... because it keeps on renaming them. Which means they have to review their Sourcecode to replace all the occurences of the product name, and then they have to fix the resulting bugs again. Latest name changes: WinFX becomes .NIET Framework 3.0, Antigen becomes Forefront. I wonder what the new name of the Internet Explorer will be, once it's released. Maybe "Windows Live Explorer"? Or is maybe Microsoft introducing it's previous try in setting up a brand - "Microsoft Passport Explorer"? Or will it be "Microsoft Live Passwort.NET Explorer"? I wonder what Vista will be called once it's released? How about "Duke Nukem Forever"? The funny thing is that Microsoft lost track of its product names itself - ther are two different products named Microsoft Live Search.

Martin, on second thought I wonder why you are reinventing the wheel. Bind can already handle updates and also deals with the authorisation part. The thing that sucks about it is that it never rewrites the zonefile, but saves diffs instead, so once you start using dynamic updates in a zone, updating it by hand becomes more difficult.

Martin, I fully agree that bind should not try to second-guess the admin, but for the simple reason that it is not possible in any sane way to know about all the possible authorisation schemes, so why bother trying? I don't buy the argument that applications need to be able to deal with ACLs either, for exactly the same reason. "scp" for example, could not care less, simply because in the vast majority of cases, it will be used to copy files between computers whose user account databases are not synchronised anyway, so you cannot restore the ACL. If you want that, use tar and explicitly tell i

I have read a lot of statements like this lately:

"CNN are reporting..."

"The Free Software Foundation are encouraging..."

Slashdot is a terrible offender, but I've been seeing it elsewhere as well.

So what's wrong with this? CNN is an organization. Singular. The correct construction is "CNN is reporting..." Your subject is singular, so your verb should be singular as well.

"The employees of CNN are reporting" is also correct.

I are annoyed each time I read something like this. Is you annoyed too?

At work, we've been using vserver for virtualization for some years now. Due to various reasons, we're looking at Xen.

I've been trying to switch my workstation to use Xen. I've enountered a few issues so far. Probably these will go away as I learn the system.

Overall, my greatest gripe is the documentation. It is outdated and just plain wrong far too often. For instance, there's a place where it says to run "make ARCH=xen xconfig", but the Xen kernel patches don't (any more, at least) provide a xen arch.

The next gripe is the very weird kernel build system. Xen doesn't ship a diff against a kernel tree. They instead ship whole files to extract atop a particular kernel version. Annoying and unwieldy. There is a command to generate a diff, but you have to download the full kernel tree first.

A couple of other gripes: There is little documentation on memory management (can Xen adjust the RAM usage of running VMs?), on 64-bit systems (can you run a 32-bit kernel under a 64-bit hypervisor? how about a 64-bit kernel that supports 32-bit userspace?)

I'm also having trouble with my forcedeth card locking up under Xen.

However, I've heard of lots of people having good luck with it so I'm going to keep trying.

But one would think that basic docs could be actually worked on a bit more.

As this blog has become one of the top sources of information on the Webloyalty scam, I’m reporting this news about Webloyalty and Marketworks, a third party eCommerce site that supports high volume eBay sellers. Marketworks is apparently throwing the switch to make a Webloyalty subscription the default for the thousands of eBay sellers that use its services:

Over the past two years our users have experienced tremendous success incorporating WebLoyalty in their checkout. For those of you unfamiliar with WebLoyalty, it’s a special rewards program offered by Marketworks that benefits merchants with cash and repeat shopping. Given the success our participating Sellers have experienced, effective June 21, 2006, WebLoyalty will be enabled as a default setting in all US-based users’ StoreFront/Checkout profiles. We’ve updated our Terms & Conditions to reflect this setting (effective June 21, 2006 for existing users). If at any time you wish to discontinue your participation, simply indicate your participation preference by clicking the appropriate radio button on the WebLoyalty settings of your StoreFront/Checkout profile. Note that at this time WebLoyalty is only available to US sellers and buyers. Learn more about WebLoyalty. The Marketworks Team

So now not only will there be millions of Webloyalty subscribers who aren’t even aware they are paying for this useless service, there will also be thousands of eBay sellers who aren’t even aware that they are signing their customers up for this useless service. I understand that a number of Marketworks sellers who actually know this is going on are upset, but the majority of users don’t read the forums where this is being discussed. (Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with Marketworks myself.) To be fair, I should mention that a Webloyalty executive (the “lead Consumer Affairs representative” — Mary O’Reilly) has apparently posted to my blog in defense of the company. The following comment appears about 1,000 comments down on my main Webloyalty entry, and is in response to this entry mentioning inflammatory comments posted by other Webloyalty employees calling Webloyalty customers ‘suckers’:

As lead Consumer Affairs representative for Reservation Rewards, I apologize on behalf of WLI Reservation Rewards for the inappropriate and offensive comments posted by the person identifyingthemselves as “WLI Customer Service Representative”. Our company does not condone or tolerate this type of unprofessional behavior and providing consumers with the highest level of customer service is of utmost importance to us. If we can confirm that the comments were actually posted by one of our customer service representatives, appropriate action will be taken with that employee. As a company, Reservation Rewards takes consumer comments very seriously. We have hundredsof thousands of satisfied customers and we consistently strive to provide our customers with first class membership programs and customer service. In the past, our approach has been to deal with consumer concerns on an individual basis rather than in a public forum. To fully address a consumer’s concerns we need some specific information (e.g. the consumer’s full name or email address) so that the consumer’s record can be accessed. Once the consumer’s record is accessed, we can identify exactly how, when and where the membership offer was accepted and also cancel the membership if that is what the consumer wants. However, it troubles us to see the concern that some consumers have expressed on this blog with regard to Reservation Rewards. At this time, wewant to make an open and sincere attempt in this public forum to clear up the misunderstandings that are generating the concerns. We thought the following Question & Answer type format might be the clearest way to share information and address the primary areas of concern expressed on this blog: 1. How Is The Reservation Offer Presented To Consumers? How Did I Get Signed Up For This? We try to make our offer as clear as possible so that consumers can make an educated decision on the offer. Over the years, we’ve incorporated a number of client and consumer suggestions to clarify the offer even further. Consumers are presented with the ReservationRewards offer when completing a transaction at one of our client’s websites. It’s not a check box that you have to unclick to reject the offer. Instead, the consumer is presented with a full offer page (separate from the client’s transaction page) and is required to take 3 actions to accept the offer and authorize the data pass of personal information. In addition to entering their email address twice, a consumer must also click on a ‘YES’ button to accept the offer. The offerpage includes all the Offer Details, clear mention of the monthly charges, a description of the membership benefits and instructions on how to redeem the Cash Back award. 2. How Does Reservation Rewards Get Consumer Credit Card Numbers? Please be assured that our clients aren’t passing credit card information to us without the consumer’s authorization. The security of your credit card information is of utmost importance to each of our clients. They would never provide a consumer’s credit card information without proper authorization. The security of your credit card number is also important to Reservation Rewards and we require consumers to provide us with authorization. In order to accept the Reservation Rewards membership, we requirethe consumer to provide us with their email address twice to make them pause and take the time to read and understand the offer. Immediately next to the boxes where a consumer is required to enter their email address is the statement: ‘By entering my email address as my electronic signature and clicking YES, I have read and agree to the Offer and Billing Details and authorize to securely transfer my name address and credit or debit card information to Reservation Rewards for billing and benefit processing.’ If a consumer just clicks on the ‘YES’ button without entering their email twice, the membership is not accepted. If a consumer does not want to accept the offer, there is a ‘No Thanks’ option right under the ‘YES’ button. 3. Reservation Rewards customer service said they sent me multiple emails about the membership before billing. What emails? I never got any. Once a consumer accepts the membership we make a significant effort to make the consumer aware of the membership and send multiple communications to the consumer before the first membership billing occurs. We use sophisticated monitoring tools to track the deliverability of these emails and our records show a very high delivery rate. We actuallyhave these records audited by a third party to ensure we are consistent in sending them to consumers.We also work with two outside companies to assist us in maximizing our high delivery rate. If an email bounces back as undeliverable, we send the consumer a letter via U.S. postal mail. However, we do understand in this day and age of spam, some of our email communications maybe filtered out and not read by some consumers. So, in addition to the email communications, each member is also presented with a membership acknowledgement page immediately upon acceptance of the membership. Our intent with this acknowledgement page is to make the consumer immediately aware theyaccepted the membership and to give them an opportunity to cancel it if that is what they want. We have hundreds of thousands of members that happily use the Reservation Rewards benefits and we don’t want people to be in the membership that they didn’t intend to join. 4. Why didn’t I get my Cash Back Award or access to membership benefits? I don’t believe there really is a Cash Back Award or Membership Benefits. We apologize if some consumers find it unclear how they can redeem their Cash Back Award or take advantage of the membership benefits. We have many members taking full advantage of the membership benefits and redemption of their Cash Back Awards. We encourage members to redeem their Cash Back Award and use the membership benefits by immediately presenting them with the membership acknowledgement page. In addition to instructions on how to redeem their Cash Back Award, the membership acknowledgement page also includes a password to log into the Reservation Rewards website. We also send each customer an email 13 days after accepting the membership that reminds them to redeem their Cash Back Award. We encourage you to go to www.reservationrewards.com to review the array of membership benefits. We think you’ll find that we partner with many top names in leisure, dining and theme parks to provide our members with significant discounts. At the lower left-hand corner of the home page you can review positive comments from Reservation Rewards members who regularly use the benefits. When a misunderstanding occurs, we’re more than willing to cancel the membership and provide a refund. Wecan assure you that our customer service representatives are all trained to respond to consumers in afriendly and accommodating manner. When you contact our customer service department to cancel a membership, you won’t be faced with a rep trying to convince you to keep the membership ’ our reps aren’t allowed to do that. The rep will just need some basic information from you such as your email address, full name and/or zip code to access your record and immediately accommodate your request. Once your membership is cancelled, you can be assured that we will not bill your credit card again. We value consumer comments whether positive or negative. They help us consider ways we can further improve the communication and value of the Reservation Rewards offer to consumers and they also gives us the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings. If anyone would like us to provide more specific information on the actual offer that was presented specifically to you, just send your full name and email address directly to consumeraffairs@webloyalty.com. We’ll be happy to assist you and address any further concerns you have. Sincerely,
Mary O’Reilly
Consumer Affairs
Reservation Rewards

I don’t know whether or not the above description is currently true, but it is certainly entirely inconsistent with my experience. I did not enter my email address once — or twice — to “confirm” my subscription. My server logs from that time period showed that no confirmation emails were ever sent by Webloyalty (regardless of whether they might be caught by a spam filter), and the customer service representative I spoke with did try to keep me to keep my membership (and moreover was exceedingly rude). Hopefully my experience with the company is no longer true, but based on the comments on my blog that’s not the case. Webloyalty seems to have found a novel and profitable solution to the opt-in vs. opt-out tradeoff — don’t give the customer any option at all!

I had long thought that Sexism was a thing of the past; that women would have the ability to do what they wanted, and would mostly not be discriminated against. And while I was not so naive to think that there was no discrimination at all, I was under the impression that any such discrimination would mostly be something the discriminator did not think of consciously. That things like people being rejected outright for a job because they were women, and, well, "women can't work as well as men", were stories of the past. At least if I did ever discriminate against women, it never was intentional. Little did I realize how far away from the truth that was. As some troll's recent mails show, there are actually people out there who do thinkn that the influx of Women into Debian should be stopped, and that Debian should be a men only club. Our coward is too afraid to post under his real name, instead relying on tor and throwaway yahoo accounts to mask his identity. So let's call him 'Anonymous coward'. Occasionally, this is the main reason why I don't like tor; full anonymity should not be allowed, one should be able to have people stand up for what they say, and face the consequences. Anyway, that's a different story, for another time. What puzzles me is how anyone would think that there could possibly be a correlation between orphaned packages and the existance of Debian-Women. Personally, I've been happy that there is a Debian-Women which strives to make our community more complete; the lack of women (or any considerable part of the world population, for that matter) is a serious disadvantage for any community that tries to do something for the "greater good". Personally, I'm disgusted and offended by the mails this moron is sending; and even though I realize that there probably still is some (unconscious) discrimination against women, I can hope to safely say that Debian is tolerant regarding people that represent a minority amongst its community members. Even Jonathan Walther, whom we kicked out for (amongst other reasons) trolling on the debian-women mailinglist, never (to the best of my knowledge) said anything which implied that he thought Debian-Women should be disbanded (although he, err, had a "different" idea of what they should be doing). I guess all this only means we don't live in a utopia, and that Debian is not free of the plagues that will hit any sufficiently large community. But that doesn't negate the fact that I'm still offended by this lunatic.

I’ve seen several people writing here about using different kinds of network configuration depending upon where they are. This is fine and dandy, but for the more general case is there a simple mechanism for switching system configurations depending on “environment”? I use Xen a lot on my systems, but sometimes I boot into a normal kernel. If I’m running a normal kernel I want to use the non-free nvidia driver for X, since this has better performance when viewing DVDs, etc. If I’m running Xen I need to use the free nv driver, since the non-free driver isn’t available. Can I make this switch automatically? I could add an init script to symlink the right file into place depending on whether xend is running, but that just seems fragile and suboptimal.

• I have started looking into SELinux on Debian recently. SELinux provides mandatory access control for Linux, which gives you great control over which process may do what with which files, other processes, network connections etc. I've still got a lot to learn and read (more posts will probably follow), but if you're inclined to try it yourself here are a few tips:
  • First, read the SELinux and especially the SELinuxSetup pages in the Debian wiki. Also checkout the SELinuxStatus page.
  • There are currently a few bugs I noticed, which cause some trouble: bug #369852 prevents a correct install of the selinux-policy-default package, but the work-around mentioned in the bug report works fine. I reported bug #372543 yesterday, but there's an easy work-around for that, too.
  • I had to change "SELINUX=enforcing" to "SELINUX=permissive" in /etc/selinux/config (at least for now), otherwise my system won't boot up anymore because of SELinux denied permissions (I think). I'm pretty sure this is either a bug or me doing something wrong, but I haven't figured out yet what that is.
• Robert Nunnally (a.k.a Gurdonark) has created a photo collage video (YouTube, requires Flash) for Marco Raaphorst's "Blowing Snow" song. He used some of the Creative Commons licensed photos from my photoblog for the video.
• Wow! Today the number of people subscribed to my music podcast (via RSS) exceeded 200 for the first time! Thanks everyone for listening!
• GNU/Hurd 1.0.0 has been released. Finally! And they've built it on top of an interesting "middleware"...

Yesterday was the first day yet I've missed adding an entry to this blog. It's kind of a milestone, I guess, in that way. But we were up at 4:30AM yesterday to get on the plane from Montreal to wt:San Francisco, and I stayed up late talking to family, so I didn't get a lot of time online. I'm thinking that days that you're having too much fun to sit in front of the computer are probably the best days, not the worst ones.

This May I spent four consecutive weeks abroad, visiting first Debconf6 (including the Debcamp that preceded it), and then Los Angeles afterwards. I won't write a detailed report of everything that happened; nobody likes to read pages after pages of descriptions of meals and such. Instead, I'll jot down a few memories of moments. It's still long, sorry about that. May 6, about 3 AM, at home. Waiting outside for a taxi. Pretty tired already: spent the night frantically weighing all my clothes to optimize my packing. It is warm enough to wait outside without a jacket. The night is calm and beautiful. Mankind is so much nicer when it sleeps. May 6, about 4 AM, the Helsinki airport. I bump into Tuukka and Tulitar, who are on the same plane. Kaol also joins us, but that I knew beforehand. I'm suddenly much less apprehensive about the long flight. May 6, Mexico City airport. We meet more Debian people. The first taxi driver we're assigned seems to be suspect somehow. The other taxi drivers rebel and our luggage is put into another car, with another driver. I have no idea what is actually going on, but that develops into a theme for the Mexican part of the trip. May 6, Oaxtepec. We're finally here, but it seems very difficult for us to get rooms. While we wait, we and some of the people who arrived earlier go to a restaurant. The Germans want to order the same thing for everyone, but fail to agree on what, so eventually we order all the steaks on the menu. The food is good, but the restaurant staff would probably have preferred to go home at closing time. We eventually get rooms and I collapse into bed. Debcamp week, Oaxtepec. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We're frustrated all the time. I was supposed to do billable work (related to Debian, even), and can't. Should've prepared for this possiblity. I'm too dependent on a good Internet connection, need to figure out to reduce this dependency. To have something else to do, I start the Mugshots project: take a photo of everyone together with a paper with their name, or IRC nick, or anything else they want to say about themselves. Debconf, late one evening. Everyone is partying one way or another, drinking, dancing, discussing. Lots of people around already. Nice people. Still I withdraw into myself. I'm physically present, but not interacting. Never know what to say; exhausted by having to remember who everyone is. I'm introverted, and deal better with smaller gatherings. My life's ambition is to become a multi-millionaire recluse. Debconf, late another evening, Oaxtepec. Everyone else is getting drunk, and it affects me. I make the silly bet about Debian releasing on time: if we do, I'll get a Debian tattoo. Not to worry, I win either way. Debconf, some evening or another. I participate in a game of Mao. It is an unpleasant game, for me. I suspected this beforehand, but now I've verified it. It is best for everyone if I never play again, now that I know enough to at least try to reach my personal, alternative goals in the game, which make the game less fun for everyone else. (Better for me too, since I make fewer enemies.) Debconf, day after formal dinner. I learn that Jonathan (Ted) Walther is gone. Good riddance. I suprise myself with the amount of glee I feel when removing him from the Mugshots gallery. (That, incidentally, was something I decided all by myself. It's my gallery, after all.) Debconf. The sponsored food is quite acceptable, but eventually becomes boring and bland. Mass-kitchen food can't but help to be like that, I guess, unless it gets expensive. I don't want to see another chicken leg ever. Debconf, early in the week. Droidy (Leena) and Burger (Ville) arrive. Very nice. Helps massively with my withdrawnness to have real life friends around. I still go early to bed, though, instead of participating in the partying. Debconf, late in the week. I get Ville and Frans Pop to talk and Ville agrees to have look at the installation manual. He's an actual (former) professional tech writer, so hopefully will be able to improve it a lot. May 22, Oaxtepec. Last day. I spend all morning packing, checking out, and waiting for a taxi. Strangely relaxing. Debconf is finally over, and although I did enjoy parts of it, and don't regret coming, I'm not sad it's over. May 22, evening, Los Angeles. Julie and Kristian meet me at the airport. Hugging happens. Happiness happens. I get my first taste of LA traffic, which seems to mostly consist of people complaining about how slow it is while driving very fast. May 23, the Promenade, Los Angeles. A three block long walking street of shops, with three (count them: three) bookstores. The two I have time for even smelled nice. I am in hog heaven. Colossal credit card cringing. May 24, Getty Center. A very nice, very impressive place architecturally. The art is good too. As usual, the impressionists make the strongest impression on me, but there's lots of other good stuff, too. Not everything, though: Robert Adams's photographs leave me unimpressed, possibly I lack the cultural reference points necessary to appreciate them. He has many photos of shabby temporary shelter-like houses that in reality seem to be nice south-western US houses from the 60s and 70s. My intuition just screams that the houses and their inhabitants won't survive their first winter. But of course, they don't have a cold winter there. The rest of the exhibition (or what I have time to see) has way too many portraits for one session. Portraits get boring after the first dozen or so, I'm afraid, unless there's something extraordinary about them. They are several rooms rebuilt from 18th century French aristocratic houses. Very nice, very pretty, but I would not like to live that uncomfortably. I have a small epiphany about nudity in art in one of the rooms with statues. I've always known nudity could be portrayed erotically, such as having two lovers embrace passionately; or that it could be portrayed more or less abstractly, using the human body, or parts of it, just because it can be a very beautiful subject, just like a flower, but without giving it a greater significance. It's decoration, nothing more. There are two statues in the Getty collection that show me a third way. They are exquisitely sensual, evoking a sense of form and texture that make me think of human skin and flesh, a sense that if one were to touch the statue, it would feel like touching a live human. Yet none of this is erotic at all. I'm not sure I can explain this, one may have to experience it for oneself. Unfortunately, I was too overwhelmed to write down the names of the statues. May 23, Los Angeles. The food takes me by surprise. Julie has always told me that food in LA is good, much better than in Finland, but she hadn't prepared me for an all-out assault on my palate. Dine well in LA and die happy. (When I go back to Finland, I will have to learn again how to cook, dammit.) May 25, Los Angeles. Jesus reminds me via SMS about the Towel Day. I participate. My hosts think I'm a bit weird, but in a funny way. Many happy days in May, Los Angeles. I visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (exhibiting a weird Italian designer, some boring Klimt paintings, and a very nice general collection); the Natural history museum of LA (dinosaurs! real skeletons! big ones! T.Rex! for the first time in my life! they're huge!); the Museum of Jurassic Technology (weird); had dinner with some local Debian people, and visited the local Google office afterwards; the Hollywood Boulevard at night (funny, for a while). And other places I've forgotten already. LA is not small. I visit a political theater play that is brilliant. I also visit my first American BBQ, and have my first experience with the LA gay community at the same time. I'm later told that these two are separable. I enjoy them both a lot. I visit more bookstores. My hosts keep finding new ones they want to recommend to me. Parking would be a pain in LA, except that it means that people do actually walk a lot, since the nearest parking space is always three blocks away, or five levels up without an elevator. May 28, Los Angeles. I innocently mention that LA is such a nice place, with nice people and gorgeous food, that I wouldn't mind living there. Julie's brother hears this and immediately connects me with someone he knows whose company is looking for new people. During the next three days, we meet and talk and things seem favorable. Even if I decide not to go (it may be too huge a change for me now), it's nice to feel appreciated. June 1, Los Angeles. Leaving for home. Not a sad thing, but I'm definitely feeling wistful. I get hugged about fourteen thousand times. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I will definitely have to go back to LA, one day.

I'll keep this short as I'm rather busy... Maemo 2.0 beta has been released, along with Internet Tablet OS 2006 beta. More information is available at the Maemo site. This release has had huge amounts of love and it's far more polished than the 2005 release, but sadly the beta release is missing the VOIP functionality. Update: seems I was wrong, the SDK may be missing the VOIP software, but the Internet Tablet image is fully featured.

LWN links to Aaron Seigo’s writeup of last week’s LSB Summit. John Palmieri was there too and has posted his notes here and here. My own writeup will be posted here shortly. In the meantime, the LSB Summit wiki page is here. Technorati Tags: linux, lsb, standards

Quite some time has passed since I accepted to process Alexis Sukrieh's NM application (back in August 2005) but today I fired his AM report out to the Front Desk, where it now waits for a review if any things are missing. I hope that I did not leave out anything crucial, due to him being my very first applicant to process as an application manager. Cheers.

Another day, another Google product launch, though this one does more than just lay the groundwork for epic battles to come (most recent example: Google Spreadsheets). Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that solves an immediate problem that no one to date has adequately solved: It automatically synchronizes browser settings across computers. I’ve been using Foxmarks for a while now to keep my bookmarks synchronized across the various computers I use and have found it incredibly useful. But bookmarks are just a small sliver of the Web 2.0 client problem, and I’ve recently found myself wishing Foxmarks could synchronize saved passwords too, the next maddening bit of client metadata that never seems to be in the right place. Well, I now have my solution, and after using it for a few hours, it seems to work pretty well. My only real complaint is that it only works with one open browser at a time—if you launch a browser on a second computer, it logs you out on the first one. I have multiple computers on my desk with multiple browsers open at any given time, and Foxmarks handled this use case well. Of course, as with all new Google products, this one exposes as many (or more) new holes in the Google platform as it covers, at least for me. For example, why not synchronize my bookmarks with, well, Google Bookmarks? That way, I could get to my browser bookmarks online, add tags (er, labels), etc., with any changes I make online being reflected back on the client side via the browser synchronization. And why isn’t bookmark functionality available in the Google Toolbar? (Actually, it looks like it is available in the IE version, but not the Firefox version, which makes absolutely no sense to me: Shouldn’t the goal be to abstract away the platform underneath, which implies exposing the exact same feature sets in both versions?) And don’t even get me started on Google Notebook, which otherwise looks promising but is completely unintegrated with Google Bookmarks, not to mention the new thing. While I’m at it, why, oh why, doesn’t Google Notebook utilize the very nice word processing functionality acquired with Writely instead of implementing its own rudimentary text editing support? (Ok, that last one’s further afield, but you get where I’m going here.) In summary, I now have three ways to bookmark things using the Google platform—the browser (nicely synchronized across computers via the Google cloud), a star (a la Gmail) next to results in my Search History (but not on plain old Google search), and “Note This” on plain old Google search (but not the Search History). Oh, and they all create bookmarks in different places. The end result? Even though I’m primarily a Google customer these days, none of this mess is usable, and I’m still using del.icio.us to bookmark things. That said, I’m not even using del.icio.us as much as I used to because it’s not as well integrated with the browser as it could be, which is presumably why Google is investing in a saner browser environment. (There, we’ve gone full circle now.) I could go on all day. And, thus far, I’ve only talked about bookmarks. From where I set, this is just an example of a much broader problem for Google: Google has an impressive collection of interesting, but disjoint, features. I’d imagine this is a result of Google’s engineering culture combined with rapid growth. Granted, this approach has served Google pretty well thus far as it pumps new stuff out on a nearly weekly basis while Microsoft struggles to get anything done in less than six years. Of course, Microsoft’s rapidly learning how to be agile, and if there’s one thing Microsoft is good at, it’s assembling disjoint features into platforms. So, heads up, Google: You have a thing or two to learn from Microsoft before that epic battle I referred to earlier begins. They’re certainly learning from you. Technorati Tags: firefox, google, mozilla, platforms, synchronization, web20

One of the really neat things about Ruby is the extensive use of blocks (closures, I think the rest of the world calls them) in the standard library to control the allocation and deallocation of resources. Take the following snippet:

 File.open('something.txt') do  fd 
   # Manipulate the file through 'fd'
 end
 # File handle is now closed

There's no way that you can escape from that block without the file being closed (well, in theory, you could lose the file handle if there was an exception thrown in the block, but the File::open method can take care of that internally by catching, closing, then rethrowing). I've loved this feature since I first saw it -- "holy crap!" I thought to myself, "I never have to call close again!". And I was pretty well right -- I think I can count (in unary, not binary!) on one hand (well, I'd use grep wc) the number of times I've used IO#close in my Ruby code. The funny thing is, though, that I don't think I've used this pattern in my own code enough. But I just had an epiphany whilst waiting for a train home -- and I think I'm cured. Take this hideous piece of test code I had laying around in an app I'm working on at the moment:

 def test_something_funny
   faux_path_on
   d = Domain.new('127.0.0.1', 'somethingfunny.com')
   faux_path_off
   
   # assert writ large
 end

Domain::new calls out to a shell command (dig(1) to be precise -- take a guess at what I'm writing <grin>, and yes, it will be released shortly) but for test purposes I can't run dig (because I'm not guaranteed to have all the infrastructure available for a real dig to succeed). So I have a flimsy mock of dig in a directory in my test suite, which is where faux_path_on sets ENV['PATH'] to look at. This is, of course, pretty untidy, because when (not if!) I forget to call faux_path_off, everything goes to complete poop, and my children will have two heads or something. The much cleaner version is like this:

 def test_something_funny
   d = faux_path   Domain.new  
 
   # Assert ahoy!
 end

And my faux_path method (I've even saved a method!) is as simple as simple can be:

 def faux_path
   realpath = ENV['PATH']
   ENV['PATH'] = my_fake_path
   rv = yield
   ENV['PATH'] = realpath
   return rv
 end

I also have a trickier faux_* method, which sets a couple of environment variables which tell my mock nsupdate(8) where to write the data it gets sent from my application -- again, it's a block-taking method that sets the environment, yields, reads in the data from the temporary file, cleans it up, and returns the contents of the aforementioned file. The power of the Ruby is growing within me, I can feel it. And I like it.

I thought I knew most of what was wrong with rpm, but this bug has opened my eyes to whole new levels of evil. (It's also a textbook example of exactly how not to respond to bug reports.) Description of why using rpm to upgrade a package with /usr mounted read-only can cause the package to silently be removed from the rpm database:

RPM uses a "best effort" algorithm when doing upgrades. What actually happened here is that the previous versions were removed as part of the upgrade process, and the newer versions were installed. At least as much as possible. :-) As many files as could be removed from the old install were, and that install was removed from the RPM DB. As much of the new stuff as could be installed was, but the install of some items failed, so the new packages were not added to the RPM DB.

dpkg's behavior in the equivilant situation is to complain as soon as it can't write to a file, and roll back the package state to the previous version.

Ok, it may not be ready yet, it might be lacking too many details. It might even make sense to make this initial announcement in Spanish - But a long time ago, I decided my blog would be English-only, as most of the people who read it are not Spanish speakers. Anyway, here I go.
We are less than one month away of the presidential elections in Mexico. We are facing the choice between two candidates (the others won't really make a difference this time): Felipe Calder n, a conservative member of the right-wing PAN party (currently ruling), and Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador, from the center-leftist PRD party.
There are way too many reasons for me, and for my friends, to prefer and promote the L pez Obrador project. No, that is not the definitive leftist stance we want, but it is a good step in the right direction. He was the major for Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, and his government showed he knows how to push social programs, he knows how to improve the conditions of the mass of the population, he knows he must start acting from below, reducing the terrible gap that exists in my country between poor and rich people, among the steepest differencies in the world.
So... Instead of flooding my personal blog with things that are not directly relevant to most of us, some friends and I have started setting up www.fecal.org.mx, the unofficial site of Felipe Calder n.
Yes, we took some of the steps we often criticize about the right-wing propaganda: Attacking instead of proposing. L pez Obrador has lost some points as he is centered more in proposing and spreading his government plan than in destroying Felipe Calder n - While Calder n has been working on creating fear, on tying L pez Obrador's figure to that of an authoritarian dictator (Hugo Ch vez has often been quoted, although it has been proven over and over no link or similarity exists), on dismissing his economic program saying he only knows how to create debt (while Mexico City's economy was strongly reactivated during L pez Obrador's period, and the city's public debt has not grown considerably compared to what previous governments did), and simply ignoring any criticism to his own project dismissing them as baseless propaganda.
Originally, we intended FeCal to become just a parody of Felipe's official site, emphasizing on what a shitty candidate he is (no wonder he carries such a name!), but we decided to be more propositive than him - We will post news following Felipe's intransigency, erroneous economic decisions and incoherences, yes, but we will also write articles by ourselves, trying to provide more interesting content, something that can objectively be used as a reference on why Felipe Calder n's project cannot be seen as socially responsable, as something that will benefit anybody but the current ruling elite - Just giving six more years to the already too long 24 year old marriage with neoliberalism we have seen, just continuity with the current government's failures, just more white-collar corrupt thieves which never recieve any kind of punishment and discourage people from pushing together towards a better country.
So, I stop flooding here. If you want to take part in the FeCal project, please contact me. If you agree with what we say, link us from your page, from your texts, from whatever you do.