So, a little while ago, I wrote about why I like HP. This week, I'm starting to be annoyed at them.

My employer just bought nearly $100,000 worth of HP hardware. We get a new MSA1500cs Fibre Channel SAN (with redundant controllers, FC switches, disks, etc), a new blade enclosure system, three blades to start with (all of them, at minimum, dual dual-core Opterons with 4GB RAM, and some considerably more), a rack to put all this in, etc.

So we're starting to set all this stuff up. I've got Debian installed on an NFS root for testing the blades and how they interact with the SAN.

The blades have an integrated dual-port QLogic QLA2312 Fibre Channel adapter. The Linux kernel has a built-in driver for this (qla2xxx), which detects it and, so far at least, works fine. We want to run kernel 2.6.17 because it's the first version where XFS has decent semantics for write ordering to prevent corruption after a power failure. Plus we want at least a 2.6.16.x kernel because we want to run the latest Xen 3.0 on these blades. (Live migration of virtual servers from blade to blade -- this will be great.)

But we learn that HP does not support the kernel qla2xxx driver. HP does not say WHY they don't support it, just that their own driver is the only one that they support.

After plowing through several annoying scripts to get to their driver, I realize why it fails to install: it is OLD. At BEST, 2.6.14 is the most recent kernel it would even compile against (release date: October 2005), and I think the most recent version it supports is more like 2.6.8 (almost TWO YEARS OLD now). They reference a whole bunch of kernel symbols and macros that were removed somewhere between 2.6.8 and 2.6.17.

I sent a ticket to HP support. Their first request was to run their system information gathering tool and send them the results. Fine, that's reasonable. I did so. Next they say, gee, you're running Debian, and we don't support that.

Argh.... If they tried to compile it against 2.6.17.1 on RedHat or SuSE, they'd get the exact same problem. I told them what symbols they were erroneously using, and a simple grep would have showed them that.

Besides, how many customers are going to be pleased with no upgrade path available for 2 years? I wouldn't want our kernel version to be held hostage to HP's slow driver development process.

Sigh.

I moved to wordpress. I dont have neither the time nor the patience to upgrade drupal from 4.5.8 (the existing version on sid) to 4.7.x, the upstream version which was released some time ago. From 4.5 to 4.7 there is no upgrade path, so the Debian package that eventually needs to be uploaded has to provide an easy way to get there. But even the 4.5 -> 4.6 -> 4.7 path ended up in posts from the front page which were not in the RSS feed originally being posted without content to planets around the word. So, since I already host a couple of other wordpress services in my machine, decided to move to wordpress and will put the old database for historical reasons somewhere.

Typeahead find in gvim’s GTK+ open dialog box is driving me bananas, but today I discovered a trick I hadn’t seen before that will help work around it with a bit of relearning. For those who aren’t familiar with the problem, John Goerzen describes how painful this feature is for large directories. Just imagine, then, having to regularly deal with large directories on particularly slow, remote filesystems. Argh. Unusable! The trick I came up with to work around the problem is to first enter the path incorrectly and then fix it afterwards. Type a blank first, then the whole filepath, then [Home] to return to the beginning of the line, and finally [Delete] to fix the path, and [Enter] to open the file. It still takes an awfully long time for gvim to read the file, but it’s a great improvement over either trying to type the filename blind, or waiting for each directory to be scanned. Ultimately, these files should be moved off the remote filesystem and into subversion, but there are cross-platform compatibility issues that prevent me from doing this at this time (OpenVMS + Linux + win32). I’m still looking for a real solution. In the comments to John’s post, someone suggested there is a gconf setting that controls this, but so far I haven’t been able to find it. So for now, I’ll have to live with this hack.

Unfortunatly, one person in the python camp cannot accept critics. Even worse, he slenders people who offer critics and disagree with him as liers. I don't think that this is good behaviour for any developer. Of course, that is end-of-discussion for me with that person (for obvious reasons). That he gets a lots of facts wrong is another topic. Anyways, EOD, until a public apology happens.

I flooded the Planet just by upgrading WordPress. So this weekend it’s happening in Caracas. The National Free Software Congress (CNSL) arrives to the capital in the second edition of the only nation-wide Free Software event. It will take place on Colegio Universitario de Caracas, in La Floresta, near the Indian Embassy, France Square and other nice landmarks of the city. The event is promoted by GLoVE, a national NGO which is currently organizing the CNSL and hosting several Linux User Groups (the whole list here in spanish, follow the links) including CHASLUG, the Free Software Users Group for the Young. I’m part of the group, but it’s currently run by three guys under 18. As in FLISOL Caracas, this will be a themed event featuring two days of conferences, keynote speakers, workgroups, expositions, installation festival and security related events. The first day is aimed to Free Software in Society, including presentations from government officials related to recent activities towards the Country migration. As Enrico pointed it in debconf-discuss and debian-project, some recent activities have been turning stronger the Free Software migration process in Venezuela. The announcement from the Department of Science and Technology of the mass capacitation of the citizens in the usage of computers featuring the Gnome Desktop Environment took everyone by surprise. Numbers are varying, being the more conservative around 400.000 people having their first computer relationship with Free Software, GNU/Linux and Gnome. Distribution? I haven’t see it yet, but most likely it will be Debian (the whole Department is using Debian) Saturday will also feature some conferences from community members about their experience on Free Software usage and how they can change the way people communicate and act with each other, specially noting the nationwide speech from Octavio Rossell about Free Software and GNU/Linux and the interesting presentation from Efra m M rquez-Arreaza on Business Models. Finally, on saturday, renowned economist Felipe P rez-Mart will be presenting his work Game Theory Applied to the Free Software Development Model. Sunday will be a hands-on day, like in FLISOL Caracas. The main speeches focus on development, featuring experienced programmers on PHP, Perl and Mono presenting Web and Desktop development tendencies in those programming languages. We will also feature an Ajax presentation and three workgroups about Linux Distributions, Web Development and Free Software and Education. On special guests, CNSL Caracas is proud to announce the visit of two fellow partners from IEEE Colombia: Erika Luque and Jeffrey Borb n from the District University of Bogot , and the special conference from Rafael N ez, who was apprehended in Miami, FL (US) for the massive attack of 679 servers in 2001, one of whom was the Air Force Training System in Colorado. He was also accused of attacking the Department of Defense servers and stealing confidential data from NASA. He made seven months of prision in Denver after declaring himself guilty of all charges and having the Judge to look on evidence of his work against child pornography with the Venezuelan CICPC. (more info in spanish) On the security side, Sunday will host the second Key Signing Party (guidelines in spanish here) and the first CACert assurance in Venezuela. We made the first KSP in CNSL Aragua (where I had the opportunity to speak about Debian and make a hands-on session on Marvelous Debian) with about 10 people. This time we’re aiming to something between 25 and 50 people. This is the first event promoting security culture in our Country and hopefully it will have a warm welcome in the public. Caracas will also be the inflexion point of the Congress, which will now travel to the Eastern part of the Country, usually forgotten by all the hacktivists in Venezuela. In states Sucre, Monagas and Bol var people is ready to have their first contact with free software through this Congress and hopefully next year the Congress will have a venue in each state of the Country (including the two most inhabited by natives, Delta Amacura and Amazonas) If you’re in Caracas, you’re welcome to pass by after registering (it’s free as in who cares) and if you’re not, you’re welcome to listen to the streaming that will be announced here. See you there!

The Latin American Infest finally ended yesterday. In Caracas, it was a week of hard work with people of the Science and Technology Department and the IT Office (government offices) but the event in Caracas ended succesfully. It was a world-class event featuring renowned keynote speakers who spoke about Web Development using Frameworks (featuring TurboGears, Rails and Catalyst) and software development paradigms migration from privative platforms to GNU/Linux (Gambas and Mono). Other talks included basic security in Debian GNU/Linux and a speak about electronic signature security by an officer of the Venezuelan Government CA. We had a speak about Clusters, hosted by a female member of the Venezuelan Free Software Community and Debian User, and a speak about Free Software in the Venezuelan Education, by a 16-year-old Venezuelan GNU/Linux user and a willing Debian Maintainer. Of course, the Installation Festival took place in the Knowledge Square, in the Auditorium Building Lobby, with the extraordinary support of the Venezuelan Free Software Users Community. Debian GNU/Linux Sarge netinst and CD1 was distributed (several hundreds) as well as Knoppix and Ubuntu Hoary. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (maintainer) and me wore Debian T-Shirts on Saturday, and he made a great speech about the Project, named “Debian is inexorable“. We had demonstrations of Linux on a Mac Mini, using XGl and presenting several applications, as well as Debian running Enlightenment on an old Presario 1246 laptop. I would like to thank all the speakers and the attendees for making of FLISOL Caracas a great event. More information about FLISOL Caracas is in my blog and the homepage (spanish). Pics are here.

I was at a client today when I remembered that David was due to arrive to Caracas circa 1430, so I called him to his brand-new-venezuelan-GSM-cellphone and I found out that he was in problems. In big, dark, awful problems. As I told in previous posts, he went to San Crist bal (near the border with Colombia) to visit his girl and know the city. He departed from Caracas in a bus on Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning. He spent the whole weekend there, and in Monday he was due to leave San Crist bal through the Mayor Buenaventura Vivas Military Airbase, in a civilian airplane. He arrived just on time for his flight, rushing to take the plane on time, and he was stopped by two so-called Inmigration Officials who demanded to see his passport. He recently got a new one from the Passport Office in Mexico City, so he had a brand new passport with the Venezuelan Entry Stamp (Mexicans don’t need a visa to enter Venezuela)
ONIDEX, the National Office for Inmigration. Praised for lots of people for fighting against Passport Corruption, kidnaps people in San Cristobal. The Officials told him that his passport was a fake, and they told him that, from this time on, he was under arrest. They made him leave the Airport quickly and took him in a civilian vehicle with no identifications. They started the trip to San Crist bal City (1 hour away from the Airport in a very scary road) and they kept telling him that his passport was fake (they claimed that the Passport didn’t have the watermarks, and stuff) Soon their position changed and a common practice in Venezuelan officials started: extorsion. They told him that there were “several ways to fix the problem”, and asked him what was in his backpack (which had a laptop, but he denied it): they were demanding money, and David wasn’t prone to do that.
National Guard. Doesn’t have a /proc/clue about anything. They drove David to the Inmigration Office in San Crist bal and told him that they “made” some tests to the passport and they determined that the passport was fake. They told David that their “Commander” told they that he should be deported into Colombia, since he was a “very important member of a Cartel that they were willing to capture”
DISIP: the Venezuelan Political Police. They were helpful in this episode, but they’re not angels. Finally, hours after that charade of Officials telling him funny laws, stupid suppositions and wanting him to give them money, they left David in the Bus Terminal in San Crist bal, where he was able to talk to Ana, from Debian Venezuela, which picked him up and went back to the Airport. The two “Officials” weren’t there anymore, and he had a last problem with the National Guard which had stupid suppositions about his trip, and stuff (this is common, but at least it’s not illegal) before he was able to get into the plane. Being in Caracas, I was really worried. Between Ana, my mother and me we were able to move several people to check David status in the Airport (my mother called four members of the Venezuelan FAA, I called the Venezuelan CIA and Ana called the Vicechancellor) and this probably saved David’s life and money, since the “Officials” might have been scared by the movement of people caring about David. He’s safe now, back in Caracas, in home. He has all his stuff and his health is OK (yet he was scared when he arrived, which I fully understand) Why am I writing this post? I’m really concerned about what happened to David, and I want to make a public statement on this. Somehow, we venezuelans got used to this kind of practices in our Country. Probably 40 years of pseudo-democracy with messy governors helped, maybe it’s a matter of education and culture. I don’t really care about this, but I do care about what they’re doing with the people in my Country. Today, President Chavez declared that a dance against corruption was going to start. I think it’s the fourth time he’s making something about corruption, and he’s failing. There’s a gang of people in San Cristobal, Mr. President, who tries to rob and scare the visitors. They should be in jail. They arrested somebody illegally. It’s forbidden in our Constitution to arrest somebody without having proofs to do it (we have one of the best Constitutions in the World, experts say, but we don’t have people who obey it). If you’re going to arrest an alien, you need to have a Public Prosecutor in place, writing down a legal document and guaranteeing the safety of the detained. This people should be in jail.
Stop Corruption! Though, as my mother later said to David, two awful Venezuelan people kidnapped David, but probably twenty Venezuelan people quickly acted to find out what was happening. We might be a Third World Country, but we use to be able to get out of our problems by our own. And, hell it’s rewarding. I want to apologize in the name of all venezuelans to David and to make a clear statement against corruption: we venezuelan won’t tolerate more corruption. We’ve grown between that, buying places in a line to get our National ID Card, paying one million bolivares to get a Passport appointment. We’re sick of this. This is not the great Venezuela we live in. Please, losers, shoot yourselves. Or eat rat poison, whichever makes less stains.

I had a bit of a surprise today when I sat down to read this weeks DWN and found my own name and a link to and old post about some Lightweight Debian Archive Scripts that I had written in October last year staring back at me from the second sentence! As chance would have it, just last week I updated these scripts to use reprepro, as suggested in many of the comments that I received after writing the last post. I hadn’t got around to making the new scripts public yet, so I guess the link from DWN is a sign of sorts! My main motivation for updating the scripts to use reprepro was to give myself the ability to have a testing, and stable archive as recently we’ve been dealing with .debs manually for testing as we didn’t want to put them into the archive for fear of prematurely updating the production hosts with untested code. I’d heard that reprepro had some nice support for moving packages between local repositories which sounded exactly like what I wanted. Reprepro was indeed fairly easy to setup and install. I backported reprepro 0.9.1 and installed it alongside my existing sbuild setup as documented in the original post. The changes to the scripts were fairly minimal, although again, they assume some things for my environment, and its likely that they’ll need some modification before being useful to you:

• process_packages assumes you have pairs of distributions named like ‘foo’ and ‘foo-testing’. Every package picked up from incoming/foo is automatically added into foo-testing after it is successfully built
• add-packages is mostly redundant, used only to add packages manually if the automatic insertion fails because reprepro has got itself confused

You can grab the updated scripts and my reprepro configuration from:

• process_packages - Runs from cron to build new packages and add them to the -testing archive
• add-packages - Manually adds packages
• distributions - Reprepro distributions file
• options - Reprepro options file
• pulls - Reprepro pulls file

The new setup is great and I’m very happy with reprepro and the new archive. The only thing I haven’t had time to look into properly yet is how to pull specific packages from testing into stable, but not everything. Ideally I would be able to run a command like

reprepro <stable-dist> pull <pkgname>

If I could get that working then it would be awesome.

n/a

I just sent in the AM report for my first ever NM, Lucas Nussbaum. If I haven't done anything wrong, that means Lucas is now well on his way to actually becoming a Debian Developer. Welcome Lucas!

Being Father's Day today gives me pause to consider Debian Jr., a project for kids. The goal was to make Debian the OS kids prefer to use. I wanted my own kids to grow up enjoying using a system that puts the fewest barriers in the way to learning about how computers work, and to making computers work for them. It's nearly six years later now: enough time for my second youngest to grow from a toddler to an eight-year-old girl, for my youngest girl to be born and put to the test the lower limit of our "for kids from 0 to 99" slogan, for our boy in the middle to grow from a preschooler to a preteen, and for the two oldest girls to turn into teenagers. Perhaps by the time we have grandkids, Debian Jr. will finally be "done". In that time, our kids have gone from using a VT-420 attached to my Pentium 100, exploring commands using the "magic" tab-key at the bash prompt, playing with words and letters in pico, to playing 3D games and creating artwork in the Gimp on the family Sempron 3300+. And through it all, they've remained happy and proud to use Linux, which none of their friends have. They have become, I believe, more firmly grounded and comfortable with computing than they might have been using a system "dumbed down" for kids. To all the Debian using fathers out there today, Happy Father's Day! May you and your kids' lives be enriched as you share in the finest OS in the world.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on extending the dbconfig-common packages to support the SQLite database format. My primary motivation for this is so that I can start using dbconfig-common to manage the database(s) for the PHPwiki packages which currently only support SQLite out of the box. The main changes that were required were to separate out the debconf questions that are only relevant for remote and authenticated database types. These changes were committed yesterday. I plan to make the remaining changes required to bring the SQLite support up to scratch over the next few days, so hopefully dbconfig-common 1.8.18 with SQLite support will be uploaded before too long. NM Application
In other news, Alexander Wirt finished off my NM Report, so now I’m waiting for the front desk to review it and send me on to the DAM. It’s great to be making progress and a big thank you to Alexander for taking me through the process, testing my knowledge and sponsoring my packages.

Friday - The Party Good food. Good times. (Though, I have to admit it was considerably more interesting when it got dark and the torches were lit and we tried to avoid melting the beach ball.) Helpfully labelled drinks. Saturday - The Graduation Good music. Good speeches. (<plug> yes, this is me </plug>) Saturday - After We Are Graduated In which I pose with the superintendant. In which I pose with my brother outside in the blinding sunshine and blazing heat, while thinking about the cool water that happens to be behind us. In which I pose with my parents and brother in a moderately more forgiving environment at home. In which I pose with my brother and grandparents, who could probably stand in for an alternate Matrix cast, and kick your [posterior]. At least in this picture. In which my cousin Mark discovers that my stole is kinda fun. In which a good friend of mine gives me a freaking awesome shirt. I will now proceed to summarily disappear off the face of the ‘net from sometime tomorrow until late Monday or so, in which I Move To Cambridge.

I've refocused the Debian Jr. programming metapackage on languages made for kids. I'm sure there are some who have used scheme or python with their kids, and sure, if you want to do that, go ahead. But these were only initially included because of a lack of choices. Littlewizard is an icon-based language only recently added, and kturtle replaces the less-kid-friendly ucblogo. I've also been pursuing #236721 to see what it would take to get Squeak into main. While it doesn't look like there's hope of that anytime soon, recent changes to their licensing might allow it to go into non-free.

Many advances have been made in agile software development. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails embody agile principles by making software easy to write, easy to test, and above all, easy to change.If only we could say the same for the infrastructure on which we develop and deploy web applications. Not every application can be a Rails one, especially where it's been up and running for years. The systems we deploy on often rely on configuration files scattered all over the filesystem, and can be complex results of years of change.By extension, the systems we develop on often don't exactly mirror where we deploy. If we're lucky and careful, then we have a staging server which mirrors the live environment, but that's not too much of an advantage. Among other things, we need ways to evolve and refactor the live environment, and have our development environments easily track that.I'd like to call such an environment "agile infrastructure". Infrastructure that doesn't hamper developers, and allows live configurations to change and evolve. Infrastructure that allows new things to be tried with minimum cost, and can provide the best information possible to help future planning.Tools enable techniques, of course. It's a lot easier to be agile if you're programming in Rails rather than plain old PHP. So what are the tools enabling agile infrastructure?
Techniques I've found usefulWhile there's a long way to go, I'd like to describe some of the techniques I've been using to help create a flexible environment for developing a sizeable PHP/MySQL application.Operating systemAn operating system must be easy to bring into a known state with minimum interference. For this, I've found Ubuntu or Debian to be an ideal choice. Two of the main reasons include the constancy of stable releases and the fact that it's rare you need to stray outside the distribution's servers to get the software you need.DeploymentDeploying an application shouldn't break the cleanliness of your OS build. I prefer to package deployed applications into .deb files. This enables me to build on several advantages of the package management system:

• configuration file handling: deployed machines can keep individual config in /etc, which is preserved over software update.
• no random state: you know for sure exactly the state of the deployed application, no random files left hanging around.
• natural workflow: packages take a little bit of effort to build and deploy, which means it focuses developers on getting them right. If things do go wrong, it's very easy to roll back one version.

Source controlThe case for source control, thankfully, doesn't need making these days. Yet not every source control system is created equal. Developers shouldn't be constrained by source control, it should be cheap and easy to try new ideas and merge these in later.Not only cheap branching, but also easy merging, is required to keep development agile while still retaining the benefits of source control. Many people flock to Subversion these days, predominantly because it fixes some of CVS' more egregious misfeatures. However, merging can still be pretty difficult in Subversion.I prefer to use a system allowing easy merging, such as svk or bazaar. Because so many of us use laptops these days, disconnected operation is also a huge boon. Bazaar-NG offers both repository-oriented and completely decentralized operation, giving the best of both worlds. It also wins the competition for least setup overhead.VirtualizationPreviously a high-powered technology, cheap virtualization is now with us. Many identical virtual machines can be quickly created to enable testing and experimentation. Deployment to virtual machines can enable hardware independence for applications, reducing another big headache.Large organisations have it within their reach to bring new hardware online easily, and have invested much in management systems for it. Virtualization brings this in reach of small and one-man development teams.Desktop-based virtualizationSystems such as VMWare and Parallels untether developers from their desks. I use the OS X desktop daily for its productivity software, but an Ubuntu virtual machine for a large proportion of development work. A simple keypress lets me flick between the two. The advantages of multiple desktops to hand for web development are well known. (In fact, thanks to WINE and IES4Linux I can run Internet Explorer cheaply too from the same virtual machine).
Xen virtualizationAfter the initial novelty wears off, one of the most tedious tasks in the world is bringing new machines online. Combined with the tendency development environments have to get crufty as new ideas and tools are tried out, this makes for increasing disparity between the development and deployment environments.Wouldn't it be nice just to take a clean machine off the shelf, check out the source, and pick up again? Using Xen for Linux, this cheap virtualization is possible.Sadly, Xen isn't yet a packaged part of Ubuntu, but getting it up and running on Ubuntu Dapper isn't too hard. Warning: here's where things get pretty deep. Skip this bit if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty.I followed these steps:

• Followed instructions in the Ubuntu wiki to get the first domain (vm) up and running
  
• Installed the xen-tools package, which provides wrappers for easily creating virtual machines
• Adjusted some of the xen-tools configuration (/etc/xen-tools/hook.d/20-setup-apt) to set up for Ubuntu rather than Debian
• Once the virtual machine was made, adjusted its config to allow for the kernel initrd and configure the network bridge I was using
  

Getting over the DNS mountainIf you want it to be easy to bring new virtual machines up and down, you need to adopt a different approach to managing your DNS. You need to know how to predictably connect to a virtual machine. Yet it's going to get very boring and error prone to manage the IP address space manually in your DNS, or even to map the MAC addresses of your virtual machines in your DHCP configuration.
Help is at hand in the form of mDNS (also known as Rendezvous / Bonjour / ZeroConf). In the host machine, and in each virtual machine, I ensured the avahi-daemon and avahi-utils packages were installed, providing mDNS services. (You should also check that mdns is present in the hosts entry of /etc/nsswitch.conf).What all this does is allow the machines (virtual or otherwise) on the network to resolve names using mDNS. So if I create 3 VMs, alpha, beta and gamma, I can access these right away using the hostnames alpha.local, beta.local and gamma.local.Hey presto! Easily make machines appear and disappear without any need for sysadmin involvement. All the extra steps to add avahi installation can be easily scripted with xen-tools, to reduce the number of commands needed to birth a new machine to one.With this ease of creating new machines, it's much more straightforward to experiment with server topology and conduct experiments on server environments.ConclusionAgile development is necessarily constrained by the infrastructure on which it is conducted. The infrastructure itself is constrained by the tools and platforms of choice.By appropriate tool choice we can reduce the commitment and overhead of infrastructure. This enables developers to get on with the job they do best, and makes experimentation and evolution of infrastructure much simpler.When programming, it's dangerous to fall in love with your code, as the best solution may often involve throwing half of it away. The same hazard exists with infrastructure, with bizarre and awkward effects propagating back into code and operations. Get yourself a low commitment, agile environment, and you'll be able to keep up with the pace. 

My friend Dick rarely asks anyone anything. If he needs some information, he looks it up himself, on the Internet, in a book, from source code, or wherever. Only after spending considerable effort himself will he ask someone else. He takes this so far that he'll get very upset if you give him the information. It ruins his day to get derailed, and then he sulks the rest of the day. My other friend Ollie, on the other hand, always asks immediately when he has a problem. Either on IRC, by e-mail, by calling on the phone, or by shouting over a cubicle wall. He'll even run to the other side of the building to find someone he suspects has the answer. Only if he can't find anyone with the answer will he start looking for the answer himself. Both Dick and Ollie are smart. Both are successful in their careers and both are regarded well enough by their colleagues, but only Dick is considered an expert. Looking things up yourself is slower and harder, in the short run. You spend a lot of energy finding the little bit of information that solves your immediate problem. On the other hand, you learn things on the way. You learn about things related to or surrounding the immediate bit, and most importantly, you learn where to find more information. You might even learn that the bit you're looking for is the wrong bit, and there's an altogether different way of looking at the problem that lets you do things in a much better way. There's nothing wrong in asking questions, but on the whole, it's better for yourself to try finding the answer yourself first. In a hacker culture, where being good at something is valued exceptionally highly, someone asking frequent questions is often considered annoying. Doubly so, if they seem to be an Ollie. Don't be an Ollie. Do yourself a favor and be a Dick. (This entry was written some time ago, in reaction to a certain someone's umpteenth question of the day, and seeing people responding simply with Google's domain. I've postponed publishing it because I didn't want to attack that person directly.)