Continuing on the reading binge, I’ve read: The Warren Buffet Way by Robert G. Hagstrom: This book got really repetitive after a while. Warren Buffet is a disciple of Benjamin Graham, the original value investor, who is referred to heavily in all three books. According to Graham, the theories of an efficient market don’t apply very well, and it’s occasionally very easy (especially during a recession) to buy companies (or their stocks) for far less than they’re worth. Buffet simply buys the whole company. The best advice is that “the market is only useful as a reference to see if anyone’s offering to do something foolish”. It’s a theme that’s echoed in all three books. One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild: Not as good as I’d hoped, but in some ways better, and worth reading. The title comes from the idea that individual investors are actually better placed to take advantage of the market before institutions, since they often have access to information to assess a company with before analysts even take a look at the company. He then follows this up by saying that you should treat it as a tip, and that you should treat all tips the same: as a reason for investigating a particular company. All of the preceeding didn’t impress me much. But he then tells you how he goes about assessing a company, especially reasons why he won’t buy a company, which I found very helpful. The Intelligent Asset Allocator by William J. Bernstein: The best of the three. This book picks up where Random Walk leaves off; that book encourages diversification, while this one shows you how to do it. Also, Random Walk focuses largely on the stock market, whereas this book discusses lots of asset classes and the correlations between them and how to pick a portfolio designed to maximize return while reducing risk. Also he spends a lot of time on specific details about which mutual funds are good for various asset classes, as well as various tips for really squeezing out as much return as possible through thinks like tax-conscious funds.

Security Updates

A new version of GNUMP3d is out. This is primarily a security update. Install it now if you use it publically. (Local mirror in case you’re running from source and the gnump3d.org site hasn’t updated yet)

Apt Updates

I’ve updated my personal APT repository. This now uses reprepro to create/update/manage it. The reprepro tool is utterly wonderful. (Although I used the backported Sarge version, rather than the older one). Expect an article on the Debian Administration website shortly. Now I have an “incoming” directory I can upload new package builds to, and have them magically migrate into the relevent section. The other significant change is that now I can host packages with Arch: All, as well as i386. This is useful as I distribute several perl scripts/libraries which were previously unavailable to non-x86 users. Talking of which I still have to finish my review of The Debian System written by Martin Kraft - I’ve been sitting on that for too long. (Summary: Great Book, buy it if you can’t get one donated to review ).

I'm going to Montreal this weekend. It should be fun. For those curious about my trip through Scotland, I've managed to post half of my ramblings at Cycling Sasquach. Not all of the posts are still on the front page, so what may seem like never ending rants do go on ;)

Recently I've started to suffer from using a laptop as my primary work machine, namely stiff neck, sore back, etc. So I went shopping and purchased a PS/2 to USB cable, and an iCurve. I did toy with other laptop stands but they were either expensive, or incredibly ugly (think huge sheets of grey steel). The iCurve on the other hand is invisible... Here my unsed desktop's mouse and keyboard are plugged into the USB dongle, which through the magic of the kernel 2.6 input layer Just Works without any action at all. When I want to use the desktop -- a monthly event generally -- I can just whip the USB adaptor from the laptop and plug it into the desktop. Then I can watch Windows XP fail miserably to handle hardware changing between reboots. It appears that although Windows managed to handle the keyboard moving from PS/2 to USB, it refused to acknowledge that the mouse wasn't plugged into the PS/2 port still.. I had to figure out the keyboard navigation for the login screen and then remove/insert the mouse again. Not a great pain, but I bet that will catch out some normal users. Anyway, the iCurve totally rocks and is a great example of design via simplicity: it's just a curved piece of plastic but the laptop sits firmly on it. I recommend it to everyone who uses a laptop all day.

I'm not on any irc channels right now because I sensed I needed a certian distance from some things, and email tends to provide that as well as additional clarity. (And ameanability to thread pattern matching of course. ;-) It's interesting how quite a lot of things have been excerpted from irc channels in emails from various people since I left irc the other day. Almost makes me wonder what would happen if I pulled a Knuth. I can envision these boxes of email printouts arriving at my door.. nah. I actually remain on irc for the important thing, instantaneous communication -- if you really must /msg me, I will get the message. The most likely /msg to work right now is "plz check your email".

Here's how to subscribe to mailing lists with a combined total posts of 2000 or more per day, and live. It's all about pattern recognition. Threaded mail readers such as mutt sort emails into a tree based on which emails are replies to other emails. The mail index displays this tree of messages with the author of each indicated. Since the Subject field rarely changes, mutt does not display it unless the thread's subject changes. Combining these elements of author names, thread trees, and occasional subject changes produces patterns that the brain can use to quickly identify important and useless sets of mail messages, without actually reading anything, and without resorting to complicated and fragile killfile and scoring systems. Some patterns are very simple. For example, this is the "take it to private email" pattern. This pattern can be thread-killed on sight; if you're feeling generous, read the last two messages in the thread.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
fred         +->
bob            +->
fred             +->
bob                +->
fred                 +->
bob                    +->
fred                     +->

This is the "think before you post" pattern.

bob    +-> Foo
bob      +->

This is the "blindingly obvious answer" pattern. If you're bored you can read any one message to get the gist. Sometimes many of the replies will be worth reading to get a broad overview of all possible responses to a given obvious question. Most times not.

bob    +-> Foo?
fred     +->
alice    +->
george   +->
nancy    +->
steven   +->
nick     +->

Here's a deceptively simple pattern, the "uninteresting message". It might be worth checking the post date to make sure that it's not just the beginning of one of the above patterns of course. And if you're feeling generous, you can read some small fraction of them.

bob    +-> Foo?

This might be a worthwhile thread. Notably because it's short, has a reasonable mix of participants, and seems to come to some kind of conclusion.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
alice      +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bob              +->
nancy    +->
fred       +->

And here's a transformation of that same thread featuring "too late for the party syndrome"

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
alice      +->
bill       +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bill             +->
bill         +->
nancy    +->
fred       +->
bill         +->
bill       +->
bill     +->

This is a perfect time to er, threadkill bill. Or if feeling generous, read the second or third of his many replies to see what's got him so worked up. To see more sophisticated patterns, you need to categorise participants of the mailing list. A few people almost always manage to turn even a useless thread into something interesting, or have viewpoints that are good foils for your own. Learn to recognise the names of these interesting posters without thinking about it (I'll name them in uppercase below). Similarly, some people never contribute anything useful, and can be filed under the label of k00k. If there are more k00ks than interesting posters it's probably time to leave the list. Most people won't fit in either category. Some people change category depending on the subject. Here's the same potentially worthwhile thread as before, but now the people matter.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
k00k       +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bob              +->
NANCY    +->
fred       +->

Suddenly, three messages of the thread become worth reading, and the larger k00k-tainted subthread's likelyhood of being valuable drops substantially. Similarly, this thread can be ignored.

k00k   +-> Foo
bob      +->
fred       +->
k00k         +->
alice  +->
k00k     +->

And this thread has a high potential for being interesting.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
NORRIS       +->
george         +->
bob              +->
NANCY    +->
fred       +->

This thread, a variation of "take it to private email", increases bob's chances of being a k00k. Or he's really right and everyone else is wrong.

alice  +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
nancy        +->
bob            +->
alice            +->
bob                +->
fred                 +->
bob                    +->
fred                     +->
bob                        +->

This thread is a hard case to call, it depends on how good the interesting poster is in deflecting k00kitude. There could be as many as three worthwhile messages in here; I'll flag them.

  k00k   +-> Foo
  bob      +->
* NANCY      +->
  k00k         +->
* bob          +->
* NANCY          +->

It might be worth reading the interesting poster here, but probably only for a laugh, and it's just as likely that they've been cruelly trolled into answering, especially if an instance of the "blindingly obvious answer" pattern is grafted onto one of the subthreads.

k00k   +-> Foo
NORRIS   +->
k00k       +->
NORRIS       +->

So far the Subject has been ignored, and generally it's more important to look at the thread structure than the subject, but there are useful exceptions. It might be worth checking out the differently named subthread here, on the other hand its close proximity to the k00k likely means its a useless tangent.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
k00k       +->
bob          +->
george         +-> Bar (was: Foo)
bob              +->
fred               +->
fred           +->
tony     +->
fred       +->

Here is not just one thread, but a collection of threads. This pattern, typically associated with a much larger thread than shown here, is a sure sign that a thread has gone pear-shaped and unless the followup thread has a lot of interesting posters in it, there's not much hope for the lot. (k00ks also spawn disconnected threadlets; such threadlets should be ignored.)

 k00k   +-> Foo
 bob      +->
 NANCY      +->
 k00k         +->
 bob          +->
 NANCY          +->
 bob    +-> About foo..
 tony     +->
 k00k       +->
 alice  +-> That foo thing

That's enough patterns to get started with, but they really come into their own when picked out of larger threads in an overloy long ongoing discussion. A few examples can be found in this segment of 23 lines of a much longer thread.

bob                                                       
k00k                                                      
tony                                                      
k00k                                                      
tony                                                      
k00k                                                    +-
bob                                                  
k00k                                                +-> Bar
john                                    +-> Bar
nick                                  +-> Bar
barney                                  +->
nick                                      +->
nancy                                       +->
NORRIS                                        +->
nancy                                           +->
SAM                                           +->
nick                                            +->
NORRIS                                            +->
oliver                                          +->
john                                    +->
frank                                     +->
john                                        +->
tom                                           +-> Mumble
bob                                             +->

Part of this thread is useless by two criteria; it has far too much k00k in it, and it's nested so deep that mutt doesn't bother to try to draw the thread indicators. The next bit though shows some signs of being interesting despite its fairly deep nesting. And the tangent might be worth keeping an eye on. Those are the thread patterns that I know I know. I suspect there are many others that I also know, since I can typically read mail with the d key as fast as mutt will scroll, stop at the interesting spots, and not miss much. If you know of other patterns, send them my way. Finally, even if you prefer to read every post, please do us all a favour, imagine your reply is already in the thread structure, and look for patterns like "take it to private email", "blindingly obvious answer", "too late for the party syndrome", and k00k influenced posts.

Went to see Broken Flowers with JD and Laura, was a very deliberate (read: slow) film, that leaves a lot of unanswered questions... but that in itself was really quite interesting. Very odd ending, it really does just end, leaving the running question through the film entirely unanswered, which was fantastic :) Anyways - only a few more days then it's off to Norwich for a partay! Should be arriving in Norwich sometime Saturday afternoon (depending on when I leave Brighton, and how well I remember how to get round to Liverpool Street and get the Norwich train. I'm planning on getting in to Norwich sometime ~ 1500 or 1600, which gives me enough time to find stuff before wandering off to find the party at 1830 (ish).

Ok, so my brain is right now thinking on how to make Comas (my Conference Management System, which is quite nice, but somewhat unflexible. Sorry for the butt-ugly and incomplete webpage...) more flexible - And I have come accross some quite nice things. First of all, I want the fields for each person (the person table) to be easily modifiable, allowing me to add/remove attributes at will between different instances of Comas. Ok, this is the muscle behind my new idea. Yes, PostgreSQL-specific, as basically everything in Comas:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW table_attributes AS
SELECT c.relname AS tablename, a.attname AS attrname, t.typname AS type,
a.attnotnull AS required, d.description AS description FROM pg_class c
JOIN pg_attribute a ON a.attrelid=c.oid JOIN pg_type t ON a.atttypid=t.oid
LEFT OUTER JOIN pg_description d ON d.objoid=c.oid AND d.objsubid=a.attnum
WHERE a.attnum>0 AND a.attisdropped = 'f' AND c.relkind='r' AND c.relname
NOT LIKE 'pg_%' AND c.relname NOT LIKE 'sql_%'
ORDER BY tablename, a.attnum;

Nice, but still not enough - As with any other RDBMS, fields can not only hold data, but -of course- they can be foreign keys, referring to data in other tables. Ok, in order to check those relations and be able to build a map of the relations in my DB, I came up with this:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW related_tables AS
SELECT c1.relname AS referrer, c2.relname AS refered, a.attname AS ref_key
FROM pg_constraint con JOIN pg_class c1 ON con.conrelid=c1.oid JOIN pg_class c2
ON con.confrelid=c2.oid JOIN pg_attribute a ON c1.oid=a.attrelid AND
a.attnum=ANY(con.conkey) WHERE contype='f' ORDER BY c1.relname, c2.relname;

In the first query, note that I am excluding from what I report all the tables starting with pg_ or sql_ - While that's a usual convention in Postgres, there surely is a better way to do it, some attribute signalling it's a system catalog... But, at least for now, this covers my needs.
Anyway, this might come useful for your projects. PostgreSQL introspection is fun! (Yes, those two queries are the result of many lonely hours going through the documentation and a couple of spontaneous questions to several friends - But it's worth it!)

This weekend I was in Berlin, at the Berlinux 2005. I have to work until about 17:00 on Fridays so I couldn't attend the first day, instead I arrived at Berlin at about 19:00, just in time for the Social Event :) The Social Event was really nice, well organized with little group tables to sit and chat and very delicious food. Apparently there was also a tuxracer tournament planned but that couldn't be done due to some technical problems (didn't follow that too closely). The evening was very nice anyway I ate a lot and talked to the other attending Debian people. We didn't stay up too long since the exhibition was scheduled to start at 09:00 the next day.
When we got to the Technical University on the next morning the first thing I noticed was a huge transparent hanging over the entrance. Upon closer inspection however it advertised some events for this semester's new students, not Berlinux. Shame. We quickly checked with the Information desk, where we were told to check back with them before giving our talks, since there had been some last minute room changes. Given the quite chaotic organisation in the run-up of this event I must say I wasn't too surprised. (There had been quite a mess regarding the preparation of the talks, many speakers only read on the site when - and that - they were giving their talks, deadlines suddenly popped up and then started wandering ... All in all preparations had been a bit confusing.) Also the planned Berlinux CD had somehow not worked out, so there were no CDs available.
With such good news we went on to the Debian booth to set up the usual stuff. The biggest attraction certainly was Frank Ronneburg's Debian-controlled model railway. Kids had to be forcibly moved on and grown-up men were seen regressing to small children again ;) Unfortunately attendance was rather low anyhow and a lot of the people walking by were regular students on their way to some other events.
At least the talks managed to attract a higher number of people. I can't estimate for shit so I have got no idea how many people attended my talk on user friendly system administration. But I was rather content with the number and so were the other speakers I talked to (The only one who was a bit unfortunate was Alexander 'Tolimar' Schmehl who had to compete with Klaus Knopper giving a talk at the same time.) After the talks were over we killed some more time at the booth, playing with Frank's model railway and Wolfgang Borgert's Nokia 770 (It has Mahjong! Yay!). It should be noted that when we were finally taking down the booth a very brave person walked around with a laptop collecting criticism and suggestions for improvement. There were so many of them that I had to help him out with my Thinkpad's power supply :)

I am not sure how much the Debian project benefited from the whole event since the attendance was so low and we got very few questions. Personally though I quite enjoyed the event. The talk went well (I got a few laughs and good questions afterwards), I met a bunch of new and very interesting people and had a really great Pizza. I hope Berlinux Organisation picks up a few of the suggestions they received. For the moment, my conclusion is that I'd probably give a talk there again, I am however not so sure if I'd go there only to man the Debian booth.

PS: Sadly they didn't have name tags either, so I don't even have something to put on my "trophy board" :(
Hint: Most speaker love souvenirs, give them a piece of paper with their name and your logo on it and they are happy people :)

The moral of the story is always, always use at to schedule a reboot shortly in the future, no matter how harmless you think something is... Today I stopped procrastinating about upgrading daedalus's kernel to 2.6.12 and did it. That worked fine. The reason for the upgrade was that I'd read somewhere that 2.6.12 fixed the problem with things like Dell's Baseboard Management Controller, where if you downed the interface in Linux, it downed it so far so that the BMC (which does some funky low-level physical interface sharing) also stopped being remotely accessible. So I upgraded, hopeful in the fact that if I were to ever remotely shut down daedalus, I could turn it back on or reboot it remotely with ipmitool. I thought I'd test this, so I did this:

daedalus:~# ip l s dev eth0 down; sleep 10; ip l s dev eth0 up

and promptly kissed daedalus goodbye. Not just for 10 seconds, for until I could get the colo guys to kick it in the guts for me. Grrr. At least I determined that the problem appears to persist. If I down an interface in Linux, it's down for the BMC as well. That sucks.

Yesterday night grml 0.5 - Codename Tokolytika was released. I can just repeat my last remarks: grml is a charm when it comes to restoring systems, or in other tricky situations where you need your sysadmin tools handy. Saved my day quite often so far, and I'm sure it won't stop. Get it now! I simply don't know any better live CD. For those who wonder what I was doing in the last time: I had been to the last Friday Night Skating of this year. The last hundred meters of the almost 2 hour lasting course I got pushed because my legs had finished early... Thank you very much, Conny!
All in all it was a great event and I'm sure to visit it more regularly next year. :) Workload both at work and private didn't really stop for quite some weeks, it was a horror. I wasn't even able to reasonably follow any mailing lists, left aside to do any real work. Though if you noticed my 1.2.2-16 upload of beep you might know that I also have invested quite much there. Furthermore I managed to get some people of our Debienna group interested in the g++ 4.0 transition. Greek0 wrote some scripts to bring the data of mfurr's page into one (for us) better suited to use and work from. In our wiki we write down our progress to keep us updated on who's working on getting what in.
I don't have real numbers, but from tracking mfurr's list of packages needing a recompile it went down quite a bit since we started, and we don't plan to stop soonish. And finally: I've written an article about jigdo-lite for my company's magazine. It's the 5th issue of the magazine, and my third article for it (first has been about gnupg and second about MUDs). I like writing, and from some of the feedback I received people like reading me, too. :)

On Tuesday I attended the CALIBRE workshop on Quality, Security and Safety in FLOSS in Krak w, Poland. There were several interesting talks, including one looking at flight safety control and one about the large-scale deployment of Linux based thin-clients for the Polish government. I presented my work on quality management and discussed problems of release management in large, volunteer projects. The following day KKIO 2005 started, the Krak w Software Engineering Conference. Niklaus Wirth gave the keynote speech, looking at ideas which seemed like a good idea when they came up many years ago and evaluating them from today's perspective. I presented my paper Software Process Maturity and the Success of Free Software Projects and listended to several talks. Some talks were in Polish but the proceedings are in English and I look forward to reading some of them.

In Oldenburg, Joey gave me a PARISC box, an Apollo 715/50. It wasn't complete—no RAM, no hard disk, no CD-ROM or other media—but the system itself seemed complete and functional. Unfortunately, it isn't. I added some RAM that I took from my parent's old computer (196MB in total, IIRC) and tried power on the box. Didn't work. When I powered it up, the machine powers up its fan for a short while before shutting it down again; then the fan moves to a lower rate, and the machine appears dead. Well, mostly so; there's no output on the VGA port, and the LEDs don't do anything anymore, either. But those LEDs would appear to be helpful, if one would know what they mean. Unfortunately, the box came without manual, so figuring out exactly what they mean all by myself is going to be painful. Google to the rescue. I found an archive of the comp.sys.apollo newsgroup, with loads of postings from 2000. One of them also mentions failure to boot, no output, and mentions that all LEDs except one are on at the end. That's the same as what happens here, except that in my case the one-but-last one are on, rather than the last one. A reply suggests that the machine couldn't find the boot disk, and that therefore the box can't be booted. So, lemme get this straight: if the boot disk is having issues (or not available, as in my case), Apollo machines simply decide to not do anything? Fuck. Update: okay, turns out the HP Website still has a PDF of the model 715 service manual, which contains an explanation of the LED error messages. Turns out it means "No Memory Found". Hm. Watch this space.