Michael Davies recently blogged that all developers should have big screens. This news has been around for a while, the most publicity for the idea came from Microsoft Research where they did a study showing that for certain tasks a 50% performance increase could be gained from a larger monitor.

If you consider that a good software developer will get paid about $100K and it's widely regarded that in a corporate environment the entire costs for a worker (including management, office space, etc) is double their base salary then you consider each developer to be worth $200K per annum. Therefore larger and more monitors could potentially give a benefit in excess of $100K per annum (we assume that the value provided by the developer is greater than their salary - apart from the dot-com boom that's usually the case).

It's quite obvious that you can get a really great monitor configuration for significantly less than $100K and that it will remain quite current for significantly more than a year (monitor technology advances comparatively slowly so a good monitor should last at least four years).

Some time ago I researched this matter for a client. I convinced all the managers in my area, I convinced a bunch of colleagues to buy bigger monitors for their homes (and bought one myself), but unfortunately senior management saw it as a waste of money. I was trying to convince them that people who were being paid >$100,000 should be each assigned a $400 monitor. Sadly they believed that spending the equivalent of less than a day's wages per employee was not justified.

If I was in a management position I would allocate an amount of money for each developer to spend on hardware or conferences at their own discretion. I would make that amont of money a percentage of the salary of each employee, and I would also allow them to assign some of their share to a colleague if they had a good reason for it (EG if a new hire needed something expensive that would exceed their budget for the first year). I think that people who are good programmers are in the best position to judge what can best be done to improve their own productivity, and that allowing them to make their own choices is good for morale.

On a more technical level I have a problem with getting a big monitor. I do most of my work on a laptop because I travel a lot. I don't travel as much as I did while living in Europe but still do a lot of coding in many strange places. I started writing my Postal benchmark in the hotel restaurant of a Bastion hotel in Utrecht during one of the worst recorded storms in Europe (the restaurant had huge windows and it was inspirational for coding). I wrote the first version of my ZCAV benchmark in Denver airport while waiting for a friend.

What I need is a good way of moving open windows from my laptop to a big external display and then back again. I don't want to logout before moving my machine. With a Macintosh this is quite possible (I'm using a OS/X machine while working for a client and the only thing that has impressed me is the monitor support). With Linux things aren't so easy, it's supposed to be possible but I haven't heard any unqualified success stories yet.

I guess I could try setting up XDMCP between my laptop and a desktop machine with some big displays and logout before moving.

Any suggestions?

I used to live in Norfolk, so Norwich Evening News: Was top cyclist killed by driver asleep at the wheel? (Updates: EDP: Death crash trial hears of "most viable explanation" and EDP: Driver guilty of causing cyclist's death ) and Norwich Evening News: Cyclist hit by bus on A47 are rather worrying. Weston super Mare Weston Mercury: Town centre havoc reports that Wales and West Utilities will be digging up Orchard Street followed by Alexandra Parade, Regent Street, Walliscote Road, High Street and Knightstone Road over 16 weeks from 8 January, and also

"Three months worth of work to remove the central reservation and add a filter lane to Herluin Way is also due to start on the same day [...] Uphill Road South in Uphill is closing on January 9 for six weeks as Wessex Water repairs the highway's sewer. [...] Winters Lane in Redhill is shutting for two months while a new sewer is put in."

Pipe works seldom seem to take up the full width of the road and the Herluin Way cycle track only crosses Herluin Way at a few points. Will these roads be kept open for cycling? They should be. All of these seem to be starting just before next week's Cycle Forum (7pm Wednesday 10 January at Worle Campus, press release ). Interesting new year present.

I need to reconsider my current way to do IRC.

• My main computer is a laptop, so I can’t leave my IRC client open all the time.
• More and more, I tend to ask stuff on IRC, then I have to leave, so I never get the chance to see the answer. Being able to stay connected all the time would be much easier.
• I’m currently using XChat, and would like to continue using it (ie: I’d prefer to avoid going back to irssi).
• Most of the time, I’m connected to two different networks (OFTC and Freenode).

• I tried to set up an IRC bouncer, but I had the impression that it was complex, and not very user-friendly. (Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I should have tried a different bouncer (which one?))
• I’ve considered running two clients: XChat for my “main client”, and irssi just for logging everything. But that’s not really optimal.

Which solution are you using? Should I really go back to using irssi? Any good example irssi configs somewhere? Update:

• Comments are now open (they were closed because of a broken WP plugin)
• I used to use screen+irssi, but then, I switched to xchat. I really like xchat, have written some custom scripts for it, and would prefer to continue to use it…
• The possible suggestions I already got are:
  • use xchat with irssi_proxy
  • use xchat with ctrlproxy (looks very nice, but RC buggy and not in etch)
  • use xchat with shroudbnc (or psybnc, or dircproxy)
  Update 2: Ok, due to all the praise of the screen+irssi solution, I’ll give it another try…!

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.

• I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
• For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
• Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
• On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
• In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!

Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.

(and I'm still catching up on my blogging backlog) So Sarah and I returned to Australia for two weeks at the end of November/start of December. The reason for the timing was my grandmother's 90th birthday, but we decided to spend 5 days on Heron Island for a belated honeymoon as well. We flew back with Qantas, who are always a pleasure to fly with internationally, directly to Sydney. I'm getting better at sleeping on that long-haul. We then flew domestically up to Brisbane on Saturday, after spending Friday in Sydney, checking out the Sydney Google office and catching up with as many friends and family as time permitted. Saturday was a bit of an "open house" at my parent's place for my grandmother's birthday. She now lives in Toowoomba, but lived in the Sandgate/Bracken Ridge area for the majority of her life, so it was easier for her to come down to Bracken Ridge, and for everyone to come around to my parent's place than for everyone to go up to Toowoomba to see her. I didn't keep count of how many people dropped in through the course of the day, but I'd hazard a guess at about 40 or 50. It was really good to see some relatives on my Mum's side of the family that I probably hadn't seen in nearly 10 years. It was also good to see my Aunty and Uncle and one of my cousins from Vanuatu (who is now in New Zealand), who I haven't seen for a while either. On Sunday, we went out for dinner with just a bunch of the more immediate family. On Monday we flew up to Gladstone, and then had a helicopter transfer out to Heron Island, where we stayed until Friday. Heron is a fantastic little island, and I highly recommend it if you want to relax and disconnect from the world for a while. It feels very isolated, there's no telephones in the rooms, and there's only really slow Internet access via a couple of coin operated kiosks. It's a really tiny island as well. Only about three kilometres in circumference. The snorkeling is absolutely fantastic. You can see so much marine life from straight off the beach. We also saw turtles coming up the beach to lay eggs in the mornings. I certainly felt very relaxed afterwards. Photos from the week are here. We had more time to spare on the way back, so we took the launch back to the mainland and then flew back to Brisbane for four days. Sarah and my sister organised a bit of a surprise dinner for my 30th birthday with a bunch of family and friends, which was a total surprise for me, and very nice of them. On Tuesday night we flew down to Canberra and stayed with our old neighbours and caught up with friends down there. I also spent a day racking and installing the new mirror.linux.org.au server, but wasn't able to cut over to it at that time. On Thursday, we drove off into the outback to find Alli and Rusty's new property, a 1000 acres near Braidwood. They really are living remote, but it sounds like they've got some very exciting plans for the place, and I look forward to checking out what they've done when we're next able to visit. Then on Friday morning, we drove out at an ungodly hour, headed back for Sydney, to fly out for San Francisco (via Los Angeles, unfortunately) again. I'm not sure when we'll be visiting Australia again. We're intending to get our respective parents over here to visit us during the year, this year, and not return for Christmas. I'm unable to attend linux.conf.au this year, but would like to go to Melbourne for it next year.

In a discussion on a mailing list, on a topic that isn't relevant to this log entry, someone wrote: "I just have expectations that if there is going to be progress in the [civil liberties/equality issue], that the 'Free' software world would be at the forefront of that effort". This is a common mistake. The thing that unites the free software developers, and the only thing that unites us, is that we make free software. Even though many of the us are liberal, or libertarian, or "leftist", or "green", or whatever you perceive as the common trait, it is wrong to assume all of us are. Some free software developers are very much "leftist", to the extent of being members of the communist party. Some are stout, Bush-voting Republicans. A couple are neo-Nazis. Some are worried about global warming; others are working full time to prove it isn't happening. ESR has a gun fetish, I'm nervous even of policemen carrying guns. All free software developers aren't even united in their opinions on matters that affect free software development directly. Some organize campaigns against software patents, others (although admittedly very few) apply for them. I'm a free software developer and the only thing about me you can deduce from that is that I develop free software.

Note: This post grew larger than originally intended. It drifted away from Vista to general rants about Microsoft and the content industry towards the end of the post, so just skip the rest if this is not of interest to you.
The latest thing I heard about Vista is that Microsoft bribes bloggers with Vista notebooks. As the article points out, this is plain wrong. Apart from crossing the line by not only giving away their own product to reviewers for free, but by actually providing an additional benefit (in the form of the notebook), they also did it wrong because - as the article on tech.blorge.com linked above points out - they don’t understand the way blogging “works”. Too many will be more or less angry because they didn’t get a free notebook (if anything at all).

In my opinion though, this is by far the least important mistake they made with Vista. All their content protection stuff is far worse. It basically does what current copy protection mechanisms already do, but to a much larger extend: Bother the legitimate users while users of pirated copies are uneffected. I don’t think they can avoid pirated copies for a minute. A friend already has a nice HD video player (HDDVD IIRC) and a nice HDCP capable TFT-display, both bought in december. Problem is that the HDCP protected connection resets every few minutes, causing a dropout in both video and sound for a few seconds each time. Seems HDCP compatible player and HDCP compatible display doesn’t necessarily mean that the two work together. Fortunately, in this case, there is some “secret” code you can enter on the players remote to disable HDCP completely. Of course, technically, this is not legal use, but if he didn’t use that hack, he wouldn’t be able to watch his legitimately bought video with his legitimate player and display. Given this problem, I can only shudder when thinking what will happen on Windows Vista with all those encrypted and signed communication channels (drive->memory->videocard->display, just to name the most obvious ones). And there is also the degradation of totally unrelated audio and video stuff while some “premium content” is played. Assume that I play some premium audio stuff. According to the hardware and driver specs for Vista, the availability of any premium content means that any non-encrypted channels need to be turned off or artificially degraded (like downsampling video from 1080p to VGA and upsampling it again since the display might be limited to only display 1080p). This is oh-so-stupid.
And there is also their EULA, as reviewed by Ed Foster. I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say that the EULA is the final nail in Vista’s coffin for me. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows for Workgroups came out (though I’ve used Linux on my machines since 1993 - and almost exclusively since 1998), but I won’t buy Vista, not even when it would be included with a new PC. By the way: This also most likely means that I won’t buy any HD video stuff at all, since the Vista content protection stuff was mostly dictated by the big Hollywood studios. Seems like I will be saving quite some money over the next years. (Which I actually need to do anyway.) Other interesting links regarding Vista:

• The Inquirer - Charlie Demerjian: Microsoft Vista is not an option
• The Register - Scott Granneman: Surprises inside Microsoft Vista’s EULA
• Juha Saarinen: DRM behind lack of Windows Vista drivers… and fear the new content protection
• Techworld.com - Chris Mellor: Vista crippled by content protection
• The Register - Andrew Orlowski: Vista’s Suicide Bomb: Who gets hurt?

I said they did it all wrong because they forgot that they are selling Windows not to the content industry but to the consumers. Sure, the consumers want to see what Microsoft calls premium content, but I’m also sure that they don’t want all that content protection nonsense Microsoft built into Vista for the sake of the content providers. They lost the balance between avoiding pirated copies (which I think the content protection stuff will have no big effect on) and bothering users of legitimate copies. Heck, I already use “pirate” copies of most of the (Windows-based) games I play because I don’t want to be bothered by their original-CD-checks, even though I own at least one legal copy of all the games I play. Would I need to download pirate copies of the HD movies I want to watch because I don’t want to be bothered by whatever side-effects VCP will have, even if I own legal copies of the same movies? Dear Microsoft, dear Content-Industry (TimeWarner, Disney, whoever), please re-think who you want to sell your content to. I already avoid DVDs which carry additional copy protection (apart from CSS), and if they were available at all, I would prefer to buy DVDs without even CSS. The same is true for CDs (except that they obviously don’t have CSS). Consequently, I’m likely to avoid buying HD videos which impose unpleasant restrictions on me, including those that disable the S/PDIF output of my player (no matter wether PC or standalone) since I paid a lot of money for decent HIFI equipment two years ago and I sure as hell won’t want to by new equipment within the next few years. Luckily, I didn’t yet buy any HD video gear, though my notebook, when equipped with a HDDVD or Blueray drive should be capable of playing HD video - if MS and the content industry wouldn’t impose stupid restrictions.

Happy New Year! Happy 2007!

And a really happy one!

After the cloud of ideas and subjects on the last post, giving the clear idea that I should keep this blog more up-to-date, here is an important note that is missing (including old news that I should had post but didn't, sorry for that). I'm aware that a few people are interested in how the Debian NM process evolves from person to person, on my last update on that topic, I told you that I was recommended to the DAM by my AM. Almost three months later (2006-11-18) Myon (Christoph Berg, Front Desk Member) couldn't find my final report, he pinged my AM and one week later everything was fine again and I got approved to the next step: DAMnation. On the Christmas' evening I got a nice gift from Joerg, DAM approval. Yesterday (2007-01-02) I got the nice e-mail with the subject: New Debian maintainer Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (Thanks to James Troup, aka, elmo). The entire process took me 8 months and 10 days. I would like to say thanks to everybody that helped me pass thru this experience: Otavio Salvador (my advocate and mentor), Christian Perrier and Luk Claes (Mentors and Uploaders), Clément Stenac (my AM), Christoph Berg (Front Desk), Joerg Jaspert and James Troup (DAMs). They are directly involved in my NM process, but they were not alone, thanks for every single person that helped me with tips and hints, that took some time to teach me and all the people behind different projects in Debian (I really start naming everybody but then I realize that it got very large for Planet): Debian Brasil, Debian Volatile (aba, zobel, sgran), Release Team, Debian Women, Debian i18n Task Force and Debian l10n Brazilian Portuguese, Debian Weekly News Team, buildd.net project, Alioth admins and staff, Debian Installer Team, Debian Kernel Team, Debian Mentors, DebConf Team, OFTC Staff, Debian QA Team, Debian Doc Team, Debian WWW Team, Debian Admin Team (DSA)! People, you know who you are, thank you VERY much! You can check my Status Page to see more details about my NM process and more information about the acronyms used on this post. Now, Brazil has 17 Debian Developers (not counting the one that already retired). :-)

Sven Mueller commented:

"There is a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up. Use pbuilder (w/ or w/o the pdebuild "frontend"). I had refrained from setting up pbuilder for quite a while, and was amazed how easy it was when I eventually did. The only "problem" is that you probably want to make sure that at least "debian/rules clean" works even under Debian/stable. But I personally like to keep my packages buildable under stable anyway (since I usually use backports of them on production systems)."

I tried pbuilder at first and it failed because of the aforementioned debootstrap stable/unstable difference. After I read up on debootstrap, I didn't really see what pbuilder added to the system besides more tarball processing, so I didn't bother trying it again after debootstrap worked. Am I missing out on anything important? Mark Brown commented:

"pbuilder provides management of the chroot environments (you can have several set up and it'll let you choose between and update them) and a convenient front end for building packages in a chroot (you can just point it at a package and say "go build this in a chroot")."

I'm probably being dense, but I still don't see a benefit. A chroot is more-or-less just a tree on the disk so I can have several set up anyway, updating them is just running update inside the chroot and I just mv the package into the chroot and say "go in that chroot and build this". Maybe pbuilder just isn't beneficial for me.

For the fifth time in a row, I started yet another year with 5k race by participating in the 22th New Year's Day 5k at the lakefront. The race had decent conditions. Chicago is currently having unusually mild weather, which is an extra bonus. It was well over 50 degrees yesterday, but a little cooler around fourty this morning, and unfortunately overcast. And luckily fairly little wind as it can be unplesant at the lake. Following some mild training runs both Saturday and Sunday, I took it relatively easy and finished around 20:15 or 20:20 -- I forgot to stop the Garmin at the finish, and the official results are not yet published. Not a bad time given that I haven't really trained since the last marathon.

I have just been installing a Xen domU on Debian Etch. I'll blog about installing dom0 later when I have a test system that I can re-install on (my production Xen machines have the dom0 set up already). The following documents a basic Xen domU (virtual machine) installation that has an IP address in the 10.0.0.0/8 private network address space and masquerades outbound network data. It is as general as possible.

lvcreate -n xen1 -L 2G /dev/vg

Firstly use the above command to create a block device for the domU, this can be a regular file but a LVM block device gives better performance. The above command is for a LV named xen1 on an LVM Volume Group named vg.

mke2fs -j /dev/vg/xen1

Then create the filesystem with the above command.

mount /dev/vg/xen1 /mnt/tmp
mount -o loop /tmp/debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso /mnt/cd
cd /mnt/tmp
debootstrap etch . file:///mnt/cd/
chroot . bin/bash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/hosts /etc/hostname
apt-get update
apt-get install libc6-xen linux-image-xen-686 openssh-server
apt-get dist-upgrade

Then perform the basic Debian install with the above commands. Make sure that you change to the correct directory before running the debootstrap command. The /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname files need to be edited to have the correct contents for the Xen image (the default is an empty /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname has the name of the parent machine). The file /etc/apt/sources.list needs to have the appropriate configuration for the version of Debian you use and for your preferred mirror. libc6-xen is needed to stop a large number of kernel warning messages on boot. It's a little bit of work before you get the virtual machine working on the network so it's best to do these commands (and other package installs) before the following steps. After the above type exit to leave the chroot and run umount /mnt/tmp.

lvcreate -n xen1-swap -L 128M /dev/vg
mkswap /dev/vg/xen1-swap

Create a swap device with the above commands.

auto xenbr0
iface xenbr0 inet static
pre-up brctl addbr xenbr0
post-down brctl delbr xenbr0
post-up iptables -t nat -F
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 10.1.0.0/24 -j MASQUERADE
address 10.1.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
bridge_fd 0
bridge_hello 0
bridge_stp off

Add the above to /etc/network/interfaces and use the command ifup xenbr0 to enable it. Note that this masquerades all outbound data from the machine that has a source address in the 10.1.0.0/24 range.

net.ipv4.conf.default.forwarding=1

Put the above in /etc/sysctl.conf, run sysctl -p and echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/forwarding to enable it.

cp /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-3-xen-686 /boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz

Set up an initial initrd (actually initramfs) for the domU with a command such as the above. Once the Xen domU is working you can create the initrd from within it which gives a smaller image.

kernel = "/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-xen-686"
ramdisk = "/boot/xen-initrd-18-3.gz"
memory = 64
name = "xen1"
vif = [ '' ]
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1,hda,w', 'phy:/dev/vg/xen1-swap,hdb,w' ]
root = "/dev/hda ro"
extra = "2 selinux=1 enforcing=0"

The above is a sample Xen config file that can go in /etc/xen/xen1. Note that this will discover an appropriate bridge device by default, if you only plan to have one bridge then it's quite safe, if you want multiple bridges then things will be a little more complex. Also note that there are two block devices created as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb, obviously if we wanted to have a dozen block devices then we would want to make them separate partitions with a virtual partition table. But in most cases a domU will be a simple install and won't need more than two block devices.

xm create -c xen1

Now start the Xen domU with the above command. The -c option means to take the Xen console (use ^] to detach). After that you can login as root at the Xen console with no password, now is a good time to set the password.

Run the command apt-get install udev, this could not be done in the chroot before as it might mess up the dom0 environment. Edit /etc/inittab and disable gettys on tty2 to tty6, I don't know if it's possible to use them (the default and only option for xen console commands is tty1) and in any case you would not want 6, saving a few getty processes will save some memory.

Now you should have a basically functional Xen domU. Of course a pre-requisite for this is having a machine with a working dom0 installation. But the dom0 part is easier (and I will document it in a future blog post).

I've been using Rails for about a year, and I am, in general, quite satisfied. It really is a big step forward in terms of web programming, and I've found the whole experience very enjoyable. In a year I've managed to crank out a number of sites in my spare time (in between various other activities such as the occasional bike ride and Hecl hacking):

• linuxsi.com - a site in Italian helping people to locate Linux-friendly computer retailers.
• builder.hecl.org - lets you create Hecl mobile phone applications from your web browser.
• libreriaminerva.it - a small bookstore in the center of Padova, specializing in rare and antique books and prints.
• stufftodo.dedasys.com - my own vision of an ajaxy todo list that plays nicely in a business environment, where it's important to be able to share tasks.

As promised, one of my goals is to shift a bit towards producing open source software as a side effect of revenue generating work. The first small result of that is the on_idle plugin I packaged up for Rails. It's the code that Stuff To Do uses to tell whether people are active or not. Installing it should be as simple as:

./script/plugin install http://svn.dedasys.com/public/on_idle

It's just a few lines of Javascript code that are wrapped up in a way that makes it trivial to use from Rails views:

def on_idle(timeout, options, wakeoptions)
<%= on_idle(600,  :url =>   :action => 'notify_idle'  ,
                  :url =>   :action => 'notify_wake'  ) %>

• timeout: the number of seconds before the user is considered 'timed out'.
• options: the action to perform when the user goes idle.
• wakeoptions: what to do when the user 'wakes up'.

Let me know if there is anything I should fix/change/improve. If this plugin works out, I will post, in short order, a plugin that improves the default Rails drag and drop functionality.

I recently had an issue where a remote host would frequently run out of memory after a number of processes had been invoked from remote. I looked in the wrong direction first, but finally found out that each process invocation leaves two sshd processes hanging around, which are eventually exhausting the memory on the box. Next step was finding out what happened for the sshd processes not to properly terminate. Eventually, I remembered that the incoming ssh connections were not invoked directly, but via a third host with “proxycommand ssh other-host socket %h %p”. Looking on other-host quickly showed a number of socket processes being around, and killing them made the sshds on the low-memory host vanish as well. Short-term remedy was therefore to set ClientAliveInterval in the low-memory host’s sshd configuration. I then searched for reasons why ClientAliveInterval is not set by default at least in Debian’s sshd configuration. I didn’t find a reason and proceeded to file a wishlist bug request againnst openesh-server for this option to be set by default. Before filing this bug, I routinely visited the BTS, just to find out that the bug was already filed. By me. One year and 285 days ago. And that the openssh maintainer(s) didn’t even bother to reply to it yet. Guys, this is a textbook example how to discourage people from filing Bugs against your packages. Please, give them at least the appreciation of a short ACK if you don’t get around to fixing the bugs in reasonably short time. Having a bug rot away uncommented and unfixed in the BTS for two years is simpy not acceptable. Yes, that goes even for a wishlist bug.

In my previous work as a sys-admin I have worked for a number of companies that depend heavily on free software. If you use a commercially supported distribution such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux then you get high quality technical support (much higher than you expect from closed-source companies), but this still doesn't provide as much as you might desire as it is reactive support (once you notice a problem you report it). Red Hat has a Technical Account Manager offering that provides a higher level of support and there is also a Professional Services organization that can provide customised versions of the software. But the TAM and GPS offerings are mostly aimed at the larger customers (they are quite expensive).

It seems to me that a viable option for companies with smaller budgets is to have an employee dedicated to enhancing free software and getting changes accepted upstream. For a company that has a team of 5+ sys-admins the cost of a developer dedicated to such software development tasks should be saved many times over by the greater productivity of the sys-admins and the greater reliability of the servers.

This is not to criticise commercial offerings such as Red Hat's TAM and GPS services, a dedicated free software developer could work with the Red Hat TAM and GPS people thus allowing the company to get the most value for money from the Red Hat consultants.

If using a free distribution such as Debian the case for a dedicated liason with the free software community is even stronger, as there is no formal support organization that compares to the Red Hat support (there are a variety of small companies that provide commercial support, but I am not aware of a 24*7 help desk or anything similar). If you have someone employed full-time as a free software developer then they can provide most of your support. It would probably make sense for a company that has mission critical servers running Debian to employ a Debian developer, a large number of Debian developers already work as sys-admins and finding one who is looking for a new job should not be difficult. There are more companies that would benefit from having DDs as employees than there are DDs, this isn't an obstacle to hiring them as most hiring managers don't realise the technical issues involved.

This is not to say that a company which can't hire a DD should use a different distribution, merely that their operations will not be as efficient as they might be.

The simple answer is, you can't. I didn't want cats while we were here in the US. And yet, we have three of them. We made the decision not to take our current cat with us from Australia, because of the length of the journey, and the fact that we were planning on being away a lot travelling, and because of the length of time she'd have to stay in quarantine when we returned to Australia. Then along came Stumpy, a cat we were supposed to be temporarily fostering, because she was hit by a car, had a broken pelvis and lost her tail. She was all sweet while she was convalescing, and Sarah really wanted to adopt her, so I caved in. Stumpy was probably less than a year old, so still at the boisterous kitten age, and sure enough, she recovered, and became a boisterous kitten again. To the point where she was so energetic, she needed a little friend to wear her out, and I was asked if we could get a second cat, and since I seem to have problems saying no to anything (but heck, I was getting attacked in bed by her in the middle of the night as well), along came Lily (wow, Sarah really needs to spot breaking all the image links in her blog posts). Sarah was taking Lily back to the shelter we adopted her from, for her shots, and was asked if she'd foster a tiny 4 week old kitten, that was going to have to be euthanized if a foster home wasn't found for her. We still have Smudge today, months later, technically still as a foster, but we intend to adopt her as well, because she's such a sweet little kitten, and of the three, she's the most affectionate towards me. Call this one "my" cat. Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we've got people coming round for dinner (it's been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried. After our last trip away, the cats got sufficiently bored that Stumpy thought chewing on laptop power adapter cables would be fun. My laptop no longer charges. (I'd just had said power adapter replaced under warranty not two weeks previously). Don't get me wrong, I love cats, I just so didn't want them right now, and especially right now, I'm wishing I'd stuck to my guns on that one. I think I'd have rather brought LC over from Australia, and not have her become obese by the new owner we found for her, than have so much of our stuff be destroyed by three kittens in a small townhouse that we're away from too often to give them the attention they need as kittens. Sigh.

I spent some time playing with haskell over the past month or so. One of the most incredible things about it is the wonderful community that has sprung up around the language. The haskell homepage is a treasure trove of information, excited users throw all sorts of new articles at reddit every day, and the #haskell channel is exactly what you want out of an irc channel. A nice bonus for Debian types is the incredibly close ties the haskell community has with our distro.

Comparing this to Debian is instructive. The haskell community seems to be having a ton of fun using their language. The sense in #debian, or from whatever Debian tutorials I read, is that people aren't using their system to have fun any more. The air of joy and occasional whimsy that traces its way through #haskell (and also very strongly through the ruby community) seems to be somewhat surpressed in Debian, as though we're so big and cool and technically competent that we don't have time for frivolity. It's hard to have fun and create a warm and inviting community with this kind of attitude. Turf wars, protocol, and politics only compound the problem.

Doing something fun for its own sake should be a part of the Debian experience the same way that it's inherently part of the free software experience. It's way too easy to lose that in the mountain of packages, emails, and bug reports. Using Debian makes me happy, and I want to try and let that spirit out to play a little more.

While reading the discussion of Vista security on Bruce Schneier's blog it occurred to me that comparing the issues of DRM that face MS with the issues faced by SE Linux developers provides some benefits.

SE Linux is designed to enable the owner of a computer to effectively enforce security policies to protect their system integrity and the confidentiality of their data. Some of the SE Linux users (military users) use all the available features, but most people only use the targeted policy which provides a sub-set of the system integrity and data confidentiality protections that are available to give a greater ease of use.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with the SE Linux targeted policy enabled by default. This policy is not something that most users notice. The main program that is commonly used which might have an issue with the default SE Linux policy is Apache. Fedora and RHEL systems that do not run Apache (which is most of them) can run SE Linux with almost no costs.

setsebool -P httpd_disable_trans 1
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

It seems clear to me that there is no good reason for disabling SE Linux by default. There are reasons for running a particular daemon in the unconfined_t domain via the FOO_disable_trans boolean. EG to run Apache without restrictions you would type the above commands.

In spite of the SE Linux targeted policy being so easy to use, the fact that it prevents certain daemon compromises from allowing immediate control of the system, and also prevents some kernel exploits from working, there are still some people who turn it off when installing Fedora and RHEL systems and advise others to do so.

Given this great fear of some people to use a technology that is specifically designed for their own benefit I find it difficult to imagine that any users will be inclined to accept the MS DRM technology that is specifically designed to go against their interests.

ESR claims that the 64bit transition is the critical period for Linux to move on the desktop. While he makes many interesting observations I don't find his argument convincing. Firstly current P4 CPUs with PAE can handle significantly more than 4G of RAM (64G is possible now). Secondly it's quite possible to run a 64bit kernel with 32bit applications, this means that you can use a 64bit kernel to access >64G of RAM with each 32bit application getting direct access to something slightly less than 4G of virtual memory. As ESR's point seems based on total system memory the 4G per application doesn't seem to be an issue. As an aside the only applications I've used which could benefit from >4G are database servers (in the broadest interpretation - consider an LDAP server as a database) and JVM environments. Again it would not be difficult to ship an OS with mostly 32bit code that has a 64bit kernel, JVM, and database servers.

I hope that Vista will be a good opportunity for mass transition to Linux. Vista offers little that users desire, many things that will hurt them, and is expensive too!

With Vista you pay more for the OS and more for the hardware (Vista has the usual excessive Windows hardware requirements plus the extra hardware for TPM encryption) without providing anything substantial in return.

What I want to see next is support for Security Enhanced X to protect desktop environments against hostile X clients. This will make a significant difference to the security of Linux desktop environments and provide another significant benefit for choosing Linux over Windows. While MS is spending their effort in making their OS act against the best interests of the users we will keep making Linux enforce the access controls that users need to protect their systems. Hopefully Linux users will choose to use SE-X, but if they don't they are given the freedom to make that choice - unlike the poor sods who use Windows.

Since I have been having a digital camera since a few weeks now, I've had a need for an application to manage my pictures. The two applications that people have pointed me to are f-spot and digiKam, which also seem to be the most popular applications in this category for Linux. Since I use neither KDE nor GNOME as my user interface, it doesn't matter much to me which I install; so I've tried them both. Their feature set is quite different; unfortunately, though, they both have some features which the other doesn't, which makes choosing for one or the other rather hard. Since their on-disk format is rather different, it's impossible to use them both at the same time—at least not if I don't want to enter commentary and tags each and every time; so I'll have to choose one or the other based on their features. Since that requires me to actually compare them, I thought I might as well make a blog post out of that. Note, though, that this comparison is in no way intended to be complete; it only compares those features which I really care about. Features digiKam

• Stores pictures in albums; these albums can be created hierarchically, and are created on disk as the directory lay-out in which to store pictures. One picture can be chosen as an example picture per album.
• Pictures can have tags, comments, and a score (on a scale of one to five stars) applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tagset is empty. Tags can be made to have icons that are otherwise available to KDE attached to them, to make them more immediately visually recognizable, but selecting pictures to fulfill that function seems impossible.
• Has an interface to manage pictures in gallery and gallery 2; it can view, add, and remove pictures in that gallery.
• The selector dialog which is used to upload pictures is rather spartanic; it allows one to select pictures by filename and by album; pictures aren't even shown before upload (bug filed).
• Pictures can be filtered by tag, album, or date; I haven't been able to find an interface to filter pictures by score (it is possible to sort them by score in any view, though).
• A KDE application, so written in C++, which is a compiled language; i.e., rather fast.

F-spot

• Does not know the concept of albums
• Pictures can have tags and comments applied to them. Tags can be created hierarchically; the default tag set contains (amongst others) People, Places, and Events, suggesting that f-spot encourages the use of tags where Albums would be used in the case of digiKam. Tags can have icons which are otherwise available to gnome selected as their icon, or one can select a picture to fulfill that function (in fact, it selects the first picture which receives a tag to do that by default)
• Does not know the concept of scoring; instead, the default tagset contains a tag Favourites, suggesting a scoring system with a binary scale.
• Uploading pictures can be done by selecting them, and choosing the right option in the menu system. As a result, all filtering options otherwise available can be used to select which pictures to export (just filter the view, then select all pictures in the view).
• Uploading pictures will optionally also export comments that were applied to it.
• Since it does not know the concept of albums, pictures cannot be stored in a one-directory-per-album lay-out. Instead, pictures are stored in a one-directory-per-day layout, using a yyyy/mm/dd format. Unfortunately, this also means that no picture metadata (tags, comments) is easily available to command-line applications.
• Apart from the ability to upload pictures to gallery or gallery 2, does not interface with it in any way; gallery is a write-only storage medium to f-spot.
• Written for mono, a system that requires a runtime environment to translate instructions at runtime from some sort of virtual machine code, and which uses garbage collection all over; i.e., rather slow, especially after you've been using it for a while.

My opinion After having used f-spot for a few weeks before I tried digiKam, I have to be honest and say that I don't like the concept of albums. They do not add value; everything they allow you to express can equally well be expressed with tags. Additionally, one can categorize a picture in only one album, whereas it's possible to categorize pictures in as many tags as you would want. Just creating one album which contains all my pictures, with tagging used for categorizing, doesn't help either; that way, digiKam would store all my pictures in a single flat directory, which would become problematic when the number in the picture filenames wraps around. I do love the scoring thing in digiKam. A favourites tag just doesn't cut it; and creating five tags for scoring would make things like find all pictures that have a score of three or above rather cumbersome, and sort by score outright impossible. However, the fact that it's not possible to filter by score makes it all rather useless. The export to gallery function in digiKam is horrible. I have to select my pictures blindly; none of the metadata which I tack on them can be used to help select which pictures I want. Workaround: use whatever filtering is available to select the right pictures and add them to a temporary album from which I then upload all pictures, but that's silly (and requires disk space for no good reason). Additionally, there seems to be a bug in the interface, which means that I have to babysit an upload (with no workaround). And I can't even view my pictures to spend the time waiting. Bah. F-spot isn't without problems of its own. Due to a bug in mono, it crashes rather often on my PowerPC laptop. When that happens, it can't be restarted until the X server is restarted. Workaround: use Xnest, but that makes it impossible to view pictures in full-screen mode. Also, since f-spot is a GNOME application, its options dialog is as helpful as a pair of soccer shoes when you're out swimming. No surprises there. Conclusion Which one do I prefer? I'm not sure. The digiKam upload interface is positively annoying, especially the bug which requires me to click continue after every picture. For that alone, I might ditch it. On the other hand, it has a slew of interesting features (the scoring, to name one) that f-spot lacks, and that pull me more towards digiKam. I guess I'll have to give it a few days of thought. But hey, at least I know where I stand now.

We had a great day on the coast yesterday, just the three of us -- Maj, me, and Amita June. We drove over Highway 92 from my parents' place in Los Altos Hills, a pretty steep and winding highway, down to Half Moon Bay on the peninsula's coastline. We were going to head up to Montara Beach, one of my favorite places in the Bay Area, but it's a bit of a drive and we had plans to be back in Mountain View for dinner. So instead we turned off at the nearest coastal access -- Venice Beach, right in HMB -- and parked for a little beach time. Unfortunately, the strong winds and storms that we've had in the Bay Area this week have also caused higher-than-normal surf. We couldn't actually get to the beach from our parking lot -- Frenchman's Creek was blocking the staircase down to the sand. We think it might have been diverted by the high surf and winds. Anyways, we had to walk about 20 minutes out of the way to actually get down to the beach. Which was, of course, fantastic. I don't think there's anything quite like a Costanoan beach on a December day. The Bay Area's Pacific coast is quite unfairly ignored by most visitors, but a drive down scenic Highway 1 from SF to Santa Cruz can give a really good idea of what most of coastal Northern California is like -- from Santa Barbara up to Eureka. Venice Beach has nice yellow sand, Amita June loved running through the sand in bare feet. We chased seagulls (Amita tried to talk chicken-language to them: "bok bok bok!") and kicked around a soccer ball we'd brought. The surf has been exceptionally high, and it was probably pretty reckless to do, but the tide was going out, so we took off our shoes and dipped our feet in at the top of the sand. Amita loved seeing the waves come in, and running away when they got close. After a lot of playing and a little bit of a tantrum when we decided to leave, we all headed to lunch at the Distillery in Moss Beach. The Distillery is a California historical site -- an old speakeasy, built on the peninsula's coast in the 1920s when Canadian rum-runners would drop off their wares under these remote cliffs. It's kind of hard to find -- down some teensy residential streets on the ocean cliffs -- but it's a local landmark. The view was excellent and the food was great -- I had a big tub of steamers, and Maj had a really good plate of seaweed-wrapped prawns. The only problem was the wait -- we got there just as the lunch rush was starting, and didn't leave until after 3PM. That would have been nice for a romantic lunch for two, but with a one-year-old you're on a pretty tight schedule. Back over the Coast Range and down again to the introspective Bay, we took long naps then headed over to brother Andy's house for turkey soup and some family time. I dunno if there's any kind of tired like sun-and-wind tired from the beach. tags: beach half moon bay maj moss beach amitajune distillery bay area