Al Gore, former vice president of the US, has given a very, very interesting and impressing speech on Martin Luther King Day a few days ago. He states very clearly a huge number of (unlawful, illegal, or immoral) things the current US president Bush and/or his administration have done. For example:

• illegal wiretapping of American citizens
• illegal imprisonment of American (and other) citizens
• illegal torture by the CIA
• illegal kidnapping of people
• suppression of free speech by threatening NASA scientists
• and lots more

A quote of Al Gore, from a small Reuters summary of the speech:

We still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the president of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.

Transscripts are available from The Raw Story and the Washington Post, and there's also a full audio recording of the speech (MP3, 48 MB). Although I'm not very political usually (or at least I don't write too much about it), this is really something I highly recommend listening to. I cannot imagine why a president of a democratic country can still be in charge, after all these things have become publically known... (via Tim Pritlove)

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.

This week is Regents week in New York, so juniors and seniors had Thursday and Friday “off” — meaning you only go to school when and if you have an exam, at least in my district. Today I had a great time leaving the house at 2:20-ish on bike to hand in my Engineering final report, which was due at 2:30 today (the end of the school day, in essence). Needless to say, I barged my way through hordes of exiting freshmen and handed it in at approximately 2:27. Nothing like punctuality. This week’s been busy, heh. In other news, combined with biking back and forth to the school for my Calculus midterm this morning, I’ve put in about 5.8 miles today. Bwah.

People seem to still want to make big computers to beat chess masters, while Kasparov has been beaten by the upgraded Deep Blue, then nicknamed Deeper Blue, in 1997. But actually, what’s the point ?
I mean, all it demonstrates is that brutal brute force is better than human. And now human has been beaten, what’s the challenge ? So, let’s move on a bit and go for a real challenge : beat human at Go. You know, this simple game with simple rules but for which no computer has yet beaten average players. I’m not even saying advanced or masters, because computers are so boring and lame that strong players prefer to play humans. And if they happen to want to use the brute force as they did for chess, well, they’d need a computer to which Deep(er) Blue would be an abacus. More seriously, though, why isn’t there more IA research on Go, now that Chess is more or less mastered ? Another thing that puzzles me is how come gnugo is so good compared to other Go programs, while free software Chess programs are so lame ?

I am pretty sure this cluelessness at its best:

m26s25:~# swaks -s spam-is-theft.sput.nl. -f'
' -t rob@sput.nl -q rcpt [...] -> RCPT TO:

<** 550 Host name is listed in abuse.rfc-ignorant.org. Get yourself an other ISP.

According to the web interface the host 83.151.30.59 is not definetly not listed on abuse.rfc-ignorant.org.

Anyway, should you read this, the answer to your question is: It has been reported before http://bugs.debian.org/326160 and is suppposed to be documented (although I fail to parse right now, due to being slightly tired) perhaps unknown_in_list http://www.exim.org/exim-html-4.60/doc/html/spec.html/ch48.html#SECTlogselector should be added to log_selector.

just finished reading: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice which was a pleasure to me.

I recently blogged about humans failing my blog’s comment “Turing Test.” My blog had a box below the real comments box, prefaced with a statement to the effect that you shouldn’t enter anything in that box if you were a human (yet some humans did enter comments in that box, thus shunting their comments to a spam file). In response, several commenters noted that my layout was confusing and offered suggestions for improvements. I’ve taken their advice and wrapped the “spam” comment box in a style tag that will make the box invisible if your browser renders CSS. I had this perhaps irrational fear that the spammers were smart enough to read the CSS, but as it turns out, they aren’t. The box is now invisible to most users, but I continue to get as many as several dozen spammers filling in the invisible box. The main shortcoming I can see with the current system is that people who use text-only browsers like w3m or cell phones, or people with visual disabilities who use an audio screen reader may still be confused. Still, I think this is much less intrusive, annoying, and non-accessible than, say, a hard-to-read captcha that won’t work at all for those people.

I just told my boss. I'm moving to Venezuela. It's now official. Everybody knew, except for my boss and he supports me completely: He rocks. Well, it somewhat depends on the definition of 'moving', but I'll be there for more than a couple of months, call it whatever you want.

I'm pretty excited. Time to get tickets. And time to plan actually, again, going to DebConf, which is, from an specific point of view, quite funny .

For all of them who have asked me for some spare space at my place in Mexico City, it'll be available from May 4th to 24th. But feel free to mail me or drop a line on IRC if you need some space somewhere before or after that period, I have plenty of friends (both geeky and not ) who would like to host people for a few days.

Now, should I start a petition online in order to abrotman gets decided and come to DebConf? 

Ahh, I haven't played a purely instrumental piano piece for a while, so here goes. Ehren Starks with a wonderfully calm piece which gets more energetic near the end... Song: Ehren Starks - One Big Hope (4:50 min, 4.5 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 1.0
Source: magnatune.com
Purchase from: Magnatune

At 23:22 I turned the comments plugin back on on my blog... at 00:42 I'd got *1* real comment and *139* spams. Needless to say, I've turned comments off again :) I'll get round to actually fixing it sometime, until then my e-mail address is reasonably visible on my website :)

According to this Spiegel Online article Athen plans to “ban offroaders” from the centre of the city with the beginning of September 2006. Since the Greek governments argues about the traffic space these cars need, their drivers “only being posers” that have “nothing to do than driving around all the day”, I suspect, they mean SUVs and not offroaders. At least here in Germany, you usually don’t see offroaders in the cities, but a lot of Sport Utiliy Vehicles which usually just pretend to be an offroader (Wired, Guardian) but are perfect for parking with one or two tires on the sidewalk. As outrageous as this sounds — it may have a real and reasonable reason: SUVs are usually bigger than other cars (especially in Europe), they need more parking space and have bad turning circles. They often have to back just to turn left or right in Athen’s narrow alleyways. Because of this, they are accused to cause most of the traffic jams in the centre of Athen I’m still not sure, if I should believe this news, although SUVs are some kind of enemy concept for me. Why only SUVs? Why (AFAIK) also small offroaders like the Suzuki LJ or SJ? Why not being consequent and taking the Paris of ’50s (or ’60s? Can’t remember and Google and Wikipedia didn’t help…) as an example and creating a Zone Bleue (“Blue Zone”), in which only cars may enter, which have appropriate dimensions. “Zone Bleue”? Back in the decades after WWII, Paris had problems with big lorries in the city, so Paris’ introduced the Zone Bleue (AFAIR) in the inner city, which was restricted to vehicles with a floor space less than 5m² or 6m² or so, so even some French car makers started build special “Zone Bleue” versions of their delivery vans with bumpers closer to the van body, tunneled rear lights and rolling shutter instead of outside lying sliding doors. And often high roofs for raising their capacity. (The only “Zone Bleue” van I found pictures of on the net was this Citroën HY Zone Bleue Pickup. You can best see the unusual rear bumper and the tunneled rear lights on the lower left picture.) But back to Athen: Another reason which makes me sceptical about that news is that neither the Englisch Google News nor the the German Google News (also tried several other search terms…) finds any other news about this except the above mentioned Spiegel article. Found via Ignoranz.ch.

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.

Yesterday

Yesterday was a hectic day involving lots of beer. Last night I:

• Went out for a meal with some visiting Americans. (2 pints of beer)
• Went out to the Guildford Arms to meet some visiting Dutch people (2 pints of guiness) [Signed and uploaded all three GPG keys this morning]
• Went out to The Auld Hoose to meet friends. (1 bottle Newcastle Brown Ale)

Waking up this morning was a long and gradual process. Now I have to fight to install SCO upon a new HP server. The machine has no floppy drive, and requires additional drivers to be installed to access the disks. Fun stuff.

Today

Some Debian work:

• Orphaned “ud” since it is in a bad shape and I just can’t bring myself to care.
• (Now every package I “own” is in a great state and used by me semi-daily.)
• Made a new sarge backport of xen-tools.
• Have a pending upload of Komi to fix a FTBFS issue.
• Need to make the CSS changes to the Debian Admin site to improve the site header.

Tomorrow I need to setup a new site to advert the commercial setup/support I’ve been doing for the past few months. First of all I need to actually clarify what I’ll offer, then work out how to charge, etc. In the past I’ve mostly done single-server setups for one-off fees, and maintainence which just included applying security updates plus monitoring disk-space + services. Not sure that there is a huge market for it, but it is something I’d like to do more of, even if there is no money involved.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I've been working on a new layout for my website, which is mostly completed. Still need to do some work on some of the styling, but I'm mostly happy with the layout of the site. It's not exactly an original design, but it's a significant improvement on the half style I used to have. The next step is to improve the style so I don't have to repeat the style and html on every page and I'm hoping to do it without php. I have some cunning plans involving python and xslt, but we'll see how that goes. Also, after several months, I fixed my blog comments to not give a 500 Server Error, so people can now freely spam my comments. Turns out that the comments plugin didn't have write permission to the comments directory, but pyblosxom kindly didn't prove any hints beyond "Premature end of script headers". Cheers.

Yesterday I posted about some bad shell code I had found and posted an improved version. Part of the reason for posting it was that I hoping someone could point out any errors in the version I posted. Fortunately Neil Moore emailed me some improvements.

1. If the script returns more than one line they will be removed by the $(...) expansion when it is split into words. The solution there is to surround it in double quotes.
2. The next problem Neil pointed out was that $@ should be surrounded by quotes in pretty much every case, otherwise parameters with spaces in will get split into separate parameters.
3. The final problem is that if the script includes a return statement, it will stop the inner most function or sourced script, but not during eval.The solution is to enclose it in a function:

   
   dummy()   eval "$(perl "$CONF_DIR/project.pl" "$@")";   dummy "$@"
   
   

Since making the post, I discovered that Solaris' /bin/sh doesn't like $(...), so it's probably better to use backticks instead if you want to be portable. As I know the output from the script I'm not worried about return statements, so I've ended up with:

eval " perl "$CONF_DIR/project.pl" "$@" "

There's a fairly standard set of activities that go on at linux.conf.au each year -- keynotes, tutorials, seminars, miniconfs, BOFs, lightning talks, keysigning, etc. The hackfest is a standard part of the program, but one which (in the past) maybe hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. I think this is because, in 2004 and 2005, the hackfest was a fairly narrow task -- in Adelaide (2004) contestants had to write a tetrinet client (fairly complex), and in Canberra (2005) contestants had to write either a GUI or an AI for spellcast (a fairly esoteric game that nearly nobody has ever heard of). Prior to this year, I'd never participated in a hackfest. I've never played tetrinet in my life, and I knew I had no hope of writing an AI for spellcast. Also, since the contest in both cases ran for most of the week, to be competitive I figured you had to spend all of your spare time working on your program, and there was beer to be drunk, so I decided it was a bad use of my time. This year, though -- phwoar. A totally different problem set, a new way of running the hackfest. Far more approachable for a much broader collection of hackers, and since it was a 4-hour session, you knew how much time you had to invest up-front. I really appreciated that there was something for pretty much every type of competent programmer. One task, for instance, was to build a config GUI for the ccontrol tool, another was to write a Sudoku puzzle generator. These aren't simple problems, but I'd say that most people I'd call a programmer could make a good showing at one (or both) of these problems. At the same time, though, there were some really low-level problems (like optimising a C program or turning some PPC64 assembly code back into the original C function). These were interesting for me, as it's not something that I'd ever touch myself in the normal world, so it was nice to be able to submerge into something like this for a little while. There were even a couple of problems that didn't require much programming skill -- fix a corrupted gzip archive, and fix a corrupted filesystem image. These are difficult problems, but don't (necessarily) require the production of reams of code to solve. To be able to win the competition, though, you need to have a broad range of skills. This is entirely appropriate (although it rules me out of the running) as a true hacker is adaptable to new problems. With the previous competitions, if you happened to luck out and be a tetrinet or spellcast guru, you had the competition in the bag. This competition will slightly favour someone who is a PPC assembly expert over someone who doesn't know much about anything, for example, but your PPC guru (who can't do much else) is going to get 0wz0red by the problem-solving, google-loving generalist. The time limit aspect was a very, very good move as well. It meant that I could accurately estimate, up front, my total time commitment to the game. I didn't have to worry about getting flogged by someone who dedicated themselves day and night to cracking the problems while I was out stonegrilling my dinner and emptying barmates. Now I only have to worry about getting flogged by people who are just Better Hackers -- which I have no problem with. It was also great to be able to switch on the iRiver and bury myself in the problem for a few hours, instead of putting it off all week and then bodging up a poor solution in the last few hours. So, kudos to Chris and the rest of the team who ran this year's hackfest. I really enjoyed this year's competition, and I hope that next year will be equally interesting.

Sorry. Couldn't resist. Following on from my previous look at XTech proposals, I wanted to comment on one of the hot topics contributed to the Applications track. While this track will push all the buttons (we've got Rails, RSS, web services, content management and more) one of the really striking things was the number of proposals on the topic of DITA. If you're not a regular in the tech docs world, then DITA is probably at best just another acronym you've seen whizzing by. DITA stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, and it's a new document format making waves in the world of technical documentation. From a casual documenter's point of view, the obvious question is probably "what does this mean for DocBook?" Does the mass of enthusiasm mean DocBook's on its way out? In short, no. DocBook and DITA compared  DITA and DocBook are actually rather different beasts. DocBook is a sound DTD for writing technical books and articles, with the structure that such forms imply. DITA is focused on creating modular technical documents, with the intent for easy reuse across varied delivery methods. It's intended for topic-oriented documentation, which may be chopped about and rearranged within a variety of contexts and for a variety of display devices. DITA is a DTD and a set of rules for writing online contextual documentation such as software help files. There's a lot more to it than I'll write here, but here a few more differences between DocBook and DITA:

• DocBook is hierarchical, DITA separates content from context allowing multiple architectures of information
• DocBook is a fixed element and attribute set, DITA is extensible, allowing the definition of custom information types
• DocBook is much more mature than DITA, with a variety of solid tool support options. DITA's the new kid on the block.
• DocBook is well documented, DITA's documentation is still in the early stages.

There's a real need for something like DITA, which addresses concerns that didn't really exist in the same way when DocBook first emerged at O'Reilly in the early 1990s. DITA and open source projects I'm looking forward to learning more about DITA, but one thing that immediately strikes me about it is its relevance to some of the documentation problems faced by open source projects. DocBook has never quite clicked as a documentation format for some collaboratively maintained projects, probably because the inevitable book-like nature of the result necessitates sole or restricted authorship, and heavy editing. Instead one of the increasingly popular ways for providing documentation has been the wiki. You guessed it, a topic-based architecture. What wikis seem to lack, however, is any way of providing a thought-out progression through the content. In essence, the information architecture side of things. Had I been able to attend every session from XTech last year, I'd have heard Paul Prescod talk about what DITA and wikis have in common.
There may be a downside, however. DITA looks impressively engineered, but it may be too industrial-strength for many. My initial investigations suggests that while there's emergent commercial tool support, there's not much going on in the open source field (although there is the DITA Open Toolkit, which looks to have been produced in close association with OASIS technical committee now in charge of DITA.)
As DocBook guru Norm Walsh observes, DocBook can play in this space too. With additions such as those Norm proposes, DocBook could play host to DITA's major features. (Norm writes "With a couple of hours of hacking, I've implemented on top of DocBook the four key features of DITA that I could identify.") Though these possibilities are intriguing, I think that, for open source projects, things need to get simpler rather than harder. More reading:

• DITA--Getting Started (XTech 2005 proceedings)
• To DITA or not to DITA? (Palimpsest blog)
• Cover Pages: Darwin Information Typing Architecture (Robin Cover)
• DITA FAQ (OASIS)
• Going DITA (O'Reilly weblogs)