One of my former teachers told a reporter from the local paper that I had just gotten back from Israel and he called me to set up an interview to get my views on the recent conflict. I met with him monday, and the story is now in print. I haven’t seen where in the physical paper it is, but it’s position on the webpage suggests it’s a front-page story. It’s available online here: The Pilot: War Zone: Local Residents Flee Mideast.

John Goerzen professes not to understand the apparent inconsistencies in the Presidents positions on life issues. While I can't speak for him, I am as near to a "typical Republican" as you are likely to get around these parts and although I'm busy with other things I feel compelled to explain how they are in fact consistent.

The foundation is a belief in the innate dignity and right to life of Man simply by virtue of being a member of the human species. Therefore the default position in any case should be to protect against the unnecessary taking of life whenever there is a choice in the matter. Therefore abortion is wrong precisely it is as its defenders say a "choice." Stem cell research is also wrong on these grounds but as a clump of cells is not clearly a human being you can agree to disagree on that. Those who do think it is wrong should not be forced to participate in murder which is why the government is against Federal funding of embryonic stem cell research not against the practice altogether. (Also remember there are other sources of stem cells.)

The innate dignity of a person can be made forfeit by an act of will on the part of that person. Thus a murderer has no right to life, by his personal actions he has surrendered it. If fetuses started leaping out of vaginas and attacking people, they would forfeit their right to life too but they don't.

What John conspicuously fails to mention concerning the 30,000 Iraq civilian deaths is how they died and who killed them. In the vast majority of the cases it is at the hands of those who putatively were on their own side. So how is Bush or America morally culpable? In the few cases where Americans have deliberately caused civilian deaths, they have been punished for it. But where is the outrage when terrorists do not wear uniforms and deliberately hide amongst civilians and in religious sites? (May I note that such behavior is against the Geneva convention and UN resolutions though I'm aware such things only apply to Israel.) It is the Baath party and Al-Qaeda have right to life issues concerning the war in Iraq not the US.

You can disagree with any of these positions--even from a conservative or Republican point of view but my point is they are consistent. And I daresay being easier to understand, they resonate more strongly with the electorate than the muddled messages of the Democrats.

Hall and Oates in '08!

This afternoon I started looking at cfengine. In very little time, I've already set up rules that can bring a system from pretty much cdebootstrap state up to a minimal production system in our environment. I've still got a little ways to go, but it's already hacking on /etc/hosts, hosts.deny, sources.list, installing appropriate Debian packages for our systems, etc.

It's come a long way since I last looked at it six years ago.

One thing I can't figure out...

I have a /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf file that contains, among other things, this:

Director  

  Name = backup-dir

  Password = "foo"

 



Director  

  Name = backup-mon

  Password = "bar"

  Monitor = yes

 

I can't figure out how to make cfengine delete just that second section. I tried this:

       BeginGroupIfLineMatching "  name = .+-mon"

         IncrementPointer "-1"

         DeleteToLineMatching "\ "

         DeleteNLines "1"

       EndGroup

But it seems that the pointer is never actually being decremented, even when examined under verbose mode. That is, it leaves the leading "Director " line in the file.

I can't understand Bush's (and the typical Republican position in general) opinion on life issues. He recently said that it is wrong to "destroy life to save life" and that every being is a valuable person in the context of the stem cell debate. He also said last year that 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed as a result of the Iraq war.

So, here's a Handy Chart:

Topic	Bush Theory	Bush Moral Judgement
Death penalty	Kill known murderers so others won't kill more people	OK
Iraq war	Kill 30,000 Iraqi civilians during operation to overthrow Iraqi government	OK
Stem cell research	A small minority could become babies if implanted	Wrong
Abortion	Killing an unborn person	Wrong

I can't figure out any possible way that the first two should be OK for someone that believes that the last two are wrong.

In fact, to me, the items in this list that most clearly are wrong are the first two. There is no question about whether life has begun with them. Treating 30,000 people as regrettable results of an operation is not treating them with full human dignity. 30,000 people were killed. That's more than 10 times the number of deaths from Sept. 11.

I had a great weekend this week. It didn't start off too great, though; I had been walking around with a rash on my hands for a few days already, and had to call in the doctor. Luckily he told me it's just a allergic reaction to something; and though we weren't able to pinpoint exactly what the problem was, apparently that doesn't matter much. I'm on some medication now which should, at least, make it less of a problem. After that, I left for Ninove, where Freek, a long-time friend of mine, lives. This is not the type of friend that I see every weekend, but it is someone I know from high school and that I kept in contact with over the years. It had been three years since I'd last seen him, even though we had called eachother on our respective birthdays during those years. Which boils down to "we haven't seen much of eachother in three years". Still, I consider him one of my best friends, because of the very special relationship I have with him; we have no secrets for eachother, and I would trust him with my life. Which is strange, considering how little we see eachother. Oh well. Due to a misunderstanding, however, I arrived in Ninove a few hours early. However, I still had a few hours worth of battery energy in my laptop, so I did some work on the exim4-config-wouter package I've been working on for a few weeks now. Not quite there yet, as you can see in the other blog post. Spent some great time with Freek in Ninove—mostly catching up with eachother, but some other interesting things, too—and then left for Leuven, where I'd arranged to meet p2(@debian.org), who was going to help me understand some of the more obscure parts of the lowlevel code on a GNU/Linux system. I needed that help, because in my work to get Debian/m68k working on the ColdFire V4e processor family, I had gotten stuck due to the fact that I didn't understand some of the bits there properly. P2 and I had some beer together, and lunch too, since we met in a bar that had food on the menu as well, and, well, because I, at least, was hungry. Next, we went to the mind (ex-)offices, and played a bit with the support packages for the Belgian electronic ID card that I maintain for Debian, and reached some incremental successes. Whee. New packages are in incoming. Right now, I'm on my third train trip of the weekend, which is "towards home". I hope to be able to go to bed soonishly, since I have to get up early tomorrow -- and I didn't get to catch much sleep last night... ... It turned out I did. So quickly, even, that I was unable to post this particular blog entry before hitting the deck. Oh well, being one day late on that won't hurt anyone ;-)

Speaker break-in tme myth or reality tries to debunk the myth of audio speakers needing time in orders of 30-50 hours to get to ther best audio properties after purhase.
I bought a new set of Sennheiser HD 215 a few weeks ago. I unpacked them and conected to my laptop. I was blown away by their performance, but something at how the bass frequencies were “muddy” and not clean confused me. Then I read in the manual that I should play some music on the headphones for at least 30 hours to break them in and only then they would get to their best audio characteristics. So I left the headphones on the laptop and left some music playing in them overnight and only came to them after at least 20 more hours of breaking-in. I put the same music on as I did the first time and I was not dissappointed - the bass was much more clean and instruments in the bass area were finally as distinct as they should be at this level of headphones. I did not listen to the music during the break-in time, so my brain did not adopt to the sound of these headphnes - they acctually sounded better.
I do not really care that a distinguised loudspeeker engineer can not find an explanation of how this break-in happens, but that does not change the fact - it exists.
Update - A few more links:

• Discussion - fun starts around page 10
• Pro-burnin article

In the end peple end up playing sine waves and measuring frequency response thus oversimplifying the problem. It is well possible that non-sinusiodal sound is needed for proper break-in (as in sound with multiple different frequencies at once, or sound with harmonics, …). It is well possible that the “sharpness” or “mddiness” that is reported by the audiphiles as the characteristic of a non-broken in sound system is not something that is measurable by frequency response - aharmonic dispositions, temporal dispositions and other distortions of the sound are easy to detect by a trained ear, but very hard measure with precision unless targeted. Also people ignore the real complexities of the materials that are used. We think that wood is simple and plain and understood material, but in reality wood is such a superior microcomposite material that it has properties that are still not nderstood by modern material science. And when we get cooperation of metalic parts, wood, chemicals and, most importantly, natural and complex vibration - predicting all effects of such vibration on the complex system, that is a simple speaker, is … well … complex. Audiophile ear can easily hear distortions that normal audio equipment simply can not measure with any confidence. Discarding phenomena that one simply does not know how to measure or explain is just blindfolding yourself. I was even more fascinated by the description of an simple non-scientific experiment showing break-in effect on audio cables. This was discarded outright as impossible, but it is acctually much easier to understand. Cable is simply a thin piece of metal through which a stream of electrons is flowing. It is not too hard to imagine that these electrons traveling at light speed could impact any impurities or defects in the cable. Any such impacts would distort the analog signal going through the cable. Also after multiple weeks of electron bonbardment it is not impossible to imagine such impurities or defects (or the material around them) being changed in a way to ease the flow of electros (like wind erosion of rocks) thus breaking-in the cables and improving their sound - making it more fluid. That is quite easy to see - why should not there be a set of similar efects working on a whole audiospeaker?

Today will hit unstable the new GRUB package version. This version has a new and very interesting feature: Xen kernel detection. Until now, every Xen user needed to change the menu.lst byhand to have it suitable to boot the dom0 and that’s a very error prone way of to do that. Currently, like any other image on menu.lst, you can change the Xen dom0 kernel options and they will be use to write down the kernel entries. Very nift. Thanks by all Xen Packaging Team for their work on it.

I just discovered that at least some of the requests for access to LWN.net under the group subscription Debian paid for by HP have ended up in the wrong mailbox for a few weeks. Sorry about that, it's entirely my fault. I believe I've now caught up and given everyone access who asked for it and meets the requirements. If I missed any, please re-send the request. If you're a DD and don't know what I'm talking about, you can find details about LWN and how to get added to the Debian group subscription in this message in the Debian mailing list archives. For what it's worth, there are now 427 DD's subscribed to LWN as part of this group subscription.

Back in mid-February, I was invited to participate in a review of EU government policy support research on gender issues in Free Software communities at the University of Cambridge. The meeting was fascinating to me not only because of my level of interest in the content, but also because the reviewers were a wonderfully diverse group of genuinely interesting people. I also must admit that being a guest of Kings College for two nights was quite an experience in and of itself... As someone who has been a strong proponent of the idea that approaches and technologies adopted by Free Software developers are something other communities might want to borrow from or emulate, I found the results of this research both disturbing and enlightening. The disturbance centers around just how strongly male-biased our current behaviors seem to be in practice, particularly in the Debian project. My moment of enlightenment was the realization that many of the ideas we discussed about how to encourage and enable more female participation in our communities could simultaneously make our projects more appealing and rewarding to all of our contributors! I've talked to various people about this research in my travels since the meeting in February, and many have followed up asking for pointers to the findings. I was pleased to learn this morning that the integrated report of findings and recommendations from this work are finally available online. I hope at least some of you will read this report, and will then be as interested as I am in looking for ways to change the status quo. Perhaps a BOF at the upcoming Debian developer's conference to discuss these results and brainstorm specific actions we can take in the Debian project would be a good place to start? I expect to arrive late on the 15th, and must depart early on the morning of the 21st...

Occasionally, the list of things I really should be working on gets a little overwhelming. Late last night was one of those times. So, I spent a couple hours playing with the pile of PDP-11 parts... Took the BA-11N apart far enough to extract the backplane, and added the wires necessary to support 22-bit addressing. Put everything back together, and had a bit of a scare since I couldn't seem to get the console talking to me again. Found a problem in my serial cabling, after which all was well. Dug the DELQA out of the stack, stuck it in the chassis below the KDJ11-D/S, and confirmed that the Decserver 550 firmware still in the CPU board was able to discover it. Extracted the CQD-223/TM SCSI board from the s-box front panel it came in, and realized it's not going to fit into the slot spacing of the BA11-N as-is. The problem is that the 50-pin header for the drive cable is straight, so by the time you put a cable on it the stack is too thick for a backplane slot. So, either I need to scare up a Qbus continuity card or something to let me skip a slot and give the card double height, or alternatively I can replace the 50-pin header with a right-angle box header and the card should fit... At that point, I decided I'd made enough progress, and called it a night.

Just home from West Virginia, where my wife's family gather at her grandmother's house to celebrate Thanksgiving. The traditional turkey feast was pleasant as always, but the real culinary high point of this trip was on the way home... The closest major airport is Pittsburgh, we had a couple of extra hours on Saturday before our flight, and Karen and I are both graduates of CMU. So we decided to detour into Pittsburgh and and drive around a bit to see how things had changed over the years and what was still familiar. The biggest visible differences to us were on the river fronts, from the new stadium that replaced Three Rivers to what looks like a technology park built along the Monongahela under the parkway, where steel mills once stood. We didn't take time to do more than drive around the CMU perimeter, but even that let us see that the campus landscape has changed dramatically since we were students. Otherwise, most of the major landmarks that matter to us remain unchanged, including the apartment on South Millvale I lived in for all but my freshman years at CMU. But best of all, 'the O' was still alive and well on Forbes avenue! I'm sure I ate there an average of at least once a week from the time Steve Fisher introduced me to the place until I moved to Colorado. I often tell people that the best part of having to travel a lot for work is that I get to sample interesting foods from around the world... and many of my strongest travel memories are of meals enjoyed with interesting people and wonderful food. However, despite all those experiences, 'O' fries continue to rank near the very top of my list of foods I'm willing to go out of my way for. Even my 5-year-old son, who can be a lot pickier about what he'll eat than I like to admit, thanked me repeatedly on the flights home the rest of the afternoon for "making me try those french fries with cheese". Sometime, I'd love to spend enough time in Pittsburgh to see how many of the other places I used to love to eat are still around... In the meantime, a regular fix of chili dogs and fries at the 'O' are one of the few things I really miss about the years I spent in Pittsburgh.

Came home from a weekend in the mountains with my family to discover that the UPS serving the stack of networking gear and the main gag.com servers had shut itself down, apparently during a big thunderstorm last Thursday evening. Fortunately, pushing the "on" button on the UPS was enough to bring everything back to life with no apparent loss of data. But I can't help wondering if there isn't something wrong with the UPS, since it should have powered itself back up even if the batteries got run all the way down... nothing useful in the error logs.

I'm not typically prone to raving about books that I've read, but I picked up Jeffery Deaver's "The Vanished Man" in an airport to read on flights last week, and it was one of the better escapist fiction books I've read in quite a while. Sort of a multiple-murder-mystery thing where the perp is a serious magician, employing all sorts of misdirections and "sleight of mind" tricks. Highly recommended if you're trying to decide what to grab off the airport bookshelf in a hurry sometime soon... ;-)

What a couple of weeks.

So I went off to Europe. I had planned to meet up with Daniel Stone and many others in Paris, but fate decided to piss in my cornflakes and delay my flight out of Boston so that we missed the connecting flight to Paris. I spent the whole next day in Montreal's airport, and while I got a lot of reading about Norse mythology done, I didn't have nearly as much time in Paris and didn't get to meet up with anyone. Daniel and I will have to postpone drinking and bashing X in person until a latter date. The time that I did spend there, was great though, and I got to do some of the tourist things that I didn't get to do last time I was there. Nicole, my girlfriend, had never been to Europe, so she was thrilled to see things for the first time.

Then it was off to Munich, where I did get to spend some time with Michael Banck, who is even more awesome in person than on the internets. Michael was my sponsor in Debian for well over a year, as well as my advocate, and now we're both ops in #debian together, so it was a real thrill to finally meet up with him. He was too polite to let me buy him dinner or a drink as thanks, so I'm hoping he comes to visit so I can repay him. I also got to meet several others, including release manager extraordinare Andreas Barth, which was a lot of fun. We were in town when Germany was playing Sweden in the world cup, and Germany actually won, so the whole city was singing until dawn. Ever since I've been back I've been drinking lots of Hefeveisens and wishing that they were served in 1 liter form.

Surprisingly, since I've been back, I've had the opportunity to do some programming at work and push Free Software at the same time. A co-worker of mine recently did an experiment that got her a list of 900 genes, and she wanted to narrow that list by comparing them to another list or two, but had no idea how to get this done in a reasonable amount of time. So one afternoon I wrote a small ruby script to do this, and all of a sudden my boss is looking at me wondering what other sort of neat computer things I could whip up. I also had to start doing some statistics, and I found a test that I needed to do which Excel couldn't do, so I started learning and coding a bit of R, which is pretty nice so far. The co-worker of mine just invested $800 in a two day class on learning to use an add-on for R, which is cool because I've totally failed until now to get anyone to use Free Software in the lab. The whole thing is making my labmates look at me a little funny though, since this stuff is way out of their league for the most part.

The bad news is that a few days after I came back, I found that my laptop's hard drive started making some very bad noises. I moved my data to backup computer that I'd inherited but not really used, only to find that the backup machine was prone to weird random errors. That left me without a functional computer at home. I took the opportunity to order a new machine for myself, but for now I'm kind of stuck with a web browser at work. In the meanwhile, I've taken to teaching myself statistics, and in order to do that, I've been re-learning calculus. I find it a little weird that I'm going home at night and picking up a calculus text book in my free time.

As far as X work goes, not having a working computer has caused a bit of a problem. Luckily, just before my machine died, Andres Salomon had nearly finished work on backporting Xorg 7.1 to sarge. Afterwards, he decided that he wanted to join the XSF, so since then he's been spearheading getting 7.1 in to experimental. He's been continuing the work that I haven't been able to do lately, and I'm excited to work with him in the future. In addition, Jurij Smakov joined the team as sparc driver maintainer, and Drew Parsons is officially joining the team, bringing Xprint officially in to the XSF. So even though I haven't been able to do much, things are moving forward, which is wonderful to see. As soon as I can get set up, I'm going to keep working with Andres to get 7.1 ready to ship in December.

Surprisingly, I drink far more lately than when I had a working computer. I think something is wrong with me if working on Debian helps to keep me from seeking chemical modification.

Finally. For the first time ever, I've been able to log on to tax on web using my electronic ID card. Too bad I've already filed my tax report on paper. Oh well. If you live in Belgium, use Debian unstable, have an eID card and a reader, and haven't filed your tax report yet, this might be nice to do. I'll update the backports on backports.org any time soon, but they need some patches (gcc3 and gcc4 have some different ideas on what is well-formed C++ code, grmbl), so that's not for today; so if you need sarge backports, don't count on it just yet.

Quote from Joey Hess: In 1999, Debian began moving /usr/doc to /usr/share/doc to comply with the FHS. Due to unfortunate dpkg issues at the time, we couldn t simply move the directory and be done with it, but decided to move things peicemeil by updating all packages. Due to some silly concerns about users having to look in two places during the transition, we decided to start by making /usr/doc/ -> /usr/share/doc/ symlinks. In 2001, putting any documentation in /usr/doc became a serious policy violation. The symlinks were still allowed. In 2002, we completed the first stage of the transition, released woody with complete /usr/share/doc and /usr/doc directories, and policy was changed to not require the /usr/doc symlinks. debhelper was changed to stop adding postinst and postrm fragments to manage the links, and so most packages only needed a recompile to finish the transition. As a result, More than 250 bugs were filed, blockers of #322762. Most of these bugs, rot in peace in the BTS for years, some maintainers fixed them themselves, some other maintainers NMUed and others did QA uploads to deal with this issue. But it was not enough. It looks like at a certain point I decided we would not ship Etch with a transition from 2002 still in progress, so I did approximately 114 NMUs between the 11th and the 18th of July, fixing 152 bugs, 46 of which were not related to the /usr/doc transition. I also closed the ones affecting packages not in testing or unstable, unblocked the ones for packages that would not ship with etch (as exim3, that will be replaced by exim4), and updated the MIA info for several of the maintainers. At the same time, I revamped packaging a bit if I felt inspired to do so. Sure, things went wrong at bits and places, which I later fixed the best I could, but inmense love was poured in these NMUs. Several maintainers thanked me and the most NMU-unfriendly people didn't even complain. Lars Wirzenius pointed me to other related bugs, found by upgrading from testing to unstable with piuparts, and added blocking relationships with #322762 where needed. At this stage, less than 5 open bugs remain. I suspect that more packages once created this link and don t remove it on upgrade. I would need some help to find them. All this NMU fever happened while Joey was away on holidays, and when he returned, he confirmed my fears, I had DoSed his email and bandwidth: <joeyh> amaya: did you have to fix all the /usr/doc bugs while I was on vacation?
* joeyh watches his inbox and BW groan at the seams :-)
There is still several important and minor issues that we should deal with before Etch is released, Release Goals or not, just because we are Debian, and just because we care about this sort of things:

• The "You still Build-Depend on Xlibs-dev" Transition.
• The "You left a link link in /usr/doc" Transition.
• The "Please use Invoke-rc.d in all maintainer scripts" Transition.
• The "Let's switch to Cdebconf" Transition.

Some of you will argue that these might not be transitions per se, just mass-bugfilings. I don t really care how you d rather call it. If you are looking for easy ways to help Debian, or to fill your lazy summer afternoons with, provide a patch today and CC: me. I intend to group these bugs either using user-tags or blocking bugs in the BTS. Help locating them and grouping them will also be appreciated. [Updated entry to reflect more accurate NMU and bug totals]

Collection Management I like to collect things, books, audio cds (which I buy exclusively second-hand/used then rip), and films. I’ve had a lot of fun putting my film collection online (Warning image-heavy). Although I admit the reason I did it in the first place was because I found myself buying DVDs I already owned more than once. I do the same thing with books. I can recognised covers easily, so if I see a book which is by an author I like I will look at the cover and think “Hmmm got this”, or “Hmmm thats new”. This leads me to buy duplicates too often. This leads me to wanting to organise the hundreds of books I have, so I can lookup what I have/dont have easily. My recent query the other day about scanning ISBN numbers with a barcode reader seemed to suggest that using the hardware is trivial. However the next step is hard. I can’t find a decent tool for using storing the data in. So far I’ve looked at:

alexandria

I loved this when I started it up and imported a few books by ISBN. It found the title, the publisher, a cover image, and more. However the backend seems to be a bit hit and miss. Picking books at random I soon found major gaps. e.g. Adding Terry Pratchett’s Mort gave me all the details. Adding Witches Abroad gave a blank image and just the title, all the other details were wrong/missing.

tellico

Tellico I’ve just ruled out. It allows you to create collections of things, but you must enter all the details yourself. I’ve neither the time nor the patience to do that.

So I’ll postpone this project for a while. Probably just as well since I’ve discovered that a suprisingly large number of my books do not actually contain ISBN numbers! Mostly the older paperback fiction books I have such as “H.G.Wells the valley of the spiders & other stories”, but even modern books like some of Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series are free of ISBN numbers.

So, some interesting things happened since I last reported. TurboGears finally entered experimental, and has received a bit of good feedback from some users; I became sqlobject co-maintainer, and packaged a svn snapshot to experimental to make that happen, too. TG 0.9a8 has just been uploaded, btw. Feedback would be great! I would welcome people willing to help on deciding the best way and doing packaging of TG add-on widgets. In other news, I've been doing some last feature aditions to libgksu and gksu. The former now ships a gksu-properties capplet that allows users to set up some of the behavior. The gconf options and this capplet surely need some love, but they'll get it in the future. After the "redesign" libgksu now holds almost all the code that does the gksu magic, and should be more secure in some ways. The application, gksu, ships a nautilus extension, which adds a 'open as administrator' item in the context menu for files and directories in Nautilus. I'd love to receive feedback and buf reports on this new feature. Right now the nautilus extension uses the gksu application, instead of the library, since there seems to be problems with doing async calls of libgksu inside of another main loop, or something, and I could not get it to work. The gksuexec application, which provided the 'Run as another user' menu item has been removed in these last versions. Will anyone miss it? I'm willing to have this functionality implemented in gksu itself, if needed, but I'm not sure it's that useful.