So, today was "interesting", but aside from the working part of the day, I was in a pub... Now, this isn't a new experience for me, as most people will know... but anyways - the subject came up about "religion" (kinda), as I don't actually believe that anyone exists, but do believe in the fact that I find myself in this environment that I can't actually prove does or doesn't exist, and that I then deal with that on a day by day basis of "shit, it's time to go to work..." my view on the world may be "a little" skewed by other people's standards... So, anyways - it came to a point where someone was saying that "animals" don't do "xyz" and so they can't be as intelligent as us... now my view on this is that animals may have already done xyz and decided that "survival" in this environment is the key to sucess, ergo basic instinct assuming that they all know mortality (which if they didn't the wouldn't reproduce) is that the *only* thing in this world that actually matters for any given species is survival of the species. Now, that being the case, and the general case being survival of the fittest, why on *earth* did we invent this medium (the internet) for talking to each other - do we *really* need to know what's happing several thousand miles away? If we ditched the technology and went back to our roots, what seperates us from the thousands of other species on the planet? Isn't it possible that other species have already been through the stages that we are still going through, come out the other end and worked out that, actually, on balance, it's better to hunt/gather and survive than mess with the delicate balance of nature? So, get out the way the messy politics, the correctness, the complete stupidity that is current human nature and go back to the basics - eat, sleep, hunt/gather... we've ended up making the world a much more complicated place than it actually needs to be... and, at the end of the day, what do we actually gain from this? Anyways - just a random brain dump after a potentially stupidly long chat in an establishment that is setup purely to intoxicate it's customers... Night peeps. Brett.

TerrorBullGames has just released the board game War On Terror. The first I heard of this was a short article in a local news paper about how much the game has offended some people (quoting someone who was injured in the London bombings). A co-creator of the game Andy Thompkins said "We accept that some people think this is in poor taste and may see it as puerile. But we would say that launching an illegal war on Iraq is in poor taste".

It's not as if profiting from terrorism is anything new. Governments in Australia, the UK, and the US have profited from it at the ballot box and also used it to stifle opposition parties to get unpopular legislation approved. An example of this is the attempts of the Bush regeime to legalise torture, see the Washington Post and The Age (Australia).

Shortly after 9-11 almost every computer company that had anything to do with backups or disaster-recovery was advertising heavily. Oil companies have done particularly well with high prices, they would have done even better if the plans for Iraq had succeeded.

TerrorBullGames appears to have an aim to draw attention to the lies of politicians, which makes them better than everyone else who has profited from 9-11. Maybe if they draw enough attention to the bad things that our governments are doing they can influence the results of elections, and we can get governments that don't promote terrorism.

Here's a review of the game.

I am currently working on something which hopefully end up being a good calendar server. The goal is to make it easy to add new frontends such as a CalDAV frontend, a Web frontend, etc. So far, I am just working on getting the data model right. The iCalendar RFC has a data model which I am trying to formulate into SQL, something which is ending up being quite hard. Shannon Clark blogs about why calendars are hard, and all of those issues are issues I am running up against when trying to make the data model. The main problem seems to be related to time zones, more closely: "How do you store timezone information in your database". The easy (but wrong) solution is to just normalise everything to UTC. This will not handle the case of events crossing timezone changes, such as to or from daylight savings. What I am currently considering is making sure all data in the database is stored in UTC, but also store the original time zone information. While a bit more complex, this allows applications to get back the same timezone they put in (I am not convinced Evolution will be happy if the timezones are renamed, for instance) and it allows my application to generate recurring events properly. My main issue with this is having the application responsible for making sure the data in the database makes sense, but without putting half my app in PL/perl, I can not see a way around that. Oh, and if anybody has great ideas on how to represent timezones in a relational database (postgres), please do mail me or grab me on IRC or something similar.

I got an enormous amount out of the just-finished European FooCamp, with lots of thoughts sparking off and interesting things to consider. Jon Mountjoy proposed a theory to me that Web 2.0 and the enterprise weren't in fact as far apart as a naive observe might imagine. He reckons that mashups, tagging and the like do happen within the enterprise, and in fact are often solving harder problems than found in the wilds of the web. There is a lot in common between Web 2.0 and SOA (even aside from buzzword compliance factors). This is a theme I'd like to follow through. Who are the hackers on the inside of companies, and what stories do they have to tell? Gavin Starks from Global Cool really opened our eyes again to the problem of the environment, and introduced the interesting position that Global Cool are taking. If you want to do anything real right now to avoid catastrophic consequences, it's too late to wait for government initiatives to bear fruit. Private citizens must act too. And that's the aim of Global Cool: educating and lobbying the individual, not the government. I was struck, as were others, by the unfortunate irony that conferences have a big environmental cost in the travel involved, as we sat there among people from many countries. I want to now investigate how XTech could be better in this regard, through carbon offsetting and similar schemes. I guess being in Paris is already a good start, as trains are apparently only 25% as polluting as planes, though this still seems like a lot! Claus Dahl led an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about Second Life as a prototyping space for real life invention. Too many themes there to summarise neatly, but we did have an entertaining side discussion about Second Life's potential environmental impact due to CPU consumption and data centers. One suggestion was that objects and activities could be annotated in-world with their environmental cost. Simon Willison energetically explained OpenID, a decentralized identity system proposed by SixApart and already live in systems such as LiveJournal. It attempts to solve the problem of a username and password pair for every site you visit, without the controversy of centralisation suffered by projects such as Microsoft's passport. Simon demonstrated a proof of concept that I think will be a very neat answer to site providers who ask "why should I support OpenID?" (Sneak preview: because if you don't, it's going to be astonishingly easy for a middleman to provide it, and you wouldn't want that.) I also took time to learn about something I'd been interested in but not known much about, 3D printing and "fabbing". Simon Wardley led a great overview of current systems for 3D printing and their various attributes, and indicated where the current trends were going. It doesn't seem so unrealistic that there'll soon be affordable 3D printing bureaux similar to walk-in reprographic facilities like Kinkos. Plenty more went on that I've not got time to transcribe, but I think will flavour my thinking over the months to come. I was fortunate to be among some incredibly intelligent and welcoming people. My thanks to O'Reilly for putting this on, and to everyone else who went for being inspiring companions. Oh, one more thing. Belgians are excellent at confectionery.

After take#2 at the flight (*grin*) I got here last night. Met by Carlos at the airport in the south of Tenerife, then driven up to Santa Cruz in the north. We met up with a fair-sized group of the locals and went out for pizza. I'm happy to be here; the local people are bending over backwards to include me in conversation, despite my lack of Spanish. They seem to be a really friendly group. Then across to the university at La Laguna this morning. My 90-minute talk about Debian went very well, in front of 40 or so people. I don't normally like public speaking very much, but it helps a lot when I'm talking about something I know very well. People were clearly interested in knowing more about Debian, and asked some good questions at the end. The slides from my talk and some photos will appear on-line at some point when I find a decent net connection. For the rest of my time here, people have suggested a few touristy things to do, and have offered to show me around. My thanks to Ren , Carlos and the others - it's great to be here!

Recently I've been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.

The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error "ff ff ff ff" in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message "ff ff ff" which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it's shared secret for no reason I could determine.

A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the "ff ff ff ff" error message as appearing in the case where the "ff ff ff" error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I'm running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message "ff ff", we are still unsure of what that means.

For people who haven't used Siteminder I'll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won't restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.

The Debian Project has chosen Diebold as its official preferred electronic voting provider. This move comes at an opportune moment since the project has several votes coming up. "The double D partnership, as we like to call it, is going to change the shape of the Internet", says O. Fiend, the current Master of Voting of Debian. "We got tired of picking up paper ballots from all over the world, especially since flight security no longer allows locked steel containers handcuffed to the courier's wrist. Sea travel is so damn boring." Diebold is the global leader in the electronic voting market segment. They will bring much needed experience and expertese to Debian's proceedings. "Yep, those guys didn't know anything about cheating until we showed up. Wait, I meant voting", adds the Diebold CEO. Not everyone is happy, though. "Their stuff don't run onna m86k, dat's dumb, I wanna run it on my own-a box", claims Steve Vorlovski, one of the Debian Project's more prominent opposition members. "Stupid cabal, I hate them, hate, hate, hate." says another opposition member who prefers that we not reveal his identity, in fear of retaliation, so we'll just call him #808. The project expects to use the Diebold machines as build daemons when a vote is not going on. "The Debian GNU/Windows port is really lacking in build daemons and porter machines right now", admits Lars Wirzenius. "We don't have any, in fact." The Debian Inquirer joins the crowd congratulating Debian on getting this defect fixed.

Today's the "day of Genius" in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a festival to celebrate human reason, innovation, and inspiration. Something that deserves our respect and attention. My big genius accolades today are for the people who put on the Piknic Electronik Summer Sundays in Montreal. We stopped by the last one for 2006 yesterday, and it was a great time. Our friend John Usher (in town to defend his Ph.D. thesis) came along with us, but we also met friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, Lou and Candace and little Olive, Patti and Meg and Lucinda and Damian and Douglas and... lots of folks. Piknic remains one of my favorite parties in Quebec. An afternoon dance party under a giant Calder stabile on a beautiful island park in the St. Laurence River? Truly genius! I hope Piknic 2007 keeps growing and going with the mellow, friendly atmosphere that it's had in the past. tags: montreal piknic electronik party genius

Web 2.0 Conference So, I'm sad to see that the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in November is sold out. Maj and I made plans to visit SF during this time just to get to the conference, but I guess it's all filled up. Now I'm trying to track down a spare ticket or two. Anybody got a miracle? tags: web2.0 web2con san francisco miracle

R RS There's now a draft version of the Revised Report on the algorithmic language Scheme (R RS). It's not much news for folks who read the recent status report on R RS, but it's still pretty interesting. Most of the good ideas seem to have gotten into the spec, and the icky idea of doing immutable pairs seems to be gone now. Check out http://www.r6rs.org/ for a copy of the draft spec and a signup form for the discussion list. tags: r rs scheme spec

SxSW Panels and Wiki I'm pretty excited to see that the new 2007 South-by-Southwest Interactive panel voting interface is up today. I proposed a panel called Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills, to discuss different ways that private companies are creating wikis and investing in Wiki technology. I was surprised to hear that, for SxSW Interactive 2007, it's the only proposed Wiki panel! If you're thinking about SxSW 2007, or if you just feel like voting on things, please drop by and give the wiki panel your support. tags: wiki sxsw sxsw2007

Ms. P. I'm really proud of my cousin, Lisa Prodromo, who's a teacher in Chicago. Lisa's from the poor branch of the family that can't afford a "u" at the end of their name, but she's overcome that hardship and is now a really great English teacher. She's got a blog at http://www.msprodromo.com/ for her students, but I'm waiting for her to bust out with one for grownups, too. Anyways, she was just nominated for the prestigious Golden Apple award, a Chicago-area teachers award. I'm sure she's going to win. tags: lisaprodromo u msprodromou teaching chicago golden apple : What's the protocal for commenting here in your bliki? Edit now and ask questions later has always worked for me, so I'll try that. When am I got to get an introduction to the illustrious Chicago Ms. P? We're doing some scheming here in Chicago and would love to include her. --TedErnst

A guest researcher today called us, because his laptop with Fedora Core 4 didn’t get any working IP address. That problem was solved quite quickly: The “Internet Connection Wizard” didn’t allow him to choose a dynamic configuration via DHCP. It was greyed out and the static configuration was one for a private 192.168.* network. I quickly found out, that “Network Device Control” allowed us to switch to DHCP. After deleting /etc/resolv.conf, it also got the right DNS servers. But whatever I restarted, it didn’t set a default route although it did get one by DHCP and had it documented in its lease file. After about one and a half hour of debugging configurations and network configuration scripts I found out, that if the environment variable $GATEWAY is set, it ignores the one given by DHCP. Then I grepped for GATEWAY in the config file. But I just found the default gateway configured for the old, now greyed out static IP configuration. Although I told myself “No, it can’t be!” I commented out the default gateway of the now unused static configuration. And yes, I wasn’t mistrustful enough about Fedora: It worked. You really have to change parts of the not selected static IP configuration to make the selected dynamic one to work. Thanks, Fedora! *bangingtheheadontothetable*

I finally decided to move the Jabber server of luon.net to a different server. Our main luon.net server was being fairly loaded for weeks because of the business of the S2S component. The transition was a lot easier than I had expected and everyone got to keep his/her JID. Some tips/hints concerning the steps I took:

• First I moved all our services’ DNS names to a CNAME of jabber.luon.net, that is:

   msn 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   icq 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   s2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   c2s 1800 IN CNAME jabber
   ...

  Note that jabber.luon.net still has the same addresses as luon.net at this time.
• I also added SRV records for luon.net so XMPP servers and some of the clients can find us right away. (Since the server won’t be running on luon.net anymore, the @luon.net-JIDs still will let everything try to contact us there). The SRV records used:

   _jabber._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
   _xmpp-client._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.
   _xmpp-server._tcp 1800 IN SRV 5 1 jabber.luon.net.

• With that done, I installed all components we use on the new machine, rsynced the configuration, restarted the server and services and tested the connection.
• Then, I modified the address of jabber.luon.net to point to the new host and let it propagate.
• Next, I sent a MOTD (luon.net/announce/motd) about our server move and notified the users that if their clients do not support SRV records, they will not be able to login anymore and they’ll have to change the server address in the client¹.
• Finally, I installed a second C2S component on luon.net that connects to the main XMPP router component on the other host for transition purpose. I’ll leave it on for two weeks.

It’s a pity that SRV records aren’t used more these days. But I guess the whole sub-domain and multiplex-by-CNAME stuff came earlier (why doesn’t your website start with ‘www.’?).

¹ I thank Google for introducing the gmail.com JIDs <-> talk.google.com server discrepancy so that now all clients can configure the server separately from the JID.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos] So, I've been on the ship for a week or so now, learning knots and nautical stuff, cooking, cleaning, making inventories and otherwise preparing for the voyage. So far, we're just sitting in the harbour in Cairns, learning and working until the 24th. It feels weird to be away from the Internet for so long and the communities with whom my main contact has been Internet based; Debian, Perth/Indymedia & Cat@lyst. Kinda like being shipwrecked on an island, cut off from the outside world; no access to communication networks or ability to move around. However, the ship has an SSB (single sideband) radio (as well as VHF), I'm hoping that will satisfy my communications addiction. I've been learning about the SSB radio; if anyone knows of any information about, or free software (gratis and/or libre, preferably Windows based as there is only Windows - and a Mac and a Knoppix CD on board) that can access WEFAX (weatherfax) or the Internet via SSB, please email me about it. argh! damn German keYboards have the Y and the Z in the wrong places!!!

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.) After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old. Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware. First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all. So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:

1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.

So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like. The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break. And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace. So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

During Debconf5, I voiced the opinion that all Debian packages with a priority Standard or higher, as well as packages with a high Popularity Contest rating and development packages with a priority Optional or Extra that many people rely upon for development work, ought to be team-maintained as a matter of Policy. I justified this by pointing out that Debian's Social Contract puts our users among our key priorities, which implies that keeping the packages that our users value the most in excellent shape ought to be the embodiment of this value, and that the best way of meeting this goal is to enforce a policy of team maintenance and easy NMU for those packages. While my own packages are rather modest contributions to Debian's pool and few of them rate anywhere close to the top in popularity, I honestly feel like practicing what I preach is the best example I could give. Another reason is that several business ideas that I'm working on are monopolizing my time, which means that I'm not as available as I would like to be to participate in Debian. I however see this situation as only temporary, which is why I have not orphaned my packages. Instead, I am soliciting Debian Developers to come as co-maintainers. Interested parties should check my QA page for packages that might interest them and contact me for details. Thanks! PS: in case this wasn't obvious, the whole point of enforcing team maintenance and allowing NMU on non-RC but annoying bugs is to avoid unresponsive lone wolf maintainers who let tons of bug reports pile up on their packages without fixing them or even acknowledging them. Ubuntu avoids this by allowing anyone on their development team to chip in, while Debian still clings on to each maintainer's absolute reign over their packages, which leaves users of neglected packages completely in the dust.

One thing that has always appealed to me about Debian is the strength of the community behind it. A somewhat recent incident has reminded me of how strong this community really is. When several members of the Debian community became concerned about a situation in the life of another member, they immediately tried to contact that member, and that member’s friends and family to insure that person would be ok. Phone calls were made halfway across the world in the middle of the night (in various timezones) to insure the well-being of a member of our community. It is a strong reminder that even though the Debian community may have vigorous arguements about technical and social issues, we still take care of our own.

I'm going to set up a new laptop system soonish (more on that later) which shall have a completely encrypted hard drive. Hence, I'm testing a few setups wrt security, performance, manageability and fault-tolerance. Here's a few performance tests I did on an 80 GB laptop hard drive (in an Intel Celeron based laptop, 1.7 GHz, 256 MB RAM, Linux 2.6.17, Debian unstable).
I ran bonnie++ (with no options) and hdparm as hdparm -tT /dev/hda each time. I haven't put too much thought into the test setup, so if I made some stupid mistakes, please let me know. Unencrypted plain ext3 partitions:

• Extra partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /var, /tmp, /home, and swap (no LVM).
• Optionally, SELinux enabled on that system (targeted policy in permissive mode).

bonnie++:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
forest         432M 19857  84 21831  10  9536   4 16355  58 22165   3 148.8   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  1650  98 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  1734  98 +++++ +++  3820  96
forest,432M,19857,84,21831,10,9536,4,16355,58,22165,3,148.8,0,16,1650,98,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,1734,98,+++++,+++,3820,96

bonnie++ with SELinux:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
forest         432M 20321  90 21036  13  9473   5 16742  61 21978   4 148.1   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  1398  98 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  1473  98 +++++ +++  3305  98
forest,432M,20321,90,21036,13,9473,5,16742,61,21978,4,148.1,0,16,1398,98,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,1473,98,+++++,+++,3305,98

hdparm:

 Timing cached reads:   1416 MB in  2.00 seconds = 707.48 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   82 MB in  3.06 seconds =  26.80 MB/sec

hdparm with SELinux:

 Timing cached reads:   1404 MB in  2.00 seconds = 700.59 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   80 MB in  3.02 seconds =  26.53 MB/sec

Ext3 partitions on top of LVM on top of dm-crypt:

• One partition which is encrypted using dm-crypt (aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 mode, AES, 256 bit key size)
• On top of that an LVM2 system, with extra partitions for /, /boot, /usr, /var, /tmp, /home, and swap.
• Optionally, SELinux enabled on that system (targeted policy in permissive mode).

bonnie++:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
forest         464M 11149  54 16660  20  6461   5  7472  58 11129   5 136.4   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  1564  98 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  1650  98 +++++ +++  2640  97
forest,464M,11149,54,16660,20,6461,5,7472,58,11129,5,136.4,0,16,1564,98,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,1650,98,+++++,+++,2640,97

bonnie++ with SELinux:

Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
forest         464M  9878  52 12138  11  5457   6  6834  56 11037   5 137.2   0
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  1426  97 +++++ +++ +++++ +++  1451  98 +++++ +++  2433  97
forest,464M,9878,52,12138,11,5457,6,6834,56,11037,5,137.2,0,16,1426,97,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,1451,98,+++++,+++,2433,97

hdparm:

 Timing cached reads:   1408 MB in  2.00 seconds = 704.01 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   80 MB in  3.02 seconds =  26.53 MB/sec

hdparm with SELinux:

 Timing cached reads:   1396 MB in  2.00 seconds = 698.06 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   82 MB in  3.07 seconds =  26.69 MB/sec

So yes, there is some overhead, but it's nothing too serious, IMHO. And quite honestly, I don't care too much about performance here — security is more important than performance. I think you'll agree; if you don't agree now, you will agree with me on the very day someone steals your laptop ;-)

If there are electronic voting machines where you live, and you've ever considered using one of those... well, you should probably reconsider. In this CNN report (M4V video, 13 MB) Avi Rubin explains why voting machines are a really, really bad idea. To quote some issues raised in the video:

• There's no way for voters to verify that their votes were recorded correctly.
• There's no way to count votes in a publicly viewable fashion.
• Meaningful recounts are impossible.
• Machines must be trusted not to fail (and we all know that computers never fail, right? ... right?).
• The Diebold machines contain gross design and programming errors (a detailed analysis is available).
• The quality of voting machines cannot be determined, because their code is proprietary (closed systems can never be trusted

, especially so in such important scenarios) The CCC Berlin has a very detailed analysis of the topic (German), with many links to further articles. I'd recommend everyone to not use voting machines at all, but rather perform traditional pen-and-paper voting, if you value your vote... Also, make sure to inform relatives and friends about the risks of voting machines, and complain to your local responsible authorities, and ask them to remove these unreliable, insecure machines. Update 2006-09-18: Just in case you thought that maybe you can trust the Diebold machines after all - their locks can be opened with a standard hotel minibar key. (via The Lunatic Fringe)

This is kinda a mix between my list of bookmarks and some things I've been thinking about and following lately. astronomy I've been reading a lot of astronomy stuff lately, a lot more than my usual low-level interest in it. I'm kind of feeling the need for a refresher course, so I can get a better handle on stuff that's happened since I studied this stuff in school. It's hard to get my head around things like dark matter and really grok the evidence. While black holes and relativity and such seem so obviously a natural part of this universe. Does this mean I'm getting old? The chance to bounce questions and ideas off someone would probably help in getting a real grip on this stuff. So would a lot more physics than I know.. (Hurrah for Eris BTW. The name almost makes all that sillyness over a mere definition worthwhile.) Favorite sites: Universe Today and Wikipedia.

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weather I've been following this hurricane season, to make up for having paid so little attention to last year's disastrous one. I knew about the "New Orleans bowl" scenario well before Katrina, and the night before it hit I actually spent several hours tuning in far-away AM stations from down there and listening to the city not react in time. But despite all that I feel that I missed out on really seeing it happen, so I've been learning about tropical waves, and wind shear and ULL's, and dropsondes, and the satelite data that can be used to follow hurricanes. The nice thing is that instead of the old stereotype of someone watching the weather channel 24/7 with a map and thumbtacks, these days there's a nice mix of pre-processed info and analysis and raw data, easily followed in small amounts of time on Wunderground's blogs.

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spaceflight Half love and half hate. The recent shuttle mission has been a riot for a shuttle-hater and SF lover. It has all the elements of one of those SF novels where they go down to the cape, dig up an Apollo stack, and use it to save the world / travel to Mars / fight the alien invaders. Except here they're pulling an unused orbitor out of mothbolls. And putting it up on the launchpad with a hurricane bearing down, getting it struck by lightning, pulling it off the pad, changing their mind with the giant crawler half-way through that milti-day maneuver when the hurricane fizzles, putting it back, filling and refilling the tank as sensors fail and they rewrite their safty regs on the fly, barely making the launch window, and proceeding to triumphantly lose nuts and break wrenches .. In Space! Space opera, indeed. Then there's the genuinely interesting stuff. Intentional crashing of a French probe into the moon, probes firing projectiles at asteroids and trying (with great difficulty and many glitches) to return a sample. A mission on its way to Pluto. The rovers still going strong on Mars after all this time. Bigelow launching an inflatable prototype of his planned space hotel. A whole load of microsats tragically blowing up on launch. All the private aereospace stuff, which seems to close to turning into something real. Happily followed at Spaceflight Now.

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TV Over the past while and a half I've been very happy to discover The Wire and Deadwood, have been working my way through the Sopranos and Lost, been creepily fascinated by Big Love, got a kick out of the Canadian antics of Corner Gas, vegged out to Greys Anatomy, and have been very sad to reach the end of Six Feet Under. BSG, Doctor Who, House, and some other shows haven't held up as well past the first seasons for me. Happily, there's NetFlix, which makes it plausable that I did this legally despite not having HBO or even owning a TV.

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literature I've been reading Charles Stross, David Drake, John Twelve Hawks, Kelly Armstrong, Naomi Novik, Robert Charles Wilson, VC Andrews, and, loath though I am to admit it, John Ringo. I'm in the middle of books by Steph Swainston, Geoff Ryman, and Dave Duncan. I finally found a defintion of Science Fiction I like, but I lost the link. (It's the subjective "her world exploded" one.) Anyway, I'm afraid that I may have reached the point where to get much more out of reading SF, I'd have to start going to cons. Which I don't want to do. But I seem to be at a low ebb for it being interesting to me, or just need to finally tackle some other branch of literature. Actually, the most engaging reading I've been doing lately is in the achives (all of them!) of the Idle Words blog. It makes obscure details about Poland and China, and even interpretation of Russian classics seem pretty darn interesting, and has much better rants about the space shuttle. And it proves that blog entries should properly be good and long.

For the next upcoming stable update, which should happen around October, 16th, is just sent the first preparation mail. Procedure is as usual, intervene if you think, we do something completely wrong here. An up-to-date version of my mail can allways be found here. Next update on that mail will follow in about 10-15 days. release