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dhcpStatements: ddns-update-style none
dhcpStatements: authoritative
dhcpOption: smtp-server code 69 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: www-server code 72 = array of ip-address
dhcpOption: wpad-url code 252 = text

Next, the entire subtree is processed, one level at the time. When all the DHCP configuration is loaded, it is ready to receive requests. The subtree in Debian Edu contain objects with object classes top/dhcpService/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions, top/dhcpSubnet, top/dhcpGroup and top/dhcpHost. These provide options and information about netmasks, dynamic range etc. Leaving out the details here because it is not relevant for the focus of my investigation, which is to see if it is possible to merge dns and dhcp related computer objects. When a DHCP request come in, LDAP is searched for the MAC address of the client (00:00:00:00:00:00 in this example), using a subtree scoped search with "cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no" as the base and "(&(objectClass=dhcpHost)(dhcpHWAddress=ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00))" as the filter. This is what a host object look like:

dn: cn=hostname,cn=group1,cn=THINCLIENTS,cn=DHCP Config,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
cn: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname

There is less flexiblity in the way LDAP searches are done here. The object classes need to have fixed names, and the configuration need to be stored in a fairly specific LDAP structure. On the positive side, the invidiual dhcpHost entires can be anywhere without the DN pointed to by the dhcpServer entries. The latter should make it possible to group all host entries in a subtree next to the configuration entries, and this subtree can also be shared with the DNS server if the schema proposed above is combined with the dhcpHost structural object class. Conclusion The PowerDNS implementation seem to be very flexible when it come to which LDAP schemas to use. While its "tree" mode is rigid when it come to the the LDAP structure, the "strict" mode is very flexible, allowing DNS objects to be stored anywhere under the base cn specified in the configuration. The DHCP implementation on the other hand is very inflexible, both regarding which LDAP schemas to use and which LDAP structure to use. I guess one could implement ones own schema, as long as the objectclasses and attributes have the names used, but this do not really help when the DHCP subtree need to have a fairly fixed structure. Based on the observed behaviour, I suspect a LDAP structure like this might work for Debian Edu:

ou=services
  cn=machine-info (dhcpService) - dhcpServiceDN points here
    cn=dhcp (dhcpServer)
    cn=dhcp-internal (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=10.0.2.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    cn=dhcp-thinclients (dhcpSharedNetwork/dhcpOptions)
      cn=192.168.0.0 (dhcpSubnet)
        cn=group1 (dhcpGroup/dhcpOptions)
    ou=machines - PowerDNS base points here
      cn=hostname (dhcpHost/domainrelatedobject/dnsDomainAux)

This is not tested yet. If the DHCP server require the dhcpHost entries to be in the dhcpGroup subtrees, the entries can be stored there instead of a common machines subtree, and the PowerDNS base would have to be moved one level up to the machine-info subtree. The combined object under the machines subtree would look something like this:

dn: dc=hostname,ou=machines,cn=machine-info,dc=skole,dc=skolelinux,dc=no
dc: hostname
objectClass: top
objectClass: dhcpHost
objectclass: domainrelatedobject
objectclass: dnsDomainAux
associateddomain: hostname.intern
arecord: 10.11.12.13
dhcpHWAddress: ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00
dhcpStatements: fixed-address hostname.intern

One could even add the LTSP configuration associated with a given machine, as long as the required attributes are available in a auxiliary object class.

Adobe aren't supporting their flash player on amd64 right now. The cognitive dissonance gets a little draining, anyway, and I've seen the hoops I'd have to jump through to get the 32-bit version running. So I'm going to try tracking gnash trunk for a while. First impressions: gnash seems easier to build than it used to be (or maybe I just read the instructions this time). I chose the AGG graphics backend, with gstreamer and gtk. I also chose to install the browser plugins system-wide. The bzr repository ships copies of the necessary Mozilla libraries, which I'd usually frown upon as a packager, but it did mean I didn't have to worry about them. So the whole process looked like:

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk
cd trunk
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-renderer=agg \
            --enable-media=GST \
            --enable-gui=gtk \
            --with-plugins-install=system
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-plugins

The README file was very helpful, as was the configure script output. So, off to youtube... "An error has occurred, please try again later." Hmpf. Off to read the mailing list... there was a problem discussed a while ago about cookies that YouTube has started sending. I checked the patch discussed at the time, and a version of it seems to be in trunk, but the symptoms are still happening for me. But... disable all cookies in the browser, and it starts working. (There's a chance that libcurl might not be configured properly.) I'll have to report the problem or track it down further, but for now, I'm sitting back and declaring success. Co-incidentally, the video was discussing another cookie problem. ("Put pinky down. Down pinky. Good.")

Thanks to the work of Mark Heily, both upstream and in Debian, this week saw the arrival of libdispatch in Debian. libdispatch is the userspace component of Apple s Grand Central Dispatch technology, designed to help write applications that really take advantage of multicore processors without having to fiddle directly with threads and locking (and getting it terribly wrong). To get that working on Linux, Mark wrote a userspace implementation of the pthread workqueues and a kqueue compatibility library (libkqueue). He also packaged the Blocks runtime (libblocksruntime) for Debian so as to build libdispatch with Blocks support. That means code using libdispatch must be built with CLang (or llvm-gcc-4.2) rather than gcc, as getting Blocks support in gcc in the near future looks highly improbable. On Mac OS X and FreeBSD, a kernel-based implementation of the pthread workqueues is used; we don t have that for Linux yet. The all-userspace implementation we have at the moment works really well; there are some caveats, though, but that s no reason for not starting to play with libdispatch right now! Try it out, it s great. Thanks again, Mark!

Wow tonight was thrilling. It s hard to explain why, but it s pretty exciting to have a radio setup that is all wrong in so many ways work well enough for me to sit in my kitchen in Kansas and talk to someone in Indianapolis using only two-way HF radios. I recently passed my technician and general amateur radio exams. I ve been talking to some very nice people locally on the 2m band, which permits local (say, 100-200mi radius) communication. It s been fun, but Kansas is sparsely populated enough that sometimes there just isn t any activity. At all. Earlier this week, my Yaesu FT-857D and two antennas arrived. I tried it first on VHF, and had a nice chat with Kent (KB0RWI) a few miles away. But tonight was the big experiment. I bought a 20m dipole antenna. This is basically a 30-foot-long wire, connected to a balun and a coax feed line in the middle. You re supposed to put it at least 30 feet off the ground, and away from trees, houses, etc. You re supposed to have a nice RF ground for your transmitter, power supply, antenna tuner, and all that stuff. You re not supposed to just run the coax under that (until today, annoying) small hole in the seal under the kitchen storm door. You re supposed to have to have the correct connectors on your coax, instead of soldering an RG-8 PL-259 onto some RG-8X because you re new at this and didn t realize that you need to buy an adapter. And, I m really pretty sure that you re not supposed to have an aggressive outdoor cat complete with a full set of claws and teeth attack the coax RG-8X cable as it s being pulled through the grass. Fail to do any of these things, and the thing might not work well, or might not work at all, or for people that use old equipment, might burn out your radio or something. So anyway I got out the ladder today, and I got the antenna maybe 10-15 feet in the air. I have three trees in a row with the perfect separation to hang each end and the center balun from. So while Jacob went around playing with water and trying out the ladder on occasion (with my help), I used some string to hang the antenna. In the trees, not far from them. Near the house. Not 30ft off the ground. I strung the feed line into the house, set up all my equipment on our kitchen table, flipped the switch. And nothing. Just the occasional familiar whine while tuning. I tried the 20m band, then the 40m, then even 15, 12, and 10. No activity anywhere. So what was wrong? I improvised some grounding extracted the ground conductor from an old strip of AC house wiring, shoved it into the ground, and grounded the tuner and transmitter. No difference. I unplugged the coax, and tested it with my multimeter. It tested out OK. I plugged it back in and wiggled the connector. Turns out the connector isn t in great shape, but it had been working. I tried transmitting. The tuner made a whole bunch of alarming-sounding clicking noises (sounded like a symphony of relays), indicated SWR over 3, and the ammeter on my power supply went a bit nuts. Later I realized that I just wasn t giving the tuner enough time to tune up; with a few more seconds, it tuned up just fine on every frequency. (So yes, it was supposed to do that.) And, it turns out, that all I needed to do was wait a little while longer to hear some signals. Pretty soon I was finding stuff all over the 40m band. I heard a discussion from Chicago, another from Oklahoma City, some apparent broadcasters from Africa. I decided I would try and transmit. I was hearing one side of a discussion very clearly and decided I would wait for an opportunity to try to contact that person. I heard his callsign, K9RM. I looked it up, and realized he was near Indianapolis, where I had lived for awhile. Eventually he invited a station trying to get in to participate. And: KD0MJT (I announced my callsign, as a request to join the conversation) He said he only made out the 0, but eventually we were talking quite well. It was a brief conversation, but interesting; the person he was talking to was in Portland, and couldn t hear me (and I could barely hear him, but not loud enough to make out). That with no phone lines, no Internet provider needed, etc. And with a rig that is far from being at peak efficiency. I had no idea what to expect tonight and was surprised that just tossing an antenna up in a tree let me talk to someone in Indiana. That s 650 miles away. I wonder what I ll be able to do once I get things done the right way. This hobby is going to be fun. Many thanks to Mike_W for equipment suggestions, Kent and Dan from Newton ARC for encouragement and coming out to the house to test things, Kent for being my first ham radio contact ever (on 2m while I was using an old 1981 radio), Chuck (K9RM) for taking a few minutes to be my first HF contact, and my dad for helping plan out exterior wall penetration methods that will eliminate this coax under the kitchen door and lack of grounding business. Jacob, by the way, still loves his radios and is starting to take an interest in mine. It wouldn t shock me at all of he s one of these kids that gets his technician license in the 2nd grade or something. I think he and I can do this together for a long time.

The daemon feature of Emacs is great. But when should the daemon be started? At one time I used an '@reboot' line in my crontab. But when you want to use things like Tramp mode (for editing files on remote servers transparently), you very quickly wish that emacs could talk to your ssh-agent. So if you accept that you will be running a desktop environment (not always true), you can add the daemon to your equivalent of "System >> Preferences >> Startup Programs". But then you find that Flymake (when used with cperl-mode) is not picking up any of your uninstalled, work-in-progress Perl modules. Wouldn't it be great if you could set $PERL5LIB to fix this? And doesn't M-x copyright require you to set "$ORGANIZATION"? Ever since Debian bug #411639 was fixed at the end of 2007, we have the option of "~/.xsessionrc" for setting environment variables that will cover everything in your desktop session, including things launched from panels and startup scripts. So now that's what I do. But I've yet to figure out a good equivalent for console-only systems. Maybe I don't need one?

Yesterday some confusion arised on my side when I saw a new facebook advertising campaign in my facebook account (yes, I am a member of facebook, although I'm aware of the privacy concerns). Basically it was saying that I should try the friends finder and that some of my friends (showing and naming me three of them) would have used it already.

Some background:
The friends finder feature of facebook is a feature that asks for the password of your e-mail account. It will then crawl through your emails to find contacts that might already be on facebook but not connected to you (in a facebook sense).

My first feeling was: Oh my god. How can it be that friends (and family) of mine are so naive? Especially since there were people included which I consider to be quiet clever. But honestly: Who would be so naive to give an unknown company direct unsupervised (you can't tell what they really do) access to your mail account? Would you give it to your friend? Your husband? Your father? I guess the answer will be "No" in the most cases and these people are most likely people you trust. Well, I know, you could state similar things for Googlemail who crawl your mails to show you personalized advertising. And in fact you are right. But if one decides to use gmail for your email hosting you have to trust them anyway. Like you have to trust anybody else you retain to host your mails (who could do the same but just don't tell you). But in this case its a third party, Facebook.

But if you now think that this becomes a rant against my friends: You are wrong. Over the day I found out that it basically shows up all my friends in a rotation. Every time I open the start page it randomly picks three people from my friend list and shows them to me, telling the same lie to me all over again.

So what do we have here? Facebook tries to advertise the most dubious feature they have in the most aggressive way one could imagine. By pretending wrong facts. Wouldn't that even be an element of crime in Germany ("Irref hrung" 5 UWG or maybe also 4 UWG, "unsachliche Beeinflussung")?

Facebook, you can do better.

Update: Stefano raised a good point. I didn't actually make clear that it has been verified that those people actually did not use the "feature":

1. I asked some of them. They said, they didn't use it and were in fact surprised that I asked.
2. Others told me they saw that ad stating that I used the feature. I definitely did not use this "feature".
3. Probably weak: IMHO its highly unlikely that all of my friends used that feature and at the point I've written this it had already shown my whole friend list.

Some of you may have noticed WebKitGTK+ 1.2.2 and 1.2.3 have been uploaded recently. Here s their announcement =). A quick summary: if you re running the 1.2.x series upgrade to 1.2.3. Here s some information regarding 1.2.2: 1.2.2 is an update to the 1.2.x stable series; along with a lot of crash, and misc fixes the biggest changes are: 1) the inclusion of a new API from the development branch (webkit_back_forward_list_clear()),
because it s simple and will help with fixing a problem in Epiphany stable, and 2) lots of drag and drop, and clipboard related work by Martin Robinson. Despite not being strictly fixes, we believe the stable series has a lot to gain from this work; a couple examples should illustrate this better: the changes included fix both a crash when dragging links from WebKit into other browsers, and the annoying bug that made the cursor get stuck in a grab when dragging, sometimes.

http://webkitgtk.org/webkit-1.2.2.tar.gz
MD5: 40338001324a38b977c163291e8816d3

Here s some information regarding 1.2.3: To some such a quick succession in releases may look like a brown paper bag was in order. Not strictly, but indeed 1.2.3 aims to fix some oversights with easy fixes. First of all, WebKit was not buildable with ICU 4.4.1, but thankfully a fix had already been checked in to trunk, so 1.2.3 includes that fix. Secondly, Debian s Michael Gilbert has done a great job going through all CVEs released about WebKit, and including patches in the Debian package. 1.2.3 includes all of the commits from trunk to fix those, too.

http://webkitgtk.org/webkit-1.2.3.tar.gz
MD5: 0ab5c478a6f5b74a1ae96bf13a456662

You can read some more details, including the list of CVEs that were addressed, in the NEWS file:

http://gitorious.org/webkitgtk/stable/blobs/master/WebKit/gtk/NEWS

Enjoy!

Tomorrow, at this time, I'll probably be unsuccessfully trying to find a comfortable position on a seat of the Bilmanbus to Irun. Very early on Saturday, as soon as we get off the bus, Maria and I will quickly head to Hondarribia's beach in Cape Higer to symbolically wet our feet in the waters of the Cantabrian Sea. We won't have much time to enjoy the cold waters of the ocean, though. Soon after that, we'll have to take a deep breath, look East, and start walking if we want to achieve our utmost objective: take a bath in the beautiful beaches of the Cap de Creus, in the Mediterranean sea. In between, 30 days and 840 kilometres of thick woods, deep valleys, high peaks and cold waters, all of which shape incredible landscapes.

The Portella de Baiau, during our 2008 trip For a whole month, we'll be mostly disconnected from everything else that isn't our knee ache, our blisters, the Sun over our heads or where to get food. It's the first time I leave on a hiking trip as long and tough as this one, and I feel both uncertainty and eagerness. We've been so busy during the last few months that we've been unable to train at all for this, and I'm probably in the worst physical condition in a decade. It's too late to take care of that now, so we'll try to take good care of our legs and spine. In order to get back home in the Mediterranean, we'll have to be fast, some days joining two stages and skipping a few that we know are not that interesting (sections over asphalt, etc.). It's hard to make it in just one month, but we'll try our best. The plan is going to sleep not long after sunset, getting up at dawn, to be able to walk for a decent time before the heat starts being a handicap and just resting at midday, when the Sun is <strongest.> Of course, this means that I'm missing, yet again, this year's edition of DebConf in New York City, which is really sad because I was looking forward hanging around with Mako, Mika, Biella, micah, Clint and the rest of the NYC/ Boston gang, but when the idea of doing a long trip this summer popped up around January, it was clear DebConf seemed unlikely this year. I hope all of you have a lot of fun, and see you in a few weeks!

Finally we have the same exact features as the upstream precompiled one. YAY! Here's the story. JOSM supports the OAuth authentication method since the SVN snapshot rev. 3094. At the time (the package was uploaded on Mar 18, 2010), we didn't have some needed dependencies in Debian for that. So I had to disable it, by patching the source code. In the meanwhile, I started filing RFP/ITPs, to fulfill the missing dependency chain. And it turned to be a long chain. Here it is: Looking at it now, that it's all done, it doesn't seem that long. However, I had to face the infamous Maven buildsystem, which I didn't know at all and pretended to download every dependency in a "local repository". Then I found the maven-debian-helper and maven-repo-helper packages, and started understanding it. Unfortunately, it seems that maven is only being used by CDBS people, so I had to override some debian/rules targets to get the work done with dh7. Once the chain was fulfilled... JOSM didn't even compile. Then I discovered that JOSM had code working with oauth-signpost 1.1, but 1.2 (which I uploaded to Debian) broke the API. So I had to port it to the new API, and I could finally upload it. Now we're at the end of this adventure. Debian JOSM users will have the choice of OAuth re-enabled, and I learned to master a new (to me) beast. Enjoy

On python, frameworks and TOOWTDI The Python world is ridden with frameworks, microframeworks, metaframeworks and their likes. They are often very clever things, but more often than not they are a tool of despair. A very peculiar thing about Python web frameworkish things is that there are so many of them. There's cherrypy (in its various API redesigns), fapws, gunicorn, bottle and flask, paste, werkzeug and flup, tornado, pylons, turbogears 1 and 2, django, repoze who, what and whatnot, all the myriad of rendering engines and buffet as a metathing on top of them, diesel, twisted, and I apologise if I don't spend my day listing and hyperlinking them all, I hope I made my point. Frameworks are supposed to standardise some aspects of programming; the nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from, and they all suck, so I'll make my own. But wasn't Python supposed to be the world of TIOOWTDI? Ok, everbody knows it isn't. Just in the standard library there are 2 implementations of pickle and 2 urllibs. But people like the TIOOWTDI idea. I believe the reason people like the TIOOWTDI idea is because it creates a framework. It standardises some aspects of programming, and defines building blocks that guarantee that people doing similar jobs will be using similar sets of components. Let's take for example the datetime module in the standard library. It is an embarassing example of a badly designed module, so embarassing that the standard library documentation continuously fails to document its fundamental design flaws and common work-arounds hoping that noone notices them, but as a consequence each poor soul starting to use it for nontrivial things has to google for hours in despair to rediscover in how many ways it's broken. But still, datetime works as a structure to hold those values that make a date, time, or full UTC timestamp. For that job it's become the standard, and as such it's an important component of the Python TIOOWTDI framework: one can use it to exchange datetimes among different libraries: for example ORMs are using it instead of rolling their own, which makes database programming so much easier when date/time is involved. Even if the implementation is far from perfect, once we apply TIOOWTDI to dates and timestamps, python code from different authors can exchange dates without worries. This is much better than having 3 different superior datetime libraries and having to convert date objects from one to another when passing values from a web form to an ORM. There is an often overlooked Python framework. The Pyton framework. It's called TIOOWTDI. All the micro-mini-midi-maxi-meta-frameworks that people scatter around, are, or should be, just experiments, proofs of concept, competing ideas waiting to be distilled in The Only One Way, bringing the Python experience one step forward. What is unfortunate is that this last distillation thing happens so rarely that people get used to the idea of having to use proof of concept code to get things done. Update: this post apparently wasn't very clear, so here is some clarification:

• that python, plus the idea of TIOOWTDI, in fact generate a framework, the framework;
• that framework currently includes very little web stuff;
• the web stuff is currently shipped in countless prototypes and proof of concept things;
• something from all the prototypes people develop ought to be brought into the TIOOWTDI "framework";
• otherwise people get used (or worse, forced) to use proof of concept throwaway code to get their job done.

Released cfget 0.15 I have released version 0.15 of cfget. cfget is a tool to extract values from ini-style config files. A trivial thing, really. It is also simple to install: it is a single python executable and it has no dependencies besides the python standard library. It is trivial and simple, but because of the complex requirements (and sponsorship) of ISAC - CNR it has recently accumulated quite a set of features, and it manages to get a remarkable lot of things done. There are several news since 0.8, worth a rather major announcement: Added --dump=pickle Now all the contents of the configuration files, plus all the contents generated by cfget plugins, can be dumped in pickle format. This provides a quick and dirty way to load all cfget-generated data into a python dict:

data = pickle.loads(
    subprocess.Popen(
        ["cfget", "--dump=pickle"],
        stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0])

It sounds like a rather complicated way to read a configuration file, but if you have various plugins that compute nontrivial derived configuration values, that quick&dirty hack could be quite useful. Curly brace expansion Suppose that you have a config file like this:

[general]
mode = show
[show]
command = display
[edit]
command = gimp

And you want to get the command from the section indicated by general/mode. Now you can, very easily: cfget ' general/mode /command' When it notices curly braces, cfget will literally replace them with the result of querying their contents, then parse the expression again. Simple expression support ISAC - CNR are using cfget to configure the run of a rather complicated physical model, and use plugins to derive all sorts of values form the base configuration. This works, but there are times when adding a function to a plugin sounds like overkill: for example, sometimes one needs foo/bar + 1, or just the hour of a timestamp. For those simple cases, I've added support for simple expressions:

• operators: +, -, *, /, **
• grouping with parentesis
• function calls (int(), round()), with the possibility to define new functions via plugins.

So to compute a middle point one can now do this:

cfget "round((pos/start + pos/end) / 2)"

It needs a space around arithmetic operators to avoid conflicts with characters used to refer to configuration values, but with the space the expressions look nicer, so the result is that it generally does the right thing. Just as a scary thought, curly braces work with and in expressions:

cfget "values/val round((pos/end - pos/start) / 2)  + 1"

Although if someone ends up having a hairy thing like that, it is worth considering to replace it with a dynamic value computed using a plugin.

Social Micropayment A social micropayment system allows you to donate a small amount of money (a few pennies/cents) to thank someone else for a good blog post, piece of music, or for a free software that you enjoy. That s what Flattr is all about. How Flattr works With Flattr, donating is as easy as a single click on a Flattr button that content providers (read free software developers ) embed on their websites. A Flattr button is very similar to a Digg button or other social buttons (you can look at the end of this blog post for a sample). The amount donated per flattr varies from month to month because you define a fixed amount of money to spend each month (minimum 2 ) and it s split evenly between all the things that you appreciated. You can flattr as much as you want, it won t cost you more. Support Free Software with Flattr Free Software lacks a good business model to fund the creation of software, yet someone has to pay the time spent in writing the code. Many projects have tried to ask for donations but the amount collected rarely covers more than the expenses for the website hosting. Flattr makes it so easy to donate that this is possibly about to change. Flattr users have to spend their monthly amount each month, otherwise it gets donated to charity. Thus if it takes off, most Flattr users will grow the habit of doing regular donations to projects that they use and appreciate. Bootstrapping the Process Flattr is a new service, not many projects are using it to accept donations and not many users are participating yet. But it s growing quickly on both sides. In order to help users who want to support Free Software with Flattr, I have started the Flattr Free and Open Source Software project. You can subscribe to a newsletter to receive a monthly reminder with recommendations of Free Software to Flattr. If you have more time, you can also browse public directories listing various Free Software projects using Flattr so that you can manually pick your favorites. To learn more about the Flattr FOSS project, click here. I also invite Free Software developers to setup Flattr on their websites, blogs, and to register those sites so that Flattr users can easily find them. To learn more about this, check out the Earn a Living With Free Software page. Share the News Flattr can change the situation of many small but popular free software projects struggling with a single developer who started it as a hobby and who can t afford to spend more free time on it. But this can only happen if lots of users start using Flattr to support the Free Software that they benefit from. So share the news, tell the friends, join Flattr FOSS and give some Flattr-love every month. Get Your Free Flattr Invite! Flattr is still in beta, but they like Free Software a lot and have offered 30 invites for the launch of Flattr FOSS. You can get yours by subscribing either to my main newsletter or to the Flattr FOSS one. Just reply to the welcome email you get after having subscribed and ask for your invite. No comment Support my work

One of my favorite conferences is HOPE, which I have missed the last 2 times as I was away from NYC, so I am glad I am around this year. I find it especially valuable when there is some controversy brewing in the air, as there is with Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo, and Manning. I am also giving a talk, description below, with a fabulous postdoctoral researcher, Finn Brunton, who works on spam! But we will be talking about pleasure, trickery, and exploitable media for activists. Our talk is late, like really late: 11:00 PM on Saturday night. At first I was a bit annoyed at the scheduling but then I figured, when will i ever give a talk at 11:00 PM?

Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.

One of my favorite conferences is HOPE, which I have missed the last 2 times as I was away from NYC, so I am glad I am around this year. I find it especially valuable when there is some controversy brewing in the air, as there is with Wikileaks, Adrian Lamo, and Manning. I am also giving a talk, description below, with a fabulous postdoctoral researcher, Finn Brunton, who works on spam! But we will be talking about pleasure, trickery, and exploitable media for activists. Our talk is late, like really late: 11:00 PM on Saturday night. At first I was a bit annoyed at the scheduling but then I figured, when will i ever give a talk at 11:00 PM?

Following a brief lecture on Project Chanology, the question will be posed: how can we harness the power of lulzy virality, of pleasure, of trickery, of spectacular trolling for purposes above and beyond sharing the wisdom of Advice Dog? It ll start with a brief look at great activist media in the past, from Guernica and the picture of the whole Earth to projects by the Yes Men - how they spread ideas and helped people get informed, organize, and act. What makes the creation of lulzy memes different? Learn about how to create exploitable forms and rapid variations, and mechanisms for bringing the best stuff forward. Can we make media memes with goals beyond lulz, and teach activists who ve never heard of 4chan to make them too? Part lecture, part workshop, this will feature cameos by Rageguy, Pablo Picasso, V, alt.pave.the.earth, Kathe Kollwitz, Courage Wolf, Stewart Brand, Sarah Palin, Batman, Goya, Philosoraptor, Adolf Hitler, Trollface, Shepard Fairey, Joseph Ducreux, David Cameron, lots of Spartan warriors, and lots and lots of (trollish) cats.