Search Results: "will"

26 November 2009

Vincent Sanders: Sometimes it don't come easy, sometimes it don't come at all

My work sometimes causes me to have reason to change small things in open source projects which I then have to submit for consideration upstream. Often this is as simple as providing a patch on the relevant mailing list and moving on.

Sometimes however the change is larger and I really would like to see the feature or bug fix accepted by the project. I am fortunate that my employer is enlightened enough to not only accept this but actively encourage participation in open source communities.

Most of the time the patches are accepted, with changes or updates, in a reasonable timescale. Certainly for kernel work I have got used to a submission/accept time measured in hours!

On occasion the change gets dropped on the floor or missed and you have to resubmit (even if its just to get told its uninteresting and to go away ;-). Unfortunately there are a small number of projects where getting something merged is an experience in frustration.

The particular project which has caused me the most trouble along these lines is Qemu. Daniel and I did the work to support the Samsung ARM based 2410 and 2440 System on Chip (SoC) and a couple of boards they were used on. Of course we then presented the patch to the Qemu mailing list. That was in November...No, not this year, or even last, we are talking 2006!

Unsurprisingly there were numerous issues with our first cut, we improved the patches and resubmitted them and received absolutely no feedback. Eventually we provoked the maintainer to respond, we took his feedback into account and resubmitted. After a year of so of this Daniel got bored and gave up.

Being a complete idiot and apparently sucker for punishment I decided to re-try. I completely restructured the port and started by just trying to get the absolute minimal core changed accepted. It took some time to provoke a response (oh and they altered RCS which meant I had to change my submission again, but they did change to git so that is acceptable ;-)

Earlier this year resulted in my all time favorite maintainer response. Eventually I managed to find out he actually objected to the patch because the SoC we were using actually required a slightly different processor capability set (the emulation is ARMv5 by default and the SoC in question is ARM v4te, hey I had not noticed any practical difference, and Qemu is an emulator not a simulator...but OK)

Remember this is the first time this objection has been raised in 30months of patch submission. Fine, I create a patch which adds V4te emulation and submit that. I eventually get a response, to which my reply is a little frustrated I will admit.

I have since resubmitted the patch with the corner cases fixed, it has been ignored, and I never have received a reply to my direct questions. On this three year anniversary of the original submission I am simply going to give up, something I detest doing.

I am one of those dull people that finishes what he starts, that is pretty much my role in Simtec these days, ensuring stuff we start gets finished or at least drawing the line and calling it complete. To end up with a complete failure offends my personal values.

Now please do not think I hold any ill feelings towards anyone concerned, open source maintainers perform their roles without pay and, by extension, without responsibility to anyone but themselves. I am sure people are too busy to care about the itch I wanted scratched and that overall their project has not really lost all that much by not having me as a contributor.

I know I could have forked the project, or maintained my own tree or any number of other technical solutions but at the end of 1,100 days I have finally exhausted my enthusiasm and can move on. Speaking of which, time to resubmit a kbuild change which got dropped ;-)

Michal Čihař: Ubuntu bugs for second time

It looks like my post about bugs in Ubuntu has received a bit more attention than I expected for few lines of ranting :-). Most interesting reactions came to Lucas Nussbaum's blog. There were nice explanations how it is supposed to work, but the problem is that people out there can not manage that amount of bugs. It is possible, that for some core packages, they manage to do the job. However most bug reports will probably go to some leaf packages, which are not that important, but lot of people use them. I started to interest in bugs in Ubuntu when I noticed that there is some huge number of bugs linked on phpMyAdmin's PTS page. There was something like 50 too much bugs. After quick look I could see that most of them are duplicates. After little fight with ajaxy interface, I even managed to mark most of them as duplicates and fix it in Debian package. But as somebody with no knowledge of Ubuntu (and not willing to learn internals of yet another distribution, I think Debian and OpenSUSE is enough), I really have no idea what could be done to push some bug fix to existing release. So once some Ubuntu release (The Lucid Lynx in this case) got new version, I marked the bug as fixed. This is probably not that nice to users, but somebody from Ubuntu community should take care of them. Off-topic PS: If anybody is interested in Google Wave invitations, just write me an email, I currently have 15 without any use.

Russell Coker: Killing Bankers

John Robb wrote an interesting post about running web sites to target corporations such as Goldman Sachs [1] (such as tracking where it s employees live). Naked Capitalism has an interesting post about US investment banks getting preferential access to vaccines [2]. In the comments section some people state an intention to deliberately infect Goldman employees if they get sick. Rob Blackwell at American Banker writes about a popular iPhone game based around the idea of defending the White House from attacking bankers who try and steal money [3]. The game features a number of ways of killing bankers. It seems to me that the US bankers have gone way beyond the level of greed that will actually benefit themselves and their actions seem to indicate a death-wish. As the banks are supposedly too big to fail they should also be too big to be allowed to kill themselves, so maybe we need some sort of corporate suicide-watch. According to a blog post I read when someone is admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt they are watched by video at all times, inspected every 15 minutes, and regularly searched for sharp objects. Maybe part of the bail-out package should have included the US government inspecting the offices of bankers every 15 minutes, watching them at all times by video, and regularly searching them for toxic assets, derivatives that no-one understands, etc. It seems that the TSA employees would rather search for money than weapons [4], so they could be redeployed in searching bank offices. TSA employees never were much good at searching for bombs anyway [5].

MJ Ray: Who wikis Who in British Librarianship

It s great to discover this experimental wikified version of W. A. Munford s Who was Who in British Librarianship 1800-1985 (1987). As a statistician who has strayed into serving libraries, I don t know many of the famous names and a lot of the online materials are from the US. This looks like a useful guide (and CC-BY-SA-3.0 which is OK, although the current site has an unfriendly Choice of Law and Forum) and I hope that any UK-based Librarians who read my site will take a look and see if they can help it.

25 November 2009

Erich Schubert: Identifying Link Spammers via nofollow links

I wonder if it's possible to identify link spammers (you know, these bots that mass-submit a link into as many blogs/etc they can find in order to boost their page rank) by the simple measure of how many of the links to their site are marked 'nofollow'.Say, a regular page should have less than 5% (and less than 20) nofollow links; a site that goes significantly above this value probably employs some spam bot.The only really hard thing is how to avoid attacks on a site using this ... say, I write a bot that spams links to Microsoft on as many sites as it can find that DO use 'nofollow', in order to get that site above the limit, and have google penalize it.So in general I don't think Google would automatically penalize such things, still it could be used to e.g. have a human check the destination site for useful content, and then only blacklist when it doesn't seem to be useful.P.S. Which BTW is a reason why some of the SEO "do nots" are bullshit: it would be too easy to deliberately use these to blacken a competitor. So a 'link farm' will at most do nothing to raise your ranking; but Google must not allow you to actually lower a competitors ranking by setting up a link farm to him!)P.P.S. On another side note: Who guarantees that Google actually ignores "nofollow" links? They could also just be assigned a lower weight or a penalty, so that a "nofollow" link from a strong site such as Wikipedia would still be worth a lot, while the average blog comments page link goes down to 0. Say a "nofollow" link from a PR 6 site is as much worth as a regular link from a PR 4 site, and PR 2 becomes PR 0. Would already do much of the trick in discouraging the use of blog spam bots. Because after all, ignoring the links on Wikipedia for page rank would be quite stupid. In German Wikipedia, the page contents are even "sighted" (aka: peer reviewed); this is a rather trustworthy source, especially when you take time effects into account. A link being constantly in Wikipedia on a popular page for more than a month very likely is good.

Erich Schubert: Lost an ext3 filesystem

These days, something happened to one of my external USB drives that I so far only knew from ReiserFS (which I since called ReisswolFS, German word play on "shredder" ...). But, it's not ext3 which I blame.Short story what happened: What I will do now: As you can see, something was wrong with the system, not with the file system.I have a strong suspect to have caused this. In case you wondered why I included "resumed from suspend" above: I've been having system stability issues with resume ever since upgrading to the Intel driver 2.9.0 and KMS (Debian unstable+testing) with kernels up to 2.6.31. In about 1 out of 5 resumes, I get a Xorg or system lockup after anything from 1 to 60 minutes. Sometimes I also experience video corruption after a few minutes, trashing some terminal emulation until the next redraw. Just before writing this email I had a typical lockup: when scrolling the terminal emulator. This has been a typical trigger for lockups. On contrast I havn't seen any such crashes (or screen corruption) on a fresh boot.Freedesktop bug reporting the same issue closed as "not our bug, blame it on the kernel".Note that 2.6.32 release candidate Changelog contain many changes for the intel DRI kernel driver. So the bug might already be fixed in the RC kernels.Same report in Kernel Bugzilla is still 'NEW' though.Related bug report in Debian, blaming it on KMS.

Russell Coker: Seatbelts and Transporting Computers

I ve just read an interesting post at Making Light about seat-belts [1]. In Australia seat-belt use is mandatory, you can be fined for failing to wear one and the police (who help clean up the mess when someone dies on the road) are apparently quite aggressive about enforcement. Even aside from the legal requirement the use of seat-belts is fairly ingrained in Australian culture, people tend to use them even when they won t get caught. One of the things I like to do in my spare time is to take unused computer gear from IT companies (which they regard as rubbish) and give it to home users for recreational and educational use. Due to that and my work for some smaller IT companies I ve helped many people load computer gear into their private cars and observed that most people will not take adequate care unless I coerce them. A CRT monitor tends to be large and heavy, you wouldn t want to get hit in the back of the head with one at 60Km/h. With some combinations of monitor and car you can fit a monitor in the front passenger foot-well, but usually the only place a monitor will fit is the back seat. The correct thing to do is to use the seat-belt to strap the monitor in place. It s most likely that the monitor stand (the only part that allows a seat-belt to be attached) would snap off in the event of a serious crash but this would at least slow the monitor down. Also don t put the monitor directly behind your seat if you can avoid it, put it behind the passenger seat. In a collision monitor might be able to push through your seat and cause you a back injury. Between 1992 and 2006 there were 78,000 acute computer-related injuries treated in US hospital emergency rooms [2]. The number of injuries caused by monitors peaked at 37% of the total in 2003 this was largely due to monitors falling on people. Even without the speed of a car a monitor can be a dangerous projectile. Hard drives have a lot of potential to cause damage, they are dense, hard, and the corners often aren t rounded. Storing them above the back seat behind the driver s head (as a friend once tried to do) is a really bad idea. Mythbusters showed that a box of tissues isn t going to kill you in a crash, but a hard drive is much more dangerous. The typical car glove box can store a few drives. If you need to transport a box full then the front passenger foot well is a reasonable place. If your car rolls then that would suck, but it seems that people usually die when they roll their car anyway so just try not to do that. A serious server (EG 2RU or bigger rack-mount) typically weighs 30Kg or more and is solidly constructed. The size and mass of such a machine makes it extremely difficult to safely store inside a car. The ideal place is the boot, but if that isn t an option then behind the passenger seat is the next best option. One final issue that I ve been wondering about is the safest option for laptops that are in use in a moving car. A 3Kg Thinkpad would have to hurt if it hit you in the back of the head at 60Km/h. The child-seat attachments are solid anchor points that can be used for other things. I wonder if a laptop security cable could be attached to one of the child seat points. According to an exhibit at a science museum I can throw a tennis ball at 115Km/h, so I presume that laptop security cables are designed not to break when someone swings the laptop at that speed. Therefore if a car was driving at a legal speed in Australia before crashing then a laptop security cable should be able to stop the laptop. Preventing the cable from injuring the passenger on the way would be the difficult part.

Lucas Nussbaum: Re: Ubuntu Bugs

(Context: Michal iha complains about bugs filed in Ubuntu not being looked at nor forwarded to Debian or upstream) Michal, I think that your complaint is caused by a misunderstanding of how package maintenance happens in Ubuntu. I ll try to clarify it, based on what I understand (if you know better than me, don t hesitate to comment). The part of Canonical maintaining the distribution is organized into teams (full list here), like Kernel, Foundations, Desktop, Mobile, Server, etc. Most of those teams have mirror-teams in the community, like the Ubuntu Desktop team. Those teams take care of subsets of packages in Ubuntu, of relevance to the respective teams. (This is orthogonal to package upload rights, which are managed with the Ubuntu Core Development Team, and the Ubuntu Development Team ; there s a proposal to change that so that package upload rights are based on the first set of teams). However, there are some packages (probably more than 70% of the packages in Ubuntu, including main+universe) that are of no interest to any particular team. Those packages are maintained on a best-effort basis by all the Ubuntu developers (inside the loosely defined MOTU team), and focus is usually on not diverging from Debian, to make their work as easy as possible. It s very similar to what we do in Debian with orphaned packages: sometimes, important bugs get fixed, because someone complained loudly enough or a developer ran into the bug and did a QA upload ; but usually, we don t really do any bug triaging. Of course, there are some packages in Ubuntu that are not maintained by any core team, but still have someone that cares about them. They are more the exception than the rule. So, yes, obviously, you will run into packages with lots of untriaged bugs, sometimes even with patches. And those bugs and patches are rarely being forwarded manually to Debian, simply because nobody cares about those packages in Ubuntu. In an ideal world, with infinite resources, this would not happen, of course. But realistically, this is not going to change anytime soon. There s a link on the PTS to the bugs of your packages in Ubuntu. The idea is to allow an easy access to the bugs reported in Ubuntu, which are likely to be also relevant to the Debian package. You should probably feel welcomed to triage the bugs against your package in ubuntu, if it makes it easier for you to monitor them. There s some noise in the Ubuntu bugs, of course, but more and more often, by looking at the Ubuntu bugs, I find important bugs in my Debian packages that are not even reported in Debian yet.

Gunnar Wolf: Source format 3.0 (quilt) for teh win!

My Debian QA page shows what I consider to be a huge amount of packages I am currently uploader for 207 packages. Why so many? There are many factors The main one is group maintenance (I'm directly responsible only for 19; of course, this should not mean I disregard the rest of them), the second one is regularity. By far, most of my source packages (177) match lib.*perl, followed by lib.*ruby with 20. Anyway A strong factor that allows the pkg-perl group to be successful in maintaining 1411 packages is the regularity of the task: Packaging Perl modules is usually as easy as running dh-make-perl on them (of course, not taking away the merit of packaging the few strange corner cases In Ruby-land, the landscape is quite different. The developer community is quite anchored in agile worldviews, which go beyond coding practices and all the way over to confronting the way most Free Software projects distribute their work. I have previously ranted presented informed and opinionated blog posts on this topic Ruby culture dictates the distribution via Ruby Gems, which are for many reasons not Debian friendly. Besides Gems, most projects have adopted Git for development tracking and are hosted under Github That's why I came up with Githubredir, which basically presents an uscan-friendly listing of tags for a given project. But if you develop in Git, you might want to split a project in its constituent parts for easier organization, without meaning that each subproject should be an independent project by itself, right? After all, that's what Git submodules are for. That's what happened with a great PDF generating library for Ruby, Prawn. Thing is, the three parts of the main project are required for the project to be built. Anyway, that was a great reason to move the package over to the new dpkg 3.0 (quilt) source format. And, yes, it is a straightforward move! If you have not yet done so, take a look at Raphael Hertzog' explanation+FAQ wiki page. It just works, and makes many things way easier. There are still some wrinkles in my packaging, like where I'm getting the orig tarballs from As the submodules are not presently tagged in any way, I was only able to download a snapshot of their respective current master branches. This is suboptimal, I know, but I have talked to the upstream author, and he confirms that for the next major version (which should not be long in coming) the tags will be synchronized, and things will be even cleaner. PS- I love Hpricot. To get the numbers for my QA page, I just had to get three dirty but useful arrays:
  1. require 'hpricot'
  2. require 'open-uri'
  3. url = 'http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=gwolf&comaint=yes'
  4. doc = Hpricot(open(url))
  5. tot = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row  
  6.         (row%'td' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .select   i  i 
  7. team = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row 
  8.          (row%'td' % 'span.uploader' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .
  9.        select   i  i 
  10. mine = ( (doc / 'table' )[1]/'tr').map    row 
  11.          (row%'td' % 'span:not(.uploader)' % 'a').inner_html rescue nil .
  12.        select   i  i

And work from the three very simple lists there i.e. tot.select pkg pkg =~ /lib.*perl/ .size gives me 177.

Erich Schubert: Google Wave rolling out?

When I got my Google Wave account, it took the invitation about a week to arrive. A few days ago, I got my first own invites, and invited some colleagues (in an attempt to actually find a use for Google Wave beyond "rich media live messaging"). Within a few minutes they were "in". Now I just got my second set of invites. So is Google Wave now getting ready for mass opening, rocketing user numbers?As you might have already guessed, I'm not convinced by Google Wave. It's technically interesting and well-done. The demos are all nice. It's just that the UI in the browser is a bit fragile and cumbersome, and the big question so far is:
What does Google Wave allow you to do that you couldn't do before?
To me, there has been little actual use so far. Wave can do everything, but isn't optimal in any of them: Yes, I'm aware that you should differentiate between the protocol and the ui. Still pretty much everything is currently designed for the web browser with full JavaScript and Flash capabilities.Of course this isn't the end yet, Google Wave will evolve. Maybe into something cool, maybe it will remain just a niche thing. Maybe some cool apps will just use Wave as protocol. But I figure, I'll mostly wait for these things to happen first before I become a frequent user of Wave.The biggest thing I see is the "spam" (this especially includes 'Quiz', Mafia Wars and similar Scamville type of 'apps' that surely will show up in no time, once Wave is open to the public). What will Wave provide to me to handle this flood of worthless information that I'm getting more and more?P.S. Please don't bother to ask for invitations to Wave.P.P.S. here's how to replace the odd scrollbars with the regular OS scrollbars with a really simple user style (CSS).

Jo Shields: Taking a back seat

I m making a few changes to my online interactions. Some things, however, will NOT be changing. Thank you for your time.

Biella Coleman: Ninja Mind Tactics

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

Biella Coleman: Ninja Mind Tactics

Over the years far too many years I have occasionally chronicled the slow death of my mother, a death of mind, personality, really person that comes with Alzheimers. She has officially had the illness for 7 years now but had symptoms prior to this time, in the form of perceptual disturbances that are the defining feature of the rare type of Alzheimers she has, Benson s syndrome. As her illness progressed and we saw her doctors they would always ask: what other illnesses or health problems does Vera have? And I would answer none. Without fail and almost immediately, the inquiring doctor would respond back none? often with a slightly raised eyebrow, the one word uttered not to challenge the veracity of my answer, but used instead to convey another meaning, often bathed in some mixture of compassion and pity. It was an acknowledgement of the future that awaited us, basically stating with no other illness, this is going to be on heck of long and difficult haul of a life experience, which has indeed been the case. However, after nearly two years of being bed bound in a nursing home, physical health problems are now creeping in and my mother is descending into different type of hell, especially since she can no longer communicate the physical pain she might be in. The words she knows are few: no and a few other words (she likes to tell people they are loco and indeed I can only imagine how true this accusation of crazy is given that we are keeping her alive against her wishes). Her consistent and persistent wailing, agitation and crying do of course communicate the depth of suffering this being the hardest thing to bear witness to. She does have periods of calm, coaxed in part by the drugs she is given but these are not enough to override the pain she and we feel. About two months ago, her body started to give, the first problem being a fracture that led to significant internal bleeding and required a blood transfusion and a brace she is still wearing. A few weeks ago when I was visiting her, she basically developed these black and red welts on the bottom of her feet in a manner of two days, so instead of boarding a plane to NYC, I took her to the emergency room and stayed a full week while she was pumped with intravenous antibiotics. At first, doctors thought it might be gangrene, which was mortifying mostly because of all the associations that come with it. The doctors determined that it was not in fact gangrene but that she has a bone infection technically called osteomyelitis a tricky condition to treat that requires at minimum 45 days of IV antibiotics. The hospital/doctors who had originally determined she would stay there for her treatment, changed their mind unexpectedly and announced their intention to ship her to a long-term care facility, which in theory we were not opposed to, except for the fact that it is very far from where my sister lives, and also it is a facility we had not verified for ourselves. On top of it, we knew she had a legal right stay in the hospital (though some doctors informed us otherwise). We preferred the hospital because it is so close to our house, we would be able to hire someone to visit her when my sister is at work, and we suspect that she will have additional complications from 45 days of IV abx so why not stick around and receive treatment and care from the same internist who had been nothing but a great doctor. The story took a turn toward the surreal when the infectious disease doctor decided to release her to her nursing home with a treatment of oral antibiotics, even though every single doctor we saw from the emergency room doctor to the weekend internist who subs for her regular doctor, repeatedly informed us the only treatment is IV antibiotics for at least 45 days, possibly more (which is the normal treatment protocol).
Since so many people don t know how to maneuver complaints and take action in hospitals, doctors and other staff can exploit this to make medically dogdy decisions (which happened in fact when a feeding tube was put into my mom, but that is another long story I don t think I ever wrote about here). I am sure also that some doctor s are less willing to take questionable action with certain patients depending on the class and background of their family members but I bet the first impression I give off to doctors, to invoke Erving Goffman s work on self-presentation, is not someone willing to take swift action. In the hospital, I have the sense that most doctors don t take me all that seriously, probably thinking that I am 5 foot slacker/artistic type that I admittedly do look like as I dress in jeans, a hoodie and a winter cap because the hospitals are so effing, ridiculously cold in PR (and I can t help my height nor the fact that I look 24 or so). So it usually comes as a surprise when I bring out my mind ninja tactics developed over years of being and thinking like an academic, whose craft is research, whose passion is arguing, and for some of us who are politically inclined, who love the challenge of righting wrongs. So when this happened I contacted lawyer-friends, talked to the social worker and promptly complained to the head of client services/ombudsperson and made a stink but of a very particular sort: it was packaged in massive tact. I was very deferential (especially since those folks have nothing to do with the mess, they are there to help and are your allies), repeatedly pointed out how the doctor s decision amounts to medical negligence, and made it clear that I was willing to take action, leave my work if need be and get my ass down there, and casually mention how in the 5 hours between their decision and my phone calls, I have already taken action (how I have contacted lawyers on the island, etc). Needless to say, the hospital decided that my mom is staying put in the hospital and I am relieved. But this solace is only of the tiniest sort. I am still reeling from the absurdity of her condition and her suffering. She is only alive because of a feeding tube that I am opposed to, her state of being a modern day zombie that in reality, or at least from my perspective perpetuates her suffering. For this reason, truth be told and at one level relieved that her body is finally failing, that there is a chance, a light at the end of this lonely, now horrific tunnel that her life will end sooner than later. This, however, makes it no easier emotionally nor ethically as it is my mother who must journey alone through significant pain and suffering as her body now goes elsewhere a journey we can watch in person yet are powerless in its face.

Russell Coker: Computer Security and Political Censorship

I ve just been disappointed to read about the DNI (Defence in the National Interest) web site closing down [1]. The final blog post says In the meantime, I ll leave everything up unless we start having more security problems , but unfortunately they have had a number of security problems in the past. I doubt the ability of a Wordpress installation to remain unscathed on the Internet if it s not upgraded regularly. So I think it s only a matter of time before a new bad Wordpress bug is discovered and DNI goes offline for good. In the past I did idly consider volunteering to help them run their site, but apart from a lack of spare time there is the issue that a number of their policy positions are things that I strongly disagree with. I can agree with paleo-cons on a number of issues, but there are also significant areas of disagreement. So it seems that the combination of a lack of skilled system administrators and a lack of good security in their software is reducing their ability to spread their message. While the site content is going to be mirrored on other sites the URLs will break and Google will give it a lower rank. In many ways losing Google ranking is a way of being silenced. I wonder whether the apparent lack of moderate-right political expression on the Internet is partly due to that demographic having less IT skills than the groups who have centrist to left-wing political views and those who have extreme-right views. Naturally anyone can pay to have someone run their web site, but having to pay raises the barrier to entry and eliminates some of the potential contributors. I think it s a bad thing for democracy if the only people who get their voices heard are those who have significant amounts of money or technical skill. One of my hopes for the SE Linux project was that it would increase the longevity of servers while also decreasing the amount of money required to run them. But of course if you have buggy PHP code then there s not much SE Linux can do to help you.

Kees Cook: missing kernel features in ARM

As more attention is given to the ARM ports of Linux, I m hoping someone (maybe me if I learn a bunch) will be able to implement some upstream kernel features that are implemented only on x86 so far: Stack is already randomized, it should be easy to do the rest! ;)

24 November 2009

Jordi Mallach: Ten years as a Debian Maintainer

On the 24th of November of 1999, the Debian ftpmasters processed the NEW package wmbiff, which got installed in the potato distribution. This sponsored upload by Fernando S nchez was the first of my packages to hit the official Debian archive, thus officially making me a Debian maintainer. So, in short, today is my tenth anniversary as a Debian contributor! I actually started a few days before, and soon after that upload, many other ITPs and uploads followed. I will always be thankful to fer for his patience with my upload sponsoring until I became a Debian developer with full rights and was able to upload myself. During these years, I've been involved in many teams and different tasks, with my activity and dedication probably peaking around 2001 or 2002, when I apparently was doing a crazy amount of different stuff. I started doing plain packaging work of software packages, some of which also have come a long way (thanks for that, Chris!), but soon started to contribute in other Debian tasks. I think it's safe to say that the task that has ended up having more impact in the people that surround me was bootstrapping the Debian Catalan community and starting the Catalan translation of Debian's website, which soon after triggered the creation of a formal Debian Catalan translation project. I've also spent a lot of time giving back to the NM team which helped me get a Debian account through the still experimental new New Maintainer process, and the QA team helping as I could with the never ending release cycles of potato and woody. At some point I got engaged in the GNOME packaging tasks and the creation of the Debian GNOME team, and picked up the Catalan translation of GNOME 1.5.x releases, which eventually opened me the doors of Softcatal , a Catalan non-profit devoted to the promotion of the Catalan language in technology. I've believed in Debian's values since my classmate Ulisses Alonso prodded me to install Debian on my desktop back in 1997. Even if getting X up and running on bo was a real pain in the ass, knowing that the system I was running had all been written by people driven by altruism was enlightening; months later it was time to give back. Of course, I've not been able to keep my motivation or output as high as I'd like. Debian as a collective has sometimes taken some decisions which were not so easy to understand from my point of view. The outcome of the non-free votes was a bit appalling, and having debian-devel becoming more and more a battleground instead of a civilised mailing list certainly did not help at some point (unsubscribing from it made my life a lot simpler!). Joining a triathlon club, having a girlfriend and suddenly rediscovering my neglected social life didn't help either. The result is that my dedication has been wanning noticeably since 2005 or so, but I still do my best to keep up with most of duties, even if I'm aware I'm clearly neglecting a few of them. I am very proud of having been a part of an incredible project like Debian, and hope to be around for at least ten more years. Not only because I love and believe in Free Software; thanks to my involvement, I've been able to work on Debian-related jobs for all of my professional career, but above all I've been very lucky to make lots of real friends. Today's has been a nice day full of remembering and mailbox digging. Thank you, Debian!

Russell Coker: SCO Unix and Proftpd

I recently had the misfortune to be compelled to install Proftpd on SCO Unix. There s nothing wrong with Proftpd of course, but everything is wrong with SCO. LDFLAGS=-L/usr/ucblib ./configure libdir=/usr/ucblib --enable-builtin-getnameinfo To get it to compile the above ./configure line is needed. It uses /usr/ucblib because having the basic BSD sockets API residing in a non-default directory makes things more exciting. The --enable-builtin-getnameinfo option is needed because the getnameinfo library call in SCO Unix doesn t work properly. On a real OS I would have downloaded the source to libc to figure out where the problem might be, but on SCO I had no option other than to disable that functionality. Then once I got it working I had to put UseIPv6 off in the configuration file, otherwise I got the error No Route to Host (from memory) when I tried to start proftpd. Finally the process was dying from an unhandled SIGALRM every 10 seconds. According to truss (a vastly inferior equivalent to strace) the sigaction() system call was being entered four times to handle SIGALRM (as was reported for every time the application code called sigaction() but the default action of terminating the application remained in place. I ended up running proftpd from inetd which removed the need for the alarm handling code. Then it all worked. SCO sucks. Last month Darl McBride was terminated from his position with the SCO group [1]. It s unfortunate that Darl wasn t terminated a lot earlier, if so then maybe SCO could have focussed on improving the quality of their products and delivering value for stock holders. Hopefully Darl will be sued by some of the people who lost money when SCO went bankrupt. It would be good if Darl could also be sued by companies that lost money due to the poor quality of SCO Unix that means every company that runs SCO servers or that writes software for it. The truly awful nature of SCO Unix is in large part due to the fact that all of SCO s money was spent on litigation that was well known to be baseless.

Russell Coker: Car Drivers vs Mechanics and Free Software

In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said If you don t know how to make a surgery, you don t do it. If you don t know how to drive, don t drive. And if you don t know how to use a computer, don t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses. Later he advocates using a taxi. Now I agree about surgery apart from corner cases such as medical emergencies in remote places and large-scale disasters. I also agree that it s good to avoid driving if you aren t very good at it (that would be much better than the current fad of sub-standard drivers buying large 4WD vehicles). But I don t think that people who lack computer skills should avoid using computers. When cars were first invented everyone who owned one was either a mechanic or employed one. Driving a car often involved being well out of range of anyone else who might know how to fix it, so either the car owner or their chauffeur had to be able to fix almost any problem. As the car industry evolved the level of mechanical knowledge required to own and operate a car has steadily decreased. I expect that a significant portion of drivers don t know how to top up the oil or radiator water in their car and probably don t know what is the correct pressure for air in their tires. To a large extent I don t think this is a problem, owning a car involves regularly taking it to be serviced where professionals will (or at least should) check every aspect of the car that is likely to fail. If I used my windscreen-washer less frequently I could probably avoid opening the bonnet of the car between scheduled services! When budgeting for car ownership you just have to include regularly spending a few hundred dollars to pay for an expert to find problems and fix them with of course the occasional large expense for when something big breaks. When the computer industry matures I expect that the same practice will occur. Most people will buy computers and plan to spend small amounts of money regularly to pay people to maintain it. Currently most older people seem to plan to have a young relative take care of their PC for them essentially free mechanic services. The quality of such work will vary of course, and poorly designed OSs that are vulnerable to attack may require more support than can be provided for free. Due to deficiencies in city design it is almost essential to drive a car in most parts of the US and Australia as opposed to countries such as the Netherlands where you can survive quite well without ever driving. When a service is essential it has to be usable by people who have little skill in that area. It would be good if driving wasn t necessary, I would be happy if I never drove a car again. The need to use computers however will continue to increase. So we need to make them more available to users and to support users who can t disinfect computers etc. The only skill requirements for using a computer should be the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse! This requires a new industry in supporting PCs. Geek Squad in the US [2] seems to be the organisation that is most known for this. I expect that there will be multiple companies competing for such work in every region in the near future, just as there are currently many companies competing for the business of servicing cars. We need support for free software from such companies. Maybe existing free software companies such as Red Hat and Canonical can get into this business. One advantage of having such companies supporting software is that they would have a strong commercial incentive to avoid having it break unlike proprietary software vendors who have little incentive to do things right. The next issue is the taxi analogy. Will software as a service with Google subsidising our use of their systems [3] take over any significant part of the market? Of course the car analogy breaks down when it comes to privacy, no-one does anything remotely private in a taxi while lots of secret data is stored on a typical home computer. Google is already doing some impressive security development work which will lead towards low maintenance systems [4] as well as protecting the privacy of the users to the extent that you can trust whoever runs the servers. My parents use their computer for reading email, browsing the web, and some basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet work. The mail is on my IMAP server so all I need is to have some way to store their office documents on a server and they will pretty much have a dataless workstation. Moving their collection of photos and videos of their friends and relatives to a server will be a problem, transferring multiple gigabytes of data on a cheap Australian Internet access plan is a problem.

Lucas Nussbaum: UDS Lucid

I m back from Dallas, where I was invited at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Lucid. I spent a great week there ; the event was extremely well organized (by organizing them every 6 months, you are probably able to gather a lot of experience!). Of course, after all I had heard about people hugging each other all the time in the Ubuntu community, I was a bit worried, especially with the flu spreading! But there are lots of fantastic people around Ubuntu, and it was a very nice opportunity to be able to meet them all. Since it was my first UDS (I was at FOSSCAMP in Prague a few years ago, but didn t stay for UDS back then), I was not really sure of what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised. UDS vs Debconf UDS is very different from Debconf. In Debconf, we do three different kind of things: In UDS, the main focus is on the third point: most of the sessions are about discussing what will be implemented for the next release. All of the relevant developers are in the same room to discuss possible problems, and the outcome of each session is usually a detailed plan, with a list of action items. It s a very nice way to ensure that changes are well thought, and allows making large-scale changes in Ubuntu very easily (you don t spend weeks arguing about them on mailing lists). Of course, it s probably also helped by the fact that there s a company behind Ubuntu, with a set of large teams (kernel, foundations, desktop, etc), which helps transfering trust (not everybody feel like they have to participate in each discussion, even when they affect the whole distribution: the team in charge is trusted by the rest of the project). On the other hand (yeah, let s be negative for a while) it doesn t really help spreading information between Ubuntu developers: it s often a bit difficult to get the global view of what is happening inside Ubuntu, especially since lots of things are discussed on IRC. Collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu During the week, I mainly was interested on collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. There s a strong focus on doing the right thing wrt Debian (and also other upstreams). Then, of course, Ubuntu also has an agenda, which sometimes requires moving very fast on some things, or making compromises between technical purity and pragmatism. But the willingness to have common foundations between Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid will surely benefit both distros. Quality Assurance On the QA front, I am planning to do archive rebuilds for Ubuntu as well (fixing FTBFS is an easy way to start contributing to Ubuntu or Debian, and having those bugs fixed in Lucid would benefit Debian as well, by having patches already prepared). I also had a session with the QA team, where I gave an overview of what we are doing in the Debian QA group, to discuss opportunities for collaboration. The Ubuntu QA team focuses more on testing (with automated or manual testing) and bug triaging than archive quality that part is left to the MOTUs and the release managers. (About MOTUs, I liked how what they do was described as long-tail maintenance, landscape gardening or terraforming. That gives a good idea of what it s about). Ultimate Debian Database On the Ultimate Debian Database front, I did a plenary talk to try to demonstrate how UDD could be useful to Ubuntu as well, and, with Jorge Castro, we examined some metrics of Ubuntu s giving back to Debian. I also talked with the Launchpad team to try to resolve my long standing pretty please provide an export of Ubuntu bugs, so I can easily import them in UDD! issue. Ubuntu and ARM ARM netbooks and smartbooks (mix between netbooks and smartphones) are coming, and Ubuntu is clearly very well positioned to play an important role on that market. There was a whole track about ARM support, with lots of changes that will be done for Lucid. Let s all hope that Ubuntu-powered ARM netbooks win that market, so we don t reproduce the failures of the non-ARM netbooks. Distributed Development James Westby has been working on a set of tools to be able to work on Ubuntu packaging using bzr. The point is not to store the canonical source for Ubuntu packages in bzr (well, at least it s not the plan yet), but to provide a set of branches to make it easier to merge or cherry-pick from Debian. The resulting workflow looks extremely nice, with lots of syntaxic sugar. And even better, he assured me that his code is portable to Git ;)
Using his work, merging Ubuntu-specific changes in a new version of a Debian package basically means pulling from lp:ubuntu/foopkg, merging from lp:debian/sid/foopkg, and you are done!
As a bonus, we (Debian) would get bzr branches with the history of packages (kind of bzr-powered snapshots.debian.org).
James project is not completely ready yet, but should be very soon. It s already basically usable, apparently. Conclusion Ubuntu has clearly gone a very long way since 2004. Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop. With Cloud Computing and now ARM netbooks, Ubuntu has proven to be able to adapt to the current trends and attract a lot of visibility. It is great news for Free Software, but also proposes an interesting challenge to Debian: of course, it s nice that a Debian-based distro is in that position, but will Debian manage to stay relevant, or are we just going to be the technically-pure distro without many users that serves as a package supermarket for Ubuntu?

Peter Van Eynde: on the lack of future for cmucl in Debian

Following the announcement of the source+throw away binaries route for uploading packages I've had a brief discussion with our FTP team.

The implications of the new method would be that if you upload a package it will automatically be recompiled from source by using the packages already in the system.

For cmucl which needs cmucl to recompile itself it means that we can only use the previous version of cmucl in the archive, not the one we are just uploading. This won't work as the compiling cmucl needs to be hand-patched to be more 'like' the new version, otherwise you cannot rebuild it.

The conclusion of this discussion is that systems like cmucl are no longer possible under this new system.

The FTP team suggested to change cmucl to be able to do this. Needless to say we already have this, after several years of hard effort by multiple people, it's just called sbcl.

So in the end the 'everybody uses C' camp won and cmucl on Debian will die a quiet death. It's a sad end for a system hand-patched from PDP10's to modern CPU's over the coarse of almost 30 years...

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