Reprap generation 20 or so + proprietary objects with embedded viruses. Real ones. (Consider what you can do in postscript )

As you all know by now, exciting moves from Google on the WebM project have lead to them open-sourcing On2 s VP8 codec to provide a freely available video codec for HTML5 content. Collabora Multimedia worked with Entropy Wave to add support to GStreamer for the new codec from day 1, and I was really happy yesterday to update my Debian system and get the support installed locally too. Thanks to our and Igalia s fine work on GStreamer HTML5 support in WebKitGTK+, Gustavo Noronha found it worked out of the box with Epiphany too. Predictably, the MPEG-LA aren t too pleased with this, and are no doubt winding up their PR and industry allies at the moment, as well as this opening a new front on the Apple vs Google ongoing platform battle. But if your business model is collecting money through what is essentially a protection racket and spreading FUD about patent litigation, the VP8 license implicitly creating a zero-cost zero-revenue patent pool is not going to be good news for you (from the department of Google deleting your business model). The question is now whether the allure of Google s content will win over against the legal chest pounding of the patent trolls, and whether they start flipping switches to make YouTube only serve up WebM content after a while. Also in amazing and incredible news, Collabora s Telepathy/GStreamer/GNOME/Debian/general R&D guru and staunch Web 2.0 holdout Sjoerd Simons has actually now got a blog after a mere 3 years of us suggesting it to him since he joined Collabora as an intern. He s been hacking on some RTP payloader elements for VP8 so we can use it for video calling on the free desktop. All very exciting stuff, especially in conjunction with Muji (multi-user video calls over XMPP) support heading into Telepathy thanks to NLNet s ongoing support.

Google has had a very nice idea today, to celebrate Pacman s aniversary: they made their logo become a playable HTML5 pacman. If you re wondering why your WebKitGTK+ browser is not being able to play the game here s why: Google is doing User-Agent sniffing and denying you the fun, sending a static image that you can click to perform a search instead of the game. If you make Epiphany or Midori identify themselves as Chrome or Firefox, the game will work. I really don t get this User Agent sniffing bullshit coming from Google. If you go to gconf-editor, and under epiphany->general set the user_agent key to Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-gb; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Firefox/3.8 it works. I m starting to seriously consider User Agent spoofing for *.google.com as a quirk on WebKitGTK+. Lame. Update: as a protest, I m making blog.kov.eti.br and kov.eti.br say Chrome/Chromium are not supported, by doing User Agent sniffing.
Update2: it s been pointed out to me that the game is not HTML5 - it s actually smart usage of divs, and flash *urgh* for the audio

My SO did had an extremely good idea for my birthday this year: We went to a concert of Ich + Ich. We both were a bit sceptical beforehand but actually we were both in agreement about that it was one of the finest concerts we have been to. I want thus to share some of the great songs of the band with you:

• Universum (Universe): I am thinking of my son when listening to this sweet song.
• Stark (Strong): Not only the title but the lyrics.
• Dienen (Serve): Probably the best known of their songs.

Enjoy!

Now that we have released the slightly updated version of Debian's Machine Usage Policy (DMUP), I am thinking about a major rework for the next version. Maybe we should even start with a completely new text for it. I am currently doing a bit of brainstorming about how the new version could look.

Here are some of my ideas (completely unsorted):

• Debian is not an ISP. All services are offered on a best-effort basis. While we provide @debian.org email addresses, they should only be used for Debian-related work.
• Debian resources should be used for Debian-related work only. Even though I think this is self-evident, it should be explicitly mentioned.
• Data meant to be private should stay private, and not mirrored elsewhere. This especially includes log files and subscription data of any kind. I am not sure yet what to do with anonymized data, but in my personal opinion we should not even allow mirrored data of that.
• Drop large parts of the document and move it to a new document, called Debian Machine Usage Guidelines or Debian Machines Best Practices. Some parts of the current document are outdated, so let's see if we can drop those entirely.
• We forbid unlawful activities on our machines. Machines should not be used for private financial gain or for commercial purposes.
• Penalties might need some rework, in coordination with DAM.
  

Please note that this brain dump is my very personal opinion and does not reflect the opinion of the complete DSA team.

I would like to see a discussion on what the new DMUP should look like. Even though the final decision on which paragraphs make it into DMUP should stay with DSA, I think the Debian community should be involved in the evolution of this document.

Even though i am not attending DebConf10 (actually I think no one from DSA will make it), it might be a good idea if the conference could be used to do some further brainstorming. Maybe having a BoF on DMUP 2.0 might be a good idea.

So you probably heard about WebM, right? It s the awesome new media format being pushed by Google and a large number of partners, including Collabora, following the release of the VP8 video codec free of royalties and patents, along with a Free Software implementation. It turns out that if you are a user or developer of applications that use the GStreamer framework, you can start taking advantage of all that freedom right away! Collabora Multimedia has developed, along with Entropy Wave GStreamer support for the new format, and the code has already landed in the public repositories, and is already being packaged for some distributions. I just couldn t wait the few days it will take for the support to be properly landed in Debian unstable, so I went ahead and downloaded all of the current packages from the pkg-gstreamer svn repository, built everything after having the libvpx-dev package installed, and went straight to a rather unknown, small video site called Youtube with my GStreamer-powered WebKitGTK+-based browser, Epiphany!:

If you re running Debian unstable, or any of the other distributions which will be lucky to get the new codecs, and support packages soon, you should be able to get this working out of the box real soon now. Check the tips on WebM s web site on how to find WebM videos on youtube.

We had a Microsoft salesperson stop at our offices today to tell people about wonders of cloud computing and Microsoft s Azure will save us all. The following is a short and non-exhaustive list of what Azure does not do according to their own experts:

• no Infrastructure as a Service which means that they actually don t offer you servers to run you code on, they only offer Windows Server instances to which you can deploy your code. There is no imaging and no platform choice. In a half a year or so they plan to roll out Virtual Machine Instances where you will actually be able to upload your own images of what you want to run and then running Linux on Azure will be possible, but that will run with a double virtualization, so it is likely to be incredibly slow
• No fast key-value storage they only provide SQL servers, with blob storage if you want, but nothing in the NoSQL scalability department
• their Windows Azure (limited version of Windows Server OS that they actually run in their cloud) does not run most of their current server solutions they are working to migrate them one by one
• SQL service has no backup (but raw data storage has data triplication)
• No autoscalability as such (but they do provide a tool that you can install on your cloud servers to launch additional instances when load rises, or kill instances reliability and configurability is unclear)
• No VPN (they are working on it, might be delivered in 12 months, meanwhile they suggest to use a Service Bus their equivalent of Amazon SQS to communicate to you cloud servers, and pay a subscription fee + per-request fee + bandwidth fee)
• No way to launch a server with more than 14 Gb of RAM both Amazon High CPU and High RAM server offerings were alien to the presenter
• Their SQL server offering is a monthly subscription no pay-as-you-go there
• No reserved instances, but Microsoft is willing to talk about volume discounts, but later, at some point in a year or two when they start actually providing service contracts
• Their bandwidth fees for Asia are three times higher than in other regions for some reason
• If you think of any interesting feature, like CloudFront, CloudWatch, MapReduce, FWS, load balancing, notification service, Microsoft Azure does not have that.

The Microsoft presenter also repeatedly engaged in shady tactics when presenting his information:

• he implied that you need to pay for Windows licences on Amazon
• he claimed that starting up an instance on Amazon with any custom configuration (like from your own image) would take a lot of time
• he claimed the invention of container data centres
• he claimed that Microsoft is the only provider that you can trust to store your data in the location that they advertise when confronted that Amazon has a EU datacenter and provides you a clear way to get your data there, he actually claimed that Amazon might leak your data to other datacenters How can you know they will not?
• He impled multiple times during the presentation that no other cloud providers can be trusted to keep data within EU he even tried to say that Amazon only opened their first EU datacenter last month and was very surprised and annoyed when corrected (they opened an Asian datacenter and had a EU datacenter for a long time)
• Tried to pass off the fact that you can only run Windows provides a good choice for the customers
• Talked about planned features like they were implemented and available already like MS Systems Centre online which he spend 5 minutes talking about how it will enable to migrate services from your private cloud in-house to the Azure cloud and then barely mentioned that it might mature to a beta status at the end of 2010
• Tried to pass off Amazon as too low level and complicated while contrasting it to niche force.com and Google App Engine and then presenting their solution that will run all kinds of .Net and Silverlight applications ! Yeah, apparently their platform does not even run regular Windows .exe files
• Tried pass off their SLAs (non-contractual guarantees of service levels, which are unlikely to be enforceable beyond money back guarantee ) as key selling point, even though they don t even offer actual service contracts Update: Also claimed that Amazon does not provide SLAs, while the actually do
• With fanfare claimed 14k applications running in their cloud, when pressed noted that most of these application don t even pay them, because they got in on special promotions.

So to summarize, Microsoft has build a cloud of Windows-like machines which can run your programs (as long as they are in .Net or Silverlight) and which does not have even a third of the features of such de-facto market leader as Amazon AWS. They try giving away their product for free and only get 14k applications in 6+ months. Note: Amazon has at least 300 000 public applications and God only knows how many more private ones. They will grow, due to companies locked-into Microsoft s way of thinking buying into their marketing, but if you have a head on your shoulders, you should avoid it as a trap, which it actually is. All that can be done on Azure, can also be done on Amazon. The opposite is not always true. In addition, if you will want have a mixed environment with both Windows and Linux servers, you will not be able to deploy Linux servers to Azure (or they will be very slow) and you ll have to put your Linux servers into Amazon (or another) cloud and pay double traffic fees for every byte of traffic between your own servers. Microsoft Azure prices are exactly the same as Amazon EC2 prices with Windows instances. However on Amazon you actually get fully capable Windows Server instances. And if you don t need Windows, you can get a much better price on Amazon. The only companies that can safely use Azure are companies that only have Windows servers AND plan to only have Windows servers for the foreseeable future. Knowing how dominant Linux is in the server market and how many Windows-only shops actually have a few Linux servers in the back room, there is very little future for Azure, until they wise up and make Linux instances first class citizens in their cloud. If not because their customers need them, then because their customers think that they at least might need them in the future. Update: Amazon now released a Reduced Redundancy storage for S3 that provides the exacts same level of storage guarantees that regular Microsoft Azure SLA (99.9%) for two thirds of the price, and also Amazons now explicitly says that their regular S3 is Designed for 99.999999999% Durability , which is worlds above what Microsoft provides. Now in this case Amazon again is cheaper than MS. Also Amazon bandwidth prices are 33% lower compared to Azure. In Azia the difference is simply staggering (0.45$ vs 0.19$ per Gb).

Hello Currently Config::Model can upgrade /etc/ssh/sshd_config file because Sshd model is complete. All 80 parameters mentioned in sshd_config man pages are described there. The whole model (including doc is about 1000 lines long). If one just want configuration upgrade capability, requiring a complete model is too much work. The aim of this GSoC project is to find a way to provide upgrades at a reasonable cost. Ep 01 focused on what feature was missing from Config::Model to provide a model that could handle unknown parameters in most cases to enable upgrades without a complete model. This covered the use case of an unmaintained model facing software evolution. Now, let s go on with the OpenSsh example and let s see what would be the minimal model that would enable upgrades from older sshd_config version to a more recent one. (Note that this blog is based on upgrade requirements mentioned in sshd_config man page). This will cover the use case of a maintained model targeted for upgrades. From last blog, we know that this minimal model must feature:

• structural information (i.e. Match parameter)
• upgrade information (KeepAlive to TCPKeepAlive)

Let s tackle the structure of this minimal model by re-using the current model structure. We will need 2 classes:

1. Sshd: to handle all leaf parameters a the the Match parameter
2. Sshd::MatchElement: to handle parameters within a Match block

Sshd::MatchElement will need to handle unknown leaf parameters (exceptd Match parameters), so its declaration should be like: 'Sshd::MatchElement' =>
accept =>
match_not => '/Match/i'' ,
type => 'leaf',
value_type => 'string'


Note that there s no element declaration. The accept structure means that Config::Model will accept any parameter that does not contain match in its name and will handle it as a string parameter. (Note that this feature is not yet implemented in Config::Model) Now, we must declare the main class: Sshd. It will feature the a wider accept statement and element declarations for the following parameters:

• Match (the only structural element)
• KeepAlive (obsolete parameter)
• TCPKeepAlive (value migrated from KeepAlive)

Here we go: Any unknown parameter will be accepted by Sshd configuration class: accept =>
type => 'leaf',
value_type => 'string'
, Here are the element that require a special treatment: Match just refer to the class declared above
Match =>
type => 'hash',
index_type => 'uniline',
cargo =>
type => 'node',
config_class_name => 'Sshd::MatchElement'
, KeepAlive is the obsolete parameter. Parameter with status 'deprecated' are handled by Config::Model but will not be written back in the configuration file. Hence re-using the deprecated information elsewhere is more than recommended.
KeepAlive =>
type => 'leaf',
value_type => 'enum',
status => 'deprecated',
choice => [ 'no', 'yes' ]
, Here's the new parameter. It's value is computed from KeepAlive.
TCPKeepAlive =>
type => 'leaf',
value_type => 'enum',
choice => [ 'no', 'yes' ],
migrate_from =>
formula => '$keep_alive',
variables => keep_alive => '- KeepAlive'
,
,
Now that we have the model, we must figure out how to read and write value with minimal coding efforts. Due to the mismatch between the syntax of the file (flat structure) and the actual structure (special Match parameter), a dumb parser/writer cannot be used. A parser that takes into account Match is required. Either dedicated Perl code (like the parser/writer delivered with Config::Model::OpenSsh) or use Augeas and its sshd lenses. In summary, we ve seen that the model required to perform upgrades is about 30 lines instead of the 1000 lines required for a complete model. On the other hand, the syntax of sshd_config makes the parser and writer harder to write. But, normally, this parser/writer should not evolve during the life of OpenSsh project. Now the question that I cannot answer is: Can a packager handle the extra work to maintain this minimal model ? Feedback is welcome here Next episode will study how upgrades based on Config::Model can be applied on files with other syntaxes. All the best

A year ago, i wrote about how New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) requires the use of Internet Explorer to apply online (and it even appears to require IE just to download the PDF of the application!) Sadly, the situation has not changed, a year later. Today, I'm writing to Dan Garodnick, Chair of The City Council's Committee on Technology (and the rest of the committee members), Carole Post, Commissioner of DoITT (the city's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications), and Jeanne B. Mullgrav, Commissioner of DYCD (the Department of Youth and Community Development, which runs SYEP). Here's what i wrote:

For the last two years at least, the DYCD's Summer Youth Employment Program
(SYEP) has been only available to users of Internet Explorer:
 https://application.nycsyep.com/
Internet Explorer (IE) is only made by Microsoft, and is only available for
people running Microsoft operating systems.  Users of other operating systems,
such as GNU/Linux, Macintosh, or others cannot access the SYEP application
process.  Even users of Windows who care about their online security or simply
desire a different web browsing experience might prefer to avoid Internet
Explorer.
Not only is the online form inaccessible from browsers other than IE, even
retrieving a copy of the PDF to print out and fill in manually is unavailable
for web browsers other than IE.
What is the city's policy is on access to government sites?  Is it city policy
to mandate a single vendor's software for access to city resources?  Should NYC
youth be required to purchase software from Microsoft to be able to apply
for the Summer Youth Employment Program?
The sort of data collection needed by such an application is a mainstay of the
standards-based web, and has been so for over 15 years now.  There is no reason
to require particular client on an open platform.  I can point you toward
resources who would be happy to help you make the system functional for users
of *any* web browser, if you like.
I raised this issue over a year ago (see nyc.gov correspondence #1-1-473378926,
and a public weblog posted around the same time [0]), and got no effective
remedy.  It's worrisome to see that this is still a problem.
Please let me know what you plan to do to address the situation.
Regards,
	--dkg
[0] https://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/47

Feel free to send your own message to the folks above (especially helps if you live in or near NYC) Finally, Carole Post, the head of DoITT will also be present at a panel tonight in Soho, which i'm unfortunately be unable to attend. If you go there, you might ask her about the situation.Tags: policy

Digging into the fabulous world of Emacs and Lisp, I wanted to use it to build my personal Web site and my blog. I already moved from ikiwiki to Emacs Muse for my HTML pages some weeks ago. Muse provides an extension to maintain a journal, called muse-journal. Unfortunately, it was far to fulfill all my needs, and I decided that it would be a good exercise to write a better extension. Consequently, I started to wrote my own extension, which I named muse-blog. And this is now what is used to build this blog. :-)

[107108.433300] chrome[12262]: segfault at bbadbeef ip 0000000000fbea18 sp 00007fffcf348100 error 6 in chrome[400000+27ad000] When I first tried running the Google Chrome web browser [1] on SE Linux it recursively displayed the error message in the above picture, it first displayed the error and then displayed another error while trying to display a web page to describe the error. The kernel message log included messages such as the above message, it seems that some pointers are initialised to the value 0xbbadbeef to make debugging easier and more amusing. V8 error: V8 is no longer usable (v8::V8::AddMessageListener()) When I ran Chrome from the command-line it gave the above error message (which was presumably somewhere in the 8MB ~/.xsession-errors file generated from a few hours of running a KDE4 session). type=AVC msg=audit(1274070733.648:145): avc: denied execmem for pid=12833 comm= chrome scontext=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tcontext=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 tclass=process
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1274070733.648:145): arch=c000003e syscall=9 success=no exit=-131938567594024 a0=7fd863b41000 a1=40000 a2=7 a3=32 items=0 ppid=1 pid=12833 auid=4294967295 uid=1001 gid=1001 euid=1001 suid=1001 fsuid=1001 egid=1001 sgid=1001 fsgid=1001 tty=pts4 ses=4294967295 comm= chrome exe= /opt/google/chrome/chrome subj=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 key=(null)
type=ANOM_ABEND msg=audit(1274070733.648:146): auid=4294967295 uid=1001 gid=1001 ses=4294967295 subj=unconfined_u:unconfined_r:unconfined_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 pid=12833 comm= chrome sig=11 V8 is the Google Javascript system which compiles JavaScript code and thus apparently needs read/write/execute access to memory [2]. In /var/log/audit/audit.log I saw the above messages (which would have been in the kernel message log as displayed by dmesg if I didn t have auditd running). The most relevant parts are that execmem access was requested and that it was by system call 9. From linux/x86_64/syscallent.h in the strace source I discovered that system call 9 on the AMD64 architecture is sys_mmap. Does anyone know a good way to discover which system call has a given number on a particular architecture without reading strace source code? Attempts to strace the Google Chrome process failed, Chrome gave the error Failed to move to new PID namespace after clone() failed. Clone was passed the flag 0 20000000 which according to /usr/include/linux/sched.h is CLONE_NEWPID. It seems that programs which create a new PID namespace (as Google Chrome does) can t be straced as the clone() call fails. It s a pity that Chrome doesn t have an option to run without using this feature, losing the ability to strace it really decreases my ability to find and report bugs in the program I m sure that the Google developers want people like me to be able to help them find bugs in their code without undue effort. Anyway the solution to this problem to allow it to run on the SE Linux Targeted configuration is to run the command chcon -t unconfined_execmem_exec_t /opt/google/chrome/chrome which causes the Chrome browser to run in the domain unconfined_execmem_t which is allowed to do such things. Of course we don t want Chrome processes to run unconfined, I think that the idea I had in 2008 for running Chrome processes in different SE Linux contexts is viable and should be implemented [3]. As a general rule if you are running a program from the command-line on SE Linux with the Targeted configuration (the default and most common configuration) then any time you see an execmem failure logged to the kernel message log or the audit subsystem then you can change the context of the program to unconfined_execmem_exec_t to make the problem go away. Note that this isn t necessarily a good thing to do, sometimes it s best to change the program to not require such access. But it seems that in this case the design of V8 requires write/execute memory access to pre-compile JavaScript code.

• [1] http://www.google.com/chrome
• [2] http://code.google.com/apis/v8/
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/09/02/google-chrome-the-security-implications/

I have something of an informal goal of learning a new programming language every few years. It s not so much a goal as it is something of a discomfort. There are so many programming languages out there, with so many niches and approaches to problems, that I get uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge of some of them after awhile. This tends to happen every few years. The last major language I learned was Haskell, which I started working with in 2004. I still enjoy Haskell and don t see anything displacing it as my primary day-to-day workhorse. Yet there are some languages that I d like to learn. I have an interest in cross-platform languages; one of my few annoyances with Haskell is that it can t (at least with production quality) be compiled into something like Java bytecode or something else that isn t architecture-dependent. I have long had a soft spot for functional languages. I haven t had such a soft spot for static type checking, but Haskell s type inference changed that for me. Also I have an interest in writing Android apps, which means some sort of Java tie-in would be needed. Here are my current candidates:

• JavaScript. I have never learned the language but dislike it intensely based on everything I have learned about it (especially the diverging standards of implementation). Nevertheless, there are certain obvious reasons to try it the fact that most computers and mobile phones can run it out of the box is an important one.
• Scheme. Of somewhat less interest since I learned Common Lisp quite awhile back. I m probably pretty rusty at it, but I m not sure Scheme would offer me anything novel that I can t find in Haskell except for the ability to compile to JVM bytecode.
• Lua it sounds interesting, but I m not sure if it s general-purpose enough to merit long-term interest.
• Scala sounds interesting a OOP and FP language that compiles to JVM bytecode.
• Smalltalk. Seems sad I ve never learned this one.
• There are some amazing webapps written using Cappuccino. The Github issue interface is where I hear about this one.
• Eclipse. I guess it s mostly not a programming language but an IDE, but then there s some libraries (RCP?) or something with it so to be honest, I don t know what it is. Some people seem very excited about it. I tried it once, couldn t figure out how to just open a file and start editing already. Made me feel like I was working for Initech and wouldn t get to actually compile something until my TPS coversheets were in order. Dunno, maybe it s not that bad, but I never really understood the appeal of something other than emacs/vi+make.
• A Haskell web infrastructure such as HSP or hApps. Not a new language, but might as well be

Of some particular interest to me is that Haskell has interpreters for Scheme, Lua, and JavaScript as well as code generators for some of these languages (though not generic Haskell-to-foo compilers). Languages not in the running because I already know them include: OCaml, POSIX shell, Python, Perl, Java, C, C++, Pascal, BASIC, Common Lisp, Prolog, SQL. Languages I have no interest in learning right now include Ruby (not different enough from what I already know plus bad experiences with it), any assembly, anything steeped in the Microsoft monoculture (C#, VB, etc.), or anything that is hard to work with outside of an Emacs or vim environment. (If your language requires or strongly encourages me to use your IDE or proprietary compiler, I m not interested that means you, flash.) Brief Reivews of Languages I Have Used To give you a bit of an idea of where I m coming from:

• C: Not much to say there. I think its pros and cons are well-known. I consider it to be too unwieldy for general-purpose use these days, though find myself writing code in it every few years for some reason or other.
• Perl: The first major interpreted language I learned. Stopped using it entirely after learning Python (didn t see any advantage of Perl over Python, and plenty of disadvantages.)
• Python: Used to really like it. Both the language and I have changed. It is no longer the clean language it was in the 1.5 days. Too many lists-that-aren t-lists, __underscorethings__, etc. Still cleaner than Perl. It didn t scale up to large projects well, and the interpreted dynamic nature left me not all that happy to use it for some tasks. Haven t looked at Python 3, but also it probably isn t ready for prime time yet anyhow.
• Java: Better than C++ for me. Cross-platform bytecode features. That s about all that I have to say about it that s kind. The world s biggest source of carpal tunnel referrals in my book. Mysteriously manages to have web apps that require 2GB of RAM just to load. Dunno where that came from; Apache with PHP and mod_python takes less than 100M.
• Haskell: A pretty stellar mix of a lot of nice features, type inference being one of the very nice ones in my book. My language of choice for almost all tasks. Laziness can be hard for even experienced Haskellers to understand at times, and the libraries are sometimes in a bit of flux (which should calm down soon). Still a very interesting language and, in fact, a decent candidate for my time as there is some about it I ve never picked up, including some modules and web toolkits.
• OCaml: Tried it, eventually discarded it. An I/O library that makes you go through all sorts of contortions to be able to open a file read/write isn t cool in my book.

Although my progress in adding new features is not too fast (hint: patches and help is welcome), I'm quite happy with the progress of deb.li. As mentioned on my last post on debian-devel@l.d.o, I've spent some time to migrate it to the new, but very well written microframework Flask, which is based on Werkzeug, the probably most advanced WSGI utility module. The migration also allowed me to clean up several pieces of messy code which were necessary to work around some issues in python-bottle. Also I've started to bring the layout and CSS into a nice shape. The templates are finished already, just a bit CSS is missing now. Last but not least - the ciabot git script in the example clients is finished and used in a few git based projects on alioth.debian.org now. Just link /var/lib/gforge/chroot/home/users/bzed/godebian-client/ciabot.py to hooks/update and set your CIA project name by running git config hooks.cia-project your-project-name. As usual - comments, bugreports and patches are welcome!

At IETF 77, we re having a get together to discuss federated authentication beyond the web. The meeting will be in the Mahattan room starting at 9 PM US Pacific time. I think audio streaming will be available; I will post a link closer to the meeting time. In the last entry, I mentioned that a preliminary spec would be available; see the preliminary EAP GSS-API mechanism. A use case paper and slide set are being reviewed internally and should be ready early next week. We may even have preliminary versions of the binding between RADIUS and SAML available before IETF. There have been a number of great discussions on the moonshot-community list and with others interested in the broader area.

Some notes I think are worth sharing about the upgrade to KDE 4.4:

• The upgrade is disruptive enough that it is not possible^Wrecommended to upgrade while logged-in (kwin and plasma crash.)
  
• Either you have mysqld running or you can't use kmail (and others) anymore. 4.4's kmail appears to use akonadi resources directly, so the "workaround" to disable the migration no longer helps.
  I wonder how this is going to affect login time and resources/energy consumption once I give up and let it start mysqld.
  
• Kopete's statistics plugin makes kopete freeze at startup.
  
• The sound card keeps getting turned on and off. It's probably knotify that is happy.
  
• nepomuk is back! (the server is running even if it is disabled via systemsettings.)
  

Let's see how long I last before I regret upgrading...

I find it surreal to have people guessing at my motivations when they could just ask me. On top of all that, I find it weird that people spend so much time with in-fighting. I just want my system not to suck. Some time ago (during in the Ubuntu Karmic development cycle maybe in September 2009), I started having giant problems with my build system. All I/O would start to stall, wait times would surge, and usually my entire system would just go unresponsive with the disk light on solid. This scared the crap out of me, and it wasn t entirely obvious what was triggering it. No one else seemed to be seeing it. I managed to start tracking things using latencytop , and saw stuff like liferea going crazy. As I eliminated more and more things, I eventually settled on it being a problem with umount, and I reported an Ubuntu bug. It seemed to look like an upstream bug that no one else but the reporter could reproduce either. Since no one else was seeing this issue, and it seemed related to LVM snapshots, I migrated off of snapshots, and started using aufs overlays for my builds. For a while, it seemed like things went away. It didn t, and I started hitting it again. I opened a new (now famous) bug in Ubuntu, since now snapshots weren t in the picture, and I didn t want to confuse the earlier history. I managed to find a relatively minimal test-case too. A few other people commenting on the bug were seeing the problem now too, but it was less pronounced for them. As an aside, this wasn t a just wait a few seconds longer kind of issue on my system. A single umount would last 30-40 minutes. And when I m doing parallel builds of security updates, this would turn into my system being unavailable for hours at a stretch. Since none of the kernel developers I was in contact with were able to track down the root cause, I asked Ted Ts o in email if he could just quickly peek in on this for me, since I figured he d be in a good position to confirm or deny it. I didn t want to start wasting upstream time with this if it wasn t reproducible (see earlier upstream kernel bug). To my great relief, Ted found a few minutes to check it, and was able to immediately confirm it and give me a viable work-around ( sync; umount ) for the time being. I confirmed the work-around, and went off to do other things. A while later, Ted came back to deliver a bit of a rant, the purpose of which was not clear to me, but I ultimately ignored it I didn t seem directed at me. I just wanted my system operating normally, and he d done me a favor to check in on it and got me a work-around. More time passes, and I eventually get caught in another I/O-wait melt-down. On investigation, it seemed that the in-kernel work-around in the Ubuntu kernel totally back-fired on me in some cases, rendering even the user-space work-around useless. After investigating the Ubuntu-specific work-around, I re-read Ted s rant in the course of researching what had happened during this bug s triage. It seemed that Ted was basically saying:
this is an upstream problem
RedHat hasn t run into it and he didn t know why I figured I should confirm for myself if Fedora was affected, so downloaded and installed Fedora to double-check there. Since I was able to reproduce it there, I opened an upstream bug, linking back to the original Ubuntu bug, and then went to open a bug in the Fedora tracker, linking back to upstream. And it seems to be these actions that everyone has jumped on. I will now bore you with the reality of my motivations: I wanted to fix the bug so no one would end up experiencing the same pain I d been through over the last 6 months. The bug was, from my perspective, a serious issue. Since I d managed to reproduce it in another distro, it was my duty as a Free Software developer to report it to them. And, in what I felt was an unambiguous gesture, I made sure to include the link to the upstream kernel bug. Reproducing it in Ubuntu, in Fedora, and with a stock kernel had me confident that it was an upstream issue. While Ted did correctly suspect the issue was upstream, I really didn t want to just open an upstream bug and have it be ignored. I wanted some additional proof of reproduction, which I got when I tested it on Fedora. So, I m rather saddened that so many people spent so much time questioning my motivations, making fun of Canonical, or doing anything other than trying to just simply solve this problem. I m totally disinterested in inter-distro fighting. Instead, I continue to assume we re all on the same team, fighting a philosophical battle against close-source software. And in that regard, I think it s still true. If I ignore the rants and jeering, I come away thankful for all the people that spent time trying reproduce the issue at Canonical, at RedHat, and in the larger community. I m hugely thankful that Ted made some time to let me know I wasn t crazy, and there was actually a problem. I m thankful for having some work-arounds, and I m thankful that the root cause was eventually ferreted out, with some possible solutions. I m even thankful that some people on the LWN thread saw that, far from malicious, I was trying to be helpful with the bug. I just wanted my filesystem not to eat my computer. And I was hoping other people could maybe help me, since I m not a filesystem expert. The drama around this bug is pathetic, and now by talking about it for almost 1000 words, I m just as guilty.

In February 2009, my friend dim tried to force me using Emacs. I know a couple of people using it and Gnus for reading their mail, and it always made me curious. At that time, more than a year ago, Emacs 22 and Gnus did not seem usable from my point of view. But around mid February, with the help of dim, I tried again to start using Emacs. Actually, this was not something new for me. I (very basically) used Emacs between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, when I finished the university and started working at Easter-eggs, I met a couple of vim enthusiasts. They taught me how to use it in various ways, and I started to know more about vim than Emacs, so I switched. This time, I started by configuring it, but reading the manual and also learning a bit of Lisp. It took me several weeks, but step by step I learned many, many things. And I must admit, I liked it. I've configured and starting to use some very important mode, like Gnus, Muse, the famous Org mode or even ERC. I'll probably talk about various Emacs related things in the near future, since I already wrote more than a thousand lines of Lisp in the last 2 months. Anyhow, I'd just conclude by asserting that my new Emacs/Gnus/Org/ERC setup beats my old vim/mutt/nothing/irssi to the death with a baseball bat. :-)

One thing that happens periodically is that I start a process from an interactive shell, discover that it takes longer than expected, and then want to know how long it took. Basically it s a retrospective need to have run time whatever that I discover after the process has been running for long enough that I don t want to restart it. My current procedure in such situations is to run ps from another session to discover when it started and then type date to display when it ends. A quick test with strace showed that bash uses the wait4() system call to determine when a process ends, but passes NULL as the last parameter. If it passed the pointer to a struct rusage then it would have the necessary data. I think it would be a really good feature for a shell to allow you to type something like echo $TIME_LAST_CMD to see how long the last command took. For the common case where you aren t interested in that data it would only involve an extra parameter to the wait4() system call, a small amount of memory allocated for it, and to store yet another environment variable in it s list. A quick Google search didn t show any way of filing wishlist bugs against Bash and I don t think that this is a real bug as such so I haven t filed a bug report. If anyone reads my blog and has some contact with the Bash people then please pass this idea along if you think it s worthy of being included.

I spent last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Belgium, where we kicked off the 10.10 development cycle. Due to our time-boxed release cycle, not everything discussed here will necessarily appear in Ubuntu 10.10, but this should provide a reasonable overview of the direction we re taking. Presentations While most of our time at UDS is spent in small group meetings to discuss specific topics, there are also a handful of presentations to convey key information and stimulate creative thinking. A few of the more memorable ones for me were:

• Mark Shuttleworth talked about the desktop, in particular the introduction of the new Unity shell for Ubuntu Netbook Edition
• Fanny Chevalier presented Diffamation, a tool for visualizing and navigating the history of a document in a very flexible and intuitive way
• Rick Spencer talked about the development process for 10.10 and some key changes in it, including a greater focus on meeting deadlines for freezes (and making fewer exceptions)
• Stefano Zacchiroli, the current Debian project leader, gave an overview of how Ubuntu and Debian developers are working together today, and how this could be improved. He has posted a summary on the debian-project mailing list.

The talks were all recorded, though they may not all be online yet. Foundations The Foundations team provides essential infrastructure, tools, packages and processes which are central to the development of all Ubuntu products. They make it possible for the desktop and server teams to focus on their areas of expertise, building on a common base system and development procedures. Highlights from their track:

• Early on in the week, they conducted a retrospective to discuss how things went during the 10.04 cycle and how we can improve in the future
• One of their major projects has been about revision control for all of Ubuntu s source code, and they talked last week about what s next
• We re aiming to provide btrfs as an install-time option in 10.10
• In order to keep Ubuntu moving forward, the foundations team is always on the lookout for stale bits which we don t need to keep around anymore. At UDS, they discussed culling unattended packages, retiring the IA64 and SPARC ports and other spring cleaning
• There was a lot of discussion about Upstart, including its further development, implications for servers, desktops and the kernel, and the migration of server init scripts to upstart jobs
• After maintaining two separate x86 boot loaders for years, it looks like we may be ready to replace isolinux with GRUB2 on Ubuntu CDs

Desktop The desktop team manages both Desktop Edition and Netbook Edition, on a mission to provide a top-notch experience to users across a range of client computing devices. Highlights from their track:

• A key theme for 10.10 is to help developers to create applications for Ubuntu, by providing a native development environment, improving Quickly, improving desktopcouch, making it easier to get started with desktopcouch, and enabling developers to deliver new applications to Ubuntu users continuously
• With more and more touch screen devices appearing, Ubuntu will grow some new features to support touch oriented applications
• The web browser is a staple application for Ubuntu, and as such we are always striving for the best experience for our users. The team is looking ahead to Chromium, using apport to improve browser bug reports, and providing a web-oriented document capability via Zoho
• Building on work done in 10.04, we will aim to make simple things simple for basic photo editing
• Security-conscious users may rest easier knowing that the X window system will run without root privileges where kernel modesetting is supported

Server/Cloud The server team is charging ahead with making Ubuntu the premier server OS for cloud computing environments. Highlights from their track:

• Providing more powerful tools for managing Ubuntu in EC2 and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud infrastructure, including boot-time configuration, image and instance management, and kernel upgrades
• Improving Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud by adding new Eucalyptus features (such as LXC container support, monitoring, rapid provisioning, and load balancing. If you ever wanted to run a UEC demo from a USB stick, that s possible too.
• Providing packaged solutions for cloud building blocks such as hadoop and pig, Drupal, ehcache, Spring, various NOSQL databases, web frameworks, and more
• Providing turn-key solutions for free software applications like Alfresco and Kolab
• Making Puppet easier to deploy, easier to configure, and easier to scale in the cloud

ARM Kiko Reis gave a talk introducing ARM and the corresponding opportunity for Ubuntu. The ARM team ran a full track during the week on all aspects of their work, from the technical details of the kernel and toolchain, to the assembly of a complete port of Netbook Edition 10.10 for several ARM platforms. Kernel The kernel team provided essential input and support for the above efforts, and also held their own track where they selected 2.6.35 as their target version, agreed on a variety of changes to the Ubuntu kernel configuration, and created a plan for providing backports of newer kernels to LTS releases to support deployment on newer hardware. Security Like the kernel team, the security team provided valuable input into the technical plans being developed by other teams, and also organized a security track to tackle some key security topics such as clarifying the duration of maintenance for various collections of packages, and the ongoing development of AppArmor and Ubuntu s AppArmor profiles. QA The QA team focuses on testing, test automation and bug management throughout the project. While quality is everyone s responsibility, the QA team helps to coordinate these activities across different teams, establish common standards, and maintain shared infrastructure and tools. Highlights from their track include:

• There was a strong sense of broadening and deepening our testing efforts, mobilizing testers for specific testing projects, streamlining the ISO testing process by engaging Ubuntu derivatives and fine-tuning ISO test cases, and reactivating the community-based laptop testing program
• In support of this effort, there will be projects to improve test infrastructure, including enabling tests to target specific hardware and tracking test results in Launchpad
• There is a continuous effort to improve high-volume processing of bug reports, and two focus areas for this cycle will be tracking regressions (as these are among the most painful bugs for users) and improving our response to kernel bugs (as the kernel faces some special challenges in bug management)

Design The design team organized a track at UDS for the first time this cycle, and team manager Ivanka Majic gave a presentation to help explain its purpose and scope. Toward the end of the week, I joined in a round table discussion about some of the challenges faced by the team in engaging with the Ubuntu community and building support for their work. This is a landmark effort in mating professional design with free software community, and there is still much to learn about how to do this well. Community The community track discussed the usual line-up of events, outreach and advocacy programs, organizational tools, and governance housekeeping for the 10.10 cycle, as well as goals for improving the translation of Ubuntu and related resources into many languages. One notable project is an initiative to aggressively review patches submitted to the bug tracker, to show our appreciation for these contributions by processing them more quickly and completely.

Conference Management systems are web applications designed to make the lives of conference organisers easier. They usually include features such as registration, payment, paper submission and review, scheduling and publishing of announcements.

Since Wikipedia is apparently not a place for such a "spammy list," I figured I should at least post this here:

Name	Used by	License	Programming Language
A Conference Toolkit	YAPC::Eu	Artistic License	Perl
ConMan	Utah Open Source Conference, Texax Linux Fest	GPL	Python (Django)
Open Conference Systems	various academic conferences	GPL	PHP
OpenConferenceWare	Open Source Bridge	MIT	Ruby on Rails
Pentabarf	DebConf, FOSDEM, CCC	GPL	Ruby on Rails
SCALEreg	SCALE	GPL	Python (Django)
Zookeepr	linux.conf.au	GPL	Python (Pylons)

If you know of any other Open Source systems, please leave a comment!