Search Results: "ana"

27 March 2006

Anand Kumria: What comes around, comes around again.

Craige, it might be the first time that the exhibition has run under the Linux World Expo banner, but I recall an earlier one after the last linux.conf.au in Sydney. Indeed, a bit of Yahoo!ing reveals this from the Internet Archive, linuxexpo.com.au and the front page. It looks like I might have been there too at the Debian stand. Ah, memories.

Anand Kumria: DNS Entries in the debian.net zone

I spent 45 minutes searching around for this, so this is mainly just so I don't have to spend a lot of time searching for it again. You can add/update entries in debian.net by doing
echo "<host> in a <ip>"   gpg --clearsign   mail changes@db.debian.org
All the commands are documented on db.debian.org, look for 'DNZ Zone entry'.

26 March 2006

John Goerzen: Tuttle, OK city manager offered choice about being an idiot

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious. Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS. Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner. Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'" The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):
If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot. Your choice.
Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail. He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link). Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Joey Hess: blog moved

I've now moved my blog into ikiwiki. I think that I've managed to do this without breaking (many) permalinks to old blog posts, and without flooding any aggregators. .. Well, almost. Some of you may have seen a double post, which was due to me not having an url set right the first time.

Joey Hess: blog moved

I've now moved my blog into ikiwiki. I think that I've managed to do this without breaking (many) permalinks to old blog posts, and without flooding any aggregators.

25 March 2006

Daniel Burrows: No More Retail Electronics Stores

So, to wrap up the hardware saga I posted in the last few weeks, my memory chips finally arrived yesterday (after being delayed in Oregon for three days by "inclement weather"). I swapped them for the bad ones in about ten minutes, turned the computer on, and it worked. After I played a couple missions in Homeworld 2, I rebooted and let the memory test run all night, just to be totally sure. No problems :-).

Sadly, we seem to have lost the receipt from when we returned the first bad batch of RAM, so Fry's may get to keep Kate's money. Regardless, they've certainly managed to lose one or two customers, at least when it comes to computer hardware.

Pierre Habouzit: debian.org and SPAM

Our @debian.org addresses are just too polluted. It's a fact, and nobody moves. It's really tiredsome. I happen to also be a co-admin on a mail server, that accepts almost 300k per MX, which is not very big, but quite big enough. I've written a little tool called whitelister. It's used in conjunction with postgrey that we use as a POLICY daemon for postfix. Basicaly, what it does is quite simple: This approach has spectacular results: greylisting in action Edit: the same statistics on our backup/secondary MX greylisting in action The green area are the mails we accept for delivery (after the AV-checks and classicale anti-UCE-checks). The red line is the amount of messages that the bayesian antispam (bogofilter) marks as spam. Since our clever greylisting is up, the results are just unbelievable: we drop a huge amount of spam, without needing bayesian spamfilter or clamav or any CPU-intensive checks, so almost for free. The statistics we run show that a very few mails are actually submitted again (less than 20 per week), and most of them are spam anyway. And an analysis of the remaining spams shows that those are spam that come from redirections services (mail lists, @debian.org, ). We almost drop 99% of the spam that is submitted into the SMTP network through one of our MX's. For the record, we only use cbl.abuseat.org, dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net and dynablock.njabl.org. why doing it that way ? greylisting is all about creating a dynamic map of the SMTP queues of the planet. What I do, is only using RBL's that already exists to make that principle converge faster. Moreover, even if you use "bad" blacklists that have too many false positives, the greylist is here to let legitimates mails through. So basicaly, it combines two bad[1] methods, to make a good one: It's a win-win use. Conclusion I'd really like to see such a system be installed on our main MX's. @debian.org emails addresses are overloaded with spam (and 90% of the spam I receive, comes from my @debian address). btw, in a MTA like exim (that some of our MX use), a tool like whitelister is not needed. It's possible to achieve the same thing within the exim configuration files (but don't ask me how, I never used exim, I just know it's possible to do it). Is there anybody out there to support such an idea ?
Notes [1] Used singly, I consider those methods really bad.

24 March 2006

Anand Kumria: Some random odds and sods as well as some ACID

Horms, why not use gworldclock? Martin, I think you are after tra. Andrew, you do realise that you could do that with yum – which has been in Debian for a while now. You'd have probably heard about it earlier if Mako could be bothered to get Atom 1.0 support working on Planet Debian. Rodney, Nokia phones generally use Netfront as their default. If you want to use Opera you have to specify it. I'd be highly skepticle of KHTML being used anywhere memory footprint mattered. It looks like it might be WebCore (dervied from KHTML) instead. But that is only on very recent phones (first half of 2006). Oh, and that is likely to be Yahoo merchant crawler. Yahoo probably thinks you are a corporate whore or something ;-). Finally is it just me or does it strike anyone else as odd that the Mozilla Corporation, with all of its' money, is not able to get a crack group of hackers together so that Firefox 2.0 can render ACID2? At least two of the competitors can already so, what's the go, Joe? (or in this case Mitchell).

23 March 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Pigeon

As I was waiting for a bus to take me to work after today’s stint at the court house, a pigeon was making its merry way among all the people. In the heat of the moment, I took this picture (okay, well, the picture this image is derived from).

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Planet Haskell

Per Isaac Jones’s request, here it is: Planet Haskell. (The current URI is hopefully not the final one, but this one will redirect to the new one once we have one.) Haskellers: please email me your blog feed URIs (English only, please; no need to restrict to Haskell only, though). I will not add you if you don’t.

Matthew Palmer: The Little Engine That Might Be Able To Later

By now, you would think that I would have learned that Breakfast + Freshmeat = mess. Today, we have an unimaginatively named program called "font manager". Some day, in the future, we may have a font manager -- but we don't yet. Here's the description, direct from the horse's mouth:
font manager is a font manager for GNOME. It cannot do any font management tasks yet, but is already useful for picking fonts.
It's quite adamant that font manager is a font manager. Yet it can't manage fonts. Interesting. I suppose this is an example of the curious issue of true identity -- are you who you are because of what you are called, or because of what you are? The author(s) of "font manager" obviously believe that your true identity stems from your name, regardless of what you may actually do. I disagree somewhat -- in a lot of ways, I identify more closely with the term "computer geek" than with my name -- I think it's essentially social conditioning and a need to be uniquely identified from all the other computer geeks out there that makes me remember to respond to a call of "oi, Matt!". An interesting book on this subject is Jennifer Government, by Max Barry (ISBN 0349117624), in which people's surnames are determined by who they work for (so take a guess as to who Jennifer works for). There's something very wrong with me when a quick scoff at a freshmeat article turns into pseudophilosophy and a book review...

Jos Parrella: Flying MEX

Yesterday I booked a flight with TACA from Caracas to MEX, via SJO. I’m flying on May 12th. (so hopefully I can arrive for Debian Day) and returning on May 25th., in the same flight. The flight is gonna take 6 hours from Caracas. Ana (from Debian Venezuela) will be flying with me in the return flight.Nos vemos en Mexico!

Martin F. Krafft: Data juggling

Letting yesterday pass by in memories, I wonder how I was able to function even a bit for the last two years or so -- information-wise. While I was still at the Uni Zurich, I found myself almost constantly swamped with so much work that I (a) never got around to do any real research, and (b) turned my digital data into a complete mess. Forget about (a), it's (b) that concerns me right now. The pattern was usually:
  1. My main machine was becoming unstable and dying frequently, either on disk I/O or CPU-intensive tasks.
  2. With much time pressure, I was forced to move my data to a new machine. Two or three times that was accomplished e.g. by copying oldmachine:~/ to newmachine:~/lost+found/oldmachine (I am, unfortunately, not kidding. For the past half a year, I was working out of lapse:~/wing/lost+found/cirrus/lost+found/diamond. wing, cirrus, and diamond are all deceased machines, lapse is my laptop).
  3. Repeat (1) and (2) about three times and add to the mix that I also had a machine at home and a laptop, no synchronisation strategy really, no real backups, and no version control system.
To be fair: my important data was certainly backed up, and most of my work was on F/OSS or projects in our lab's version control system anyway. I am mainly talking about scripts, ideas, correspondence, photos, ... The chaos that built up had me busy all of yesterday. I brought all of my machines together, as well as the harddrives that were still lying around, hooked it all up, and started the endeavour. I set up a RAID 5 on one machine, mad of four 250Gb disks, and with 750Gb of space, I was ready to go. Using any combination(s) of dd nc, tar, cpio, scp, rsync, and unison, it took me several hours to bring all the data onto one machine. Usually, I would try to purge unwanted crap from ~, such as .thumbnails, or .ccache (!), once again wishing for widely-used ~/.var and ~/.etc, So today I have to consolidate about 680Gb of data. Most of it can be purged (I found a linux-2.2.7 directory somewhere in there), but often, I will have to look at two or three versions of a file and decide which one to keep. Fortunately, I am fairly certain it's usually the newest one. My intention is to move mostly everything to under the control of bzr, and then to use unison to synchronise ~ between all machines. However, there are still some unresolved points:
  • unison is for pairs, to keep three or more machines in sync, it's beneficial to have a central machine. I don't really want a central machine.

  • csync2 looks like unison for three or more, but it's a service, with listening daemon and all, and I thus cannot use it to synchronise with my home directories on machines where I don't have root or cannot install csync2.

  • I don't want everything synchronised. When it comes to documents and data, I cannot imagine any exceptions, but dot-directories in the home directory are a problem. E.g.:

    • ~/.gnupg: I don't want my GPG key to be synchronised to remote machines. However, I would not mind to synchronise the configuration or the public keyring.
    • ~/.ssh: Stuff like config and known_hosts can/should be synchronised. However, authorized_keys must not be.
    • ~/.mozilla/firefox: Would be nice, but almost impossible because of Firefox's braindead approach. For instance, you cannot write a new bookmarks.html file while Firefox is running -- it will dump its in-memory copy when quitting.
    • Most of my accounts don't need to store dot-directories for X programmes.
    • My shell or windowmanager configuration may have to be different between machines to support e.g. different defaults, Xinerama, relevant shell variables, etc.
    etc. etc. The ideal approach to the challenge of ~/.etc (I symlink into there for programmes not supporting non-default config file locations) would be a version control system. Since I don't want to depend on a single machine, bzr, git, or the other decentralised systems seem appropriate: keep a base for e.g. ~/.ssh and branch for each machine. However, then I could not use unison for ~/.etc, and just synchronising all .bzr/ subdirectories unfortunately does not work (as empirically determined). And I have not found an acceptable approach to keep the branches in sync; I surely don't want to have to push changes to every other machine before quitting the day, nor do I want to pull in changes every morning from all over the place. I may have to look at git, which IIRC stores every change/commit in a separate file, so then synchronisation of .git/ should do what I want. If you have any input on this matter, I'd be delighted to hear it.
I am still looking for the right tool to do the task of consolidation. mc works okay, but it's just a little too much typing without tab completion. konqueror is just fat, and nautilus currently won't install on amd64. Again, if you have a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. Data juggling is fun, or not. For sure, there's quite some adrenaline flowing around as you issue bulk commands, knowing that it's basically you and a scalpell, and all your digital life on the table. NP: Porcupine Tree, "The Sky Moves Sideways"

Ross Burton: Furious Anger

Today's Daily Express front page: DAYLIGHT ROBBERY That nasty Brown throwing away your money on state spending, such as the NHS, schools, pensions... A week later the same paper will be moaning about the state of the NHS, another pension crisis, or how education standards are falling. Actually, that's wrong. Another paper will moan about that, the Express will just have Diana Exclusives. NP: Trouser Jazz, Mr Scruff

Kai Hendry: Consumer hardware

This M$ Vista delay analysis got me thinking about the relationship between hardware manufacturers and well, us, the “Free software” geeks. Vista will no doubt drive hardware sales due to its high hardware requirements. Hardware manufacturers just love that. But does Ubuntu or Debian drive hardware sales? Erm, probably not. “competing hardware manufacturers are violating each others patents so much that they cannot publish specifications of their hardware without showing which patents they are violating.” -Aki I’m sure M$ has no qualms about signing NDAs with hardware companies. But for us, the future isn’t easy. I don’t think consumer hardware companies are going to shoot for Ubuntu’s certification scheme. And Ubuntu is the consumer version of GNU Debian/Linux right now.

Joey Hess: cereal

Jeff, if the Metacity window manager is Cheerios, and I agree that others do resemble Marshmallow Froot Loops (possibly sprinkeld with E), then ion must be a subcutaneous nuclear power cell. I'll take that over a rocket engine on my cereal box any day.

22 March 2006

Ross Burton: Name Dropped

Jeff Waugh was kind enough to name drop Devil's Pie at FOSDEM whilst being interviewed for Source21.nl.
...We haven't been talking about some of the really cool stuff you can do with gnome. Things like Devil's Pie or Brightside, which make the window manager work in totally different ways: they take Metacity which is a very conservative, very simple, it just manages your windows kind of window manager, and they turn it into something which does edge flipping and all kinds of cool stuff, a programmable window environment, those kind of things.
Yay Jeff! NP: Last.fm Neighbour Radio

Clint Adams: amd64 is not being handled transparently enough

I used to be into quotations. There was a guy. He was very Jewish. He had bad skin. He was morally bankrupt. He was ugly. He smelled bad. As you might imagine, there was an entire gaggle of girls trying to get into his pants. They were a bunch of Christian fundamentalists, affectionately called the God Squad by some, malevolently called the God Squad by some. They wrote him the scariest love letters and poetry I have ever seen. Finally, he had to choose one, and I was relieved that he did not choose the one who had adapted Culture Club lyrics to express whatever foul sentiment she was trying to express. Instead, he chose a sweet girl who lived with a crazy, flat-chested, exhibitionist midget hooker who claimed to be allergic to marijuana and aspired to be an architect. Now the evil boy and the sweet girl with a tenuous grip on reality performed the proper rites of the barnyard dance and became officially socially-ensnared. She drafted a timetable by which they would traverse numerous stages of physical intimacy. She showed him this timetable. He deluded himself into thinking that this timetable was much more volatile than it was. Much later on, he dumped her for a girl that was much less Christian. In the meantime, though, their dry-humping was interminable. He very quickly earned himself the nickname "Sticky Shorts", which, come to think of it, was far better than most of his other nicknames. Then once, for a moment when her legs weren't spread, she mentioned to me that she had heard that I was into quotations. I acknowledged this and she became very excited. She was into quotations too. She felt the need to prove this to me. It was rather close to that time when I concluded that quoting was lame and that I would stop living vicariously through the words of others and idolizing ink and all that other stuff from that GNR song.

21 March 2006

Joey Hess: replacing stuff with busybox

Martin- ric Racine: You asked about embedding Debian with busybox.
Would anybody happen to have more details about exactly which packages Busybox can replace while still providing just enough functionality to boot a Debian-based system up to an X display manager?
This is in general an impossible question to answer since any given Debian package may or may not work with any given utility from busybox. What we do at work to shoehorn a X-capable embedded Debian-based arm system into 32 mb or so of flash, is to install our set of packages, then tweak things until busybox diverts nearly every utility it supports. Then we snapshot the files used for a shutdown, boot, and the specific use of the system we want to support, and copy just those files over to our image, which ranges from 4 to 32 mb. For the busybox related parts of this, we use a program I wrote called busybox-links to set busybox up to divert everything cleanly and (semi-)reversably using dpkg-divert (and in some cases update-alternatives). busybox-links also tweaks a number of init scripts to work with busybox, stuff like editing /etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh to run hwclock without the --noadjfile parameter, which busybox lacks, and a dozen or so other such changes. Happily busybox readlink now supports -f, so the main set of things that had to be patches doen't anymore. This set of tweaks likely won't be sufficient for your system, but you can add more in a like vein. busybox-links is contained in our ads-additions package. As for reducing the tweaked Debian system down to just the files needed to run, we use the adsrootbuilder, which is still quite specific to our systems, but which I hope to eventually make less so. Both these packages can be downloaded from our apt repository:
deb-src http://www.applieddata.net/developers/linux/debian ads main contrib non-free
Of course, that's just one of many ways to do it. Part of the problem of embedding Debian right now is that there are as many ways to do it as there are people doing it, and no agreement on the right way, and so little progress in some areas. In the future, I for one would like to see a broad agreement in Debian that making init scripts and the like compatable with busybox is worth doing if it doesn't make them significantly slower or uglier. Then I could send all these tweaks in as patches, which would be a better use of my time than maintaining them going forward, and would make Debian an overall more flexible and more useful system for embedding. (PS, RE what debootstrap installs; it's based on whatever is > standard priority. If you have improvements, might I suggest talking to its maintainer, not blogging?)

20 March 2006

Martin F. Krafft: Python: there is only one way to do it

$ python
[...]
>>> exit
'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'
I'd love to hear the reason. Update: Michael Ablassmeier pointed me to a pretty good analysis. Update 2: The title is actually courtesy of Ari. My bad.

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