Some interesting Free Software releases:

• OpenSSH: The upcoming OpenSSH 4.3 will be able to "make a real VPN using OpenSSH without the need for any additional software. This goes well beyond the TCP port forwarding that we have supported for years". See also Slashdot story.
• X11: New, Modularized X Window Release Now Available for Download — X11R6.9 and X11R7.0 have been released simultaneously. The latter now uses the autotools as build system and is modularized. This should lead to shorter release cycles.
• Git: git 1.0, the directory content manager created by Linus Torvalds in order to replace Bitkeeper, has been released.
• Qemu: Qemu 0.8 has been released, now supporting SMP, and USB.

Lots of stuff to try out...

Free software mailing lists suck. Especially Apache’s.

• Many of them have a CRAP Web interface or worse:
• Posting limited to subscribers

For weeks I have been struggling with Apache mailing lists (apache-users and spamassassin) and now recently with mutt lists. I know with Apache lists you can use a special syntax:

You can start a subscription for an alternate address,
for example “john@host.domain”, just add a hyphen and your
address (with ‘=’ instead of ‘@’) after the command word:

But when I do it via mutt or a echo test mail users-unsubscribe-hendry=dabase.com@httpd.apache.org . I get no response from the automated mailing list manager. :( So, If I ever get subscribed it’s generally thanks to the mailing list owner. Then after lurking a bit, I try post. That never works as the return paths don’t match the email I am subscribed with. Return paths change all the time depending on which machine I sent it from. It could be anything from:

• hendry@pico.dreamhost.com (from my shell)
• hendry@laptop.dabase.com (from my laptop)
• hendry@soltecsoftware.com.au (from work)

And the first two aren’t working email addresses! If you must filter, can’t you filter on my From OR Reply-To email address FFS: hendry@iki.fi All I suggest is for Apache to start using something usable like Google Groups for user support. Does anyone else feel my frustration?

After bubulle asked and Gunar tried to explain (Anybody understood his explanation? Good, I thought I was the only one ;) he finally published it on the DebConf website... somehow I feel some kind of D j vu...

We had some troubles with a broken computer, slow internet connection, no available storage room and some smaller problems. Interesting visitors, ranging from "I'm using SuSE why should I change to Debian?", some "I'm using Debian and would like to thank you!" and some really hard technical questions. Quite mixed visitors... In the afternoon the Linux New Media award was given away. For those who aren't familiar with it: It's the only free software related award I know of in Germany. It's given away yearly in several changing categories by a jury of over 200 people of the Free Software community and industry. A small history: 2002 one category was "best distribution" - Debian won it. 2003 one category was "distributions" - Debian won it. Bored by that, in 2004 Debian one no award itself - but in the category "best newcomer distribution" 4 out of 5 nominees were Debian based - Skolelinux / DebianEdu won it. 2005 we didn't won any award again - but is was again a success for Debian for two reasons:

1. One category was "best Debian derivate" - it's so boring to give awards to Debian, that they made a "who's doing as good as Debian" award ;) (Not surprisingly Ubuntu won it.)
2. In all but one of the six laudations for the winners in this years categories Debian was mentioned :))

This year they had one special award for "Outstanding contribution to Linux / Open Source". It was hard to decide, so many nominees... The City of Munich, the BBC, several country or state governments... it ended in a tie! This years winners are Mark Shuttleworth and the anonymous developer! Yes, everyone of you out there, who ever submitted one line of code, submitted one useful bug report, wrote one line of documentation.. all you got an award! Congratulations! Personal note: Somehow managed to hurt my knee... I'm too old for this... Personal note 2: Special greetings to Meike who can't be here with us :(

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

I’m coding a new CGI application, tentatively entitled BabyOp. It is software to run a babysitting coop; I suppose it is a species of “social software.” The idea is to be able to track hours credits, schedule babysitting times, centralize contact information and other details about babysitting requirements. I considered using something like Zope or Drupal for the application, but I’ve never liked developing exclusively through a web-interface and found myself having to do a fair bit of “actual” coding to get the results I wanted. I realize there is a command-line interface for Zope, but it’s really pretty limited. I had some plans a couple of years ago when I designed my wedding site in Zope to extend it to be more useful, but sadly never got around to it. So I’m back in my comfort zone, perl. I’ve written a fair amount of unmanageable perl code, however, CoopOrder probably being a shining example (it was also my first perl program). I’ve certainly improved since then, and the fact that I’ve received several patches from others for randomplay suggests that my coding style is getting to a half-decent point. I’d really like to get it right this time, though. One thing I’ve learned over the years is always to look for a module to do what you want before setting out to do it yourself, since chances are the module writer is a better coder than you (or at least, than me!). To that end, I’m using CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and DBIx::Abstract, among others. I’m also trying to keep things really granular and avoiding long subroutines. Certainly taking the HTML out of the perl code helps with that. I’m amazed at how often my code now just “works” on the first try, similar to esr’s story about his first look at Python (“Brace yourself: this code only took me about ninety minutes to write—and it worked correctly the first time I ran it.”) I’m trying to figure out if it would be sensible to make this application more fully object oriented. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and having done a lot of database programming, I’ve always been unfortunately pathologically declarative. (My first major package was in Clipper—I was 13 years old). I find it a lot easier to modify a pre-existing object oriented package than to design my own. But then again, does it really make sense to attempt an object-oriented design where there is really only one important “object” — in this case, the babysitting unit?

CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use. The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years. Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago. The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break. I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it. The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.

Why do prioprietary pieces of software often have names like the above? (Other examples: Macromedia Flash, Chipmunk Scripts Guestbook, Mojo Mail, PeopleSoft PeopleTools, Golden FTP Server Pro, Invision Power Board) A walk though the CVE lists will turn up hundreds of hilarious examples of similar names. It's easy to guess whether a given security hole in that list affects Debian based just on the form of the software name even if one has never heard of the program before. Even free software projects that seem to partake of a proprietary mindset show it in the names: Mozilla FireFox, OpenOffice, Mozilla Thunderbird. So different than w3m, vim, mutt. A whole pile of history, cultural, and, I imagine, linguistic difference. Even if at first saddled with such a name, many free software projects seem to evolve in the other direction: Debian Installer -> d-i, X Window System -> xorg. As someone who can't name software, I find this strangely fascinating.

As you read this fascinating but edited-for-brevity irc log from #debian-boot, imagine yourself as a contributor to either the larger Debian project or the Debian-Installer sub-project. At what point do you begin to feel insulted?

---

<Chepre> can i talk to the chief of debian please. the whole project could earn some money
<minghua> Chepre: if you are serious, write email to leader@debian.org
<Chepre> thanks minghua. is there a way to get a "official" release created with all up-to-date modules, like for Intel ICH7 sATA-Controller...as long as i pay for it?
<minghua> Chepre: chances are small. the official release is a long process
<minghua> and it doesn't happen often
<minghua> the earliest date you can expect for next release is probably end of 2006
<minghua> so you would have a better chance to hire some people/company who knows debian and provide you an updated kernel
<Chepre> OMG? does debian have not enough coders or don't they have "fun" to keep it up-to-date? e.g. the intel ich7 is already very old
<Chepre> well, can i hire the debian-team?
<minghua> Chepre: well, there is no official "team", but sure, you can hire debian developers
<gravity> Chepre: The stock kernel doesn't support your device? Why not? Is the driver not in the mainline kernel tree?
<Chepre> no
<gravity> Why not?
<Chepre> its just a default Dell PowerEdge 850 with Intel ICH7 and it isn't supported
<gravity> Chepre: Well, did you send an installation report?
<Chepre> gravity: no
<gravity> Chepre: That'd be a good first step to getting your problem fixed for future releases
<minghua> Chepre: ah, then it's supported by stock kernel after all, did you say it only works for kernel > 2.6.12?
<Chepre> minghua: 2.6.8-2 doesnt support it
<minghua> Chepre: okay, so as gravity said, write an installation report so that people know your problem
<Chepre> well, we cant wait month or years for a fix
<gravity> Chepre: You can create a custom installer image with the updated kernel for your work
<Chepre> we have to install many server in the next weeks :(
<munghua> Chepre: then I'm sure if you offer enough money, some d-i people can provide an installer with a newer kernel for you
<Chepre> well, i already got an custom installer but its a bit buggy...i need a whole netinst with the same "quality" like the official releases got
<gravity> sounds you were at the right track at the beginning... though "chief of debian" is probably the wrong person to contact :-P
<gravity> You could send a mail to debian-boot I suppose, offering the work for what you need
<Chepre> well, i also need up-to-date software, not just only the installer :( so the "whole" debian-team has to stop current work and has to start creating a stable version which is newer than the current unstable
<Chepre> minghua: do you think 50k are enough to get a 3.3 as stable?
<minghua> Chepre: by "up-to-date software" you mean all the software, including desktop, web servers, and stuff?
<gravity> Chepre: You may want to check out an alternative source. HP, as I understand it, provides the kind of support you want. Progeny does as well. And Ubuntu has their own full derivative with this sort of thing
<Chepre> minghua: right, as long the software is not a beta :)
<gravity> Chepre: The whole Debian team is not the kind of project that'll do this for you
<Chepre> so the debian-team dont want to earn money?
<Chepre> gravity: i know, open source :) ... but i think the guys making a new "official" release for me whould be very happy getting up to 20.000 us$ for one month of work
<gravity> Chepre: It would violate a lot of principles and the stable release policy to do an official debian release. You could get what you need with a name other than debian though, with some of the companies I listed above
<Chepre> where is the problem? i give you the money and you give me an up-to-date release which is only for my company, not for public
<gravity> I know I'd quit the project if there was an official Debian release for cash
<minghua> and there are like what, 10,000 packages in sarge now?
<gravity> Chepre: That's what those companies are for. Debian doesn't work like that
<gravity> Chepre: If you want to talk to individual debian developers for that, you can do that too
<Chepre> hmm, ok....now i know why the d-i doesn't recognize smp or 64bit systems

---

Now imagine yourself as someone who is trying to install Debian on twenty thousand stock machines for work and it's not working. At what point above did you begin to feel alienated? (Assuming that "Chepre" is not trolling,) Neither side in this exchange is particularly meaning to insult the other, both are doing what is right and obvious from their perspective. Two ships passing in the night, two trains speeding down a track, I don't know. It's a shame we can't deal better with this sort of thing. I would be truely interested to see how other free software projects deal with it differently. The rest of this is my attempt at some analysis and is probably not very useful.. A few mistakes Chepre made:

• When trying to communicate with someone, it's helpful to try to understand their motivations. Maybe these people are not highly motivated by money. Maybe spending 1% of your budget to buy the right someone a computer exhibitng the problem would be more effective.
• If a coder asks if you're filed a formal report of your problem, and you haven't, and you don't understand the underlying problem and rebuff their attempts to get a grip on it, escalating the issue to upper management will not make them your friend.
• Trying to pre-solve your problem by setting requirements like "it can't be a beta" and "it needs to be a 3.3 release" and "it needs to be newer than the current version" will only result in the wrong problem being solved, and smart people will not want to get involved in such a process. If you plan to hire someone to solve a problem it makes more sense to give them a broad vision of the problem to be solved, some example use cases, and let them, not you, solve the problem. That's what you're hiring them for.
• Not doing basic background research. And letting it show.

A few mistakes the channel (irr-)regulars made:

• Not recognising that "it will be done at the end of 2006" is not an answer a user wants to hear, and not pointing out alternatives such as last month's beta release or today's daily build.
• Assuming that when a user asks for a release, they necessarily want what we consider a "stable release". Perhaps they want a release that has some form of support and is free of showstopper bugs; what Debian terms "stable" is not the only release that necessarily has those characteristics, depending on how it will be used. (In other words, holy penguin pee (aka "official") might be more plentiful, and more symbolic, than you think.)
• Not pointing Chepre to the Debian consultants page. (Minor, but it's possibly the best place to have mentioned.)
• Getting offended. And letting it show.

I'm still alive, thanks for asking. Though it doesn't feel too much like it. The stress at work is rather improving than lowering. But I sort of managed to reach an important step last thursday finally with the bind-to-pdns transition we are doing, so I thought I could present me with some gifts. Interestingly I just were at the bank in the morning to withdraw my christmas money... So I thought I could go to the cinema again. The people with which I was in the cinema before didn't ask me lately to join them anymore, so I have to kick my ass myself anyway. So I drove to the cinema complex, and being not too late was able to go a bit shopping, too. I presented me with three (or four, because one was a double) CDs: Mike Oldfield "Ommadawn", Garbage "Bleed Like Me" and Kylie Minogue "UltimateKylie". Besides I usually prefer albums to Best Of Albums I thought the Kylie double CD was a good deal nevertheless. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" was the movie I watched, finally. Of course people who read the book will miss the Veela, the Leprechaun, Dobbie!! and various other things. But appart from the usual cutting you get with longer books the movie itself wasn't too bad. I really enjoyed it, especially because I met two friends right before going in and got the promise to go with them to Narnia today. Yeah! Friday was very special, too. I was invited to some christmas party, at viennAventura. I really enjoyed the evening, I fully support their concept. Take a look at the nice christmas flash Diana did for the website as long as you have the chance to!
After some glogg, helping to write a christmas picture story including the photo shooting and decorating their christmas tree with handdrawn glitter balls I went happily home. I took my dog out for a walk, and when we were around the corner I heard my cat cry for me! After a week being outside and almost already thinking of never seeing him again I heard him crying for me like hell! It was sooo great to hear him, I went over to him, picked him up and took him home with me again. Of course I wasn't able to do any work that weekend but only cuddle with him all the time. Fortunately for him he was in a very cuddly mood himself, too. ;) Guess he missed me too.

Repeating and following up to my post on -devel yesterday, I think that the biggest hurdle for Linux on the desktop is indeed that there are no provisions that allow an ordinary user to mount USB drives or access the sound devices. There are a bunch of workarounds that work reasonably well for single unmanaged systems, namely adding an entry to the fstab and using a suid program. Both of those are neither foolproof nor secure. The solution I'm proposing is to go through X, where a number of system services connect to the X server and allow access to the devices they control to all clients. The filesystems would live in userspace, thus allowing the user to plug their own.

It’s more than a year since the first development release of Backup Manager, this easy-to-use tool for archiving your data under Linux. Version 0.6 which has just been released, provides a set of features for letting you implement your own backup strategy.
Backup Manager is able to use any existing infrastructure for achieving this goal: FTP or SSH accounts, CD/DVD burning devices…
A couple of different backup methods are available: tarballs (incremental or not), dumps (MySQL, SVN) and a generic method which uses content sent on stdout by an arbitrary command. An effort has been given regarding localisation, the program is now translated in 5 languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese. The user guide has been writen and is available in different formats. Hopefully, the debian package will come very soon…

Only if the attack's for the benefit of the sysadmin or their employer, as far as I can tell. All-party Parliamentary Internet Group had links to legislation/regulation:

• the Computer Misuse Act 1990 doesn't make this explicit;
• Cybercrime Convention says a person can be held liable for crimes committed for their benefit made possible by lack of supervision (Article 12) and also lets you be slapped for withholding evidence;
• the EU Framework Decision on "Attacks Against Information Systems" echoes this (Article 9).

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute didn't let me find any cases with computer misuse AND supervision. Using "lack of supervision" alone finds common sense use only. So it seems to hinge on supervision. I hope that you have to do something pretty obviously daft to fall foul of a court on that. I guess that you shouldn't let a server managed by you run totally unattended, but if you take normal precautions (firewall, logcheck, intrusion detection and so on and actually review them), the admin should be OK whatever. If someone's just using your computer as a jumping-off point for random attacks, I don't see how that's for your benefit either. I think that wording might be to discourage evil businesses having teams trying to deface competitor sites and so on. There's probably a bigger danger from copyright and trademark infringement accusations IMO. I am not a lawyer. Check the above yourself or consult a lawyer about it. If you do and have updates, can you let me know, please?

As many other people, I have become addicted to the trac system. After having used it for a few personal projects and deciding that it really is cool technology and talking about it with a few other people I switched Plone from its old issue tracker to trac and the result has been marvelous: it runs smoothly with over 5000 tickets and produces great overviews such as this 2.1.x release issue status overview. However for our projects at Amaze we are missing an essential feature: the ability to have a testing status for issues. This is a seperate step between active and resolved where an issue should be resolved, but has not been certified to be resolved by full testing, which is (should) be done by other people. To support this I created a patch which added a new ticket status called 'testing', modified the milestone and roadmap to show that tickets in a testing status seperately and updated the unittests to reflect the new possible actions. In order to make this easier to use I also modified the trac-post-commit subversion hook: I added a --testing parameter which tells the hook to mark an issue as testing instead of fixed. The default is set to fixed in order to preserve backwards compability, and since I suspect that most trac installs are for small projects which do not have a need for a seperate testing status. If you are curious: you can download trac testing patch from here or look at trac ticket 2511. The patch is based on the current svn trunk for trac. Update: seems the trac folks already closed the issue since there is a larged project in progress which provides the same functionality (and more). However since there is no assigned milestone or estimate when it might be merged, so until then I still consider this patch to be a very useful addition to trac.

This time tomorrow I'll be on a plane heading to Israel in a circuitous route for a much needed vacation in Israel. It appears that the weather in Israel had turned from sunny and hot into a real winter so that we won't feel too bad comparing the weather of Israel and Ireland. The Haaretz forecast says there will actually be rain, of which I had enough here. We will escape the empty Maynooth of Christmas for the split personality (Rehovot/Carmiel) of Hanukka with the families, for some much needed stuffing with home-made Sufganiyot and other not-necessarily-related-to-Hanukka foods. A union with a newly purchased Canon 350D is also much expected :-)
This will replace a Canon Elan7 film camera of which pictures that the local development shop manages to screw the image scanning and creates washed-out colours.