Search Results: "will"

15 January 2010

Eddy Petrișor: Busy, busy, busy and lazy me

It has been quite some time since my last post. I have been involved in quite a few things and the last part of 2009 which left no time for anything else. At the begining of 2010, just to set things on a good tone from the new year, I went on a snowboarding vacation to Austria to Kitzb hel.

Presidential campaign and pure irrationality in Romania

I got involved in Remus Cernea's presidential campaign, which was quite a success, considering the media blockade he was subject to. Unfortunately, Romanians seem to more and more indoctrinated, idiotic and gullible, probably thanks to newer generations that come through public schools after 12 years of religious indctrination and media promoting stupidity, non-values, ignorance and so on.

The more I live in this country, the more I realize how I don't feel like fitting in, because I refuse to be a mindless sheep, a moron, listening to anything the news at 5 say (those living in Romania know what I mean). I obstinately form my own ideas and question everything.

Significant event in my life

In September 2009 a life-turning event took place in my life - don't worry, is nothing bad, is pure good - and my eyes opened entirely. I have bacame a sponge trying to know more and more and this has helped me see the world with new eyes, from a new perspective, without lies or preconceptions.

Now I am thingking freely.


I am sorry for not going into details, but I have my reasons. Those who have the eyes and brains to understand what I am talking about, surely have understood by now what has happened to me ;-) .

Snowboarding vacation

At the begining of this year I went with my wife and some friends to Austria for a vacation. Kitzb hel's slopes and conditions were very good (bad points were only due to a couple of areas where snowboarders had to open at least one binding).

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Weather was good and snow was icy only late in the afternoon. I was quite suprised to see stores close at 6pm, but overall, it was a well deserved vacation and I enjoyed it very much. My wife's skills on the board got better, although the third day some beginner skyer broke one of the bindings of my wife's snowboard and she had to use a rental instead. The rental was a quite new Burton board and Otilia got used to it and liked to the extent that we decided the next board we buy (for either of us) will be a Burton.

Did it worth it to drive 1500 km (roughly 1000 miles for the metric system challenged people :-P) for this vacation? Definitely! Did I enjoy the drive? Well, let's just say that the 950km from Kitzb hel to the Romanian border were made in approximately the same time it took us to make the last 550km to Bucharest, while 110km of those last were on the A1 "highway".

I'll probably put some photos from my vacation somewhere on the intenets, but don't hold your breath :-P .

Instead of conclusions

I know I promissed a lot of people to take care of some things like Wormux and some kernel bug debugging and I didn't kept my promise. I appologise, yet I don't expect anyone to accept my appologies. I am still unsure when I'll get back to that. I still care for Debian, yet the day has only 24 hours and I have to use at least 7 of those on sleep.

Russell Coker: Cheap Net Access in Australia

The cheapest ADSL or Cable net access in Australia seems to be about $30 per month. I ve been using 3G net access by the Three phone company for 18 months now and it s been working well [1]. I recently bought a new 3G modem because the old one broke, so it has cost me $250 in modems plus $15 per month for the connection which compares well to $100 (or more) for an ADSL or Cable installation plus $30 per month. My Three net access gives me 1G of data per month. I have just noticed that they have pre-paid net access that gives 12G of data that must be used within one year which costs $149 per year [2] that is $12.41 per month or 83% the price of the plan access plus it means that any bandwidth quota that isn t used in one month can be used the next month (so you can save up for upgrading to a newer distribution of Linux). Dodo has pre-paid mobile net access on the Optus network for $139 which gives 15G of data that must be used within one year [3]. So that s equivalent to $11.58 per month or $9.20 per gig. A member of my local LUG mentioned that Exetel has a 3G plan which is good value if you don t use much data transfer but which has per-megabyte charges for excess data transfer. I couldn t recommend it for my parents as I never know when they will do something that may transfer a lot of data, I could just imagine them saying loading web pages was really slow for a week and then I got a big bill . Ross Barkman s GPRS/UMTS page gives some critical information on using a 3G phone with a tether [4]. Using that information I discovered that I need to use AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess" in my chatscript to get ppp going with my old LG U890 mobile phone (with 3netaccess being the important word). I plan to give my old mobile phone to my parents and let them use prepaid 3G net access to reduce their net access bill by more than 1/3 while also giving them more data transfer quota for times when they need to transfer a lot (EG when my sister visits them). At this stage I m not sure whether I will get them to use Three or Dodo. One advantage of Three is that I ve used them a lot and know exactly how to get it all working, the other is that my old mobile phone is locked to Three they agreed to unlock it on demand after the contract is ended (which happened over a year ago) but it will be a hassle to get it done. Saving the hassle of getting an old phone unlocked may be worth the $10 per year cost. Also I have used my 3G modem at my parents house on a few occasions and know that the reception is quite good, while the reception for Dodo (Optus) 3G is unknown One extra benefit with doing this is that my parents will have some freedom to move their PC. If they decide that the computer room is too hot in summer and want to move their PC to below their air-conditioner they will be able to do so without needing a long Ethernet cable to connect their PC to the cable modem. For my personal 3G net access (which I require for fixing servers on occasion) I am stuck with Three. When I bought a new 3G modem I decided to save about $20 by getting a device that s locked to Three. 12G per year is more than enough for sshing to servers and checking email and if I had paid extra for the unlocked modem it would it would probably have died before the savings on net access made up for the higher purchase price. Update:
Crazy John has a good deal, $129 for 7.5G which expires in a year [5]. I won t use that for my parents though, the probability of them going over 7.5G is too high to make it worth the risk for a $10 saving.

Stefano Zacchiroli: Preserving privacy with Google Docs

Eclectic paper: SEcure GOogle DOCumentS Two days from an important Google announcement, privacy awareness is steadily increasing in the media. The old mantra that "despotic governments might use your data in unexpected way" sounds more real than last week, and recent movies ring different bells in our heads. That event has prodded me to (finally!) blog about yet another eclectic paper of mine, co-authored with my old friend Gabriele D'Angelo, and which I'm going to present at the forthcoming ACM SAC conference. The paper is titled Content Cloaking: Preserving Privacy with Google Docs and other Web Applications and poses (again) a rather simple question: why should you trust Google to faithfully store your Google Docs data? What if roles in the recent Google-vs-China issue were inverted? The proposed solution (Content Cloaking) then simply implements transparent encryption and decryption in the payload which is sent back and forth between your browser and the Docs backend. Trying to access your Docs data without a decryption layer and the needed key will then just show garbage, for both humans and Google harvesters. Of course you lose something, like full text search which is performed server-side by Google, but at least you're back in charge again: it is you who decides to which extent trading-off your privacy with offered services. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided (and of course is free software!) as an extension for the Firefox browser, but is now out of date wrt Firefox mainline and was not really production ready anyhow (let's say it was master-thesis-implementation-quality ...). Still we, the authors, stand behind the idea even if we don't have the energy to maintain a production-quality implementation. So, Dear LazyWeb, If you are interested in the topic and you've development cycles to spare, please drop me a mail and I'll be happy to point you to all needed details to resurrect the implementation (or create one from scratch, which should be pretty easy and quick if you're familiar with extension development).

Christian Perrier: Samba 3.4.4 in unstable

It tooks me one week, this time after Karolin released upstream samba 3.4.4, to get Debian packages in unstable. That release will unfortunately be the first to use a "~dfsg" suffix to upstream version. In short, upstream used to distribute RFC files in their tarball. They first removed them when we pointed them at this (because we had an RC bug by our zealous "non-free documentation" hunters). However, they were reinstated after a discussion in upstream lists where it was pointed that these RFC files were needed for Samba 4 sources (that are distributed along with Samba 3 though not used to build Samba 3 packages). So, well, even though I don't feel really concerned by cutting hair in 4 about documentation files freeness, I fixed this by repackaging the upstream tarball without these files. I did choose to use "~dfsg" as suffix so that someone wanting to upgrade from our packages to some unofficial packages using the standard versioning (such as SerNet packages) can do it.

14 January 2010

Sandro Tosi: Matplotlib for Python Developers - Images available for download

This is a book on a graphic library, so when they first told me it will be printed in black&white I was quite surprised and puzzled. The editor explained it was to reduce paper copy cost, and that the PDF version will still be in full color, but I would be quite upset if I bought the book and then discover it's black&white without knowing it upfront.

Thus I've asked to at least let the images be downloadable from the book website, so that any reader (either for the paper or electronic copy) can see the pictures as if they're running the programs.

The first request went ignored, but keep pushing got results: now images can be downloaded!! To get them, got the book webpage, then in the "Code Download" section, and request the zip file: in it you'll find either the source code and the images.

The pictures are quite big, because they are the same used for book production (so with specific dimensions and DPI) but you got colors now :)

Jonny Lamb: Telepathy on Maemo

A few weeks ago, I got a cool Christmas present from work. It's pretty sweet, and I've been writing some apps for it. I'll try and blog about them here. A while ago, I wrote some a number of account plugins for Maemo 5, so that other Telepathy connection managers could be used and well-integrated into the N900's Contacts and Conversations User interface. This enables the following extra protocols: There are still a few problems which I'll try to iron out soon enough but they appear to be working pretty well. The best thing about it is clearly the integration with the rest of the phone, as demonstrated by Marco in the screenshot above. The PR1.1 update, which is due today, also opens the door for enabling other protocols dynamically by providing libpurple plugins. I will be adding Facebook Chat support soon, and someone else has made a package for Twitter. This is in extras-testing for you all to download and try out. You can find all the packages in the "Network" category of the Application manager. The Extra protocol plugins for Conversations and Contacts metapackage (telepathy-extras, in reality) pulls in all the cool account plugins and connection managers of the time. File bugs from the maemo.org package link.

John Goerzen: System Administrators Might Save Your Life

There s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of system administrators. Unless you re one, it s probably hard to grasp the full weight of it. This week has been full of reminders for me. This afternoon, shortly after lunch, I got word that people were having trouble with phones. A few minutes of testing showed that calls within our city were working fine, but it was completely impossible to place or receive long-distance calls. A little while later, a local newspaper s website indicated that numerous cities over a multi-county region, all served by the CenturyLink local telephone company, were out of service in this manner. I figure that represents hundreds of square miles, or a patch of rural Kansas roughly the size of Los Angeles. Adding to the problem was the fact that emergency 911 services are accessed via these long-distance lines that were down. For roughly three hours, 911 was completely down across this entire area. What s more, many cellphone towers and Internet access options were also taken down, since they feed from these same lines. This adds up to a situation that could very easily cost lives due to delayed response of emergency medical, fire, or police services. In the end, the problem was traced to a bad controller card on a Titan 5500 owned by AT&T. Now, here s the system administration angle: If you worked for the phone company and had to troubleshoot a problem that you knew had taken down emergency services for thousands of people, what kind of pressure would you be feeling? Would you be able to keep your cool? I m glad that I don t have that kind of job. I also wouldn t like to be the engineer (or, more likely, accountant) that decided that they didn t need any more redundancy to provide good service to the area. Especially considering this is the second time in the last year or two this has happened. But, ironically, yesterday I signed a purchase order for a new Asterisk PBX (corporate phone) server. When selecting a machine for that task, I am always completely conscious of the responsibility on my shoulders: several hundred employees rely on the machine that is ultimately my responsibility to select. Our own access to 911 would be cut if the machine were to go down. I never forget that the correct operation of the systems that our team sets up and deploys could help save someone s life, and that a malfunction could cost the company dearly in terms of revenue, productivity, image or worse. Nearly four years ago, we switched from an analog PBX, with outsourced support, to a digital VOIP system running Asterisk. Note that we use VOIP in-house, but do not use it externally. Anyhow, I can not say that the Asterisk PBX has been 100% perfect; I doubt that this could be honestly said of any PBX of any complexity. I can say, though, that it saved us well over $100,000 AND has proven far more reliable than the system it replaced. Outages are exceptionally rare and brief now. Plus we have internal expertise to fix it, rather than having to wait for a technician to be dispatched from a city 2 hours away to fix anything. I know I don t have the resources to build a perfect PBX that will never go down (if such a thing is even possible), but I take my responsibility regarding a reliable PBX extremely seriously. We used to have a frequent problem: someone would call 911, then hang up. We suspected this was often on accident maybe people hit 9 for an outside line, then misdialed their number. In any case, 911 dispatch would then call our main office, saying they got a hangup. A person or team would then go across our entire campus making sure nobody was in distress that nobody had managed to dial, then passed out, for instance. With Asterisk, I was able to help this situation. Whenever somebody calls 911 now, two emails are generated: the first contains details about the call, such as the extension number that called and the duration of the call. This goes to all people that are likely to receive a callback from 911. It may not always pinpoint the source (as with somebody using a wireless phone), but almost every time will give us a very good idea where the call came from. The second email is a recording of the call, and serves as an additional clue, but goes to fewer people. I am aware that email isn t a perfect medium, but: it let us make a dramatic (albeit imperfect) solution to a problem that very few institutions our size are able to address nearly so well. There s a lot of weight on our shoulders: keeping the accounting system up, the Internet links up, the web store or the sales phone lines, the shipping systems or the document archives up. These things going down can spell deep trouble in many ways. And sometimes the systems we maintain might save a life. Such as this morning, when someone was feeling symptoms of a heart attack, used our phones to call a colleague for help, that person called 911, and an ambulance was dispatched. I know the system worked exactly as it should, because I had two familiar emails from Asterisk in my mailbox this morning when I got to work.

Russell Coker: Links January 2010

Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

13 January 2010

Adrian von Bidder: Death

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment. Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is. Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking yes but what if ...

Russell Coker: My Ideal Netbook

I have direct knowledge (through observation or first-hand reports) of the following use cases for Netbooks:
  1. System administrator s emergency workstation something light to carry when you might get an SMS about a problem.
  2. A really small laptop for a serious technical user, can be used for programming and other serious tasks. Only someone who is really dedicated to the hobby of computing would choose a system with a tiny screen for their main computer so that they can take it everywhere.
  3. A computer for a child. Children are less demanding about some aspects of their computer experience, no-one wants to buy a really expensive toy for a young child, and children find it difficult to carry full size laptops.
1 and 2 are the options that interest me. But it would be good if the extensive children s toy market could drive economies of scale and reduce the expenses of my hobby and profession. I have found my EeePC 701 to provide adequate CPU performance (Celeron-M 630MHz) for light compiling tasks and I have used it for some Debian development work. The SSD that is built in is very fast and OpenOffice load times compare well to my Thinkpad T41p because of it. The main problems I have with my EeePC for sysadmin and coding tasks are the small keyboard (which can t be fixed the overall size of the machine needs to remain small), the small screen (which could be expanded without changing the case size), the low resolution screen (which has been fixed in newer netbooks), and the fact that my 3G dongle sticks out and is likely to get broken. More recent Netbooks address these issues while having the trade-off of being heavier and larger. There are also some tasks which are generally not performed on a Netbook but that could be if it was properly designed. Here are some examples of things that I think should be done on a Netbook:
  1. Basic image editing and blogging something that a lot of people do on smart-phones nowadays. It can be done more effectively and with less effort on a general purpose computer I can t imagine the GIMP or Inkscape running on a smart-phone.
  2. Reading electronic books. The number of people who want a Netbook but don t want to read electronic books would be quite small as would the number of people who only want to read electronic books and never want to use a general purpose computer while travelling. No-one really wants to carry both a Netbook and an ebook reader at the same time.
  3. Watching movies.
  4. Everything that you might want to do on a terminal in an Internet cafe those machines are always 0wned, just say no for security reasons.
  5. Games. The Nintendo DS has two ARM CPUs running at 66MHz and 33MHz and a combined screen resolution of 256*384*18bpp [1] and the Sony PSP has a 333MHz MIPS R4000 CPU and a screen resolution of 480*272*24bpp [2]. The original EeePC had more CPU power and more screen resolution than the DS and the PSP so it IS suitable for games even though it won t run the latest 3D games. There are lots of great games like Wesnoth that don t require much video performance.
  6. Educational Software. Portable educational devices include the awful V.smile system for young children [3] and the educational software for the DS (I ve seen a demonstration of a training program in rapid completion of basic maths problems for elderly people and presume it s not the only educational software on that platform).

Image editing requires a color screen of high resolution. Effective blogging requires a platform with a resolution that compares to the typical web user according to Hitslink 1024*768 is the most popular resolution of web browsing systems at 28.34% and the most popular resolution that is less than 1024*768 is 800*600 at 3.28% [4]. So even the most casual blogger will have an incentive to get a screen that is of higher resolution than all but the latest Netbooks. The recently released EeePC 1201 has a screen resolution of 1366*768 which should be barely adequate for those tasks. Reading electronic books requires a reasonable resolution. Based on my experience with the 1400*1050 display in my Thinkpad it seems that a resolution of 1366*768 would be barely adequate for reading an academic paper that has two columns in a small font. But as the original Kindle had a resolution of 600*800 and the latest Kindle has a resolution of 824*1200 [5] it seems that perhaps the epaper displays are good enough to allow reading the text at a lower resolution. A display that can draw little or no power when idling (as epaper does) is simply required for an ebook. The Pixel-Qi hybrid displays are claimed to offer the best features of TFT and epaper displays [6] but they haven t been released yet. I think it s reasonable to assume that someone will achieve that Pixel-Qi is attempting and that it will become the standard display for a Netbook. Watching movies and playing games (even games like Wesnoth) requires better video performance than epaper can deliver, we just have to hope that Pixel-Qi release something soon. Watching movies and reading ebooks are both things that are best done without a keyboard in the way. The Always Innovating Touch Book [7] seems like a good solution to this problem. It s a tablet PC that can be connected to a keyboard base if/when you desire. It should also be good for web browsing and reading email while on the move, I find that my EeePC is unreasonably heavy and awkward for typing email while walking. Intel CPUs are not particularly energy efficient. As there are ARM CPUs with clock speeds as high as 2GHz and with as many as four CPU cores it seems that the ARM architecture can provide as much CPU power as is required. Debian currently supports two versions of the ARM CPU, if another one became commonly used it wouldn t be that difficult to run Debian build servers for it. Given a screen resolution equal to the latest Kindle, CPU power greater than the early Netbooks, and the ability to run a free software OS the range of educational and gaming software should be adequate. So it seems that the ideal netbook would have a detachable keyboard and base and a touch-screen in the computer part. It would have a Pixel-Qi display (or equivalent) with a resolution of 1400*1050 or better. It would have USB, Gig-E, Wifi, and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to have an internally mounted USB dongle (as the Always Innovating Touch Book does). I think that this is not overly difficult to achieve it is basically an Always Innovating system with a better display. Update: Another criteria is the ability to start operating quickly when requested. Even mobile phones are often limited in their utility by the time that is taken to activate them (I can t get my mobile phone to take a photo in much less than 7 seconds after removing it from my pocket). The Always Innovating system is apparently always in suspend to RAM mode when it s not being used so that it can start quickly. That combined with fast application load times and a good menu system could allow turning the system on and launching an application in less than 2 seconds. If I was buying a Netbook right now the only thing that would stop me from buying an Always Innovating device is the shipping delay. But as my EeePC is working quite well I m not going to buy another system unless I am going to get significant benefits such as a high resolution PixelQi display.

Wouter Verhelst: Using ipcfg, now

Yesterday, I had some time to debug ipcfg some more. The main blocker for me to upload it to unstable was the fact that I could not get WPA security to work; therefore, I could not use it myself. In the interest of "eat your own dogfood", I did not feel that uploading some experimental code to Debian that I'm not using myself is a good idea. That problem is now fixed, albeit through something of a hack, one that I hope will not be necessary forever: I decided to write a plugin to run ifupdown extension scripts (found in /etc/network/if-*.d). It does require some set-up, and there are still some severe issues; but as of now, I am using ipcfg rather than ifupdown on my laptop. Those interested in trying it out can either wait for ftp-master to ack the upload and then install from unstable, or just fetch it from the git repository.

Matt Brubeck: Weekend hack: outline grep

I keep almost all of my notes and to-do lists in plain text files, so I can edit and search them with Vim, grep, and other standard Unix tools. I often indent lines in these files to create a simple outline structure, and use the autoindent and foldmethod=indent options to make Vim into a simple outliner. To get useful output when searching through these outline-structured files, I wrote a simple grep replacement. Given a text file with a Python-style indentation structure, ogrep searches the file for a regular expression. It prints matching lines, with their "parent" lines as context. For example, if input.txt looks like this: 
2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
    Visit with family.
2009-01-02
  Grocery store and library.
2009-01-03
  Stay home.
2009-01-04
  Back to work.
    Remember to set an alarm.
then ogrep work input.txt will produce the following output: 
2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
2009-01-04
  Back to work...
You can download ogrep from the outline-grep repository on GitHub, or just read the literate Haskell file. The code is almost trivial (40 lines of code, plus imports and comments); I'm publishing it just in case anyone else has a use for it, and because some of my friends were curious about how I'm using Haskell. I've now written a few "real-world" Haskell programs (compleat was the first). I'm finding Haskell very well suited to such programs, though this particular one would be equally easy in a language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. This is a one-off tool to fill a gap in my workflow; there are no configuration options or useful error messages. It would be fairly easy to extend it, though. For example, it might be handy to have an option to include children (as well as parents) of matching lines. I recently realized that ogrep often works for searching through source code too, which might generate some more unexpected use cases.

Theodore Ts'o: Proud to be a Googler

Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there. Kudos to Google s management team for having made (IMHO) the right decision. Hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will consider carefully what the ethical implications of their collusion and collaboration with the Chinese government s attempt to control free speech and the human rights implications of the same. I have my own opinion regarding the IETF s decision to meet in Beijing, since as we ve seen with the Search Engine industry s attempt to accommodate the Chinese, engagement doesn t necessarily always lead to openness and goodness. All I can suggest is that those people who do decide to travel to that meeting be very careful about what sort of message they want to send with respect to China, as well as being very careful about protecting themselves against targetted information security attacks. No related posts.

Theodore Ts'o: Proud to be a Googler

Although I obviously had nothing to do with Google s decision vis-a-vis China, having only started working there for a week, I was definitely glad to see it and it made me proud to be able to say that I work there. Kudos to Google s management team for having made (IMHO) the right decision. Hopefully Yahoo and Microsoft will consider carefully what the ethical implications of their collusion and collaboration with the Chinese government s attempt to control free speech and the human rights implications of the same. I have my own opinion regarding the IETF s decision to meet in Beijing, since as we ve seen with the Search Engine industry s attempt to accommodate the Chinese, engagement doesn t necessarily always lead to openness and goodness. All I can suggest is that those people who do decide to travel to that meeting be very careful about what sort of message they want to send with respect to China, as well as being very careful about protecting themselves against targetted information security attacks. No related posts.

Steve Kemp: Cover your heart! Cover your heart!

I've long been a fan of Danga's Memcached, back in 2005 I wrote about it for the first time. Recently I've been looking at the persistant version, memcachedb which is essentially a Berkeley Database using the memcached protocol as the transport layer. This allows you to get persistance for free, and means you can rely upon the content being present, rather than just hoping it will be there as an opportunistic cache. However in this brave new world of nosql I've been mulling over different options for new projects / new toys. I have to say that memcachedb lost out for me, and that Redis is my preferred flavour of new hot. Redis has a rich API allowing you to store interesting datatypes such as lists, and it allows both replication and distribution (neither of which I need just yet, but both are useful to have as options for the future). The documentation is great including a well-documented Twitter clone, and the facilities that are available are a step up from memcached, albeit obvious extensions which you'd expect if you were doing interesting things. The redis-server package is already part of Debian GNU/Linux, and creating .deb package of the Redis module was trivial. So now that I'm familiar with it, what to use it for? Well I think the first thing will be the new 2010 Valentines site. Over the years I've hosted several Livejournal Valentine sites, and this year is no different. (Why? I like matching people, and I like social stuff. This is why I did ctrl-alt-delete in the past, even if that failed it was a great learning experience and I'd do it again if I had the time/patience/more optimism). So far the site only has a couple of users but I fully expect it to ramp up considerably before the magical day (ha!). In the past I've limited the lifetime of the site(s) from Feb 1st to Feb 14th and still managed to achieve 5000+ users. Right now I'm using flat files for storage specifically to avoid database-load issues (which caused me considerable pain one year). I suspect the backend will be Redis-based in the very very near future, but in the meantime if you're open to amusement and use Livejournal then feel free to poke at it: ljvalentine.com. ObFilm: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

12 January 2010

David Moreno: Cherokee Summit 2010

The Cherokee web server project is hosting the Cherokee Summit 2010 in Madrid, Spain on May 7th and 8th. The summit will be focused on high-performance and scalable Web technologies. I truly believe this is a major opportunity for hackers, developers and administrators looking for the new alternatives on the Web to bond and share experiences to benefit each other's projects and enterprises, and keep up to date on this field. If you are interested on attending, proceed to the registration site (it's free of charge but seat-limited) and see you there in May!

Julien Valroff: DSPAM 3.9.0 released!

The DSPAM team have just announced their first official release, one year after the project was taken over by the Community. You can download the sources from the SourceForge project. Unofficial Debian packages are being built right now, but will only be uploaded to my repository after a bit more testing, during the week-end I guess.
They are meant to be uploaded to the official Debian archive once they are considered as ready by the pkg-dspam team. Hopefully, they will be part of Squeeze.

Julien Blache: forked-daapd: FreeBSD & kFreeBSD port completed

Mostly an update to my previous post on the subject, I ve just completed the FreeBSD port. It also builds and runs on GNU/kFreeBSD, by the way. The filescanner for forked-daapd on FreeBSD is now up to par with its Linux counterpart, as much as possible. Contrary to the latter, it will lose some metadata (play count, for instance) when files get moved around, because it s not possible to track moves and renames accurately. It also performs more rescans than the Linux/inotify implementation. Still, it works just as good. On a related note, the machine I tried to install FreeBSD 8.0 on and finally ended up installing GNU/kFreeBSD on just seemingly committed suicide. I m not sure what message it s trying to send me. It s previously been my main workstation for the best part of 10 years, so this is a bit sad. At least I found some bugs in the process and fixed some too: Not bad, is it?

David Welton: Rough Estimates of the Dollar Cost of Scaling Web Platforms - Part I

I have been pondering the idea behind this article for a while, and finally had a bit of time to implement it. The basic idea is this: certain platforms have higher costs in terms of memory per concurrent connection. Those translate into increased costs in dollar terms.
Nota Bene: Having run LangPop.com for some time, I'm used to people getting hot and bothered about this or that aspect of statistics that are rough in nature, so I'm going to try and address those issues from the start, with more detail below. Methodology All tests were run like so: my new laptop with two cores and four gigs of memory was used as a server, and my older laptop was used to run the ab (Apache Benchmark) program - they're connected via ethernet. I built up to successive levels of concurrency, running first 1 concurrent connection, 2, 10, and so on and so forth. The "server" computer is running Ubuntu 9.10, "karmic". Platforms The platforms I tested: As stated above, it's pretty obvious that using Rails or Django for something so simple is overkill: Better Tests for the Future I would like to run similar tests with a more realistic application, but I simply don't have the time or expertise to sit down and write a blog, say, for all of the above platforms. If I can find a few volunteers, I'd be happy to discuss some rough ideas about what those tests ought to look like. Some ideas: Results With that out of the way, I do think the results are meaningful, and reflect something of what I've seen on various platforms in the real world. First of all, here we look at the total "VSZ" (as ps puts it) or Virtual Size of the process(es) in memory. Much of this might be shared, between libraries, and "copy on write" where applicable. The results are impressive: Rails, followed by Django and PHP eats up a lot of memory for each new concurrent connection. Rails, which I know fairly well, most likely suffers from several problems: 1) it includes a lot of code. That's actually a good thing if you're building a reasonably sized app that makes use of all it has to offer. 2) Its garbage collector doesn't play well with "copy on write". Which is what "Enterprise Ruby" aims to fix. Django and PHP are also fairly large, capable platforms when compared to something small and light like mochiweb. That said, excuses aside, Erlang and Mochiweb are very impressive in how little additional memory they utilize when additional concurrent connections are thrown at them. I was also impressed with Jetty. I don't have a lot of experience with Java on the web (I work more with J2ME for mobile phones), so I expected something a bit more "bloated", which is the reputation Java has. As we'll see below, Jetty does take up a lot of initial memory, but subsequent concurrent connections appear to not take up much. Of course, this is also likely another 'apples and oranges' comparison and it would be good to utilize a complete Java framework, rather than just a tiny web app with one JSP file. So what's this mean in real world terms of dollars and cents? As your Rails application gets more popular, you're going to have to invest relatively more money to make it scale, in terms of memory. For this comparison, I utilized the bytes/dollar that I'm getting for my Linode, which works out to 18,889,040.85 ($79.95 for 1440 MB a month). As we can see, to have a similar amount of concurrent users is essentially free for Mochiweb, whereas with Rails, it has a significant cost. This information is particularly relevant when deciding how to monetize a site: with Erlang and Jetty it would appear that scaling up to lots of users is relatively cheap, so even a small amount of revenue per user per month is going to be a profit, whereas with Rails, scaling up to huge numbers of users is going to be more expensive, so revenue streams such as advertising may not be as viable. It's worth noting that 37 signals, the company that created Rails, is a vocal supporter of charging money for products. There's another interesting statistic that I wanted to include as well. The previous graph shows the average cost per additional concurrent user, but this one shows how much the platform costs (using when there is just one user, so it acts as a sort of baseline: As we can see, Jetty is particularly expensive from this point of view. The default settings (on Ubuntu) seem to indicate that, for instance, the basic $20 a month Linode package would not be sufficient to run Jetty, plus a database, plus other software. I think that the Apache Worker number is off a bit, and may reflect settings made to handle a large number of connections, or perhaps a different MPM would make sense. Source Code / Spreadsheet The spreadsheet I put together is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0An76R90VwaRodElEYjVYQXpFRmtreGV3MEtsaWYzbXc&hl=en And the source code (admittedly not terribly well organized) is here: http://github.com/davidw/marginalmemory/

John Goerzen: Sing to Me, Muse

(a review of Homer s Iliad)
Here, therefore, huge and mighty warrior though you be, here shall you die. - Homer (The Iliad)
And with that formidable quote, I begin my review of The Iliad. I shall not exhaust you with a rehashing of the plot; that you can find on Wikipedia. Nor shall I be spending page upon page of analyzing the beautiful imagery, the implications of our understanding of fate and destiny, or all the other things that compel English majors to write page after page on the topic. Nor even shall I try to decipher whether it is a piece of history or a piece of legend. Rather, I intend to talk about why I read it: it s a really good story.
Sing to me, O goddess Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought countless ills upon the Acheans.
As I d be reading it, I d think to myself: Ah ha! Now here we finally have a section of the story that doesn t speak to modern life. Perhaps it was a section the fear of being enslaved or butchered by conquerors, or about pride leading both sides to fight a war they need not have, or a graphic description of a spear going clear through someone s head or neck. And then, I d have to sit and think. Are we really so far removed from that? Here we are, in a supposedly civilized world. We use remotely-operated drones to drop bombs on people, and think it naught but regrettable collateral damage when the brains and intestines of dozens of innocent victims are scattered about, killing them, all for the chance of killing one enemy. But we aren t the only ones to blame; we live in a world in which killing the innocent is often the goal. People fly airplanes into skyscrapers, drop atomic weapons to flatten entire cities, and kill noncombatants in terrible numbers. And for what? A little power, some prestige, some riches, some vengeance, some wounded pride? Slavery is not dead, either. We that can happily afford Internet access most likely abhor the thought. What, though, can we make of the fact that people are starving in this world in record numbers? That our actions may literally wipe some nations off the map? Are those people as free as we are? Do our actions repress them? I suspect you can t read the Iliad without being at least a bit introspective.
Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable
One of the great things about reading the Iliad is that I can learn about the culture of the ancient civilizations. Now, of course, one can read about this in history books and Wikipedia. But reading some dry sentence is different from reading a powerful story written by and for them. I know that the Iliad isn t exactly a work of history, but it sure shows what made people tick: their religion, their morals, their behavior, and what they valued. I feel that I finally have some sort of insight into their society, and I am glad of it.
The day that robs a child of his parents severs him from his own kind; his head is bowed, his cheeks are wet with tears, and he will go about destitute among the friends of his father, plucking one by the cloak and another by the shirt. Some one or other of these may so far pity him as to hold the cup for a moment towards him and let him moisten his lips, but he must not drink enough to wet the roof of his mouth; then one whose parents are alive will drive him from the table with blows and angry words.
There are gory battle scenes in the Iliad, but then there are also heart-wrenching tender moments: when Hector leaves his wife to go fight, for instance, and worries about the future of his child if he should die. That s not to say I found the entire story riveting. I would have liked it to be 1/3 shorter. The battle just dragged on and on. And yet, I will grant that there was some purpose served by that: it fatigued me as a reader, which perhaps gave me a small sense of the fatigue felt by the participants in the story.
Why, pray, must the Argives needs fight the Trojans? What made the son of Atreus gather the host and bring them?
A question that was never answered, for either side: why are we so foolish that we must go to war? One tragedy among many is that neither side got smart about it until way too late, if ever they did at all. I read The Illiad in the Butler translation, which overall I liked. Some of these quotes, however, use the Lattimore one. This completes the first item on my 2010 reading list. I leave you with this powerful hope for the future, written almost three thousand years ago. Despite my criticisms above, we have made a lot of progress, haven t we? What a beautiful ideal it is, and what a long ways we have yet to walk.
I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.
Sing to me, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, that one day his story may speak less to our hearts, for then will we have outgrown it.

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