Call For Papers for the 4th. World Forum on Free Knowledge is now released in english (non-official translation, sorry for mine) and spanish. The WFFK is a Community-organized Forum, made possible by the sponsorship of Government Enterprises and Private Enterprises, as well as Volunteers and Donations. The first was made in Caracas, on November 2004, in the installations of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, with the sponsorship of the Venezuelan Oil Company, PDVSA. The second WFFK was made in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala-India, under the name Free Software, Free Society in May 2005, and the third WFFK was made in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with the support of several Institutions, including PDVSA, CONATEL and serveral others. Impressed by the success of the 3rd. WFFK, a group of people is organizing the fourth, which will take place in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in October 2006. This is the first ocassion a Call For Papers is being done, because the Forum will have a Congress inside it, as well as selected articles. In the past, we only had selected articles and invited speakers on a certain basis. This time, a Call For Papers will also be done, so we can invite nice speakers to come and share with the attendance. Last time in Maracaibo we had David Moreno Garza with us, as well as several Debian Maintainers and Co-Maintainers with us, from Venezuela and Colombia: Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich, Polkan Garc a, Ernesto Crespo, V ctor P rez, Ana Delgado, Gerardo Curiel, Manuel Garc a, V ctor P rez and myself (am I missing someone?). So this was quite a MiniDebConf! Let’s make the 4th. a complete one

Over one month ago, I truly hoped an evasive network misbehavior issue was solved. In the institute, we had a strange situation which caused a (seemingly random) stack of switches to go out to lunch and leave one of the floors without network access until it decided to restore itself (usually power-cycling it was not enough). The equipment, ten 4200 SuperStack switches, is new, we got it ~September, so I expected 3Com to give me at least some support on the issue. The behavior was apparently random, and I could not track it down, only (thanks to the very nice Cacti) prove it existed.
December 5 was terrible. The whole building's network refused to work. Switches were able to reply to my pings for no more than a minute after booting before they got flooded with "Spanning Tree CTRL MAC PAUSE: Quanta 65535" (according to another great tool, the Ethereal protocol analyzer).
I had been bugging the support people at 3Com for at least three weeks before this incident, they kept promising they would come soon to help us track the cause of the ellusive problem - We threatened to send the switches back and pursue reimbursement through whatever means we could (we had much better stability and performance with our old 10Mbps hubs, so my boss insisted on replacing them), so we got them to come. The answer they gave me? Upgrade your firmware to version 2.50 (not available at their website, of course) and disable spanning tree functionality at the switches.
I have to admit the big problem immediately ceased. This is not to say I was pleased with the response time or with the switches' software quality, but at least we could work.
Happily, ~7 weeks passed by with no major outages (although with a few small ones).
Yesterday, we got back the complete chaotic conditions. This time, though, I was able to get a good and useful tcpdump snapshot, passed it through Ethereal, and actually got something interesting (available to whoever requests it to me if it sounds interesting). In short: Something happens that confuses a switch (I guess it's a faulty NIC), and makes it request to all of the neighbouring switches (via spanning tree protocol - Yes, it's disabled, but still) for their complete ARP tables. But somehow, this noise or whatever keeps confusing it, so the spanning tree requests start repeating every two seconds for slightly over one minute. Then, the same switch which requested this information gets tired of too many ARP tables being thrown at it, and sends out a storm of packets (one each 0.04 seconds) asking every other switch _not_ to send updates anymore. This is broadcasted to all of each of the switches' ports, and the network dies.
My grudge against 3Com is: How come this frigging noise (at least that's what I assume it to be) on one of the ports kill all of the network? If a switch is supposed to be smart, would it be too much for it just to disable the misbehaving port?
Anyway... One and a half days went down the drain trying to find the cause for the problem, sending the report to the 3Com guy (who is very nice in person, yes, but that's by far not enough!), running up and down the stairs to reset different switches, lock down on the source of distress... And as my 3Com contact was busy with another client (who presumably had not yet given them money), I never got a call back from them.
All my good intentions to spend a nice quiet time coding for three projects we currently need to have ready soon (one of them is in production and many of you have used, my dear Comas conference management system, but requires heavy tinkering to be able to extend it) were stuck at that: Good intentions.
I seem to have locked down the problem in one of three computers (that is, network seems stable again once I disconnected them). I insist it must be a faulty NIC. My boss bets it's an ber-contaminated Windows machine. My boss' boss insists we should get the switches double-grounded just to be sure that's not the reason for failure. I am tired, bad mooded, and -again- bored you to death with a too-long blog entry.
Blame it all on 3Com.

I've just come out of Mark Shuttleworth's Saturday morning keynote, and I'm a bit irritated. His talk was fairly short, and so there was a long question time. I use the word "question" in a fairly general sense, as there seemed to be a lot of people who were keen on using their 15 seconds of fame to expel a long-winded monologue. A few notes for those people (and there were quite a number of them):

• A question is a sentence of enquiry that asks for a reply. It ends with a rising inflection. It shouldn't take more than a couple of breaths to complete.
• If your question requires a lot of explanation, it's probably not suitable for general question time -- if only because 90% of the audience can't hear your exposition. Ask it later.
• If your only reason for asking the question is to make yourself look clever, don't bother. You don't look clever.
• If you really want to have a forum for your monologue, get a lightning talk slot.

This has been a public service announcement sponsored by Opinionated Geeks for A Less Painful Session (OGALPS).

The Finnish presidential runoff is on Sunday. Absentee votes were gathered between Wednesday last week and Tuesday this week (abroad only until Saturday last week). Absentee voting. There was at least one absentee voting station in each municipality. It was also possible to vote in advance abroad at most Finland’s diplomatic missions. The elector signs in at the desk. where the official checks their identity and hands them a ballot. If the polling station has access to the online elector registry, it is used to verify that the elector is enfranchised. The elector enters the polling booth, where they draw their candidate’s number on the ballot, and then fold it so that the number is not visible. They then go back to the desk, where another official stamps the folded ballot and hands the elector a small brown envelope. The elector puts the folded ballot inside the envelope and seals it. Meanwhile, the officials have prepared a document which lists the elector’s name, the address of their home municipality. One of the officials and the elector both sign this document, affirming that the voting was handled by the book. The sealed brown envelope, containing the folded and stamped ballot, and the document are put inside another, yellow envelope, which the officials later mail to the home municipality of the elector. The officials also make a record that the elector has voted in the elector registry, if it is accessible. Institutional voting. Electors who are admitted to a hospital or live in a rest-home or are similarly temporarily or permanently living in an institution can vote in their institution. A peripatetic advance polling station visits each such instititution at least once during the absentee voting period. The vote procedure is as described above. Home voting. Electors who are unable to go to a regular polling station can preorder home voting. A peripatetic polling station visits each such home, allowing those electors to vote according to the advance voting procedure. In home voting, the elector is allowed to select one person to monitor the voting procedure (but not look at the number in the ballot!) as their personal witness. The witness also signs the advance polling document. Checking advance polling votes. Each municipality hosts a municipal central election committee. The committee, or its staff, open all the yellow envelopes, check that the advance voting document is properly filled and has no irregularities. The brown envelope is inspected without opening it. If the document is irregular (e.g. missing signatures, missing name of elector) or the brown envelope carries irregular markings (especially markings that identify the elector or a candidate), the vote is set aside and disregarded for the purposes of ballot counting. A vote is also set aside and disregarded if there is evidence of dishonest voting in that particular case (such as two separate votes by the same elector). All other brown envelopes are gathered unopened into a big pile and separated from the advance voting document at this time; the committee also makes a record in the elector registry that an elector has voted, if there isn’t already such a note and they actually did vote in the absentee balloting. The brown envelopes are sent to the regional election committee. Election day. Any elector who hasn’t voted in advance can vote in their local polling station during election day. The procedure is identical to the advance voting procedure up and until the folded ballot is stamped. After that, the elector simply drops the folded ballot in the ballot box. Preliminary vote counting. The regional election committees open the brown envelopes and count the advance votes during election day, while being out of contact with the rest of the world. Each district election committee responsible of a single ballot station during the election day count the votes they received during the day right after the polling stations close. The preliminary result is expected to be all but done after a bit more than an hour has passed since closing of the polling stations. Official vote counting. The regional election committees receive all ballots from their region after preliminary vote count is finished. They then take the next two days to recount the votes. The result is the final, official count. Results. The Helsinki region election committee collates the vote counts from the regional committees and announces the result of the presidential election. Selection of the committees. Each municipal central election committee and the district election committees under it each represent as fairly as possible all the parties and other groups that fielded candidates for the previous municipal elections in that municipality. Each regional election committee represents as fairly as possible all the parties and other groups that fielded candidates for the previous parliamentary elections within the region. Franchise. All Finnish citizens who were at least 18 years of age on the original (non-runoff) election day are enfranchised. My involvement. I represent the Green party in my home town’s central election committee. We did the “check the advance votes” dance earlier this evening. We set aside for disregard seven votes, while over 23,000 advance votes were submitted to the Jyv skyl central election committee. We had a small staff handling most of the work during the last week, all of them town employees. Other elections. European parliament elections are held using the same protocol. Parliamentary elections are held using the same protocol, with the difference that the elections are essentially separate for each election region (seats are allocated to regions roughly by population), though held simultaneously, and the regional election committee announces the result for its own region. Municipal elections are held using the same protocol, with the difference that each municipality has its own election (though they are all held simultaneously), and the municipal central election committee handles all the duties specified above for regional election committees (including announcing the result for its own municipality).In all of these, votes are counted using the open-list d’Hondt method.

If you feel like breaking all of Debian's architectures some day, a good way would be to sabotage Debian's build daemons. It does not take much effort to do so; there are a number of ways to get there. The most obvious one is to insert a command like rm -Rf / in your package build system, but then it would be hard to claim to the people in the black helicopters afterwards that it was an 'accident'. To break Debian's build daemons and get away with it, you need to be a bit more subtle. Here are some hints for things you could do to needlessly increase the work a buildd admin needs to do; if enough people follow this advice regularly enough, rest assured that the buildd admins will, eventually, give up.

1. Make your build loop, but still produce output all the time. Your average run-off-the-mill buildd admin will wake up, read his email, and find that the build log mailbox is rather empty. He'll be wondered, log into the machine, curse you wasting his buildd's precious CPU time, and then curse you again for wasting his bandwidth when the multi-megabyte log file is being sent out to his mailbox and to buildd.debian.org (or, as in this case, experimental.ftbfs.de).
2. Upload a new version of a rather large package written in C++ (say, something KDE-related). Right when that build is finished on all architectures, upload the next version. Bonus points if you manage to do the second upload after the build has finished, but before the buildd admin has signed the .changes file. Extra bonus points if you manage to do all of that during a backlog.
3. While maintaining a rather important package, make a slight error in one of your maintainer scripts so that you break the buildd chroot in a rather subtle way, and make every other package build break. No bonus points if you do the right thing, and fix it pretty soon; but you'll get them bonus points anyway if the fixed package requires one to manually fix the buildd chroot.
4. Break your postinst script so that it does not ever exit. Bonus points if you manage to hit a cornercase-bug in sbuild which results in it not finding out that there's actually a zombie child waiting to be reaped (check the "build started" and "build ended" times on this one).
5. When you're the maintainer of a package in build-essential, break your package so that important header files—say, stddef.h—are gone.
6. Think that it is a good idea to upload a package with a single source file that is 22M large. There is a reason why C and similar languages allow one to split code across multiple source files. Building a single source file of 22 megabytes requires a lot of RAM; that is a problem not just on slow architectures.
7. Upload a package that hides the compiler command line while compiling. Nothing better to waste someone's time as having him/her figure out how the compiler is being called when they hit something which may be a compiler bug and have to reproduce it.
8. Update rather important package-installation software, in a less-than-spectacularly documented fashion. Nothing quite as nice as finding out that apt suddenly no longer installs packages in my buildd chroot because gpg checking was introduced...
9. Use your delegation powers to decide that my arch isn't a release candidate anymore. Okay, so that was our fault. Whatever.
And, last but not least:
10. Take all of the above too seriously. No, really. It's only a joke.

Last weekend I moved all of my websites from my expensive dedicated server solution to a shared server solution. So far everything has been working out great - the transfer of files went fine, and some of the automatic services that are setup for you, such as automatic secure webmail which is always nice to fall back on when you're at say, a public kiosk or something. The switch saves me approx. US$720 a year, which is going to be great for my finances. However, I'm always wary when I move to a new place that something is going to be horribly wrong, so it's watch-like-a-hawk time. One of the consequences of moving to the new server is using IMAP for reading mail. I am amazed, shocked and appalled that I didn't discover this earlier, but mutt has a caching mechanism, which increases the joy of reading both large Maildir mailboxes and IMAP mailboxes. To enable, just put set header_cache="/path/to/some/directory" in your .muttrc file - things go 10x faster after the first cache. In the same spirit of switching for a new year, I decided to switch my finances up a little bit. I'm currently migrating to using the StackBacks system for managing finances. This is the budget for the generation of consumers who would rather carry around a debit card than a bunch of cash, and is especially good for weaning yourself from credit cards. At the same time, I'm switching banks from a national chain to a local credit union.

I forgot to mention that while I was home over Christmas I did some work on starting to get Northern Ireland mapped. Many online map services don't have particularly good coverage of NI outside of major roads and Belfast. Look, for example, at Google's map of Newry, where my parents live. Compare this with what I managed to get done with OpenStreetMap's map of Newry. And I didn't spend a whole lot of time getting tracks, so just imagine what I could get covered with a more concerted effort. I also covered the A1/M1 from Belfast to Newry; I'd hoped to cover the road to the point where it crosses into Ireland, but didn't get round to it. Anyway, what I've managed is at OpenStreetMap Northern Ireland. I've a little bit more to upload at some point when I have time, but I'm hoping that others who actually live in NI will start to do some work towards it as well. I notice Ireland has now got a number of roads added as well - there was nothing when I was doing NI. Maybe they'll get connected at some point soon. Like, say, when I'm home next month and fly into Dublin. :)

Update to my svnhome article: I've changed how I handle my dotfiles a bit. I wrote a program svnmerge that "merges" two or more subversion directories into a single common directory (just by adding/removing symlinks as appropriate). So with this I can easily split my dotfiles out into modules and inclue some modules on only some machines. Now my home directory in svn has no actual files in it; all the dotfiles are moved to these modules, and other directories are also pulled in via externals. This makes it easy to maintain more variants of the home directory without needing to merge dotfiles between them like I had to before. Another unexpected benefit is that since all the dotfiles that are managed by svn are symlinks, any that arn't symlinks are clearly not managed by svn, and so are easy to clean up as cruft or add to svn. Only real downsides of this approach are needing to move dotfiles to the appropriate subdirectory before adding them to svn, and svn commit not recursing into dotfile subdirectories. Oh, and it gives me an excuse to have a directory named "home-etc".

Finally on the third day of the LCA (or the first day of the conference proper) depending on how you look at it, I’ve had a chance to sit down and catch up on a few things . I managed to take on the task of running the network for the conference, and as we all know, the geeks need their network access. We’ve had some issues getting the network up and running which has been interesting. Most of the problems were caused by issues with incorrectly configured rate shaping on our upstream link which was limiting our outgoing capacity to about half of what it should have been. Once that got sorted out we discovered that the fibre tranceiver was not playing nicely with the NIC in the linux router we had been lent use of for the conference. This led to 20% of packets being dropped, and severely hampered usage of the network! When we swapped the dodgy NIC out for a new Soekris box it was immediately obvious that the connection “felt” better and the usage immediately spiked up over 3Mbps. By far the most prominent form of access at the conference is via wireless, we have 25 APs around the conference, built using Soekris net4526 biscuit computers and Atheros 802.11a/b/g wireless cards. We’re managed the network using the CRCnet Configuration System, which I also plan to introduce to the world during my talk tommorrow. We were a bit worried that we had overprovisioned the wireless, however the usage stats that we’re seeing seem to suggest that it’s about right. Earlier this morning we peaked with just over 210 concurrent clients on the APs and almost 5Mbps (our limit) of traffic coming in / out of the network. We’ve implemented some interesting protection strategies on the APs to try and prevent ARP spoofing attacks, although writing software like this in the week right before the conference and then trying to debug it as you build the network turns out to be not such a great idea! Currently sitting in listening to a talk by Brendan O’Dea about the high volume l2tpns software that they’re written at Optus. Very interesting.

I honestly, deeply, strongly feel annoyed by repeated entries of blogs on planets. So I apologize if at any point of time my blog does a stupid thing like that. And talking about rants: Martin: Iberia sucks more than Swiss. Believe me. And -30 is even more pain than -20, so all those out there who think "below -10 is all the same", you are fscking wrong. On unrelated news, I got a radio pro blem,gram : saturdays at 15.00 EET from bassoradio.com, whenever I manage to get someone to open the door on the studio building (hence the problem). I will be putting some demo mixes here.

My head hurts, but it the evil is (nearly) done: I have implemented a telnet server/client that is reentrant and does not use any C library functions. I even managed to cut down on the use of pointers, there is only one ugly case left, where it was really unavoidable, let's just hope the function call gets inlined properly, but I'm not sure gcc will notice that it doesn't need to take the address of the variable then, and places the expression back into a register where it belongs. Alfie, thanks for reminding me of the concert. Oh, and if anyone cares, I'm also going to be at the Eläkel&

Those of you outside of Massachusetts (or the United States) may not have heard about our recent healthcare insurance debates. Left Center Left has some interesting entries on the lack of local political analysis and confusion about why the business community opposes the various legislative solutions where those solutions appear to be basically in their self interest. The proposed solutions are converging on a tax on employers who do not pay for their employees’ healthcare. That tax would help pay for statewide coverage of all or most citizens, and hopefully encourage employers to provide insurance for their employees to avoid the tax. (There is strong dissent, for example from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, as to whether the tax would actually raise any money). Critics argue that the tax will discourage employers from coming to Massachusetts. The two large employers singled out most frequently in the State for not providing healthcare benefits to their large work force are Wal-Mart and Dunkin Donuts. Is it even remotely possible that Wal-Mart and Dunkin Donuts would actually shut down (or stop opening up) stores if they have to insure their employees or pay an additional tax? Obviously increased labor costs (whether through tax or insurance) could cut into profitability—but is there any evidence at all that it would represent a “tipping point” that would cause these employers to shut down? (Note that despite Massachusetts’ reputation as “Taxachusetts,” a study last year that I can’t locate right now pointed out that the overall tax burden on Massachusetts citizens was about in the middle, compared to other states). Even if the health insurance mandate depresses wages, it’s worth noting that it is cheaper for the employer to buy group health insurance for its employees than it is for each of those employees to buy it individually—both because of the bulk buying power and for tax reasons. It is thus not a “zero sum game” where employees wages should be depressed by the exact amount of the increased health care costs. Finally, wouldn’t this measure actually encourage employers to come to Massachusetts who already insure their employees, since presumably the statewide insurance mandate should decrease costs to those already providing insurance as they will no longer be effectively subsidizing the uninsured who work for competitors and other employers? And aren’t those the kinds of employers we would like to attract, rather than more Dunkin Donuts and Wal-Marts? (In fact, wouldn’t fewer Dunkin Donuts lead to less heart disease, thus also cutting down our health care costs overall…?)

Hee hee