Search Results: "spa"

13 June 2006

Carlos Villegas: Benchmarking between boot processes

For the project to improve debian boot process, I've installed debian woody and debian sarge to see the changes in debian releases. Currently installing debian etch.

The first bootcharts are here for woody and sarge with a clean installation with autologin to kde. Funny to see woody being faster with 32 seconds while sarge has 44 seconds.

For debian woody I had some problems to use bootchart but they were solved thanks to the kind help of Baruch Even. The errors were:
  • bootchart requires tmpfs filesystem, while the kernel 2.2 that comes with woody doesn't have tmpfs. It was solved by installing kernel 2.4 and substituting tmpfs with ramfs in the /sbin/bootchartd script.
  • initrd ignores the kernel call to bootchartd, as it ignores the arguments given to the kernel. It was solved by renaming /sbin/init (e.g. /sbin/init-moved) and making the file /sbin/init link to /sbin/bootchartd. At the end of the latter, there renamed /sbin/init is called. It's perhaps an ugly tweak but worked for our means.
On the other hand, the first deliverable draft was added to the svn repository and is available for comments here. It is still on an early phase and needs to be converted from tex to html.

Finally, I'm checking out SUSE's implementation of startpar together with insserv for parallel execution. It is interesting to see a boot process that looks to be already LSB-compliant.

12 June 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Norwegian Wood

During my travels in Southeast Asia, I had several chats with a fellow traveller from Portugal, who also seemed to enjoy Haruki Murakami, and other works by modern Japanese authors. She was surprised to hear I did not like Norwegian Wood, which was her first Murakami, and brimmed over with enthusiasm about discussing Murakami (who's been my favourite author for about a year now), I promised to reread the book to find out just why I didn't like it. Here's what I came up with:
Norwegian Wood was the one of Murakami's novels that I didn't like at all, wish I had never read, and by which I felt "cheated" and let down by what may well be my favourite author for the time being -- well, maybe Dance Dance Dance is also one of those. It was previously impossible for me to determine exactly why I felt so bad about the book, which made this reread a little more challenging -- and rather interesting in the end. Norwegian Wood was my third Murakami novel, after I had read the Wild Sheep Chase and After the Quake. Up front those reasons that I think made me dislike the book the first time around: the story line of Norwegian Wood is absolutely boring and way too autobiographical, and the ending is painfully artificial. In fact, half way through the book, the story takes a turn (I cannot pinpoint the exact moment), around which I often put down the book in refusal, annoyed and disappointed. If I say that the story line is boring, I mean that it's a boring foundation, but as with all stories, it's in the author's hands to make it into an exciting novel. Murakami fails in this novel, in my opinion (he claims he set out to achieve something else, that this book was a challenge to him). Anyway, I do remember from my first reading that I really liked the tension and potential in the character interplay Murakami describes in the first half of the book, and I anticipated a deadlock between them, which would have to be solved by Watanabe (the main character) in a lose-lose type of resolution. However, what happens is that everything sort of resolves itself, dragging the characters along. It never touches once on paradoxical or supernatural elements as found in most other Murakami novels, which is a shame. Furthermore, it's a love story, and one with too many romantic and melancholic moments for my taste. Upon rereading (having gone through another four Murakami books in the mean time), I noticed a number of other things that disturbed me, or otherwise came in perpendicular to my taste: Toru Watanabe, the main character, aged around 20, goes through a great deal of effort to make sure the world knows he's just ordinary. Yet, the way he swings life is just a little too good for the ordinary. Throughout the book, you get the impression that he's not very happy or satisfied with his life, yet if you look at the days he fills, you'll tend to see them as complete. This turns Watanabe into a grouchy pessimist, and that mood transferred to me as the reader. On a side note: one thing I definitely like about Murakami's main characters (at least those I have met) is their self-sufficiency: the whole world could vanish and still they'd continue doing what they always did. In some ways, I have found myself in those characters, but more often I find myself looking up to them and wishing I could be like that. Watanabe is, however, just too much of a polished character (and with that I don't mean polished to be good, just polished), and one that seems to do everything right when it comes to the moral level. Sure, he asks himself about moral issues here or there, but my feeling was always that Murakami put those monologues in for completeness, not for character. I find it hard to imagine a boy between the ages of 17 and 21 (which is the years the book covers) with traits like Watanabe, and such integrity: he's never dishonest or even plagued by the possibility, and he appears to be consciously doing everything he does. He ends up in bed (or close by) with one of several girls he devours on a number of occasions, but each time stays in absolute control, not allowing himself to "do it", or accepting whatever excuse comes =66rom the girl. I don't mean to say that this by itself is unlike a boy at his age, but I guess what I am really lacking is a reflection on his thoughts, or at least some insight, which Murakami withholds each time. It would have added a lot of tension to those moments, made them even a bit erotic (which despite all the sex and sexual references, I found none of the book to be). Finally, there is almost no character development in the novel. Even though the time span of the novel spans a very important time in the development of a boy, he does not change much, nor does his perception of the characters around him (the book is told in the first person). In the end, despite a serious lack of motivation to read on throughout most of the text, I think I did learn to appreciate it after all. On the one hand, Murakami hides many little gems of thoughts in the conversations with Midori, the girl ready to shake up Toru's life, which often have Zen-character ("I wonder what ants do on rainy days"), and it did take me a reread to notice those -- and I smiled every time I did. On the other hand, the reread did allow me to get a closer look at the relationships between the characters, and how Murakami explores them, mostly with parallels referencing the past. He remains in my eyes as one of the most imaginative writers of modern literature, and while it strikes me as easier to be imaginative in an imaginary story, the challenge is all the more as you move into real life, and in this case: real life as tangible as it gets because of the elements of love.
I am still looking forward to my next novel, which will either be Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (which is said to be his best), a book recommended to me by the aforementioned traveller (Lizard by Banana Yoshimoto), or one suggested today by my physiotherapist, but I fail to recall the name at this moment and shall have to wait until I receive my next treatment on Wednesday.

11 June 2006

John Goerzen: First Thougts on Xen

At work, we've been using vserver for virtualization for some years now. Due to various reasons, we're looking at Xen.

I've been trying to switch my workstation to use Xen. I've enountered a few issues so far. Probably these will go away as I learn the system.

Overall, my greatest gripe is the documentation. It is outdated and just plain wrong far too often. For instance, there's a place where it says to run "make ARCH=xen xconfig", but the Xen kernel patches don't (any more, at least) provide a xen arch.

The next gripe is the very weird kernel build system. Xen doesn't ship a diff against a kernel tree. They instead ship whole files to extract atop a particular kernel version. Annoying and unwieldy. There is a command to generate a diff, but you have to download the full kernel tree first.

A couple of other gripes: There is little documentation on memory management (can Xen adjust the RAM usage of running VMs?), on 64-bit systems (can you run a 32-bit kernel under a 64-bit hypervisor? how about a 64-bit kernel that supports 32-bit userspace?)

I'm also having trouble with my forcedeth card locking up under Xen.

However, I've heard of lots of people having good luck with it so I'm going to keep trying.

But one would think that basic docs could be actually worked on a bit more.

Joachim Breitner: Deleting spam trackbacks

The Trackback spam on my blog started to get really annoying, even with serendipity’s “invert selection” and “delete” buttons. So I came up with a simple perl script, that looks at all unapproved trackpack pages and deletes those who don’t link to my blog. It’s not perfect, as there might be correct cases where someone trackbacks my post without actually linking to it, but that’s ok for me. Also, the spammers will probably fix this “bug” of theirs, too (and some already have, as someone told us during a lightning talk at the GPN5), but at least for a little while this will save me some work. (See the complete post for the code)

"Deleting spam trackbacks" vollst ndig lesen

Andrew Pollock: [tech] Adventures in supporting Outlook

One of my users was having some issues using Outlook to connect to my SMTP server to send mail, so I had a bit of a poke around during the week to try and improve the situation. I used to work in IT security, so I've got a healthy level of paranoia when it comes to network security. One of the things I don't allow is any clear-text authentication. I make users use an SSH/SCP client rather than an FTP client to upload files, web-mail is SSLed, IMAPS and POP3S only, etc. For various reasons, the occasional user wants to relay mail through my SMTP sever, rather than using their local ISP. Furthermore, a lot of the time, these users are on dynamic address space, so whitelisting IPs for relaying isn't feasible. So I use SMTP-AUTH. I also support STARTTLS. During this debugging session, I discovered that one can actually authenticate without using TLS, so I fixed up Sendmail's configuration to only offer AUTH after a STARTTLS (define( confAUTH_OPTIONS', p') in sendmail.mc). The problem that my user was having (and I reproduced myself) was that even with Outlook configured to "Require an encrypted connection" for SMTP, and authentication also specified, relaying was failing. Turns out that Outlook (and Outlook Express) only support the AUTH LOGIN SASL mechanism, which is obsolete, not the AUTH PLAIN mechanism, which was all I had Sendmail configured for (and works fine for Sarah and her Mail.app on the PowerBook). So the first thing was to enable LOGIN so that the applicable lines read as TRUST_AUTH_MECH( PLAIN LOGIN') and define( confAUTH_MECHANISMS', PLAIN LOGIN') in sendmail.mc Then it turns out that Outlook doesn't really handle TLS all that well anyway, it'd rather just talk raw SMTP over SSL (i.e. port 465/tcp), and what was happening was on the first couple of delivery attempts, it would connect to port 25, start spewing SSL negotiation crap, upset the greetpause feature I had enabled, and never succeed in getting anywhere. Then it fell back to using STARTTLS instead. So rather than having this hit and miss approach, I finally enabled SSMTP, by adding DAEMON_OPTIONS( Port=smtps, NAME=TLSMTA, M=s') to sendmail.mc So the following deficiencies in Outlook were highlighted from this exercise:
  1. Outlook does not notify the user if authentication is required, but not able to be performed
  2. Outlook only supports the obsolete AUTH LOGIN SASL mechanism
  3. Outlook doesn't do TLS on port 25 properly
After all this, the user is going to probably switch to Thunderbird, but at least Outlook is now supported as properly as possible.

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Webloyalty and Marketworks

As this blog has become one of the top sources of information on the Webloyalty scam, I’m reporting this news about Webloyalty and Marketworks, a third party eCommerce site that supports high volume eBay sellers. Marketworks is apparently throwing the switch to make a Webloyalty subscription the default for the thousands of eBay sellers that use its services:
Over the past two years our users have experienced tremendous success incorporating WebLoyalty in their checkout. For those of you unfamiliar with WebLoyalty, it’s a special rewards program offered by Marketworks that benefits merchants with cash and repeat shopping. Given the success our participating Sellers have experienced, effective June 21, 2006, WebLoyalty will be enabled as a default setting in all US-based users’ StoreFront/Checkout profiles. We’ve updated our Terms & Conditions to reflect this setting (effective June 21, 2006 for existing users). If at any time you wish to discontinue your participation, simply indicate your participation preference by clicking the appropriate radio button on the WebLoyalty settings of your StoreFront/Checkout profile. Note that at this time WebLoyalty is only available to US sellers and buyers. Learn more about WebLoyalty. The Marketworks Team
So now not only will there be millions of Webloyalty subscribers who aren’t even aware they are paying for this useless service, there will also be thousands of eBay sellers who aren’t even aware that they are signing their customers up for this useless service. I understand that a number of Marketworks sellers who actually know this is going on are upset, but the majority of users don’t read the forums where this is being discussed. (Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with Marketworks myself.) To be fair, I should mention that a Webloyalty executive (the “lead Consumer Affairs representative” — Mary O’Reilly) has apparently posted to my blog in defense of the company. The following comment appears about 1,000 comments down on my main Webloyalty entry, and is in response to this entry mentioning inflammatory comments posted by other Webloyalty employees calling Webloyalty customers ‘suckers’:
As lead Consumer Affairs representative for Reservation Rewards, I apologize on behalf of WLI Reservation Rewards for the inappropriate and offensive comments posted by the person identifyingthemselves as “WLI Customer Service Representative”. Our company does not condone or tolerate this type of unprofessional behavior and providing consumers with the highest level of customer service is of utmost importance to us. If we can confirm that the comments were actually posted by one of our customer service representatives, appropriate action will be taken with that employee. As a company, Reservation Rewards takes consumer comments very seriously. We have hundredsof thousands of satisfied customers and we consistently strive to provide our customers with first class membership programs and customer service. In the past, our approach has been to deal with consumer concerns on an individual basis rather than in a public forum. To fully address a consumer’s concerns we need some specific information (e.g. the consumer’s full name or email address) so that the consumer’s record can be accessed. Once the consumer’s record is accessed, we can identify exactly how, when and where the membership offer was accepted and also cancel the membership if that is what the consumer wants. However, it troubles us to see the concern that some consumers have expressed on this blog with regard to Reservation Rewards. At this time, wewant to make an open and sincere attempt in this public forum to clear up the misunderstandings that are generating the concerns. We thought the following Question & Answer type format might be the clearest way to share information and address the primary areas of concern expressed on this blog: 1. How Is The Reservation Offer Presented To Consumers? How Did I Get Signed Up For This? We try to make our offer as clear as possible so that consumers can make an educated decision on the offer. Over the years, we’ve incorporated a number of client and consumer suggestions to clarify the offer even further. Consumers are presented with the ReservationRewards offer when completing a transaction at one of our client’s websites. It’s not a check box that you have to unclick to reject the offer. Instead, the consumer is presented with a full offer page (separate from the client’s transaction page) and is required to take 3 actions to accept the offer and authorize the data pass of personal information. In addition to entering their email address twice, a consumer must also click on a ‘YES’ button to accept the offer. The offerpage includes all the Offer Details, clear mention of the monthly charges, a description of the membership benefits and instructions on how to redeem the Cash Back award. 2. How Does Reservation Rewards Get Consumer Credit Card Numbers? Please be assured that our clients aren’t passing credit card information to us without the consumer’s authorization. The security of your credit card information is of utmost importance to each of our clients. They would never provide a consumer’s credit card information without proper authorization. The security of your credit card number is also important to Reservation Rewards and we require consumers to provide us with authorization. In order to accept the Reservation Rewards membership, we requirethe consumer to provide us with their email address twice to make them pause and take the time to read and understand the offer. Immediately next to the boxes where a consumer is required to enter their email address is the statement: ‘By entering my email address as my electronic signature and clicking YES, I have read and agree to the Offer and Billing Details and authorize to securely transfer my name address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing.’ If a consumer just clicks on the ‘YES’ button without entering their email twice, the membership is not accepted. If a consumer does not want to accept the offer, there is a ‘No Thanks’ option right under the ‘YES’ button. 3. Reservation Rewards customer service said they sent me multiple emails about the membership before billing. What emails? I never got any. Once a consumer accepts the membership we make a significant effort to make the consumer aware of the membership and send multiple communications to the consumer before the first membership billing occurs. We use sophisticated monitoring tools to track the deliverability of these emails and our records show a very high delivery rate. We actuallyhave these records audited by a third party to ensure we are consistent in sending them to consumers.We also work with two outside companies to assist us in maximizing our high delivery rate. If an email bounces back as undeliverable, we send the consumer a letter via U.S. postal mail. However, we do understand in this day and age of spam, some of our email communications maybe filtered out and not read by some consumers. So, in addition to the email communications, each member is also presented with a membership acknowledgement page immediately upon acceptance of the membership. Our intent with this acknowledgement page is to make the consumer immediately aware theyaccepted the membership and to give them an opportunity to cancel it if that is what they want. We have hundreds of thousands of members that happily use the Reservation Rewards benefits and we don’t want people to be in the membership that they didn’t intend to join. 4. Why didn’t I get my Cash Back Award or access to membership benefits? I don’t believe there really is a Cash Back Award or Membership Benefits. We apologize if some consumers find it unclear how they can redeem their Cash Back Award or take advantage of the membership benefits. We have many members taking full advantage of the membership benefits and redemption of their Cash Back Awards. We encourage members to redeem their Cash Back Award and use the membership benefits by immediately presenting them with the membership acknowledgement page. In addition to instructions on how to redeem their Cash Back Award, the membership acknowledgement page also includes a password to log into the Reservation Rewards website. We also send each customer an email 13 days after accepting the membership that reminds them to redeem their Cash Back Award. We encourage you to go to www.reservationrewards.com to review the array of membership benefits. We think you’ll find that we partner with many top names in leisure, dining and theme parks to provide our members with significant discounts. At the lower left-hand corner of the home page you can review positive comments from Reservation Rewards members who regularly use the benefits. When a misunderstanding occurs, we’re more than willing to cancel the membership and provide a refund. Wecan assure you that our customer service representatives are all trained to respond to consumers in afriendly and accommodating manner. When you contact our customer service department to cancel a membership, you won’t be faced with a rep trying to convince you to keep the membership ’ our reps aren’t allowed to do that. The rep will just need some basic information from you such as your email address, full name and/or zip code to access your record and immediately accommodate your request. Once your membership is cancelled, you can be assured that we will not bill your credit card again. We value consumer comments whether positive or negative. They help us consider ways we can further improve the communication and value of the Reservation Rewards offer to consumers and they also gives us the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings. If anyone would like us to provide more specific information on the actual offer that was presented specifically to you, just send your full name and email address directly to consumeraffairs@webloyalty.com. We’ll be happy to assist you and address any further concerns you have. Sincerely,
Mary O’Reilly
Consumer Affairs
Reservation Rewards
I don’t know whether or not the above description is currently true, but it is certainly entirely inconsistent with my experience. I did not enter my email address once — or twice — to “confirm” my subscription. My server logs from that time period showed that no confirmation emails were ever sent by Webloyalty (regardless of whether they might be caught by a spam filter), and the customer service representative I spoke with did try to keep me to keep my membership (and moreover was exceedingly rude). Hopefully my experience with the company is no longer true, but based on the comments on my blog that’s not the case. Webloyalty seems to have found a novel and profitable solution to the opt-in vs. opt-out tradeoff — don’t give the customer any option at all!

10 June 2006

Martin F. Krafft: DNS server selection, and why not to BIND yourself

I have been searching for a new DNS server for quite some time now. Among the ones I inspected were:
  • MyDNS, which seems interesting, but so far hasn't won my fancy because it has hardcoded SQL table names which do not at all fit in with our infrastructure, so I'd have to provide translation views (which isn't that much trouble). Upstream seems active, the bug count is low, but according to popcon, a whopping total of 0 participating people have mydns-pgsql installed. No wonder. Mh. Also, the package is unavailable on amd64 at the moment.
  • MaraDNS, which looks good and has a nice configuration file format, very similar to the djbdns (which I really like). The maintainer has indicated he'd prefer someone to adopt the package, not sure if I want to do that. Upstream seems active (and responsive), the bug count is equally low, popcon lists 35 installations.
  • nsd, which looks good but uses BIND-style zone files. No thanks! Read this about parsing them. I am just not all too thrilled about redundancy and brittleness.
So with all of the above, it comes down to MaraDNS or PowerDNS for me, depending on whether I want flat files (easy to maintain by separate users, with permissions set with per-domain granularity) or SQL (flexible, but not as easy to control access). My goal is to give certain users complete control over their own zones. Anyway, in the process, I did look at BIND 9 again, simply because it certainly has some interesting features the others do not have, namely nsupdate, DNSSEC, TSIG, and IPv6. So with the help of this awesome document on starting with a secure BIND configuration, I got the name server up and running with only few problems (zone files suck). However, it did not take me long to abandon it for good: The reason is #372591. I have found that the only way to give users the ability to create and modify zone files for their own domains in a fail-proof manner (so that they don't accidentally screw up permissions), is by using POSIX ACLs, so that each zone file has permissions like this:
# file: zones/belligerence.net
# owner: madduck
# group: dnsmasters
user::rw-
group::r--
group:bind:r--
mask::r--
other::---
BIND, however, insists on checking the standard Unix permissions of files it reads and fails rather verbosely if it decides that it cannot, or rather should not be able to read them:
Jun 10 15:36:15.871 client 84.7x.xx.129#33283: query: belligerence.net IN A
Jun 10 15:36:15.871 client 84.7x.xx.129#33283: error
I've let of most of my steam on IRC, but for the record, here's Bernhard R. Link's explanation, quoted with permission. He did point out that he knows only very little about BIND and comes at this rather from the point of view of the system-level privileges.
When POSIX permissions fail, it's always hard to decide. The system might not be able to drop root permissions properly and one might end up reading stuff not intended to be read. It took some time in Unix history to get privilege dropping right, and there's nothing worse than a BIND suddenly sending out your shadow file. the point is, bind needs root to bind to its ports. Then it has to make sure that root privilege is not abused. That can be either done by making sure on is only the specific user (which is hard to do portably, and sometimes fails), or double check you only access what you are allowed. Ideally it should drop privileges good enough, but given how often this failed in the past, double checks are a good thing.
I disagree. Of course it's hard to argue that double checks aren't a good thing, especially when it comes to security issues with respect to an application that has one of the worst security track records of all Unix applications. However, what BIND is doing here is covering up a potentially greater problem: if the underlying system does not handle privilege drops properly, then that needs fixing. If an admin runs such a system, there's the root of the problem. It helps only marginally that BIND is trying to help prevent attacks. Fix the problem at its root, don't fix or patch for the symptoms! Now, of course, it does not really hurt that BIND does these checks. However, if it does them, it should at least be less na ve about them. POSIX ACLs have been around for, what, almost 10 years now. Go figure. Btw: this applies to many other tools/standards in the Unix world. scp, for instance, also cannot handle ACLs. So MaraDNS or PowerDNS?

9 June 2006

Lars Wirzenius: Travel report: Debconf6, plus rest and relaxation in Los Angeles

This May I spent four consecutive weeks abroad, visiting first Debconf6 (including the Debcamp that preceded it), and then Los Angeles afterwards. I won't write a detailed report of everything that happened; nobody likes to read pages after pages of descriptions of meals and such. Instead, I'll jot down a few memories of moments. It's still long, sorry about that. May 6, about 3 AM, at home. Waiting outside for a taxi. Pretty tired already: spent the night frantically weighing all my clothes to optimize my packing. It is warm enough to wait outside without a jacket. The night is calm and beautiful. Mankind is so much nicer when it sleeps. May 6, about 4 AM, the Helsinki airport. I bump into Tuukka and Tulitar, who are on the same plane. Kaol also joins us, but that I knew beforehand. I'm suddenly much less apprehensive about the long flight. May 6, Mexico City airport. We meet more Debian people. The first taxi driver we're assigned seems to be suspect somehow. The other taxi drivers rebel and our luggage is put into another car, with another driver. I have no idea what is actually going on, but that develops into a theme for the Mexican part of the trip. May 6, Oaxtepec. We're finally here, but it seems very difficult for us to get rooms. While we wait, we and some of the people who arrived earlier go to a restaurant. The Germans want to order the same thing for everyone, but fail to agree on what, so eventually we order all the steaks on the menu. The food is good, but the restaurant staff would probably have preferred to go home at closing time. We eventually get rooms and I collapse into bed. Debcamp week, Oaxtepec. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We're frustrated all the time. I was supposed to do billable work (related to Debian, even), and can't. Should've prepared for this possiblity. I'm too dependent on a good Internet connection, need to figure out to reduce this dependency. To have something else to do, I start the Mugshots project: take a photo of everyone together with a paper with their name, or IRC nick, or anything else they want to say about themselves. Debconf, late one evening. Everyone is partying one way or another, drinking, dancing, discussing. Lots of people around already. Nice people. Still I withdraw into myself. I'm physically present, but not interacting. Never know what to say; exhausted by having to remember who everyone is. I'm introverted, and deal better with smaller gatherings. My life's ambition is to become a multi-millionaire recluse. Debconf, late another evening, Oaxtepec. Everyone else is getting drunk, and it affects me. I make the silly bet about Debian releasing on time: if we do, I'll get a Debian tattoo. Not to worry, I win either way. Debconf, some evening or another. I participate in a game of Mao. It is an unpleasant game, for me. I suspected this beforehand, but now I've verified it. It is best for everyone if I never play again, now that I know enough to at least try to reach my personal, alternative goals in the game, which make the game less fun for everyone else. (Better for me too, since I make fewer enemies.) Debconf, day after formal dinner. I learn that Jonathan (Ted) Walther is gone. Good riddance. I suprise myself with the amount of glee I feel when removing him from the Mugshots gallery. (That, incidentally, was something I decided all by myself. It's my gallery, after all.) Debconf. The sponsored food is quite acceptable, but eventually becomes boring and bland. Mass-kitchen food can't but help to be like that, I guess, unless it gets expensive. I don't want to see another chicken leg ever. Debconf, early in the week. Droidy (Leena) and Burger (Ville) arrive. Very nice. Helps massively with my withdrawnness to have real life friends around. I still go early to bed, though, instead of participating in the partying. Debconf, late in the week. I get Ville and Frans Pop to talk and Ville agrees to have look at the installation manual. He's an actual (former) professional tech writer, so hopefully will be able to improve it a lot. May 22, Oaxtepec. Last day. I spend all morning packing, checking out, and waiting for a taxi. Strangely relaxing. Debconf is finally over, and although I did enjoy parts of it, and don't regret coming, I'm not sad it's over. May 22, evening, Los Angeles. Julie and Kristian meet me at the airport. Hugging happens. Happiness happens. I get my first taste of LA traffic, which seems to mostly consist of people complaining about how slow it is while driving very fast. May 23, the Promenade, Los Angeles. A three block long walking street of shops, with three (count them: three) bookstores. The two I have time for even smelled nice. I am in hog heaven. Colossal credit card cringing. May 24, Getty Center. A very nice, very impressive place architecturally. The art is good too. As usual, the impressionists make the strongest impression on me, but there's lots of other good stuff, too. Not everything, though: Robert Adams's photographs leave me unimpressed, possibly I lack the cultural reference points necessary to appreciate them. He has many photos of shabby temporary shelter-like houses that in reality seem to be nice south-western US houses from the 60s and 70s. My intuition just screams that the houses and their inhabitants won't survive their first winter. But of course, they don't have a cold winter there. The rest of the exhibition (or what I have time to see) has way too many portraits for one session. Portraits get boring after the first dozen or so, I'm afraid, unless there's something extraordinary about them. They are several rooms rebuilt from 18th century French aristocratic houses. Very nice, very pretty, but I would not like to live that uncomfortably. I have a small epiphany about nudity in art in one of the rooms with statues. I've always known nudity could be portrayed erotically, such as having two lovers embrace passionately; or that it could be portrayed more or less abstractly, using the human body, or parts of it, just because it can be a very beautiful subject, just like a flower, but without giving it a greater significance. It's decoration, nothing more. There are two statues in the Getty collection that show me a third way. They are exquisitely sensual, evoking a sense of form and texture that make me think of human skin and flesh, a sense that if one were to touch the statue, it would feel like touching a live human. Yet none of this is erotic at all. I'm not sure I can explain this, one may have to experience it for oneself. Unfortunately, I was too overwhelmed to write down the names of the statues. May 23, Los Angeles. The food takes me by surprise. Julie has always told me that food in LA is good, much better than in Finland, but she hadn't prepared me for an all-out assault on my palate. Dine well in LA and die happy. (When I go back to Finland, I will have to learn again how to cook, dammit.) May 25, Los Angeles. Jesus reminds me via SMS about the Towel Day. I participate. My hosts think I'm a bit weird, but in a funny way. Many happy days in May, Los Angeles. I visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (exhibiting a weird Italian designer, some boring Klimt paintings, and a very nice general collection); the Natural history museum of LA (dinosaurs! real skeletons! big ones! T.Rex! for the first time in my life! they're huge!); the Museum of Jurassic Technology (weird); had dinner with some local Debian people, and visited the local Google office afterwards; the Hollywood Boulevard at night (funny, for a while). And other places I've forgotten already. LA is not small. I visit a political theater play that is brilliant. I also visit my first American BBQ, and have my first experience with the LA gay community at the same time. I'm later told that these two are separable. I enjoy them both a lot. I visit more bookstores. My hosts keep finding new ones they want to recommend to me. Parking would be a pain in LA, except that it means that people do actually walk a lot, since the nearest parking space is always three blocks away, or five levels up without an elevator. May 28, Los Angeles. I innocently mention that LA is such a nice place, with nice people and gorgeous food, that I wouldn't mind living there. Julie's brother hears this and immediately connects me with someone he knows whose company is looking for new people. During the next three days, we meet and talk and things seem favorable. Even if I decide not to go (it may be too huge a change for me now), it's nice to feel appreciated. June 1, Los Angeles. Leaving for home. Not a sad thing, but I'm definitely feeling wistful. I get hugged about fourteen thousand times. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I will definitely have to go back to LA, one day.

David Welton: Tcl on eCos

This is noteworthy - running Tcl on the eCos embedded operating system: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss/2006-06/msg00083.html http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss/2006-06/txt00000.txt Looks like my friend Salvatore's Jim interpreter is gaining some mindshare in the embedded space. Note Comments are broken... ask the Typo guys when they'll be fixed.

Clint Adams: pids and subshells and pids, oh my

If you install zsh-beta 4.3.2-dev-1+20060608-1 or later:
% zmodload -i zsh/system
% print $$/$sysparams[pid] && (print $$/$sysparams[pid])
13764/13764
13764/13765
% print $$/$sysparams[pid] && (print $$/$sysparams[pid])
13764/13764
13764/13766

Christoph Berg: Today's screen hack: bce

When you have trouble cut-and-pasting in screen because it copies full terminal lines filled up with spaces, put the following into your .screenrc:
defbce on
term screen-bce
Ganneff reports that the first line is enough, and even works at the : prompt of a running screen. Happy pasting :)

Ross Burton: Leather Case for 770

Anyone who reads Planet Maemo would have noticed Nokia 770 En Espa ol blog about a leather case for the 770. The case seems like a good idea: it holds credit cards, MMC cards and so on, and folds open to let you use the 770. However, without any PIM apps on the 770 (such as an addressbook, calendar, syncing to your desktop) treating it like a filofax seems a little strange. Did I say no PIM apps? The 2006 release includes Contacts, and OpenedHand has plans. Full PIM capabilities on the 770 coming soon!

MJ Ray: Billy Bragg prompts Myspace rethink

Summary: Murdoch company in abusive legal land-grab non-shocker? Do people really not know that MySpace is now owned by one of Murdoch's companies and is slowly [...cont with list discussion]

Norbert Tretkowski: Kernel in Ubuntu 6.06

Ubuntu 6.06 has support with updated packages for five years. So it's an alternative for the enterprise products from SuSE and Red Hat on servers, where certification for e.g. Oracle or SAP doesn't matter. That's why I wanted to take a closer look at it, and installed Ubuntu 6.06 on a spare disk in my IBM T42 last weekend. No mentionable problems with most of the packages so far, but some really annoying problems with the kernel: All in all, the Ubuntu 6.06 kernel is quite unusable on my notebook, I never had such problems with the Debian kernel images. I definitely don't want to have _this_ kernel on a productive server which needs to run for the next five years.

MJ Ray: The 3rd International GPLv3 Conference

will be held in Barcelona, Spain on June 22nd and 23rd, 2006, [Update: Registration Required] [...] Of course, I can't find any way to get there for those [cont. with links]

8 June 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Matrox pains

One of my newer computers (an Athlon 64) came with a Matrox Millenium P750 graphics card. Back then, the machine was basically headless, so the graphics card didn't need to do anything. My primary workstation has been flakey over the past year, so I decided to switch to the newer machine. Trying to figure out the drivers for X, my mouth gets all watery when I hear about the P750 triple head support -- I do have three screens, so why not? But the excitement only lasts for a short time. First of all, Matrox only released a binary driver for Linux. Second, the binary driver only supports x86, so I cannot use it on my x86_64 environment. And third, the company is completely unresponsive, and if you get someone on the line, they're incompetent. I would be happy with a binary driver (sort of), but at least make it 64bit, don't just ignore the requests I do wonder how lonk it takes until one of the graphics card vendors pluges in at the deep end, open sources their Linux drivers, and becomes the Linux userss' primary vendor. At least they could do it for their previous models so as to not screw up the gamerz market. Oh, and let's give this guy some traffic.

Gunnar Wolf: Working on politics: The FeCal project

Ok, it may not be ready yet, it might be lacking too many details. It might even make sense to make this initial announcement in Spanish - But a long time ago, I decided my blog would be English-only, as most of the people who read it are not Spanish speakers. Anyway, here I go.
We are less than one month away of the presidential elections in Mexico. We are facing the choice between two candidates (the others won't really make a difference this time): Felipe Calder n, a conservative member of the right-wing PAN party (currently ruling), and Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador, from the center-leftist PRD party.
There are way too many reasons for me, and for my friends, to prefer and promote the L pez Obrador project. No, that is not the definitive leftist stance we want, but it is a good step in the right direction. He was the major for Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, and his government showed he knows how to push social programs, he knows how to improve the conditions of the mass of the population, he knows he must start acting from below, reducing the terrible gap that exists in my country between poor and rich people, among the steepest differencies in the world.
So... Instead of flooding my personal blog with things that are not directly relevant to most of us, some friends and I have started setting up www.fecal.org.mx, the unofficial site of Felipe Calder n.
Yes, we took some of the steps we often criticize about the right-wing propaganda: Attacking instead of proposing. L pez Obrador has lost some points as he is centered more in proposing and spreading his government plan than in destroying Felipe Calder n - While Calder n has been working on creating fear, on tying L pez Obrador's figure to that of an authoritarian dictator (Hugo Ch vez has often been quoted, although it has been proven over and over no link or similarity exists), on dismissing his economic program saying he only knows how to create debt (while Mexico City's economy was strongly reactivated during L pez Obrador's period, and the city's public debt has not grown considerably compared to what previous governments did), and simply ignoring any criticism to his own project dismissing them as baseless propaganda.
Originally, we intended FeCal to become just a parody of Felipe's official site, emphasizing on what a shitty candidate he is (no wonder he carries such a name!), but we decided to be more propositive than him - We will post news following Felipe's intransigency, erroneous economic decisions and incoherences, yes, but we will also write articles by ourselves, trying to provide more interesting content, something that can objectively be used as a reference on why Felipe Calder n's project cannot be seen as socially responsable, as something that will benefit anybody but the current ruling elite - Just giving six more years to the already too long 24 year old marriage with neoliberalism we have seen, just continuity with the current government's failures, just more white-collar corrupt thieves which never recieve any kind of punishment and discourage people from pushing together towards a better country.
So, I stop flooding here. If you want to take part in the FeCal project, please contact me. If you agree with what we say, link us from your page, from your texts, from whatever you do.

7 June 2006

David Pashley: Oracle 10.2.0.1 Instant Client hanging?

Does your Oracle client hang when connecting? Are you using Oracle 10.2.0.1? Do you get the following if you strace the process?
gettimeofday( 1129717666, 622797 , NULL) = 0
access("/etc/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("./network/admin/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/etc/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("./network/admin/sqlnet.ora", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
fcntl64(155815832, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = -1 EBADF (Bad file descriptor)
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
times(NULL) = -1808543702
.
.
.
Has your client been up for more that 180 days? Well done; you've just come across the same bug that has bitten two of our customers in the last week. Back in the days of Oracle 8, there was a fairly imfamous bug in the Oracle client where new connections would fail if the client had been up for 248 days or more. This got fixed, and wasn't a problem with Oracle 9i at all. Now Oracle have managed to introduce a similar bug in 10.2.0.1, although in my experience the number of days appears to be shorter (180+). Thankfully, this has been fixed in the 10.2.0.2 Instant Client. More information can be found on forums.oracle.com and www.redhat.com.

Martin F. Krafft: Build dependencies and the clean target

I find it rather annoying that some packages require their build-dependencies to be satisfied to run fakeroot debian/rules clean. Those packages include:
  • all packages using debhelper (hm...)
  • all packages using cdbs
  • packages cooking with Python distutils
  • ...
I think they all should fail gracefully when asked to clean themselves, even if the build dependencies aren't satisfied. Rationale: if the build dependencies aren't there, there's probably nothing to clean. Otherwise it's a royal pain to quickly build packages on production systems with pbuilder or the like -- those clean first (rightly so), then try to package. Of course, an alternative would be to tell pbuilder to ignore failures from the clean process. But I'd much rather fix causes than symptoms. Also, this would mean that the clean target may actually not finish, because commands after the failed one get ignored. So please, prefix your dh_* or similar lines with a - (minus sign) in the clean target of debian/rules today. That minus will make ignore the errors. Thanks. /me now awaits the flame flood. Update: the discussion is going on (#debian-devel/irc.debian.org). It has been claimed that pbuilder must be fixed. I'd like to point out that dpkg-buildpackage does not check for build dependencies when asked to build a source package (which is when you need the clean target) with the -S switch. Update ^2: I could be coerced into accepting dpkg-buildpackage fixed to check for build dependencies before it cleans the source tree in the process of creating a source package. Note that it does this unless you pass -S, because then you're actually asking it to build the binary package, not just the source. The real question I guess is whether build dependencies need to be satisfied to "build" a source package. Update ^3: Junichi, the pbuilder author, has since followed up.

Philipp Kern: Embedding Lua into qmail

So I spent most of yesterday's time on embedding a Ruby interpreter into qmail, and most of today's time on embedding a Lua interpreter into it instead. The latter worked well enough, the former did not and the resulting scripting environment was just weird. Not even the File object did work, I was not able to put some strings into a debugging file. Why I do that? Well, I needed greylisting, which seems to require a bit more policy than expected. There was a patch for qmail-smtpd which called a shell script to check if a certain file is present, representing the greylisting triplet. I first changed the script to sanitise its input variables and it looked to work well. But no, it broke sender verify. Another machine of mine, running exim, was not able to do a proper callout to this server, out of dubious reasons I have not yet fully explored. I wanted more control over the policies when to accept mail (considering that qmail does not implement anything like this by itself), so embedding looked like a good choice. I still hope that Lua provides me enough functions through its libraries, just like Ruby would. And why I use qmail... The commercial web hosting panel I got for free with the server, called Plesk, uses it, so I will stick to it until I find a drop-in replacement. I cannot be bothered to either write a free replacement for the panel which takes some work off me, or to take the challenge and replace qmail on the live server, having no other server equipped with the panel to try it on. Especially considering that I do this hosting for free in my spare time...

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