Like you, dear Internet readers, I have no shortage of reading material. I have ready access to more engaging, high quality, informative and relevant information than I can possibly digest. Every day, I have to choose what to read, and what to pass by. This seems like an important thing to do well, and I wonder if I do a good enough job of it. This is just one example of a larger breadth/depth problem, but I m finding the general problem difficult to stomach, so I m focusing on reading for the moment. These are my primary sources of reading material on a day-to-day basis:

• Email I read everything which is addressed to me personally. I don t reply to all of it, and my reply time can vary greatly, but I am able to keep up with reading it, and I consider it important to do so. I am still subscribed to a selection of mailing lists, but I find them increasingly awkward to manage. There are a few which I scan on a daily basis, but most of them I process in batches when I m offline and traveling. I m subscribed to far fewer mailing lists than I was five years ago, though I feel they are still the most effective online discussion facility available. I find myself doing more and more discussing in real-time on IRC and by phone rather than by email.
• Blogs I subscribe to a few big aggregators and a random sampling of individual blogs. Most of them I scan rather than read. I do most of this offline, while in transit, and so I don t tend to follow links unless they re promising enough to save for later. I ve recently stopped trying to keep up (scan every post) on most of them, and instead just sample whatever is current at the time. It feels like turning on a television, flipping through all of the channels, and turning it off again. Even when I do find something which I feel is worth reading, it s hard for me to focus my attention after a long session of scanning. I do find a lot of good stuff this way, but I m pretty dissatisfied with the overall experience. I never feel like I m looking in the right places.
• Shared links I share my own links publicly, and follow those shared by friends and acquaintances. I do this with multiple groups of people who don t connect directly, and pass items back and forth between those groups. I place an increasingly high priority on reading items which are shared by people I know, more than on trying to follow the original sources, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so good: my personal network acts as a pretty good filter for what will interest me. I have the nagging feeling that I need to maintain a balance here, though. If I read mostly what other people are sending me, I feel like I m living in a bubble of like-minded people and fear that I ll lose perspective.
• News I read hardly any proper news. I don t subscribe to any newspapers, and generally don t read the online versions either. I do read articles which are shared by people in my network. Traditional media never seems to have the right scope for me. There may be particular journalists, or particular topics I d like to follow, but news outlets simply don t group their content in a way which fits my mind.
• Books Remember these? My diet of books has shrunk drastically since I started reading more online media. Devoting my full attention to a book just doesn t feel as energizing as it used to. I hesitate at the prospect of sinking so many hours into a book, only to decide that it wasn t worthwhile, or worse, to forget what I learned as I m bombarded by bite-sized, digestible tidbits from the Internet. I feel sad about losing the joy of reading I once had, and want to find a way to reintegrate books into my regular diet.

How do you decide what to read, and what not to read? How does your experience differ between your primary information sources? How have you tried to improve?

Something I've wanted to do for a while now, is somehow combine my blog with all of my projects/git repositories, and now I've done it! Welcome to my new site :) So, I got bored a few nights ago, and started trying to find some kind of project management type system to host my git repositories in. After searching for a while I stumbled across Gitorious. I'd heard of Gitorious before, but I'd never really looked at it, nor did I know that it's codebase was infact completely open. So I thought I'd give it a try to see what it was like Now I have to admit, my first impressions of it weren't exactly great. Firstly, it uses Ruby, which I can't say I'm much of a fan of (but that's a different discussion :p), nor am I a fan of installing all of the 'packages' it needed, via gem. Deploying it is an absolute nightmare, it has 4 different daemons, all of which have hideous init scripts that don't really work properly, and low and behold you try and put the git repositories and the site itself under different users, figuring out what needs to run as what and what needs what permissions is very much a game of trial and error. In Gitorious' defence, there /are/ numerous guide lurking around on the internet explaining how to do these things. But once I'd got over these niggles, and had actually deployed it, it worked quite nicely, and really did exactly what I wanted, so I decided to stick with it. It then occurred to me that it probably wouldn't be too hard to stick a blog onto it, after all, it's written using Rails, which is supposed to be easy, right? So with no knowledge of Ruby, let alone Rails, I got stuck in. Fortunately, it turns out Rails is in fact pretty easy to use, (at least once you've got used to it implicitly doing everything behind the scenes..), I'm even starting to think I prefer it to Django... So there we have it, a brand new site, and one that looks considerably better than my old one.. even if it is just Gitorious in disguise _ The only thing I'm disappointed Gitorious doesn't have, is some kind of bug tracker, but then, I'm not sure I'd use one given most of my projects just go through Debian.

My blog post about logging in as root and whether sudo provides any benefit [1] got some interest on Redit. In the Reddit comments on my post [2] there are a lot of strange things. One interesting comment was to suggest that logging in as non-root provided defense in depth . The NSA is credited with inventing the term Defense in Depth as applied to the computer industry, they have a PDF that gives an overview of the concept [3]. It seems that Defense in Depth is all about having multiple different layers of security, firewalls, IDS/IPS, passwords, PKI, etc. Entering the same password twice (once to login and once to run sudo which seems to be a fairly typical configuration of sudo) hardly seems to count. Can using sudo provide Defense in Depth benefits? With a typical configuration the use of sudo provides no real protection. The user either enters their own password or the root password to gain full root access, in either case the attacker can exploit their session and get the password. A session exploit can be easily arranged by creating a shell function or alias that makes sudo run something else (such as using netcat to send the password out over the network). One way of making this sort of attack more difficult is to make root own the user home directory, files such as ~/.login that are used by the user shell, the ~/.ssh directory and the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This way a hostile party can t change the configuration, so a successful attack has to involve a long running process that uses ptrace to intercept the shell and divert an attempt to run sudo. If the non-root user is prevented from using ptrace then things start to become a little more difficult for the attacker. In some quick tests I was able to capture about half the data through messing with /proc/X/fd/0 and /proc/X/fd/1 for a target process, but it seems that it would be difficult to get an entire password that way. To disable ptrace you could compile a kernel without ptrace support, use a SE Linux policy that prevents prevent ptrace access for the sessions in question, or make the user s shell SETGID. If the root account and the account used for su or sudo use different authentication methods, where the options include ssh authorized keys, password, and security token (maybe both password and token for the root account) then it does seem that it would provide some Defense in Depth benefits. sudo can be used to only permit executing certain commands. While this is a real security benefit it doesn t allow full sysadmin work, merely delegating some portions of operations to people who don t have full sysadmin rights. As someone needs to have full access to fix any problem that might occur on the machine someone needs to have access to run any command as root. So while sudo is great for providing limited administrative access to certain junior people, it s not going to stop an attack on a member of the sysadmin team. Conclusion In a typical sudo configuration the non-root account is configured in a default Unix manner (with the user having ownership of their home directory). The user who logs in to that account controls it s environment through .login and other scripts, so sudo doesn t gain anything. In a typical configuration ptrace is enabled so even if the critical environment files can t be modified by a hostile party they can get the same result through ptrace. Admittedly using a SETGID shell is not going to be difficult to implement after you have changed the ownership of the home directory. If you have a configuration where ptrace is not available and the non-root user can t modify their own profile files then it starts to become difficult for an attacker. If root authentication requires using a security token such that every login uses a different code and the code expires rapidly then it becomes even more difficult for an attacker. But for all configurations that are close to the default for every OS that I ve ever used none of these conditions hold. Also none of those conditions held for any of the systems I ve been employed to use which were configured to require su or sudo for root access. As it seems that most sudo configurations don t provide any extra security, and that auditing the actions of the sysadmin can be better done in other ways (such as the Bash 4.1 syslog feature) [4] it seems that for the vast majority of systems sudo doesn t provide a benefit. The fact that sudo could provide a benefit if configured in a way that is quite different to all the defaults and the ways that it is typically used is worth noting. I m not going to argue with anyone who wants to configure their systems in such a manner and who believes that they need to do so. But anyone who thinks that sudo is the only way to go because the Ubuntu default configuration does it really needs to investigate the issues. Remember that blind faith in the security choices of other people can be a security problem.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/29/logging-in-as-root/
• [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/c9m7s/im_logging_in_as_root_does_sudosu_make_your/
• [3] http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/support/defenseindepth.pdf
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/06/11/logging-shell-commands/

I finally got punished today for using unstable without knowing enough about my system. Since I can't access my emails I'm hoping for help from planet-debian. Please excuse...

So the last words of my machine:

Loading, please wait...
  One or more specified logical volume(s) not found.
Unable to find LVM volume mylvm/root_crypt
  One or more specified logical volume(s) not found.
Unable to find LVM volume mylvm/swap_crypt
File descriptor 3 (/conf/conf.d/cryptroot) leaked on lvm invocation. Parent PID 
352: /bin/sh
udevd-work[77]: kernel-provided name 'dm-0' and NAME= 'mapper/mylvm-swap' 
disagree, please use SYMLINK+= or change the kernel to provide the proper name

<blink>_</blink>

Please, if you can help me, write a comment to this blogpost!
(Thank you, Hanno for borrowing me your laptop!)

update: It wasn't udev (this time). Sorry. The problem was, that I updated libdevmapper without also updating dmsetup. I could boot into an older kernel and solve this. A Bug against the LVM Debian package is already filled.

Seth Berkley gave an interesting TED talk about developing vaccines against the HIV and Influenza viruses [1]. The part I found most interesting was the description of how vaccines against viruses are currently developed using eggs and how they plan to use bacteria instead for faster and cheaper production. One of the problems with using eggs is that if the chickens catch the disease and die then you can t make a vaccine. Aigars Mahinovs wrote a really good review of Microsoft Azure and compared it to Amazon EC2 [2]. It didn t surprise me that Azure compared poorly to the competition. Johanna Blakley gave an insightful TED talk about IP lessons from the fashion industry [3]. She explained how an entire lack of IP protection other than trademark law was an essential part of the success of the fashion industry. She also compared the profits in various industries and showed that industries with little or no IP protection involve vastly larger amounts of money than industries with strong IP protection. Lisa D wrote an insightful post about whether Autism Spectrum Disorders (such as Asperger Syndrome) should be considered to be disabilities [4]. I don t entirely agree with her, but she makes some really good points. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy gave an interesting TED talk about the way the Taliban train young children to become suicide bombers [5]. Apparently the Taliban prey on large poor families, sometimes paying the parents for taking children away to school . At the Taliban schools the children are beaten, treated poorly, and taught theology by liars who will say whatever it takes to get a result. Then after being brain-washed they are sent out to die. Wired has an interesting article about Charles Komanoff s research into New York traffic problems [6]. He aims to track all the economic externalities of traffic patterns and determine incentives to encourage people to do things that impose less costs on the general economy. His suggestions include making all bus travel free as the externality of the time spent collecting fares is greater than the fare revenue. It s a really interesting article, his research methods should be implemented when analysing traffic in all large cities, and many of his solutions can be implemented right now without further analysis such as free buses and variable ticket pricing according to the time of day. William Li gave an interesting TED talk about starving cancer by preventing new blood vessels from growing to feed it [7]. Drugs to do this have been shown to increase the life expectancy of cancer patients by more than 100% on average. Also autopsies of people who died in car accidents show that half the women in their 40 s had breast cancer and half the men in their 50 s prostate cancer but those cancers didn t grow due to a natural lack of blood supply, so the aim here is to merely promote what naturally happens in terms of regulating cancers and preventing them from growing larger than 0.5mm^3. There are a number of foods that prevent blood vessels growing to cancers which includes dark chocolate! ;) Also drugs which prevent blood vessel growth also prevent obesity, I always thought that eating chocolate all the time prevented me from getting fat due to the central nervous system stimulants that kept me active Graham Hill gave an inspiring TED talk about becoming a weekday vegetarian [8]. Instead of making a commitment to being always vegetarian he s just mostly vegetarian (only eating meat on Sundays). He saves most of the environmental cost and doesn t feel guilty if he ever misses a day. It s an interesting concept. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Guardian about the phrase Information Wants To Be Free [9]. He points out that really it s people who want to be free from the tyranny that is being imposed on us in the name of anti-piracy measures. He also points out that it s a useful straw-man for the MAFIAA to use when claiming that we are all pirates. The Atlantic has an interesting article about the way that Google is working to save journalistic news [10]. Adam Sadowsky gave an interesting TED talk about creating a Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video This Too Shall Pass [11]. At the end of the talk they include a 640*480 resolution copy of the music video. Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk advocating increased government spending on scientific research [12]. Among other things he pointed out that the best research indicates that the amount of money the US government invested in the Apollo program was returned 14* to the US economy due to exports of new American products that were based on that research. It s surprising that any justification other than the return on investment for the Apollo program is needed! Moot gave an interesting TED talk about Anonymity [13]. I don t think that he made a good case for anonymity, he cited one person being identified and arrested for animal cruelty due to the efforts of 4chan people and also the campaign against the Cult of Scientology (which has not been very successful so far). Rory Sutherland gave an intriguing TED talk titled Sweat the Small Stuff [14]. He describes how small cheap changes can often provide greater benefits than huge expensive changes and advocates corporations having a Chief Detail Officer to take charge of identifying and implementing such changes. TED Hosted an interesting debate between pro and anti nuclear campaigners [15]. They agreed that global warming is a significant imminent problem but disagree on what methods should be implemented to solve it.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_berkley_hiv_and_flu_the_vaccine_strategy.html
• [2] http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2010/05/19/so-what-is-microsoft-azure-and-how-it-compares-to-amazons-aws/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
• [4] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/80330.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/sharmeen_obaid_chinoy_inside_a_school_for_suicide_bombers.html
• [6] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_komanoff_traffic/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
• [9] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/18/information-wants-to-be-free
• [10] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/04/how-to-save-the-news/8095/
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_music_video.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_sweat_the_small_stuff.html
• [15] http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html

The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs have been discovered and reported in the process (#585410 in nagios3-cgi, #584879 already fixed in enscript and #584861 in kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I am working on a script to automate the test. The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it is to install a desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot (only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot). A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade is created. The bug report #566000 make me suspect this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a known issue and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for Debian Squeeze. Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test script, which I call upgrade-test for now, is doing the trick:

#!/bin/sh
set -ex
if [ "$1" ] ; then
    desktop=$1
else
    desktop=gnome
fi
from=lenny
to=squeeze
exec < /dev/null
unset LANG
mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
fuser -mv .
debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 101
EOF
chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
exit_cleanup()  
    umount $tmpdir/proc
 
mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger.  It need the test scripts
# to return the correct answers.
echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop   \
    chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
# Include the desktop and laptop task
for test in desktop laptop ; do
    echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
exit 2
EOF
    chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
done
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
fuser -mv

I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in kdebase-workspace-data I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs (KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome, aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed, 193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop packages.

Good morning everyone, after quite some time of organization, we got the MiniDebConf running in Berlin. Yesterday at 9.30, Zack had the pleasure of opening the event which seems to be reflected in the press already. After that, we had nice talks, one every hour from 10 to 6 with mine being the last one of the day at 5 p.m. Yes, I did it :) Slides, links, and all that stuff will follow in a later post, or more official announcements. Right now I m preparing myself to get back to the fairground. The second day starts with another bunch of talks at 10 and I m excited to meet different people again and hear more interesting talks. The BSP went well. :) Actually, we didn t really fix many bugs, I guess. A few maintainers stayed after the event as well as a couple of users completely new to packaging. Thus, it was more like a small social event bit it was really fun. And of course the HackLab is still open today, so we have every chance to fix more bugs This just as a small input from where we stand. More is to come some time later, probably after the weekend, we ll see

In response to my previous post about logging in directly as root [1] it was suggested that using sudo is the only way to log the commands that are entered as root. One reason for doing this is if you don t trust the people who are granted root access and you want to log all commands to a remote server that is run by different people. I wonder whether it is really possible to run systems with untrusted sysadmins, if someone can apply patches etc then they can surely install a trojan and then wait a while before activating it to make things more difficult for anyone who is analysing the logs. One of the many issues is that even the restricted version of vim permits the :r and :w commands, so one could start vim from sudo with an innocuous file as the target of the edit operation and then read and write some critical file such as /etc/shadow. I expect that someone has written an editor which has a restricted mode that doesn t allow reading/writing files other than the one specified on the command-line, and if not it surely wouldn t be difficult to patch vim (or your favorite editor) to have such a mode of operation. But there are always other programs that can access files other than the ones specified on their command-line. It seems that using the auditctl interface to log access to certain critical files (EG read access to /etc/shadow and write access to everything under /etc, /bin, /sbin, and /usr) would be a necessary part of an effective auditing strategy and that sudo would only comprise a small part of a useful configuration. There are other viable ways of logging everything that is done as root which offer benefits over sudo. Ways of Logging Shell Commands The Korn shell supports doing all the logging you might desire as part of a shell function [2]. Bash can have a similar shell function to do the logging, but when a command is entered the previous command is logged [3], this means that any single bash command that unsets this will never be logged. It might be possible to solve this if you know more about Bash than I do. I wonder if the Korn shell function has the same issue. This is still probably useful for some situations when you want to track what honorable sysadmins do, but of little benefit for tracking hostile sysadmins (tracking hostile sysadmins is actually possible). You can put code in a file such as /etc/bash.bash_logout to log the commands elsewhere, but even trivial things such as kill -9 $$ can defeat that so it s only useful when the sysadmin is trusted. The Sudoshell project exists to log all data that is entered in a shell [3]. One deficiency of this for the people who don t trust the root user is that it logs the data to files on disk, but it shouldn t be difficult to rewrite sudoscriptd to write directly to another machine over the network. Also one benefit of this for auditing is that it captures all the output of the commands as well (which can be a little inconvenient to decipher when curses programs are run. The web site also describes some of the problems with trying to use sudo directly for everything (such as pipelines). If you compile Bash version 4.1 with the SYSLOG_HISTORY macro enabled (which can be done by editing the file config-top.h) then it will log all commands to syslog. RootShell.be has a short post about this which mentions the security issues, some commands take passwords as parameters and these passwords could be exposed to the network [5]. Of course the best option is to just avoid such commands. Thanks to Chris Samuel for pointing out the Bash logging feature. Conclusion If you use sudo for auditing root access then you lose some shell functionality. Sudo also only logs the commands that are executed you don t get logging of output. It seems that depending on the exact needs either a modified version of Sudoshell or the logging that can be compiled in to Bash would be the way to go depending on the exact requirements. The main benefit of using sudo for logging would be that some distributions of Linux are configured that way by default but it seems unlikely that someone would go to the effort of running a separate logging server that the regular sysadmin team can t touch and then configure their servers in a default manner.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/29/logging-in-as-root/
• [2] http://blogs.sun.com/chrisg/entry/logging_commands_in_korn_shell
• [3] http://blog.rootshell.be/2009/02/28/bash-history-to-syslog/
• [4] http://www.egbok.com/sudoscript/sudoshell.1.html
• [5] http://blog.rootshell.be/2009/12/28/bash-syslog-history-could-lead-to-data-leakage/

It seems that most mailing lists occasionally have meta-discussions about what is on-topic, the few that don t are the ones that have very strong moderation authoritarian moderators who jump on the first infraction and clearly specify the rules. I don t recall the list of acceptable topics for any mailing list including also discussions about what is on-topic . As this is the Internet I m sure that someone will immediately point out an example of such a list, but apart from the counter-example that someone will provide it seems obvious that for the majority of mailing lists a meta-discussion is not strictly on topic. Regardless of a meta-discussion not being on-topic I don t think there s anything wrong with such a discussion on occasion. But if a meta-discussion is to be based on the volume of off-topic messages it would be nice if the people who advocate such a position could try and encourage the discussion in a way that reduced the number of messages. Replying to lots of messages is not a good strategy if your position is that there are too many messages. If a meta-discussion is going to be about moving off-topic discussions to other forums that are more appropriate then it would be nice to have the meta-discussion move to another forum if possible. My previous post which advocates creating a separate mailing list for chatty messages was an attempt to move a discussion to a different forum [1]. Anyone who believes that such discussions don t belong on a list such as debian-private is free to commit their thoughts to some place that they consider more appropriate and provide the URL to any interested parties. I think that it s worth noting that the only comment on my previous post is one that describes how to filter mail to split the traffic from the debian-private list into different mailboxes. I had hoped that other people would write blog posts advocating their positions which would allow us to consider the merits of various ideas without the he-said-she-said element of mailing list discussions. Most mailing lists have a policy against profanity and some go further and ban personal abuse. Therefore it seems hypocritical to advocate a strict interpretation of the rules in regard to what is on-topic while also breaking the rules regarding profanity or personal abuse. I don t think it s asking a lot to suggest that the small minority of messages that someone writes on the topic of a list meta-discussion should obey the set of rules that they advocate I m not suggesting that someone should obey all the rules all the time, just when they are trying to enforce them. Also you can argue that a list policy against profanity doesn t preclude sending profane messages off-list, but if the off-list messages are for the purpose of promoting the list rules it still seems hypocritical to use profanity. It is a fair point that off-topic discussions and jokes can distract people from important issues and derail important discussions. It would be good if people who take such positions would implement them in terms of meta-discussions. If the purpose of a meta-discussion is to avoid distraction from important issues then it seems like a really good idea to try and avoid distraction in the meta-discussion thread. I wonder whether a meta-discussion can provide anything other than a source of lulz for all the people who don t care about the issue in question. The meta-discussions in the Debian project seem to always result in nothing changing, not even when the majority of people who comment agree that the current situation is not ideal. When an almost identical meta-discussion happens regularly it seems particularly pointless to start such a discussion for the purpose of reducing off-topic content. Revisiting an old discussion can do some good when circumstances change or when someone has some new insight. I know that it s difficult to avoid being sucked into such discussions, when I was diagnosed with AS [2] I decided to try and minimise my involvement in such discussions but I haven t been as successful at doing so as I had hoped.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/06/09/serious-non-serious-mailing-list/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/11/08/im-an-aspie/

As acting release engineer of the Gypsy project (a GPS mux, if you didn't know) I'm proud to announce the release of Gypsy 0.8. So, what's new?

• Support the Nokia N810 integrated GPS. If someone can verify that this works for the N900 too, that would be great.
• Ability to dump the parsed NMEA to the console for debugging
• Fixed over-eager old-school Garmin detection
• Support reading NMEA from named pipes and FIFOs
• Support seting the baud rate on ghetto GPS devices that don't default to a baud rate that actually works (Globalsat ND-100 and BlueNext BN-903S, I'm looking at you)
• Support NMEA < 2.3

Many thanks to Jussi Kukkonen for patch review, and Bastien Nocera for patch review and new features. The big question of course is what of the future? So far we've got some rough ideas. An overhaul of the device interaction layer is definitely required as actaully getting NMEA is becoming more complex: for integrated 3G/GPS chips you need to talk to oFono/ModemManager to get a socket, for some embedded GPS devices you need a proprietary binary that writes to a pipe, and so on. There are some new features we're considering too: server-side proximity detection and update rate limiting.

I am, by nature, a tinkerer. I love to build things to see how they will work or because I have an idea that I think is fun. I am not so much of a natural business guy. I go build something "because it's there". Or rather, it's there in my mind, and I want to make it. I earn money, however, via consulting work. There are problems with this line of business though, namely that it doesn't scale very well unless, besides being good at a skill, you've also got the skills to build up a consulting business, which is very much about adding and managing people, something I'm not all that passionate about and would rather avoid. So what happens is that you go through slumps with less than full capacity, and then things pick up again, and before you know it, you hit your upper limit and can't take on any new work, putting a ceiling over your potential earnings. Sure, you can raise prices a bit, but that'll only get you so far. For a while now, I've been considering this problem, and I think some sort of product would be an ideal way out. Stories like Balsamiq's are inspirational, and along the lines of what I think might be nice. Don't get me wrong, I like my clients and like to help people solve problems a lot, but it's a stressful job in that you're never very far from having no income. I'm not much of an entrepreneur, though, in the sense of someone with a nose for making money. I tend to think about building something cool first, and not really worrying about making money with it. Predictably, some of the sites I have created are popular, but don't make any money. Sure, they have some ads, but that doesn't really make much unless you get really huge page views or have some sort of content that attracts users who will click on very lucrative advertisements. I've started to think that perhaps I should constrain myself in new initiatives to creating things that have a direct source of revenue: you want to use it, you pay. In my daydream world, I'd probably just hack on open source all day long, but there's no money in that for someone like me who is not the author of some huge, famous piece of software, nor a particularly great hacker in any case (I've met some, like Andrew Tridgell, and it's a really humbling experience). So that brings up the question of what to do with the aforementioned sites. One option would be to sell them off via a site like flippa.com, another would be simply to just let them sit there and stew, but they do take up some resources on my server, and require some maintainance now and then, and they're a bit of a distraction too (I start wondering about things to add or how to fiddle with them). Maybe there's a way to make money from some of them, but I'm too blind to see it. The ones I'm thinking about, are, in no particular order:

• http://langpop.com - this one gets decent traffic, but programmers are about the best people in the world at ignoring advertisements.
• http://leenooks.com - the Linux Incompatibility List attempts to point out hardware that people should avoid if they intend to run Linux on their computers. Happily, there is less need for this site than when I conceived of it some 10+ years ago, but I think it's still a helpful resource.
• http://linuxsi.com - (in Italian) this one is a place that highlights stores and consultants who are "Linux friendly". Want to buy a computer with Linux? There's probably a store near you. I have had fun with this site, but, once again, no revenue.
• http://squeezedbooks.com - "open source" business book summaries and discussion. There are plenty of competitors in this space who make their money by churning out summaries and charging for access for them. I had hoped to build a community interested in reviewing and discussing books out in the open. There is a lot of fluff in business books, mostly because you can't sell a 10 page book that describes your idea, but need to pad it out with lots of examples and repitition and so on to make an actual book out of it, but that doesn't mean the idea at the heart of the book in question isn't an interesting or new one.

Some people still ask me from time to time when I'll upload Battle for Wesnoth 1.8. My usual answer is that it's there already since before the official announce went out in the wesnoth-1.8 package. The longer answer which also answers Why the name change? goes like this: People asked for a way to be able to install different branches side-by-side so that they can keep the old stable branch around for finishing started campaigns there while still being able to play with their friends multiplayer games using the new stable branch. Also people using the development version wanted to not having to get rid of the stable version just to use the development branch. So there it is! Enjoy! There though is still something missing though, and that's why the question where the 1.8 version of Wesnoth is still pops up: There is no transitional/meta package yet. This requires a bit more work including adding alternative handling (so one can still run wesnoth and not have to use the versioned wesnoth-1.8 binary name) and for that some dpkg-divert magic about the historical unversioned wesnoth packages. Given that my release is requesting quite some support overhead I can't tell yet when these things will be done, but a similarly related support contract will run out by the end of the month so potential I'll be able to find some time next month to finish this for good. If you want to have it done earlier or feel like helping out, feel free to send in patches after talking with me about the fineprints and potential approaches. Thanks in advance!

After dropping and restoring a very large database a few times just to refresh the data in a single table, I thought that there must be an easier way to do this. I was right, you can restore a single table.

If you are starting with a live database, you can simply use pg_dump to backup only one table:

pg_dump --data-only --table=tablename sourcedb > onetable.pg

which you can then restore in the other database:

psql destdb < onetable.pg

But even if all you've got is a full dump of the source database, you can still restore that single table by simply extracting it out of the large dump first:

pg_restore --data-only --table=tablename fulldump.pg > onetable.pg

before restoring it as shown above, using psql.

Early this morning I sent Rcpp version 0.8.1 off to CRAN and Debian. In the meantime, Romain has already provided a very nice blog post about it. There are a few fairly visible new things in this release. As we want to focus the next few minor releases on completing the documentation, we started by adding a total of four (!!) new vignettes:

• Rcpp-package showing how to write your own package using Rcpp,
• Rcpp-FAQ addressing several frequently asked questions,
• Rcpp-modules discussing how to expose C++ functions and modules with ease using an idea borrowed from Boost::Python, and
• Rcpp-extending detailing the steps needed to extend Rcpp with user-provided or third-party classes,

The most interesting new feature is what we call Rcpp modules and is modeled after Boost::Python. This makes it pretty easy to expose C++ functions and classes to R -- without having to write glue code. This is pretty new and may change a tad over the coming releases, but it is also quite exciting. Other changes concern more improvements for use of inline which should now allow packages like our RcppArmadillo to be used with it, and some bug fixes. The full NEWS entry for this release follows below:

0.8.1   2010-06-08
    o   This release adds Rcpp modules. An Rcpp module is a collection of
        internal (C++) functions and classes that are exposed to R. This
        functionality has been inspired by Boost.Python.
        
        Modules are created internally using the RCPP_MODULE macro and
        retrieved in the R side with the Module function. This is a preview 
        release of the module functionality, which will keep improving until
        the Rcpp 0.9.0 release. 
        The new vignette "Rcpp-modules" documents the current feature set of
        Rcpp modules.
        
    o   The new vignette "Rcpp-package" details the steps involved in making a
        package that uses Rcpp.
    o   The new vignette "Rcpp-FAQ" collects a number of frequently asked
        questions and answers about Rcpp.
    o   The new vignette "Rcpp-extending" documents how to extend Rcpp
        with user defined types or types from third party libraries. Based on
        our experience with RcppArmadillo
        
    o   Rcpp.package.skeleton has been improved to generate a package using 
        an Rcpp module, controlled by the "module" argument
    o   Evaluating a call inside an environment did not work properly
        
    o   cppfunction has been withdrawn since the introduction of the more
        flexible cxxfunction in the inline package (0.3.5). Rcpp no longer
        depends on inline since many uses of Rcpp do not require inline at
        all. We still use inline for unit tests but this is now handled
        locally in the unit tests loader runTests.R. 
        Users of the now-withdrawn function cppfunction can redefine it as:
        
           cppfunction <- function(...) cxxfunction( ..., plugin = "Rcpp" )
    o   Support for std::complex was incomplete and has been enhanced.
    o   The methods XPtr<t>::getTag and XPtr<t>::getProtected are deprecated, 
        and will be removed in Rcpp 0.8.2. The methods tag() and prot() should
        be used instead. tag() and prot() support both LHS and RHS use. 
    o   END_RCPP now returns the R Nil values; new macro VOID_END_RCPP
        replicates prior behabiour
        

As always, even fuller details are in Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page

A somewhat na ve young man, a kidnapping, a policeman's daughter, a night club singer, said policeman's partner being involved, a love triangle, a pervert and (probably because it's Lynch) a cut off ear. What more do you need ... ? Or, in other words, I absolutely regret not having seen Blue Velvet before. In contrast, Pink Flamingos takes its fight over the title of the filthiest woman alive (which sets the whole plot in motion) a bit too literal for my taste. I like movies that leave more things up to the imagination of the spectator. Or perhaps it's just that my sense of aesthetics doesn't agree with John Water's. (And to the person who knew nothing bettter to say than You idiot to my negative critique about Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: I don't delete comments on my blog that don't agree with me. But I do not tolerate personal attacks. Post it to your own blog. You're as entitled to your opinion as I am.)

In the past few days, I ve been playing with icegrind, a little valgrind plugin that Taras Glek wrote to investigate how Firefox startup spends its time in libxul.so reading/initialization, mostly. I invite you to check out his various posts on the subject, it s an interesting read. After some fiddling with the original icegrind patch in the bug linked above, I got some better understanding on the binary initialization phase (more on that in another post), as we could call it, and hit some problems due to problems in icegrind and elflog. The latest version of the icegrind patch as of writing solved my main problem half way (though it needs further modifications to work properly, see below). What icegrind actually does is to track memory accesses in mmap()ed memory. When the program being profiled mmap()s a file, icegrind looks for a corresponding sections file next to it (e.g. libxul.so.sections for libxul.so ). The sections file contains offsets, sizes, and sections names, that will be used by icegrind to report the accesses. Whenever the profiled program makes memory accesses (whether it is for instructions or data) within the mmap()ed range, icegrind will add the corresponding section name in a log file (e.g. libxul.so.log for libxul.so ). Please note it will only do so for the first access in the given section. To generate section information for ELF files, Taras also hacked an elflog program that scans an ELF binary (program or library) and will output sections for symbols present in its symtab. This means the binary needs not to be stripped, though the full fledged debugging symbols are not needed. It outputs the sections names in a form that would be reusable in a linker script after a build with the -ffunction-sections and -fdata-sections compiler options, but that s mostly irrelevant when what you are after is only to see what is going on, not to reorder the sections at link time. There are glitches in the way elflog works that makes the section names for .bss symbols wrong (they will start with .symtab, .shstrtab, .comment, etc. instead of .bss). Also, technically, the .bss section is not mapped from the file. Note icegrind has rough edges, is still experimental, and isn t very user friendly, as in unix permissions, because its input and output files need to be next to the file being mmap()ed, and when that is a library in /usr/lib, well, you need write access there ; or you need to copy the library in a different directory and adjust LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Anyways, it s already useful as it currently is. If you want to play with it yourself, here are steps that worked well for me:

• svn co svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk valgrind -r 11100
  When I first tried icegrind, valgrind trunk was broken ; revision 11100 is known to work properly, at least for icegrind.
• cd valgrind
• wget -O - -q https://bug549749.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=449748 patch -p0
  You need to open icegrind/ice_main.c, go on the last line of the track_mmap function and replace mmaps with dest_mmaps.
• mkdir icegrind/tests ; touch icegrind/tests/Makefile.am
  The valgrind build system is a bit lunatic.
• libtoolize ; aclocal ; automake --add-missing ; autoreconf
• ./configure; make
• wget http://hg.mozilla.org/users/tglek_mozilla.com/startup/raw-file/6453ad2a7906/elflog.cpp
• g++ -o elflog elflog.cpp -lelf
  You will need the libelf-dev package.
• make install ; install -m 755 elflog /usr/local/bin
  as root, to install in /usr/local.

Once you re done with this setup, you are ready to start playing:

• elflog --contents libxul.so > libxul.so.sections
  Be aware that if libxul.so is a symbolic link pointing to a file in another directory, as it happens in the dist/bin directory in mozilla builds, the sections file needs to be in that other directory.
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. valgrind --tool=icegrind ./firefox-bin -P my-profile -no-remote about:blank

Obviously, you don t have to play around with Firefox. You can try with other libraries, or even programs. You ll see in a subsequent post, however, that to get more interesting information, the elflog output is unfortunately not enough.

The long-pending 0.9.2 version of the open-source, cross-platform, commandline flashrom utility has been released. From the announce:

New major user-visible features:
* Dozens of newly supported mainboards, chipsets and flash chips.
* Support for Dr. Kaiser PC-Waechter PCI devices (FPGA variant).
* Support for flashing SPI chips with the Bus Pirate.
* Support for the Dediprog SF100 external programmer.
* Selective blockwise erase for all flash chips.
* Automatic chip unlocking.
* Support for each programmer can be selected at compile time.
* Generic detection for unknown flash chips.
* Common mainboard features are now detected automatically.
* Mainboard matching via DMI strings.
* Laptop detection which triggers safety measures.
* Test flags for all part of flashrom operation.
* Windows support for USB-based and serial-based programmers.
* NetBSD support.
* DOS support.
* Slightly changed command line invocation. Please see the man page for details. Experimental new features:
* Support for some NVIDIA graphics cards.
* Chip test pattern generation.
* Bit-banging SPI infrastructure.
* Nvidia MCP6*/MCP7* chipset detection.
* Support for Highpoint ATA/RAID controllers. Infrastructural improvements and fixes:
* Lots of cleanups.
* Various bugfixes and workarounds for broken third-party software.
* Better error messages.
* Reliability fixes.
* Adjustable severity level for messages.
* Programmer-specific chip size limitation warnings.
* Multiple builtin frontends for flashrom are now possible.
* Increased strictness in board matching.
* Extensive selfchecks on startup to protect against miscompilation.
* Better timing precision for touchy flash chips.
* Do not rely on Linux kernel bugs for mapping memory.
* Improved documentation.
* Split frontend and backend functionality.
* Print runtime and build environment information.

The list of supported OSes and architectures is slowly getting longer, e.g. these have been tested: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Nexenta, Solaris and Mac OS X. There's partial support for DOS (no USB/serial flashers) and Windows (no PCI flashers). Initial (partial) PowerPC and MIPS support has been merged, ARM support and other upcoming. Also, the list of external (non-mainboard) programmers increases, e.g. there is support for NICs (3COM, Realtek, SMC, others upcoming), SATA/IDE cards from Silicon Image and Highpoint, some NVIDIA cards, and various USB- or parallelport- or serialport- programmers such as the Busirate, Dediprog SF100, FT2232-based SPI programmers and more. More details at flashrom.org and in the list of supported chips, chipsets, baords, and programmers. I uploaded an svn version slightly more recent than 0.9.2 to Debian unstable, which should reach Debian testing (and Ubuntu I guess) soonish.

DevOps I first heard about DevOps from Lindsay Holmwood at linux.conf.au 2010. Since then, I ve been following the movement with interest. It seems to be about cross-functional involvement in software teams, specifically between software development and system administration (or operations). In many organizations, especially SaaS shops, these two groups are placed in opposition to each other: developers are driven to deliver new features to users, while system administrators are held accountable for the operation of the service. In the best case, they maintain a healthy balance by pushing in opposite directions, but more typically, they resent each other for getting in the way, as a result of this dichotomy:

	Development	Operations
is responsible for	creating products	offering services
is measured on	delivery of new features	high reliability
optimizes by	increasing velocity	controlling change
and so is perceived as	reckless and irresponsible	obstructing progress

Of course, both functions are essential to a viable service, and so DevOps aims to replace this opposition with cooperation. By removing this friction from the organization, we hope to improve efficiency, lower costs, and generally get more work done.
So, DevOps promotes the formation of cross-functional teams, where individuals still take on specialist development or operations roles, but work together toward the common goal of delivering a great experience to users. By working as teammates, rather than passing work over the wall , they can both contribute to development, deployment and maintenance according to their skills and expertise. The team becomes a devops team, and is responsible for the entire product life cycle. Particular tasks may be handled by specialists, but when there s a problem, it s the team s problem. Some take it a step further, and feel that what s needed is to combine the two disciplines, so that individuals contribute in both ways. Rather than thinking of themselves as developers or sysadmins , these folks consider themselves devops . They work to become proficient in both roles, and to synthesize new ways of working by drawing on both types of skills and experience. A common crossover activity is the development of sophisticated tools for automating deployment, monitoring, capacity management and failure resolution. DevOps meets Cloud Like DevOps, cloud is not a specific technology or method, but a reorganization of the model (as I ve written previously). It s about breaking down the problem in a different way, splitting and merging its parts, and creating a new representation which doesn t correspond piece-for-piece to the old one. DevOps drives cloud because it offers a richer toolkit for the way they work: fast, flexible, efficient. Tools like Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine solve the right sorts of problems. Cloud also drives DevOps because it calls into question the traditional way of organizing software teams. A development/operations division just doesn t fit cloud as well as a DevOps model. Deployment is a classic duty of system administrators. In many organizations, only the IT department can implement changes in the production environment. Reaping the benefits of an IaaS environment requires deploying through an API, and therefore deployment requires development. While it is already common practice for system administrators to develop tools for automating deployment, and tools like Puppet and Chef are gaining momentum, IaaS makes this a necessity, and raises the bar in terms of sophistication. Doing this well requires skills and knowledge from both sides of the fence between development and operations, and can accelerate development as well as promote stability in production.
This is exemplified by infrastructure service providers like Amazon Web Services, where customers pay by the hour for black box access to computing resources. How those resources are provisioned and maintained is entirely Amazon s problem, while its customers must decide how to deploy and manage their applications within Amazon s IaaS framework. In this scenario, some operations work has been explicitly outsourced to Amazon, but IaaS is not a substitute for system administration. Deployment, monitoring, failure recovery, performance management, OS maintenance, system configuration, and more are still needed. A development team which is lacking the experience or capacity for this type of work cannot simply switch to an IaaS model and expect these needs to be taken care of by their service provider.
With platform service providers, the boundaries are different. Developers, if they build their application on the appropriate platform, can effectively outsource (mostly) the management of the entire production environment to their service provider. The operating system is abstracted away, and its maintenance can be someone else s problem. For applications which can be built with the available facilities, this will be a very attractive option for many organizations. The customers of these services may be traditional developers, who have no need for operations expertise. PaaS providers, though, will require deep expertise in both disciplines in order to build and improve their platform and services, and will likely benefit from a DevOps approach. Technical architecture draws on both development and operations expertise, because design goals like performance and robustness are affected by all layers of the stack, from hardware, power and cooling all the way up to application code. DevOps itself promotes greater collaboration on architecture, by involving experts in both disciplines, but cloud is a great catalyst because cloud architecture can be described in code. Rather than talking to each other about their respective parts of the system, they can work together on the whole system at once. Developers, sysadmins and hybrids can all contribute to a unified source tree, containing both application code and a description of the production environment: how many virtual servers to deploy, their specifications, which components run on which servers, how they are configured, and so on. In this way, system and network architecture can evolve in lockstep with application architecture. Cloudy promises such as dynamic scaling and fault tolerance call for a DevOps approach in order to be realized in a real-world scenario. These systems involve dynamically manipulating production infrastructure in response to changing conditions, and the application must adapt to these changes. Whether this takes the form of an active, intelligent response or a passive crash-only approach, development and operational considerations need to be aligned. So what? DevOps and cloud will continue to reinforce each other and gain momentum. Both individuals and organizations will need to adapt in order to take advantage of the opportunities provided by these new models. Because they re complementary, it makes sense to adopt them together, so those with expertise in both will be at an advantage.

I just read an interesting article about the dispute between Microsoft and Apple about types of PC [1]. Steve Jobs predicted a switch from desktop PCs to portable devices, while Steve Ballmer of Microsoft claimed that the iPad is just a new PC. Defining a PC I think that the defining characteristic of the IBM Compatible PC was it s open architecture. Right from the start the PC could have it s hardware expanded by adding new circuit boards into slots on the motherboard (similar to other PC systems of that era such as the Apple 2 and the S-100 bus). The deal with IBM included Intel sharing all it s CPU designs with other manufacturers such as NEC and AMD from the 8086 until the mid-90 s. AMD specialised in chips that were close copies of Intel chips at low prices and higher clock rates while NEC added new instructions. Compaq started the PC clone market as well as the laptop market, and system software for the IBM compatible PCs was primarily available from IBM and Microsoft in the early days, along with less popular variants such as CP/M86, Novell Netware and others. In the late 80 s there was OS/2 as an alternate OS and Windows as one of several optional GUI environments to run on top of MS-DOS or PC-DOS. In the mid 90 s PCs were used for running protected mode OSs such as Linux and Windows/NT. Now if we look at a system such as a Netbook then it clearly misses some of the defining characteristics of the desktop PC. I can t upgrade a Netbook in any meaningful way changing a storage device or adding more RAM does not compare to adding an ISA/MCA/EISA/VL-Bus/PCI/PCIe expansion card. With my EeePC 701 I don t even have an option of replacing the storage as it is soldered to the motherboard! A laptop allows me to add a PCMCIA or PC-Card device to expand it, but with a maximum of two cards and a high price this isn t a great option. What is Best for Home Users? For a while now my parents have been using 3G net access for their home Internet use [2]. So it seems that a laptop provides greater benefits for their use now than it previously did when they used Cable and ADSL net access. My parents have been considering getting a new monitor (1920*1080 resolution monitors are getting insanely cheap nowadays) and driving such a monitor effectively might require a more capable PC. I recently bought myself a nice refurbished Thinkpad for $796 [3], it seems likely that I could find a refurbished Thinkpad at auction which is a little older and slower for a lower price, even buying an old T41p would be a reasonable option. This would give my parents not only the option of using the Internet when on holidays, but also in a different part of their house when they are at home. The Apple iPad would probably be quite a reasonable Internet platform for my parents if it wasn t for the fact that it uses DRM. While it s not a great platform for writing, my parents probably don t do enough that it would be a huge problem for them. So I might look for a less restrictive tablet platform for my parents. At the moment the best resolution for a tablet seems to be 1024*768, but I expect that some tablets (maybe with a hybrid tablet/laptop design like the Always Innovating Smartbook [4]) with a higher resolution will be released soon. I hope that the iPad and other closed devices don t get any serious market share, but it seems likely that OSs such as Android which are only slightly more open will have a significant market share. Ultra-Mobile Design vs PCs Design One significant problem with ultra-mobile devices is that they make significant engineering trade-offs to get the small size. For a desktop system there are lots of ways of doing things inefficiently, running the AMD64 or i386 architecture which is wasteful of energy and having lots of unused space inside the box in case you decide to upgrade it. But for a laptop there are few opportunities for being inefficient, and for a tablet or smart phone everything has to be optimised. When the optimisation of a device starts by choosing a CPU that s unlike most other systems (note that there is a significant range of ARM CPUs that are not fully compatible with each other) it makes it very difficult to produce free software to run it. I can salvage a desktop PC from a rubbish bin and run Linux on it (and I ve done that many times), but I wouldn t even bother trying to run Linux on an old mobile phone. It seems that in the near future my parents (and many other people with similar needs) will be best suited by having a limited device such as a tablet that stores all data on the Internet and not having anything that greatly resembles a PC. In many ways it would be easier for me to support my parents by storing their data in the cloud and then automatically backing it up to removable SATA disks than with my current situation of supporting a fully capable PC and backing it up to a USB device whenever I visit them. I m also considering what to do for some relatives who are about to go on a holiday in Europe, they want to be able to send email etc. It might not be possible just yet, but it seems like an ideal way of doing this would be to provide them with something like an iPad that they can use with a local 3G SIM for the country that they stay in and they could then upload all their best photos to some server that I can backup and send email to everyone they know. An iPad isn t good for this now as you don t want to go on holidays in another country while carrying something that is really desirable to thieves. Ultra Mobile Devices are Killing PCs It seems to me that Google Android and the Apple iPad/iPhone OS are taking over significant parts of the PC market. The people who are doing traditional PC things are increasingly using Laptops and Netbooks, and the number of people who get the freedom that a PC user did in the 80 s and 90 s is decreasing rapidly. I predict that by 2012 the majority of Linux systems will be running Google Android on hardware that doesn t easily allow upgrading to more open software. At the moment probably the majority of Linux systems are wireless routers and other embedded devices that people don t generally think about. But when iPad type devices running a locked-down Linux installation start replacing Ubuntu and Fedora desktop systems people will take notice. I don t think that the death of the PC platform as we know it will kill Linux, but it certainly won t do us any good. If there were smarter people at Microsoft then they would be trying to work with the Linux community on developing innovative new ways of using desktop PCs. Of all the attempts that Microsoft has made to leave the PC platform the only success has been the X-Box which is apparently doing well. Tablet devices such as the iPad could work really well in a corporate environment (where MS makes most of it s money). On many occasions I ve been in a meeting and we had to adjourn due to someone needing to go to their desk to look something up. If everyone had an iPad type device at their desk that used a wired network when it was available and encrypted wireless otherwise then for a meeting everyone could take their tablet without it s keyboard and be able to consult all the usual sources of data without any interruption. Could a high-resolution version of the iPad kill MS-Windows in the corporate environment?

• [1] http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/tablets/the-ipad-is-just-a-pc-ballmer-to-jobs-20100604-xioj.html
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/03/3g-broadband-for-home-use/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/02/15/new-thinkpad-lenovo-web-site-sucks/
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/11/always-innovating/

Lately, I have recurring WTF moments when working with Python. I'm still more or less a novice in Python, as I started to use it in my day job last year, so sometimes it could be blamed to ignorance. Today I was writing some code that takes any file descriptor as argument, and thought it could be nice to accept also objects that represent one. But it seems there is no common ancestor to file objects and socket objects, for example. In Perl, I'd just check for IO::Handle. Then, I wrote code to check if a passed argument was a socket, or a file descriptor to one, with some obvious check: isinstance(s, socket.socket). WRONG, when you create sockets with socketpair, they are of an undocumented type which is not a descendant of socket, nor of SocketType! (There is a patch for this since 2007) In general, I have found a lack of any reasonable object hierarchy, and many inconsistencies in the low-level interfaces, which is a pity, because Python is in general quite tidy. Comparing with Perl is unavoidable, and I would have expected that Python had learnt more from it. Another thing that amazes me is the lack of anything like CPAN, which is one of the reasons Perl was so successful. The cheese factory doesn't come close, as you need to publish your files somewhere else, there is no automated testing, no automatically generated documentation, or anything that requires access to the source code. In Perl-land, many people loathe the venerable MakeMaker, and some of the alternatives are ugly as hell. The Python equivalent (or so) to Makemaker, distutils, looks to me like a bad joke: advanced customisation is black magic (if possible at all), and doesn't provide absolutely basic things like running your unit tests! After fighting with it for some days, I decided to go back writing my own Makefile and calling distutils just to build and install. Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, Programaci n