Last night, I ended up hacking on the usplash and casper codebases until about 0500 (local time) in the morning (mostly due to the developer status meeting at 0200 UTC). usplash had a fairly icky bug where it would choke and die if the fifo filled up and it got "incomplete" commands. No longer, it now uses a buffer which it fills up and then processes, handling partial commands and such correctly. casper-md5check is a tool which does md5summing according to a list of files, similar to the regular md5sum program, but with one notable exception: it does progress information through usplash. So, since the live CD has a huge file which is the compressed live file system, just doing a per-file progress bar would be silly and inaccurate. It therefore does a size-based progress bar which looks quite neat. If the debian-cd config has already been updated, just pulling down today's daily cd and choosing "integrity check" should show you the nice little hack.

Sarah has created a blog for showcasing cats that are available for adoption at Palo Alto Animal Services, an animal shelter she is volunteering at until her work permit is approved.

About a week or two ago, my sister called me that her computer didn't boot anymore. After looking at it for a short while and asking her how it had stopped working, there was only one conclusion that I could come to: the processor fan had broken down, which meant that she'd had a processor meltdown (she had a Pentium I-class system; back then, builtin thermometers weren't as common as they are now). She needed a replacement. Now I do have a bunch of spare hardware, but I didn't have anything that could compare to her 200-something Mhz system, and she was already complaining that the thing was rather slow; so I helped her find a 233Mhz Pentium mainboard (with processor) on eBay. That arrived on monday at her place, and she brought it to me to install it. That's done now, but not before I had to tell the thing it was the worst mainboard design that I have ever seen. No, really. And I've seen quite some mainboards already, since I used to work for a place where they sold hardware, a while back. The power connector, IDE connectors, serial ports, parallel port, and floppy drive connector are all positioned in the top left corner of the mainboard, above the PCI slots and right below where the power block is supposed to be. As a result, it's nearly impossible to reach them. When you do reach them, they're all placed so fucking close to eachother that it's nearly impossible to fit them all and to do so correctly. The one exception to that rule is the parallel port, which is fairly close to the rest, but still in the same area. It gets in fairly easily—unfortunately, it also gets out fairly easily if you touch them cables, which you have to do to put the topmost PCI card in its slot. Grmbl. Can't they put those cables in the center right, where they belong?!? After fighting with them cables, it was time for the RAM. That mainboard contains two DIMM slots and four 72-pin SIMM thingies. I have one RAM module for the DIMM slots, but unfortunately it didn't work with that module; I'm not sure whether it's the RAM that's broken, or whether the mainboard simply doesn't want to accept it. Fortunately, I have some 72pin RAM modules left. Unfortunately, I found that the 72pin slots were placed so close to the top of the mainboard that I had to get it out again in its entirety to be able to fit the topmost module. Grmbl. One centimeter of space is too much to ask? After that, it turned out that the machine still didn't boot. At first I thought this was one of those braindead BIOSes that doesn't boot unless you hook up a keyboard, but in the end that didn't seem to be the case. After one by one disconnecting everything, it turned out that the system would boot when I didn't connect the CD writer, but it would not boot at all when I did connect it. And when I say "not boot", I really mean it that way; it didn't even start the POST. Replacing the IDE data cable didn't help. I even tried using the one of the hard disk (which worked, because I had already done a boot from disk), or to connect the writer to as slave to the primary connector, but no luck; it simply wouldn't boot with that writer connected. Well, I'm tired of it now. Maybe I'll go to the shop with that writer again (it was a christmas present, so should still be under warranty) and ask them to have a look at it, but otherwise sis won't have a writer.

A coworker and I were discussing whether we should eventually switch our company servers to Etch or Dapper. As Andreas Barth recently sent out a release announcement with a schedule prediction and goal list, I pointed him to it, and then followed up w/ my own predictions. Looking through the goals, it looks as though the easy stuff has been taken care of while the difficult things remain. This is not to discount the work done by the gcc and X people; I don’t mean technically difficult, I mean the things that have traditionally been difficult for Debian to accomplish. It’s more a question of manpower and motivation; there are plenty of people who want the latest software in Debian, and those people can also complete such work, so it tends to get done fairly quickly. On the other hand, the remaining things in the TODO list are the sorts of things that are not very much fun, or can only be done by a select few people. Point-by-point:
- amd64 as an official arch (and the mirror split as a pre-condition
for that)
Infrastructure work is not particularly fun, and can only be done by a few people. It tends to take a while, as we’ve seen in the past with things like the security queues, which blocked the release of Sarge for a decent amount of time. - sorting out docs-in-main vs. the DFSG
- sorting out non-free firmware
These two will not be fun, and will first require actual decisions about what should be done in each case, followed by actions that a lot of people will object to (that is, the stripping out of documentation from various packages, and the removal of functionality from various kernel drivers; hell, enough people complained when we removed tg3 firmware, imagine how many will complain when a couple hundred kernel drivers get their firmware removed?). The actual work here will require people dedicated to actually seeing a release put out, and will probably result in much unrest. I can’t imagine it will actually go smoothly. I guess we’ll see what happens. With a year to go still, there are a number of ways it could go.
(15:23:24) Andres Salomon: if etch actually releases on that day, i will shit myself
(15:23:40) Wes Chow: should we shake on it?
(15:24:02) Wes Chow: I think you should announce that on the debian dev list and see who takes you up on the offer
(15:24:13) Wes Chow: maybe people will actually push for a timely release just to see that happen!
(15:24:25) Wes Chow: and then you soiling yourself would be in the name of free software


I've been setting up EoC lists on a SELinux postfix box recently. It was rather painless, and I have enough experience with SELinux to quickly write a SELinux policy for EoC. The most difficult thing was that basically file descriptors from the postfix delivery process were inherited all the way to bounces for nonexistant lists. I tried different setups; using EoC directly in .forward, using procmail, and using a shell wrapper like this:

#!/bin/sh -e
# verify the list exists
/usr/bin/enemies-of-carlotta  --skip-prefix=eoc+ --domain=list.foobar.tld \
  --is-list --name "$RECIPIENT"   exit 67
#  deliver to EOC
exec /usr/bin/enemies-of-carlotta --skip-prefix=eoc+ --domain=list.foobar.tld \
  --incoming --quiet

This last had the drawbacks that I would have to write some additional policy, or maybe make the wrapper part of EoC. With little benefit over the procmail solution. (BTW: IMHO the Debian enemies-of-carlotta package shouldn't depend on procmail.) I've seen a solution which used a pipe transport from within postfix with a similar wrapper (basically passing $RECIPIENT and $SENDER via commandline instead of having the local delivery agent set them); but I'm not sure about the benefits I get from that (except maybe even more SELinux policy work). There are two drawbacks with my current solution:

• Non-existent lists adresses aren't rejected at SMTP time (can a pipe transport based solution in postfix do that?)
• Error messages contain the rewritten list address eoc+listname@hostname instead of the real adress (the pipe based solution doesn't have this drawback)

Hmm... since newer EoC versions now have --sender and --recipient parameters, I guess I'll try running eoc in the pipe transport without any wrapper now... Update: I've now setup EoC to run as pipe without a wrapper; this didn't solve the first wish, but caused some extra SELinux violations and despite using the --quiet option a really bad error message for invalid adresses... Patching EoC right now to exit with 67 in that case... Here's the diff:

--- /usr/share/enemies-of-carlotta/eoc.py       2005-12-22 01:05:00.000000000 +0100
+++ eoc.py      2006-01-04 19:50:43.000000000 +0100
@@ -1642,7 +1642,17 @@
             debug("Not a mailing list: <%s>" % list_name)
             sys.exit(1)
     elif operation == "--incoming":
-        mlm.incoming_message(skip_prefix, domain, moderate, post)
+        try:
+            mlm.incoming_message(skip_prefix, domain, moderate, post)
+        except BadCommandAddress:
+            sys.stderr.write("Bad command address.\n")
+            sys.exit(os.EX_NOUSER)
+        except BadSignature:
+            sys.stderr.write("Bad signature.\n")
+            sys.exit(os.EX_NOPERM)
+        except UnknownList:
+            sys.stderr.write("Unknown list.\n")
+            sys.exit(os.EX_NOUSER)
     elif operation == "--cleaning-woman":
         mlm.cleaning_woman()
     elif operation == "--show-lists":

which works much better when used as transport like this:

eoc       unix  -       n       n       -       3       pipe
        flags=R user=eoc-lists argv=/usr/bin/enemies-of-carlotta --sender=$ sender  --recipient=$ recipient  --incoming

Just hacked a few new features for my Blosxom plugin Tagging. It now shows you how many times you’ve used that tag. The number is always shown as title attribute to the link, but can optionally also be shown in parentheses behind the tag name or by the (CSS based) font size and/or color (start and end sizes/colors configurable). Also some default values changed (to my current configuration :-). I saw that font size feature quite often during the last weeks and I liked it. I first tried to figure out, which system offers that feature and found that at least Serendipity’s freetag plugin offers it, but didn’t want to download Serendipity just for the plugin. So I decided, the algorithm for calculating the font sizes shouldn’t be that hard to find and coded it from scratch by my own. :-) And while coding it I noticed that changing the color instead of the font size could be done the same way and that this feature isn’t much more difficult. So I implemented it, too. Another new feature is that you now can configure the minimum number of postings a tag should have to show up in the list of tags. The result can be seen in my blog on the right side under “Available Tags”.

Now playing: Falco — Der Kommissar

I have never liked bugzilla much, and for the past week or so, I've found a new reason to dislike it, or at least the GNOME instance of it: every time someone changes the subscriber list ("CC") of a bug I've submitted, I get mail. That's now happening daily. I really don't understand why that setting is turned on by default, and, worse, I haven't found out a way to disable that setting and only that setting. I've lost my patience and configured GNOME's bugzilla to never, ever mail me anything again. This means that if I want to continue to use bugzilla (not that I've ever done it much), I will need to actively poll any bugs I've reported. I am, however, also not going to be reporting any bug directly to GNOME again. Bugzilla is simply too much pain for casual bug reporting. I don't care how wonderful it is for the GNOME developers; if it is painful to me, I won't use it. All my GNOME related bug reporting will happen through Debian in the future. For a project that prides itself on simplicity and usability, GNOME's use of bugzilla is rather weird.

Jacobo, I can understand what you mean. Back in 1999, there was a small project created by two students, called ACPI4Linux.
we started out by building a "hello world" kernel module to get into kernel development, then added some code to have it extract the ACPI tables for us and started work on a small disassembler and bytecode interpreter.
After some time, we had working code to turn off the CPU fan on the Compaq Armada. We got invited to talk about our work at the Atlanta Linux Showcase.
There, we met some guys from Intel, who, with the best intent, presented us with ACPI-CA, which was a full implementation of the VM we had been starting to implement, and they already had Linus' approval to move it into the kernel (which is an idea I got yelled at for suggesting on the LKML, as it added 250KiB to the kernel).

My vet has written two books on cats, is nominated for Intervet's Vet of the year and is also a very interesting person to talk with: Santiago G. Caraballo.

Ugly pics of scars and post-surgery cats to be uploaded later.

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

Good luck, my babies!

Henri Yandell comments on Addison Wesley being prominent in his book list. I noticed the same thing myself recently (my list is on this page, towards the bottom: http://www.dedasys.com/freesoftware). Perhaps the surpise is that O'Reilly is less prominent than one might think given their high visibility in the portion of the tech world that I deal with. O'Reilly, however, tends more towards documenting current technology well rather than having many books that are timeless classics. I hope they keep focusing on putting out good books that do at least that rather than trying to create their own trends like "Web 2.0" (bleagh!). In any case, we'll have to wait a while to see if any of their books stand the test of time - a lot of the Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall books are from ten, fifteen, years ago or more (The C Programming Language, Knuth's books, Design Patterns, etc...). Hecl I'm currently working on making it very easy to write and create Hecl applications for J2ME. I'm pleased with how things are going from the community point of view as well - a couple of people have show interest in using Hecl commercially, and I've been asked to write an article about it for a European Linux/software magazine, which is something I'd started doing anyway... Skype My parents got around to installing Skype and buying a microphone. Free voice calls from Italy to Oregon! The quality is really good, although there are some echo issues that probably come from my use of a cheap microphone. It sort of bugs me to buy into the network effects of a proprietary system, but on the other hand, anything that keeps my money out of the hands of Telecom Italia makes me happy.

I wrote yesterday that I'm looking for a nice microphone. I decided to go mostly with the setup suggested by The Roadhouse:

• MXL 990 Condensor Mic ($50)
• Behringer eurorack UB802 Mixer/Preamp ($50)

After assorted accessories (mic stand, XLR cable, pop filter, etc.) I wound up spending $143 at Musician's Friend. I just need a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter cable yet from RadioShack to hook this up to the audio input on a sound card (or my iMic USB gadget). Librivox sounds great and I look forward to volunteering.

2006, what a lovely year! Not. I heard its a custom, that at the start of the new year, one looks back at the past one. So I did, and wasn't impressed at all. Mind you, the same happens each and every year, so it is no suprise, really. For the past year, I have been rather inactive, I should have gone on an extensive vacation from Debian a long time ago, around May, when I quit my last job. I intend to rectify that as soon as I manage to dig up my GPG key. Most of my packages will get officially orphaned too, as I lack the time and motivation to work on them - no news here, either, as this is the case since early last year. Lets see what I did on the free software front in the past year or two... One of my most succesfull projects was CCZE, a log colouriser. Needles to say, the idea is not mine. The crap implementation, the most messy and bad code I've ever written, is mine, though. It hasn't seen an update since I don't know when. Nor will it in the foreseeable future. The only thing that could help the codebase, is a rewrite, which I had been planning since 2003, and not a bit of code was committed ever. In the meantime, new programs appear, whose logs could be colourised, new demands arrive, but the project has been dead for good. Once, Thy was the software I was most proud of. I really loved it, and spent most of my time hacking on it. Those times are past, new, similar software appeared, that surpassed my beloved HTTP daemon in nearly every respect. I don't believe thy has any place among todays similar projects. This, I truly regret, I had great fun developing Thy. But as everything, even good things must come to an end. Back when I worked for a company that was into this media streaming business, I contributed a few bits and pieces to GStreamer, but all the "grand ideas" I had, and wished to make reality, never happened. Looking further back, I can't notice any significant contribution I made.. except maybe one, a very small one.. Even nowadays, I can't stop feeling a little proud, when it crosses my mind. Some may know, most probably don't, I acted as an application manager for Debian, and for a little while, I like to think I wasn't that bad at that job. For a little while... Anyway, during this, I had the pleasure to work with Daniel Stone. Heh, those were good times! I hope, that what we've done there, was of at least a bit useful. Meh, enough of this. My projects failed, I didn't have the neccessary resources to make some of my dreams come true. All I need now, is a break, a break so I will not feel bad about things I do not have time for. I'll let them go, as I should have done ages ago, that's best both for them, and me. Until a time I feel I can contribute back something, for all I received from the free software community, I'll take a vacation. From time to time, I'll be hanging around on IRC, but my activity will be as low as it was during the past year. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish! P.S.: Yamm, my over-sized tamagotchi expressed interest in maintaining me in Debian. If, by any chance, he'd take over my computer, and expressed his wish to run for DPL-ship, please, by all means, stop him. Thank you.

Aggregation the G way.
I've been using the magic of RSS (and Atom) to keep up with Planet Debian, blogs of my friends, tech news and posts to an anime fan forum for the past several months, however one little problem bothered me - the forum has a lot of posts (sometimes more then 5 per minute) and an RSS feed of only last five items. That means that I had to have my RSS aggregator (Liferea) open at all times, so that I do not miss any posts. However keeping my laptop on and online at all times is quite bothersome, so I started looking for solutions.
I tried Google Reader however I didn't like it much - I like to see more of my feed. There is too much screen space wasted for all the wrong reasons, one can only see 5 items at the time (which is quite a hassle if you have 500+ of them), a lot of info I would like to see is not there (which blog did this come from???), some strange html conversions, ...
Now I have found my solution. It is a combination of rss2email and GMail. I have a computer that I always keep on and online (it could be a server, but in my case it is a simple workstation). I installed rss2email there, added all my feeds to the database there (hint: export feedlist from Liferea and do a bit of grep/sed magic), moded config so that all mails come from a single address, all have a custom identifiable header and all are HTML mails without any transformations. After that I configured cron to launch "r2e run" every half an hour and "r2e run 22" every minute (where '22' is the id of the feed of that anime forum). At Gmail side I simply filtered all mails from rss2email into a separate label and archived them (so that they do not clutter my inbox).
Now when I want to reed my feeds, I go to the last message of the RSS label in my Gmail, open it, read it, star it if I need to look at it later and then press "k" to get to the newer message. After I am done reading I usually go and remove RSS label from read messages, so that they do not appear in this labels "folder" and are only saved in Archive. If I start running out of space, I will simply search and delete old RSS items then.
Most of the screen space now is devoted to the message, I can see all the fields I want to see (source, author, topic, content, pictures, URLs) and I can manage messages by hundreds. Also being able to search both your mail and your rss feeds at the same time is neat.
Yesterday I did a little improvement to this scheme. The forum that I read has the title of every message made of "author: topic", so every message is a separate conversation in Gmail. I decided to try to use the conversation feature of Gmail and did a little modification to rss2email so that if the message is from this forum, then everything up to the first semicolon is cut from the title and inserted as a part of the name of the sender. In the end the subject of every message contains only the topic of the corresponding thread in the forum and thus all messages from one thread are neatly grouped together as a single conversation. At the same time every messages From: looks like "$forum_name $author " so that I can still see who wrote what in the forum.

2005 is the first year I've blogged from start to finish, so it is interesting to go through and reflect on what has happened. It's certainly been an eventful year. Executive summary: got engaged, got married, got a job with Google, moved to the US. Did a whole lot of other mainly geeky things in between.

January

• Moved from living in an old rundown share house in Ainslie to a townhouse in Watson, without the flat mate
• Started getting my teeth into work at my new job
• Took Sarah to the ER with chest pains, after having had them on and off over Christmas

February

• Proposed to Sarah
• My blog got syndicated on Planet Linux Australia
• Wrote my blog post about mitigating SSH brute force attacks using Netfilter's recent module. Still get a lot of search traffic from that today
• Went camping at Jervis Bay, managed to hit a kangaroo on the way, had a rather traumatic time trying to euthanize it
• Decided to continue studying at Uni part-time in conjunction with full-time work (masochistic, huh?)

March

• Made changelogs.debian.net a whole lot spankier
• Had a moderately unsuccessful time turning an old laptop with a dead hard drive into a diskless server with an NFS root filesystem. (I really must get around to trying again doing ATA over Ethernet)
• Bought a QFE card, after much vying on EBay, which is still sitting in a drawer unused
• Discovered how to make my laptop suspend
• Completed a Saint John Ambulance Senior First Aid course

April

• linux.conf.au happened, and I helped make it happen
• Interesting side-effect of the above was that I got asked to apply for a job at Google
• I had fun with a cylinder of surplus helium
• Sarah is advised to discontinue triathlons because of a possible heart condition

May

• My oldest friends separate, and it looks like they're going to get divorced
• Sarah had her car broken into in the driveway and her purse was stolen
• I get into a panic about passing Uni and really knuckle down
• I discover a little too late that I've missed marking my ten thousandth day since birth
• I organised a dinner meeting of Canberra Perl Mongers, which is a largely dormant group
• We got a new cat
• I hit two years as a Debian developer
• I joined the Linux Australia sysadmin team

June

• We decide to bring forward our wedding from April 2006 to July 2005, "just in case" the Google thing comes off
• caesar, the box I use as my gateway blew up and got replaced with something gruntier
• I got into discussions with University House about doing a wireless LAN setup for them for their guests
• Started work on a box for Linux Australia that would host a few User Mode Linux instances for various things

July

• My old Rover crew turned 20
• We discovered the Tea Centre, and the wonders of different varieties of leaf tea
• I scraped through first semester at Uni
• I decided to upgrade daedalus and ordered a new box
• Michael and I went to the US for face to face interviews with Google
• Started semester 2 at Uni
• Started migrating services to the new daedalus
• Sarah and I were married

August

• Google makes me a job offer
• I ordered myself a new laptop
• My car tyres got slashed while I was at Uni
• Uni all got a bit much, and I decided to drop out
• I got a 1 gig USB key
• I had some fun with LVM snapshotting

September

• Video card in my desktop blew up
• I return to working in the office, and have a crack at catching the bus because of heinous petrol prices
• I built Linux Australia's content mirroring box
• The cat vomits one time too many and gets a new diet
• We went and saw the Warehouse Circus' most excellent BAM! production

October

• I ascended Mount Tennant with Rick
• Sarah and I went and checked out the Tumut 3 power station
• Sarah got her wisdom teeth out
• I had some more fun with LVM and data migration
• I had even more fun with LVM snapshots
• We finally got our visas for the US
• I quit my job
• We bought a new dining table
• We bought an iPaq and a bluetooth GPS and some navigation software
• We bought a new digital camera
• Canberra Perl Mongers had another dinner meeting

November

• I finished up at Cybertrust
• I went to the US
• Sarah went to Singapore for a holiday with some of her relatives
• I started at Google

December

• Sarah arrived in the US from Singapore
• We found somewhere more permanent to live
• We bought new mountain bikes
• All our stuff arrived from Australia

Kayray has been writing recently about librivox, a project to make public domain audio recordings of public domain material (much of it present in Project Gutenberg). I'm interested in volunteering to read some material. But I don't have any nice microphone. After doing some research, it looks like I'm down to a couple of different options. The first option is described by The Roadhouse. It has a $60 MXL 990 mic and a Behringer Eurorack UB802 mixer at $50. I assume that he is running an output from that into a standard sound card. So the total cost of that setup would run around $110. I don't really need to mix more than one source, but having something that can power condensor mics with XLR connectors looks good. The second option is to get a dedicated USB mic. The mic of choice here seems to be the Blue Snowball at about $140. I don't know enough about this to know which setup would get me the best quality for voice recording that is going to be going to wind up digital on the PC in the end. I guess the third option is something such as the m-audio mobilepre USB preamp at about $120. So if I used that with the MXL 990, I'd be talking about $180. That's rather more than I'd like to spend, but it would give me more options down the road. If any of you have suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

Abridged to remove irrelevant conversation…

< Czesiu> Btw, udev recommends at least 2.6.12 kernel, which is not shipped
in Debian.
< Md> so far the upgrade procedure is “upgrade your kernel, reboot,
upgrade udev”
< Md> Czesiu: yeah, nobody had told me this yet, you know?
< dilinger> you can either go the lvm route, and make up some kernel APIs to
match again, or you can go the ndiswrapper route and make some incredibly
strict dependencies so that people are sure to upgrade kernels and udev
in parallel.  both solutions suck.
< Czesiu> Md: you sound quite sarcastic :)
< wildfire> why not just have a udev-compat; which conflicts which newer
kernels; and make udev conflict with older ones
< Md> dilinger: a future udev version will refuse to install on anything
older than 2.6.12, so this will reduce the potential for brokeness
< Md> the /dev/input/mice problem has been unexpected, if it cannot be fixed
I will make the next package require 2.6.12
< dilinger> the best solution, imo, is to have udev 0.5x and 0.62 allowed
to be installed in parallel, and have a wrapper script that determines which
to use when it’s run
< wildfire> hmm, dilinger, that does sound pretty clean
< Md> dilinger: the configuration syntax is subtly different too. this is
not really possible
< Md> wildfire: yes, until you start looking at how to implement it 
< dilinger> Md: sure it is; /etc/udev05x for the old version or something
< dilinger> /etc/udev for the new version
< wildfire> md, but that’s someone else problem ;-)
< Md> dilinger: keeping them in sync is hell
< dilinger> no kidding, but that’s what maintaining stuff like this requires
< Md> so far, it appears to be too much complex to be justified
< Md> if upgrades will happen to be more complex than we currently know then
I will reconsider this
< dilinger> are you kidding?  i think the number of people whose systems
are breaking is pretty good justification
< Md> dilinger: only because the package currently is not refusing to run
on older kernels
< idnar> Md: but if the package fails to run, isn’t that likely to cause
breakage too, since your /dev won’t look like it normally does?
< Md> idnar: it will refuse to be installed or upgraded, like it’s currently
happening if you are using a kernel < 2.6.8
< dilinger> Md: what about doing something insane w/ devfs/
< dilinger> and devfsd
< Md> dilinger: ?
< idnar> Md: ah
< dilinger> depend upon devfsd, if the kernel is older than 2.6.12, have it
mount devfs over /dev and run devfsd instead of runing udev
< Md> different configuration syntax, different semantics, no HAL/hotplug
support. basically, I can’t see why you could think about this
< dilinger> because it would allow things to *work*
< dilinger> even if it doesn’t have the same config syntax
< dilinger> it could spit out a big warning upon startup
< idnar> suddenly switching the user to devfs would likely cause all sorts
of unknown breakage
< Md> if the kernel is older than 2.6.12 people will not be able to install
a newer udev, so this is not relevant
< Md> please try to look at the whole picture
< dilinger> people are going to want to reboot into older kernels and have
their /dev in a sane state
< dilinger> the running kernel isn’t the only one they may be using
< Clint> yeah, i’m not using the running kernel
< Md> dilinger: then udev will automatically disable itself. the current
experience shows that users are not bothered by this
< dilinger> Clint: quiet over there :P
< dilinger> Md: the user experiences around here don’t seem to match what
you’re saying, otherwise i wouldn’t even be mentioning it
< Md> again, this is not how future versions will work
< dilinger> let me put it another way
< dilinger> it would be a very good idea to future proof udev against such
incompatabilities now
< Md> tell greg k-h, now me :-)
< dilinger> because i’m sure things will break again
< Md> anyway, you persuaded me. I will upload right now an updated package
which refuses to be installed with old kernels
< Md>   * Kernels older than 2.6.12 are not supported anymore.
< Md>     If detected, the package will refuse to be installed.
< Md>     If the running kernel is downgraded after the package has been
< Md>     installed udev will disable itself at boot time.
< Sesse> Md: whoa
< joshk> that’s ridiculously stupid if you as me
< Md> this is what was going to happen in a few releases anyway
< Clint> joshk: coredump immediately
< Md> BTW, I suggest that concerned people read this before continuing
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=12236847
< joshk> breaking support for anything but the very latest kernel (which
isn’t even in debian yet!) is dumb. you break everyone’s desktop because
hal stops working
< joshk> (one particular example)
< Md> joshk: people can keep the old udev until the upgrade, nothing breaks
< Sesse> Md: *g*
< joshk> don’t grin at Md, it makes him think we’re in agreement

Audioscrobbler is an awesome service that tracks what you’re listening to, makes that play history public and generates statistics, suggestions, and links to other people with similar tastes to yours. It’s got growing pains, certainly: It’s a big ol’ Java servlet, and the server admin needed to edit and recompile the servlet to add a new client ID for my “QLScrobbler” plug-in for Quod Libet. Apparently there are some isolated cases of database corruption as well. But all in all, it’s a useful concept, and it wins on that merit. This is all a big plug for the Debian Developers user group on Audioscrobbler, which, once more than 10 members join, will get charts generated so people can see what developers listen to while breaking their favorite packages.

The following is a repost from my old blog, originally written one year ago. As I start to write this, it’s the last minute of my country’s 87th birthday (the Finnish Independence Day). It got me thinking about nation-states and independence and whatnot. And I came to a threefold conclusion: First, there is some value in independence. Getting rid of the status of a Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia was certainly a good step for Finland, in light of the rough road the Russians themselves have since travelled. For the same reason, the two wars Finland fought against the USSR were quite worthwhile. Similarly, if Finland were to be threatened by a neighbour again, armed defense would certainly be justifiable. Second, there is no intrinsic value in independence. If a humanly life (including freedom and local government) can be guaranteed even if there is no Finnish state in itself, I see no reason to hold on to the old-fashioned concept of a nation state. Third, I am in favour, as a long-term goal, of a world government. Of course, a single government becomes a single point of failure in case of a coup, for example, but if the global state is arranged properly, the danger of a successful coup is minimal. On the other hand, a world government is in far better position to institute necessary policies to combat the global problems of poverty, climate change and other such issues than the current system of competing and cooperating nation-states. In the current system, the big issues are easily put aside in name of local opportunism. Finland is by no means immune to that problem. The great crises of the 20th Century were its devastating wars. Fortunately, we have overcome them to a sufficient degree. The great crisis of the 21st Century is not terrorism – though it is a symptom. The great crisis is caused by the limits of growth, and we are already feeling quite concretely the nearness of those limits. If something is not done, our current civilization will crash spectacularly. The human race will probably survive – but do we really want to live through another Dark Age? Long Live the Earth!

Martin- ric Racine asked in the comments to my previous mini-essay on crime-related damage compensation about how immaterial losses, such as pain and suffering, are given monetary value in court. In this essay, which is again part of my essay series on Finnish criminal justice, I will try and sketch an answer. As usual, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, and this is not an exhaustive treatise on the subject. Finnish law is very vague about how immaterial damage is compensated. It basically only gives a list of the forms of immaterial loss for which compensation can be ordered by a court. The main categories related to physical injuries are kipu ja s rky (usually translated somewhat inaccurately as pain and suffering) and pysyv haitta (permanent handicap). Kipu refers to the instant pain suffered when the injury is created, and s rky refers to the longer-term but not permanent pain present after the kipu has ended until the injury is healed. A new act of parliament will amend this at new year, specifying these in greater detail. It amends the existing Damage Compensation Act by defining a list of things that are to be given special weight when measuring the monetary value of personal damage. For pain and suffering, those things are the type of the injury, the type and duration of medical treatment it required, and how long the pain and suffering lasted or is expected to last. For permanent handicap, however, the list is a little different: the type and extent of the injury, and the age of the injured person at the time of injury. This is basically just writing out the existing legal praxis. There is currently no specific standard against which the courts compare individual cases. However, since one is desperately needed, the courts generally use a substitute. There is a governmental board whose job is to set a standard monetary valuation for different types of injuries sustained in traffic accidents. That standard is intended to be used by insurance companies, but in practice, courts also use them as a guide when considering injuries caused by criminal acts. In relation to pain and suffering, the standard categorizes injuries as follows:

Category A (petty injury)

will heal fully leaving no marks in a week or two, requires no hospitalization, causes at most two weeks’ inability to work – scratched skin, small cut, minor bruises etc.

Category B1 (minor injury)

requires no resuscitation nor intensive care, requires up to a week of hospitalization without surgery, causes at most two months’ inability to work, causes only insignificant permanent disability – significant bruising, loss of few teeth, simple bone fractures etc.

Category B2 (medium injury)

may require resuscitation but not intensive care, requires one to three weeks of hospitalization, no complications in treatment, no need for reconstructive surgery in later care, causes at most seven months’ inability to work, causes only minor permanent disability – simple fractures of the long bones, fractures of facial bones, etc.

-Category C1 (major injury)

requires cardiovascular or pulmonary resuscitation, requires short-term respirator use or tracheostomy, in the case of a limb injury, requires demanding surgery, requires reconstructive surgery in later care, requires up to eight weeks of hospitalization, causes up to eight months of inability to work, causes significant permanent disability – loss of all teeth, complicated bone fractures etc.

Category C2 (especially major injury)

requires long-term mechanical respiration or resuscitation, major complications in treatment, requires extensive surgery, requires hospitalization for longer than eight weeks, causes a year of inability to work, causes major permanent disability – loss of limb, significant brain damage, loss of fertility, severe burns etc.

Category C3 (extraordinary injury)

extraordinary complications in treatment, long-term hospitalization, causes complete disability, causes helplessness – extreme brain damage causing dementia, loss of both upper limbs or both lower limbs, causes permanent pain, permanent quadriplegia, causes complete blindness

As you can see, all categories are described both by the treatment required and by listing sample injuries. These descriptions are complementary, and not identical. In categories A and B, the treatment-based descriptions are conjunctive (all requirements must apply), and in C, they are disjunctive (at least one must apply). I did not translate the descriptions completely; see the Finnish original source if you need more detail. The traffic injury standard currently specifies the following monetary values for each category:

Category	Compensation
A	see below
B1	200–1,000
B2	1,000–2,900
C1	2,900–7,300
C2	7,300–16,700
C3	at least 16,700

Due to a quirk in the traffic injury ccompensation system, Category A is not compensated in the case of traffic injuries. This does not apply in criminal cases, where Category A is usually taken as “up to 200 ”. Of course, the specifics of the case will sometimes require departing from this standard in criminal cases (the aggravation in the crime often is taken as a reason to up the monetary damage estimate). Permanent damage is similarly handled by courts by referring to the standard set for the statutory employee’s accidental injury insurances (see the Finnish sources 1 and 2 for details). I already mentioned above a new act of parliament. That act, which will enter into force January 1, 2006, creates a new Personal Damage Advisory Board (henkil vahinkoasiain neuvottelukunta), which will follow legal praxis and give recommendations, much like the above-described standard, which courts and other instances deciding on compensation for personal damage can take as a base standard against which individual cases can be measured. The advisory board’s recommendations are likely to supplant the traffic damage standard described above in the future.