These are the winners from my yearly class contest : SERIOUS BABY lol ..sometimes Did I just Get Rejected From McDonalds? (Watch to the end) This is one of my all time favorites funny videos and it has a nice catchy tune and I will also post one of my ALL TIME favorites after I show it in class next week.

I have just filed Debian bug report #556644 against the version of openssh-server in Debian/Unstable (Squeeze). It has a patch that moves the code to set the SE Linux context for the child process before calling chroot. Without this a chroot environment on a SE Linux system can only work correctly if /proc and /selinux are mounted in the chroot environment. deb http://www.coker.com.au squeeze selinux I ve created the above APT repository for Squeeze which has a package that fixes this bug. I will continue to use that repository for a variety of SE Linux patches to Squeeze packages, at the moment it s packages from Unstable but I will also modify released packages as needed. The bug report #498684 has a fix for a trivial uninitialised variable bug. The fix is also in my build. Also I filed the bug report #556648 about the internal version of sftp being
incompatible with SE Linux (it doesn t involve an exec so the context doesn t change). The correct thing to do is for sshd to refuse to run an internal sftpd at least if the system is in enforcing mode, and probably even in permissive mode. deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny selinux Update: I ve also backported my sshd changes to Lenny at the above APT repository.

This evening I investigated #555941 in libxml-filter-xslt-perl, and was able to downgrade it to "important". I'm working on a proper fix, but it's not RC any more. (Gunnar, I don't mean to make you feel bad! I've been inactive for a while myself - I'm just making up for lost time.) And now for conversation via blog! Clint, I'm inclined to agree about ego, fiefdoms and so on. But I'm unconvinced that personal relationships themselves are harmful. Actually, I was thinking more about "professional relationships" - I don't care much whether mentors take their mentees to an art gallery, provided they work with them over a period of time, and therefore get to know the quality of their packaging. (I was a bit careless in my phrasing last night.) Having said that, let's do that as well! Indeed, building relationships so that we don't flame each other to a crisp the rest of the year is the very reason we hold DebConf, right? (Apart from the beer. And the holiday.) I reckon the mentoring system would be more effective if we started thinking along these lines, and this in turn would help address the wider problem of resources within various parts of Debian. Maybe not directly, but it could free up other people to work on the complicated stuff. We could probably turn debian-mentors into a sort of "team" in its own right. (Apologies if someone's suddenly made debian-mentors active again behind my back.) And if I ever get approved by DAM (ahem), I intend to propose a deal to the debian-mentors list that each upload of an updated package will cost them one RC bug NMUdiff, and uploads of new packages will cost two. ;)

We'd like to host DebConf 2011 in Munich, Germany.However, this is a far from trivial challenge:Rent in Munich, in particular for conference rooms, is far from cheap. In my opinion, unless we get some really big sponsor (and I'd still prefer spending sponsor money to fund developer trips to the DebConf instead!), the only chance we have is to get some rooms at the university.However given the development of the recent years (budget etc.), it has become a lot more difficult to actually get rooms at the university for such events. Unless the event is considered to be fully a part of the universitys "work", we might have to pay rent to the university. Which again isn't that affordable.Anyway, if you are in Munich, working at one of the universities, or in any way interested in supporting DebConf 2011 in Munich, please join the DebConf11 Germany mailing list. Also check our meetings scheduled on the DebianMuc Wiki page, currently every Monday, 18:00, at the new LiMux offices in Sonnenstr.P.S. There will also be a Bug Squashing Party in Munich end of November: Munich BSP November 2009

Sigh I am starting to fill up my annual report for my real-life work. You know, that chore you must do every year where you score little bullets next to each completed project and talk well about yourself. For my workplace, fortunately, I do not have to lie and convince people I am worth rehiring - As this year I achieved definitividad as a T cnico Acad mico Asociado C de Tiempo Completo at my University, I can say for sure I have long-term job safety. UNAM is the best place for me to work, and I am most grateful Even if I do want to advance for the future, even though I would strongly like at some point to start working in a real academic position My job is mostly operative, limited to keeping things running smoothly in our network and servers. I work in a social sciences (Economics) research institute, and even though I have taken on an interesting project that is viewed from the social sciences I do expect to finish with a very interesting product in the near future, my interest lies in computing as a science. Anyway, back on track This is the time of year to start evaluating many things, many factors, from many different sides. And yes, for me that involves measuring how am I faring in my involvement in the projects I most care about Specifically, Debian, but also several other Free Software projects, even if my involvement in them is mostly organizational. I am once again going through a tough period in my personal life, and the impact it carries is obviously deep. However, I am not fond of finding excuses for my underachievement or underperformance. And that's what I feel now. Even more when I see posts such as Zack's and Tim's status updates, and when I see that we continue to be on a history-high streak of RC bugs. Regarding the several teams I am (at least formally) involved with in Debian, I have been away from the pkg-perl group for far too long... It is still my first group when it comes to identifying myself with - Both as on a personal level, as I consider them as good friends and great people to work with, and I do feel the responsability to share the load with them, as maintaining >1300 packages (even if they are so highly regular) is just not an easy task. But for over a year, my involvement has been basically zero. I have been a bit more active on pkg-ruby-extras, maybe paradoxically as it is a smaller team and with less packages (as I know it is much less probable for somebody to keep my packages in adequate shape if I don't do it)... and also because I am working more with Ruby than Perl nowadays. And finally, about Cherokee, I decided during DebConf9 to redo the packaging to fully use DH7 instead of our old-style quasimanual style. I have had several bursts of activity, and am almost-almost-ready to do the first newstyle upload... But so far, have been unable to do so. Of course, keyring-maint: With Jonathan's help, I have come to terms with most of the processes. Both Jonathan and I have been swamped lately, but at least I think I am finally helping speed up the process instead of holding it down. We do, yes, have several pending updates - but are working our way up the queue, and I hope not to leave people waiting for too long. And yes, we have discussed several ways of documenting and automating several of the tasks we currently sustain, and that should come soon I have been also leaving maybe a bit too much responsability aside on EDUSOL, for which today we are entering the second week of activity, and I'm very sorry to see our server is just too overloaded to even reply to even answer to me And even lacking admin powers myself, I should have worked earlier on setting up redundancy on a more automatic way (as we have an off-site backup we can promote to live and redirect to, but I am unable to do this... Given that I am the techie person on board/the only "professional" sysadmin). This year I also quietly finished the bulk of the Comas rewrite. What? Comas? Still alive? Yes, and you can expect me to show it off to more people soon, and get it used for more conferences. I will talk more about it (and its motivation, and its current status) later on But basically, the only two things that Comas shares in common with the mod_perl-based system most of you got to know (mainly at CONSOL 2004-2008 or at Debconf 5 and 6, although I know of several other conferences which used it) and the current incarnation are The (most) basic database structure and the name. The project underwent a full rewrite, and is now a far more flexible, far easier to install, Ruby-on-Rails based application. And most important, it does no longer involve your name being Gunnar Wolf as a prerequisite for successfully setting it up ;-) Regarding DebConf, I have promoted a Central American MiniDebConf, and we are right on track for holding it in late March in Panam City. Everybody's invited, and we will have (surprise, surprise!) the very professional involvement of Mr. Anto Recio as local team, as it seems he didn't have enough with last year's DebConf9 and wants to suffer further. What am I lacking here? Motivation. I have been quite pessimistic, possibly turning some people away, even though we have a good first sampling of interested people's profiles and expectations. If you want to get involved, tomorrow (Tuesday 17-nov) we will have a meeting at Freenode's #sl-centroamerica, 17:00 GMT-6. Please note we do need involvement from the Central American communities, it is more than just a motivational issue. Last meeting it seemed Anto and I were the only people pushing the MiniDebConf - and frankly, that would be a basis for not even holding it. We need motivation from the very people involved in it! Anyway You can see I have (and it seems to be a constant in my life) a series of contradictions going on. However, the excercise of putting it all into writing helps me understand better where I am standing. When I started writing this post I felt much heavier, much more at a loss Right now I feel I want to refocus my energy on the same projects and teams I have been involved with, yes, but feel it at least more plausible. Hope so.

I m widely know (by my peers, not globaly know, as you may guess) for being a well controlated person when it comes to spending my sacred and beloved money. Actually, I m so well controlated that I m sometimes seen as someone who hates to spend money. Sometimes I m almost convinced that people thinking that way about me are right, but then I get back to my conscious mind and realize that they think like this because people tend not to agree with what they don t practice and, generally speaking, society has been continuosly teaching them to become as consumists as possible. Obviously, I m not completely protected against consumism, as I m human and have as much desires as anyone else, but I think I m doing well on keeping myself from being taken to the path which lead us to bit the bullet and spend our money on something. What contributes to this control also demonstrates how we re used to learn better only from mistakes, as I already spent too much money on things which I initially thought I desperately needed, but which after I realized weren t actually all that much needed after all. I have been trying to avoid wasting money on an e-book reader for months. At the beggining it was a piece of cake, as there wasn t a real option (mind you that I live in Brazil, not in the USA or some other so called first world country). However, in the last few months, the scenario has been changing and it seems that these days there are actually some options available. I have been researching privately about options for months and have become well aware of all the advantages and disavantages of all the options available today. Sorry, I won t be pointing the right option to you, as your best option probably will be different from mine and recommending things isn t the point of this post. Technically speaking, the options available today seems to provide me with what I need. There are no doubts that almost any of them would be good (but not all of them would be the right ) choices and actually would represent a real improvement over the current situation. So, one might ask, why not go ahead and just buy the damn thing ? For most of the people out there, it would seem to be the right thing to do, as I would be doing conscious and well researched purchase after all. Well, I would be doing something good for myself for sure, but the government actually would need to show me some respect and prove me they have some respect for me as well. Amazon, for example, is shipping the Kindle for other countries and Brazil is one of them. I would surely just go ahead and buy it the day the shipment was announced and that was almost what I did. What prevented me from doing so was the insane/absurd takes government is applying on anything one wants to import from another country. Even after converting the price from dollars to the local currency (reais), the price is something like three to four times higher that the original price in the origin country. It s insanely prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens and one could wonder why this is so when this is a device used basically for reading. Mind you that the government has big tax reductions for importing books, for example, which are seen as culture related items and so get to win some advantages over other non-culture related items. To summarize it all, if you want to convince yourself how not to spend money on something, even when you really want to, just do the math regarding the amount of the taxes you would need to pay and I assure you there will be no regrets when latter you think why you did not bought it.

The darcs hacking sprint is slowly nearing its end. As planned, I have worked on integrating DarcsWatch and bugs.darcs.net, and I am satisfied so far. From now on, if someone submits a Darcs patch to patches@darcs.net, the patch will also be tracked by DarcsWatch. DarcsWatch will display a link to the entry on bugs.darcs.net, and also add a comment to the bugtracker with a link to the patch on DarcsWatch. And eventually, if the patch is included in the darcs.net repository, DarcsWatch will change the state of the ticket to accepted, removing one step of work for the Darcs maintainers. Currently, it checks the state of the repository three times per hour, so expect a delay after you applied the patch to the repository before the state is updated.

I've always preferred dead tree to reading things on screen; I just find it easier. I've tried reading fiction in the past off a laptop and just didn't find it as enjoyable an experience; whether it was the form factor (hard to curl up with a laptop, even a netbook), the quality of the screen or the interface I don't know. Equally with technical documentation if it's something I'm using a lot I prefer a printed copy to flick through. However e-ink based e-readers are becoming much more common and affordable and I figured I should give the whole ebook experience another try.

I spent 3 weeks in October in the Bay Area on work, so I borrowed my Dad's Sony PR505 for the trip. First problem is that it's picky about USB charging - works fine if attached to a computer, but using a Blackberry charger looks like it's fine but then results in what looks like a hanging reader. However once charged it lasts for ages - I charged it before I went and only hooked it up to my laptop once during the trip to transfer some new content onto it. The form factor is also quite good; a bit heavier than a book, but not excessively so. Holdable in one hand, big enough screen that I wasn't squinting at it. Slightly too big physically to easily go in a coat pocket the way a paperback would unfortunately, but perfectly fine for taking to read at breakfast every morning in the hotel.

The screen was also much better than I'd expected. I knew the technology was different and supposed to be easier to read than traditional LCDs, but I was sceptical. Overall I had no problems with it. I was even quite impressed with the Sony's zoom function - one of the PDFs I was reading was too small when view full screen, so I zoomed in so it was readable. The nice feature was that then the "next page" button gave me the next bit of text to read, rather than the actual next page, so it remained very easy to navigate through as I read. A small touch, but very welcome.

This isn't intended to be a review of the Sony reader; that just happened to be the model I was easily able to borrow. I happened to see a Kindle in use on the plane and I was struck by how much bulkier it seemed, though having looked at the relative specs it seems this is entirely due to the keyboard rather than any difference in screen size. The Nook was also announced during my trip and I'd quite like a play with that as it looks quite nice.

Despite my positive experience with the Sony I'm not planning to go out and get one just yet. And that's the lack of sensibly priced content. When I bought my first mp3 player I could take my exising CD collection, rip it and be able to play it on my new device. This meant I got an immediate benefit of having my entire music collection with me all the time, just by buying the player. If I buy an e-reader then in order to get all my existing books on it I have to go and buy them again. What's worse is they'll cost me the same or more than I paid for the paperbacks. I can't go and exchange my Pratchett collection for the electronic versions for a nominal fee. I can't easily scan them in myself and produce some decent ebooks. I can't even go and buy the entire set for 20; I'd have to spend something like ten times that. With mp3s I can continue to buy the real item and also have it on my portable player. Or, while albums still don't seem to be much cheaper electronically than on CD, there is at least the ability to buy a single track if that's all I want. Books don't have a comparison. I'm not going to want to buy a single chapter, am I?

There are some sites out there that can provide cheaper ebooks - Rachel Willmer runs ebookprice.info which lets you compare pricing from different vendors. There's also Project Gutenberg if you're looking for out of copyright books. Finally Peter Corlett pointed me at the Baen Free Library, which I haven't downloaded anything from but will definitely investigate at some point. I still maintain that none of these are enough and that content provision will continue to be a hinderance for e-reader mass adoption until there is some fundemental change in the way its provision is handled.

RCBW - week #10 Here is this week squashes, by yours truly (also truly amazed by the simple fact of having reached the 10th RCBW week, my DDPO NMU section probably hates me now):

• 09/11/2009 bug #545652 - dfsbuild - fix build w/ GHC 6.10 (use OldException)
• 10/11/2009 bug #552668 - kernel-patch-badram - add missing target binary-arch
• 11/11/2009 bug #552666 - liblockfile-ruby - add missing target binary-arch
• 12/11/2009 bug #556034 - libbatteries-ocaml-dev - rebuild against recent sexplib
• 13/11/2009 bug #553011 - sdate - add dh_installdeb to fix lack of ldconfig in postinst
• 14/11/2009 bug #553124 - libapreq2 - move dh_installdeb to fix lack of ldconfig in postinst
• 15/11/2009 bug #540493 - libcgi-application-basic-plugin-bundle-perl - fix file overwrite when upgrading from Lenny

This week I've made (once more) a friday/saturdary rush to keep up, mostly because during the week I've been traveling (again) back to Italy and also because on mon/tue we invited Luk in Paris to discuss some Mancoosi-powered Britney (potential) improvements (and yes, have some fun also. BTW, Yves, Ralf was not visiting, he has been teaching in Paris for quite a while now ). More on this as soon as the advantages will turn potentiality into reality. To conclude ... drum roll ... please join me in cherishing this week new RCBW participant, welcome on board Tim!

Recently I ve been dealing with requests for LDAP directories configs which clearly demonstrates how little people understand about directories and what they are capable of doing. A significant amount of people I know seems to really get it wrong when it comes to what they want from a directory. Actually, they somehow think that a LDAP directory will do whatever is needed for their application to store, retrieve, validate, authenticate and even take decisions based on no data provided at all. These people think that one should just deploy a directory using the minimum effort approach and suddenly everything will just work. They don t seem to realize that for their application to make use of a directory it should be prepared to do so. They can t accept it when they are told that the directory won t just work and by some unknow enchantment get their systems data stored, validated, authenticated and, shockingly for them, that it won t make their credentials consolidated so lots of different services will out of the box just start working using the same username/password pair. Also, some people don t understand the difference between a LDAP directory and a single sign-on (SSO) system. They don t realize that a directory won t, by itself (i.e. without additional software and some respectable amount of tweaking), provide them the ability to authenticate against it only a single time and have their credentials shared among all their systems. That s it. Said. Don t get me wrong. All that was metioned above is possible, but it isn t done by LDAP alone. LDAP is just a bunch of protocols and a directory is only one nice place to store information. What will be done with this information, how it wll be treated and how it could be used to produce meaningful results are almost always up to the application and/or to some middleware or added plugin/overlay/connector/whatever. Next time someone ask you to install LDAP so I can get rid of all my different username/passwords and use only one instead , be afraid. Be very afraid and present him/her some theorical knowledgment regarding the topic. Or, better said, insert some clue into his/her brain.

I can't believe this happened. It seems the important presidential candidates have agreed for a face to face debate. I am leaning to thinking that the questions are prepared in advance, but that's better than no debate.

The debate will take place today, 14th of November at 15:00, but I am unsure if this will be broadcasted live since is not clear from the article.

Mircea Geoan challenged Traian B sescu to the debate, the later accepted but considered normal the liberal candidate should be there. Crin Antonescu accepted the challenge, too. Remus Cernea confirmed his presence, too. The funny thing is that Mircea Geoan will not participate.


So, I hope some television will broadcast this live at 15:00.

This Sunday, we celebrate already 5 years since the initiation of the successful Save Carol Park civic action. Back then, the park and the mausoleum were in danger of being destroyed to make room for a cathedral, in spite of special status of the park, the already too low green spaces per capita ratio, in spite of the legal status and in spite of public opposition.

Nice to see it will be celebrated Sunday, 15th at 13:00 at Arenele Romane, and regular people being invited there (linked page in Romanian):

http://remuscernea.ro/2009/11/sarbatorim-5-ani-de-la-salvarea-parcului-carol/

I'll certainly be there!

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Debian "Core" 0.6.0 packages ready I've completed the packaging of the new release of (Jane Street) Core, version 0.6.0. Core is (yet another) extended / alternative standard library for OCaml, integrating not only the much needed "everyday functions" but also offering consistent abstractions throughout all stdlib modules (with a lot of inspiration from well-known type classes from the Haskell stdlib), consistent naming conventions (e.g. all functions using exceptions as meaningful return values ends in _exn), and significant syntax extensions. While I've been thus far an OCaml Batteries Included fanboy, I confess that nowadays I'm more skeptical about its success than in the past, in spite of having contributed a tad of code to it. The reason is simply that the lead of the project is now gone and, more importantly, has done so without having (yet?) clearly appointed/found a new lead. That does not change the fact that David has only to be kudoed for his amount of impressive work on Batteries. Still, as a matter of fact right there is no stable release yet and there is no one that will be taking the project to deliver one, since no one else has stepped forward (yet?). In this interim the OCaml problems in delivering, on top of an amazing core language, an amazing development platform in which programmers are not forced to reinvent wheels, stand. Core fills such a gap properly. I was preferring Batteries to it due to its more open development process, but in spite of that Core is a pretty damn good stdlib. Long life to Jane Street that currently maintains it Now, back to the main topic of this post, Debian packages for Core 0.6.0 are now available; you will be able to get it from the main/unstable archive soon (some manual NEW processing is required). In the meantime they can be fetched from my personal APT repository, as usual:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/
    deb-src http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/

A few noteworthy changes from the past package releases:

• There is now a new set of packages (libcore-extended-ocaml ,-dev ) that contains Core_extended. It is a new subset of Core, which offers more features on top of Core, but which has more dependencies (most notably Pcre-OCaml) and is declared to be less thoroughly peer-reviewed than Core itself.
• There is now a separate documentation package (libcore-ocaml-doc) which contains the built ocamldoc HTML API reference for Core and Core_extended. Note that it is not exactly the same doc that has been recently announced by Jane Street and that is now available on the web. The latter is comprehensive of all other Jane Street libraries (sexplib, bin-prot, ...). I'll be probably packaging that too, but first some licensing problems need to be solved.

Update 18/10/2009: core 0.6.0 and all its components have passed through NEW, they are now available in the Debian archive as usual

I've spent chunks of the last couple of days fighting a problem that's existed for about 25 years. The 8086 was a 16-bit processor with a 20-bit address space, limiting the maximum physical address that could be accessed to 1MB. However, quirks of the segmented memory system meant that addresses greater than 1MB could be constructed - these would wrap around to the bottom of memory. Because loading the segment registers was a time consuming operation, some programmers used this behaviour as a performance optimisation.

The 80286 introduced 24 bit address space. Unfortunately, this meant that the addresses that previously wrapped to the bottom of memory now pointed at real addresses - not ideal if you were expecting the old behaviour. IBM fixed this by tying the 21st address line (A20 - they're zero indexed) through an and gate, with the default behaviour being to keep it tied at 0 and thus maintaining the old wraparound behaviour. Applications that wanted to access the full address space needed to enable the A20 logic gate. IBM didn't want to add any extra hardware to their system if they could avoid it, so tied the other side of the and gate to a spare pin on the keyboard controller. By writing a couple of bytes to the keyboard controller, your PC-AT stopped pretending to be an XT and gave you access to all of the insanely expensive RAM it had stuffed in it. Hurray!

PCs have been emulating this behaviour since the AT was first cloned. Of course, this being the PC industry, many have got it wrong. There's a set of approaches for controlling the A20 gate that may work, varying in terms of performance and desirability. Most hardware will give the desired result (ie, I have no desire to run DOS executables from 1982, make my A20 work damnit) using any of the various methods of A20 enabling. Some hardware doesn't. The most common method used in bootloaders (where we still have access to system BIOS services) is to call int 15h with an ax of 0x2401, which asks the BIOS to enable A20 for us. This isn't implemented on all hardware, but we should get a failure back that lets us go and bang on the keyboard controller in an attempt to get it to pay attention[1].

Enter the Kohjinsha SC3.

I picked this up second hand in Japan. It's a ridiculously cute little tablet, only slightly larger than hardware that's comfortably in the MID range. It booted a Fedora liveCD perfectly, though having GMA500 graphics meant that what appeared wasn't terribly attractive. Installation proceeded happily enough, followed by a reboot and... nothing. Grub loaded the kernel and initrd, jumped to the kernel and everything hung.

So, for the past couple of days, I was stepping through the kernel setup code, trying to work out where and why it was hanging. I'd got it narrowed down to the region where the kernel tried to free the memory used by the initramfs, but the failure hopped around depending on my kernel build. Something was clearly very wrong. The strangest thing about this was that if I booted the liveCD boot menu and selected "Boot from local drive", everything worked perfectly. isolinux was clearly doing something that grub wasn't, but there's rather a lot of code to step through there.

Things became a lot easier once I found that the OpenSuse version of grub worked. Their grub has a rather smaller set of patches than ours, and only a few looked even plausibly relevant. It only took ten minutes or so to figure out that it was one that altered the A20 code. Things became much clearer then.

The main functional difference between the Suse A20 implementation and the upstream one[2] is that the Suse one explicitly tests whether the A20 enabling worked by putting values at two different addresses that would be the same if A20 is disabled. By comparing them, we know whether A20 is working properly or not. If not it can then fall back to other mechanisms. The Fedora code trusted the BIOS's claim that the int 15 call had worked. The Kohjinsha's BIOS lied, A20 remained disabled, grub copied the kernel and initramfs to chunks of address space that contained lies rather than RAM and everything fell over horribly.

Thankfully, not a difficult fix once the problem was identified. But seriously, people. How hard can it be not to screw this up?

(For an excrutiatingly detailed analysis of how hard it can be not to screw this up, see here)

[1] the Intel Macs don't implement the int 15 approach, but return a failure. They also don't have a legacy keyboard controller, so attempting to hit that resulted in grub falling over. The magic IO port approach works. Another example of how the Intel Macs aren't really PCs...

[2] grub2 implements the more paranoid check

Everyone who does any significant amount of sysadmin work will break a server. Most people who have any significant experience will have broken several. Anyone who has never broken one should be treated with suspicion by other members of the sysadmin team, they probably haven t learned the caution that most of us learn from stuffing something up badly. When you break a server there are some things that you can do to greatly mitigate the scale of the disaster. Firstly carefully watch what happens, for example don t type rm -rf * and then walk away, watch the command if it takes unusually long then press ^C and double-check that you are removing the right files. Fixing a half broken server is often easier than fixing one that has been broken properly and completely! If you don t know what to do then do nothing! Doing the wrong thing can make things worse. Seek advice from the most experienced sysadmin who is available. If backups are inadequate then leave the server in a broken state while seeking advice, particularly if you were working at the end of the day and it doesn t need to be up for a while. There is often time to seek advice by email before doing something. Do not reboot the system! Even if your backups are perfect there is probably some important data that has been recently modified and can be salvaged. Certain types of corruption (such as filesystem metadata corruption) will leave good data in memory where it can be recovered. Do not logout! If you do then you may not be able to login again and this may destroy your chances of fixing the system or recovering data. Do not terminate any programs that you have running. There have been more than a few instances where the first step towards recovering from disaster involved using an open editor session (such as vi or emacs). If the damage prevents an editor from being used (EG by removing the editor s program or a shared object it relies on) then having one running is very important. These procedures are particularly important if you are unable to visit the server. For example when using a hosted server at an ISP the more cost effective plans give you no option to ever gain physical access. So plugging the disks into another machine for recovery is not an option. Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what to do in such a catastrophy? PS This post is related to the fact that I had to recover the last couple of weeks of blog comments and posts from Google s cache Update: I got my data back, not I have to copy one day of blog stuff from one database to another.

Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working. Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes to be the world s hope for the US. IsMyBlogWorking.com is a useful site that analyses your blog [3]. It gives some advice on how to improve some things as well as links to feed validation sites. Evgeny Morozov gave an interesting TED talk How the Net Aids Dictatorships [4]. I don t agree with his conclusion, he has some evidence to support his claims but I think that a large part of that is due to people not using the Internet well. I expect things to improve. The one claim that was particularly weak was when he mentioned radio stations in Rwanda as an example of technology being used for bad purposes the entire point about the first-world discussion about such things is the radio vs the Internet. Ray Anderson gave an inspiring talk about The Business Logic of Sustainability [5]. He transformed his carpet company, decreasing it s environmental impact by 82% and it s impact per volume of product by more than 90% while also significantly increasing it s profitability. He says that corporate managers who don t protect the environment should be regarded as criminals. Making his company more environmentally friendly reduced expenses (through efficiency), attracted more skillful employees, and attracted environmentally aware customers. Managers who don t follow Ray s example are not only doing the wrong thing for the environment, they are doing the wrong thing for their stockholders! Ray s company Flor takes carpet orders over the web [6]. They won t ship a catalogue outside the US, so presumably they only sell carpet to the US too. Marc Koska gave an interesting TED talk about a new syringe design that prevents re-use [7]. His main aim is to prevent the spread of AIDS in the developing world where even hospital staff knowingly reuse syringes. It will also do some good in developed countries that try to prohibit drug use. David Logan gave an interesting TED talk about tribal leadership [8]. His use of the word tribe seems rather different from most other uses, and I am a bit dubious about some of his points. But it is definitely a talk worth seeing and considering. Deirdre Walker is a recently retired Assistant Chief of Police who has worked for 24 years as a police officer, she describes in detail her analysis of the flaws in the TSA security checks at US airports [9]. Brian Krebs wrote an article for the Washington Post recommending that Linux Live CDs be used for Internet banking [10]. Windows trojans have been used to take over bank accounts that were accessed by security tokens, that could only be accessed by certain IP addresses, and that required two people to login. It seems that nothing less than a Linux system that is solely used for banking is adequate when a lot of money is at stake. The NY Times has an interesting review of the book Ayn Rand and the World She Made [11]. It seems that Ayn was even madder than I thought. Gary Murphy has written an interesting analysis of the latest stage in the collapse of the US Republican party [12]. The ABC (AU) Law Report has an interesting article about Evony s (of China and the US) attempting to sue Bruce Everiss (of the UK) in Australia [13]. The Guardian has an insightful article about the IEA making bogus claims about the remaining oil reserves [14]. It seems that the experts who work for the IEA estimate that oil is running out rapidly while the US is forcing them to claim otherwise. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written an interesting article about the economic effects of the war in Iraq [15]. Apparently it caused the loss of over 2,000,000 jobs considerably more than the job losses that could ever result from efforts to combat global warming.

• [1] http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2008/03/populist-interpretation-of-latest-boom.html
• [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18bono.html
• [3] http://ismyblogworking.com/
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what_orwell_feared.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_anderson_on_the_business_logic_of_sustainability.html
• [6] http://www.flor.com/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/marc_koska_the_devastating_toll_of_syringe_reuse.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/david_logan_on_tribal_leadership.html
• [9] http://www.hlswatch.com/2009/10/15/
• [10] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/10/avoid_windows_malware_bank_on.html
• [11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html
• [12] http://politicalmoderation.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/over-analysis-perhaps/
• [13] http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2009/2737300.htm
• [14] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/peak-oil-international-energy-agency
• [15] http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/defense-spending-job-loss/

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If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise
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If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise
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If you're happy with your ekey, then your blog will surely show it.
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If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise

Iceape 2.0 is going to hit unstable in a few days, and as such, the few packages that are only compatible with Iceape 1.x will stop working. I therefore asked for removal of cascades, checky and tabextensions, 3 packages I ve been maintaining for a little while. Actually, 2 of them are my two very first Debian packages: cascades and checky. A page is turned.

I've spent the past 24 hours playing with my new phone, and so far have enjoyed it. I've put together very very rough documentation on what I've done so far which is just:

• Installing a terminal.
• Installing an ssh client.
• Uploading wallpaper, ring tones, and similar.

So far I've not had any major problems, and my biggest issue is the lack of TAB, arrows, and ctrl keys on the keyboard. I've put together a local packages for the novacom/precom USB connection utility, and will share if there's any interest. Happily it "just works" and was trivial to compile so theres probably not really any point in uploading as such. ObFilm: Dark Angel (TV Series)