Search Results: "will"

24 October 2009

Kees Cook: karmic and log rotation

In Ubuntu s Karmic and and Debian s Lenny, sysklogd was replaced with rsyslog. This is fine, since rsyslog will have converted your /etc/syslog.conf to /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf. However, if you modified the (maddeningly strange sysklogd-specific) log file rotation in /etc/cron.daily/sysklogd or /etc/cron.weekly/sysklogd, you ll want to review the new (sane) /etc/logrotate.d/rsyslog. (Note also that savelog uses .0 as the first rotated file extension, and logrotate uses .1.)

Robert Millan: Experimental branch of GRUB


We ve recently made available an experimental branch of GRUB, using GNU Bazaar. Although it is currently identical to SVN trunk (the codebase that will lead to GRUB 1.97), we plan to use it as staging area for different kinds of experimental work, which would benefit from user testing so that it becomes more mature before it is merged into our main tree. My appreciation goes to Vladimir who kindly volunteered to be the person in charge of this branch, and I m confident he will do a great job.

Holger Levsen: usplash-theme-debian uploaded to sid

Today I've uploaded usplash-theme-debian_5 to sid, making it the first upload since more than two years. To celebrate this and to make the (upcoming) change(s more) visible, I've exchanged the artwork against the one by Chad Albers. In the future I plan to provide alternative splash images too, like the one done for Lenny (which sadly was never uploaded), a new one for Squeeze (once there is one) or this darker theme. Of course, the old theme will also be reintroduced by then and equally of course, I'm interested to hear about more good artwork!

If you want to help out, usplash-theme-debian is maintained in the collab-maint repository in alioth and the BTS is eagerly waiting for your bug reports and patches :-) Currently supported resolutions are 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1365x768 and 1600x1200. 1024x600, 1280x1024, 1440x1050 and 1900x1200 are already on my list of what's nice to have, what other resolutions are there you need to have? :-)

And then, I plan to upload a new version of usplash itself eventually as well, and again, I'd be delighted if someone would work on this with me... :-)

I'll publish this post on debian-devel@lists.debian.org, please reply there. Thank you.

MJ Ray: Three Strikes: Out?

The Guardian reported this week that rights holders will have to obtain a court order before punishing persistent offenders by reducing or cutting off their internet connections. This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies these groups really are out of control! There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case. The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

23 October 2009

Bernhard R. Link: I'll never understand why some people consider it acceptable to depend on udev

This is just a reminder for all of you that have packages that depend on the udev package: I hate you. A Debian package depending on the udev package (with very few exceptions like for example the initramfs-tools package that actually uses udev) is so wrong.

Sam Hartman: The Fate of the Three Little Pigs and Little Red Riding Hood

One of the more annoying aspects to deploying Kerberos and GSS-API is making sure that clients have the correct name for the server they re talking to. CIFS, the Windows file-sharing protocol, provided the identity of the server to the client. Windows used this to make a few things easier with NTLM but does not use this information with Kerberos. I keep finding myself in conversations where someone has the bright idea of making this problem easier by generalizing this mechanism and having the server tell the client its identity. The client can then authenticate to that identity. There s definitely an implementation advantage: you remove all the complexity of name mapping. The problem of course is that it matters what server the client is talking to; the client actually needs to make a decision about how much to trust the server. Authentication to the bad guy is just as bad as the bad guy being able to subvirt your authentication to the good guy. I was talking recently to another implementor who has similar experience with their customers. Frustrated, I was looking for an analogy simple enough that people could understand the mistake here. I was running through nursery rhymes and other childrens tales in may head until I came to the Three Little Pigs. It s perfect!
The pigs do not want the results of the Let me in, service from the big bad wolf. There s no way that the situation could be made better by more authentication. Asking the wolf for his PIV Card (when have you met a big bad wolf who was not a federal contractor) will not help the pigs decide to let the wolf in. Because the pigs think to consider who they are getting a service from, they decide not to trust it. Of course, physical security is something that first two pigs should have worked on. However even their brother would not have been safe if he d taken an approach similar to the one proposed for GSS-API of asking the bad guy what name to trust before authenticating to see if the bad guy in fact has that name. There may be things we can do to make name mapping easier. However we cannot provide security without making a trust decision about who we talk to, and whenever we talk about who and trust together, we must consider the security of the mapping. Of course, as Little Red Riding Hood could tell you, sometimes it is all about authentication. Sadly, her grandmother was unable to get better than level of assurance 1 for her identity as Little Red Riding Hood s grandmother, and the wolf was able to claim that identify for himself.

Adrian von Bidder: Color Calibration

A topic I've been trying to understand more about for some time is color calibration. I've used lprof to get a very rough starting point for my old CRT (sorely in need of replacement by now...) Since hardware colorimeters are not cheap and probably not many can be used with Linux (I've not really looked, to be honest) I've wondered if I couldn't use the one device that is (should be) calibrated that I already have: my camera. With some kind of feedback loop like shoot screen, analyze img file, adjust settings, shoot again (and the same process for the printer, and, possibly a bit more error prone since the freshly calibrated printer would be used to produce the template, the scanner), shouldn't it be possible to arrive at sane settings? The camera explicitly allows using sRGB or Adobe RGB color model, so I'd think the colors should be more or less narrowly defined, at least when shooting raw or using manual white balance. (Another thought: I have a dual screen system. Can X even do this? And if X can do it, is it possible to tell Gimp to set this up? But this is just idle speculatio. I've not really looked at Google's results yet, either.) Update: Haven't really thought about ambient light. But the display emits light, so I'd shoot the screen in a darkened room, with white balance of the camera set manually. OTOH thanks Jo l if I can get a colorimeter for not much above 100$, it's not worth investing too much time. I had always thought these devices were much more expensive. divide_by_zero Yes, I know CRT are usually much better than LCD, but OTOH my screen apparently starts to show its age: it will suddenly, and visibly, change brightness and color every few hours. I suspect the high voltage circuitry is not too stable anymore... And I won't buy another CRT, those things are just huge...

Decklin Foster: Score: 5, Privileged

(No apologies to the original.) I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old boyfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. He's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, teeth whitening, and a radical nosejob to make him look as much like your current boyfriend as medical science will allow. He's handsome, of course, almost too handsome. He still uses far too much product in his hair and carries that desperate look in his eyes. The fragrant haze around him is the cologne he overuses to mask the scent of failure. But standing there in that form-fitting t-shirt, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho he was- how he used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how he was only happy when you were paying attention to him. You'd almost forget about carrying around his legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, he would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong he'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out. You complained about him for years before finally deciding to get rid of him, and here he is again. Though, somehow, he seems like a completely different person now. "I'm up here," he says when he catches you staring at his package. Tempted though you may be, you know that over time he'll get bored and slow down on you just like he always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. He keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other. "But I'm different now," he says, batting his eyes innocently. "I've changed." Indeed he has. Apparently, he's really into Kabbalah now or something like that. It's helped him discover loads of untapped potential in himself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with his understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change he has in store for you. The minute you let him move in, he'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night. He doesn't love you, but he doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that he couldn't care less one way or the other. He's here because he doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, he wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, he needs a place to stay. But all in all, he's OK. He's a seven. He'll do, I guess. UPDATE: There was a Hacker News thread about the Slashdot link that got killed before I could reply to someone who left a negative comment. I'll reproduce it here for the sake of anyone still scratching their head.
Thank you for replying instead of simply downvoting. There are assumptions in the structure of the original text that I don't think most of the people discussing it (here, or over there) appreciate. To wit: the narrative of technology belongs to men. Women are objects. The dumbest, easiest way to make that stick out (I did it over breakfast, ffs) is to swap the genders. It sounds "wrong". The emotional-abuse stuff is more creepy. The physical descriptions are more awkward because men aren't leered at in the same way. It's not about evening things out, it's about subverting what the text doesn't say outright by making it obvious. I am, I'm sure, as aware as you that "deconstruction" is not (anymore) a word you say to sound smart, rather a word you avoid saying to avoid sounding like you're trying to be pseudo-smart, but sometimes you just gotta call a spade a spade. You're free to disagree with that (I assume you still will), but I think "not even wrong" is a little over the top.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: From ORD Sessions to R-Forge in 12 hours with RProtoBuf

Yesterday, via in invitation from fellow Chicago-area Google Summer of Code mentor Borja Sotomayor, I attended the Second ORD Sessions. These are happening at the HQ of Inventable where a couple of technologists and Open Source geeks from the Chicagoland area get together and riff on code for a few hours after work over some pizza and beer. Sounded good, and I needed an excuse to try to mix the awesome Protocol Buffers with my favourite data tool, R. What are Protocol Buffers? To quote from the Google overview page referenced above:
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
and later on that page:
Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183 .proto files. They're used both in RPC systems and for persistent storage of data in a variety of storage systems.
So three hours later, I had an implementation of the 'addressbook reader' C++ example wrapped in a tiny yet complete R package that passed R CMD check. And one lingua franca for data has met another. So before going to bed, I quickly registered a new project at R-Forge, everybody's favourite R hosting site, and thanks to the tireless Stefan Theussl (and some favourable timezone differences) the project was approved and the stanza available by the time I got up. So I quickly filled the SVN repo and, presto, we had the RProtoBuf project at R-Forge within 12 hours of the ORD Sessions hackfest. I will try to follow up on RProtoBuf in a couple of days, this may lead to some changes in my Rcpp R / C++ interface package as well.

22 October 2009

Gunnar Wolf: How can we advance without a tax increase?

There has been a lot of buzz recently in Mexico after a tax increase that has been announced for next year. The two main points I have seen criticized are:
Value Added Tax (IVA) increase from 15% to 16%
There was a great improvement regarding the original proposal by our de-facto ruler (why de-facto? Because it is still unclear whether he won the popular vote. He has about the same legitimacy as George Bush during his first term: Legal but illegitimate): In Mexico, there is a category of items regarded as fundamental, which are exempt of IVA (tasa cero). This category includes food and medicines Of course, this category makes up the bulk of the poorer people's consumptions, so they pay much less IVA than people with higher living standards. For a very long time, there has been a push to remove this exemption. This has been fortunately clearly understood and fought against. So, the presidential initiative, as I was saying, contemplated a global 2% tax which would not be IVA, and which would be applied universally. This tax would be earmarked to be applied to social programs, and was euphemistically called Impuesto de Combate a la Pobreza (poverty combat tax). Many people applied the concept of duck typing (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... It is a Value Added Tax). As many analysts, I believe this tax was meant to be the foot in the doorstop, leading to point out in a couple of years that anyway nothing is IVA-exempt anymore and the world has not come to an end, and we should apply universal IVA... So, the reduction in the increase (2% 1%) is not the most notable thing here The notable (and good!) thing is that they didn't succeed into killing the tasa cero.
3% tax on telecommunications
Many friends have started rallying (with the IMHO least effective way of protest you can find on Earth, just by stating their adherence in their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Wow, great deal!) that the original proposal included a 4% tax on telecommunications, and it appears that 3% will be applied. They say, quite fairly, that telephone and Internet access are no longer considerable a luxury, but a need to power the society into becoming better prepared, more competitive. My friends state as a contrast the Finnish ruling broadband access as a citizen right. What they seem not to realize is that the proportion of taxes in Mexico (collected from the responsible taxpayers, which is not by far the way for the bulk of the money in this country) is close to 30%, taking into account the big taxes (IVA, ISR/IETU) and the host of smaller ones. In Finland, the percentage of taxes payed by every person and remember that tax evasion is way lower than here!) is over 50%.
So What is my opinion on this? What would my ideal tax scheme be?
  • Nobody likes taxes. But the country needs far more infrastructure, far wider inverstments. We need higher taxes But we need those taxes to be collected from people with higher income. And yes, that would mean I would most probably pay more (as I do sit relatively high on the income scale Qualified work, even if you do not seek money for the sake of it, pays much better than non-qualified work; remember the minimal wage in Mexico is around MX$50 a day - Less than US$4 or 3).
  • The increases should be applied to the income tax (ISR). It is supposed to be around 30% for income levels over MX$5000 a month, with a very slight increase after that point. Income tax is highly deductible now, and most people with high income manage to ellude most of it. Many cases have been documented of companies as small as Walmart paying less than MX$1000 a year due to several (intentional? you bet!) holes in the legislation. That is where the bulk of the extra government income should come from!
  • For a couple of years, since I registered as a taxpayer (people receiving money exclusively as salaries under a given limit don't have to declare taxes) I have decided not to hire an accountant to make the numbers look prettier, and just do the numbers myself over the platform provided by SAT/Hacienda (the tax collecting authority). Yes, that means I am paying more than what I could But it also means I am paying what I should! And it is an expensive point of view, but I strongly invite others to do the same. If we criticize Walmart for making numbers look prettier, shouldn't each of us do the same? Shouldn't we all care to pay what we are supposed to, so that the government has enough funds to carry out its tasks?
Yes, I am painfully aware that an important portion of what gets into the government disappears due to corruption and ineptitude. Still, the only position from where I can criticize is from being clearly legal. The same point as I do with software: I cannot ask people to comply with my Free Software licensing if I use ilegally propietary software, can I? So no, I don't use any. Even legal propietary software, free-as-in-beer (i.e. Flash player). So, please think this over before you join the Lemmings into complaining about the tax increase. Yes, this is a bad moment to increase taxes. Yes, Mexico is the worst faring country in all of America in its response to the crisis; the GDP will probably fall between 8% and 10% this year and 2010 will not be much better. Yes, it would be better to increase competitivity. But, yes, we pay ridiculously low amounts of taxes And those of us who can afford a little reduction in our expenditure should do it. And those who make gross money should just stop it. Oh, and last point, regarding the #internetnecesario Twitter hashtag: Don't be Lemmings. Internet should be recognized a basic need for a free society. But right now in our country, it completely is a luxury, even if you cannot live without it. If you are Internet-addicted as myself, you most probably will not notice the 3% increase. FFS, We will pay MX$360 instead of MX$350 a month for my Infinitum connection. Will we really notice? In Mexico, middle and upper class are Internet-enabled. Lower classes are not. Things should change, no doubt. But it is not at all comparable to an universal IVA. Things should change and universal connectivity should be a given. But right now, calling Internet a basic good... is just out of touch with reality.

MJ Ray: Some Good Does Come From Ubuntu

I ve been mouthing off about Ubuntu again, after the forthcoming release parties were advertised in some pretty inappropriate places, lamenting:
Ubuntu has taken a voluntary-sector aim-for-100%-free distribution, built a private-sector free-and-non-free distribution and gets more love and free marketing from free software supporters than its parent, or than the whole-community events.
However, I did surprise someone by ending with
The silver lining is that most Ubuntu improvements are free software and are/can be contributed back to the free software world.
That s in part because Ubuntu finally made some progress on the Mailman colour mismash bug I tried to fix 5 years ago which is still unfixed in GNU as far as I know. So I think that as long as much of Ubuntu is free software, its contributors will still be doing some good work. I hope a mailman bgcolor/CSS patch is taken by other distributions soon.

21 October 2009

Lior Kaplan: Encouraging open source in education


I ve read today a case study by Gregor Bierhals about an Austrian project called desktop4education which creates a desktop environment for school based on open suse. The fact that really surprised me (and for the better) was the fact that the federal government help the project by sending CDs/DVDs to other school and even willing to award schools to move to open source software and reducing license fees. While schools don t pay the the Microsoft Office license fee (10 euro per station), the federal government has decided to pay the schools 10 euro for each station that moved to open source software.
However, by the time of writing the situation is about to change as the Federal government increasingly adopts a policy that promotes the use of open source software in Austrian schools. Exemplary to this is the government s decision to pay any school 10 for each workstation that runs the free productivity suite Open Office that is provided by Sun Microsystems in replace of Microsoft Office, for which the government introduced a calculative license fee of 10.
I think this decision is radical as it motives the schools to move to open source software, and benefiting financially from the move. So while the government might pay a bit more, the money goes to the schools instead of commercial companies. I m sure that s a better investment of tax payers money. I can just hope more governments will adopt this policy. Posted in Proud to use free software Tagged: education, free software

Aigars Mahinovs: My first post with Google Wave pops up for people

Some time ago I wrote a test post with a Google Wave embedded into the post. Only a couple days ago I discovered that to make a Wave public one needs to add public@a.gwave.com as a participant to the wave. I did that and the Wave became visible also to people without Wave accounts. But another fun thing happened at the same time multiple people reported that this Wave popped up directly in their Google Wave Inbox. But in this case I suspect that when people saw the Wave (even in it s disabled form) either on my blog or on the Planet Debian, Google stored that info somewhere and when they logged in their new Google Wave accounts it added that wave to their Inbox, but the wave did not show up in their Inbox until I made it public a couple days ago. And thus there was a disconnect between action (people viewing my blog post) and reaction (Wave showing up in their Inbox) that will confuse a lot of people. The way to fix that would be to only add waves to your Inbox if you ve commented on them (or added to them) which would not be possible for private waves.

MJ Ray: Royal Mail Rub Our Noses in it

So after Royal Mail shut down useful community websites causing MP comments on the idiocy of Royal Mail, I was rather surprised to get this little thing in the post today: postcode That s a postmark advert for Celebrating 50 years of POSTCODES 1959-2009 . So this is what Royal Mail does with some of the money it makes from its claimed monopoly on postcode databases: it spends it on ink to celebrate postcodes in the bit where they can t sell adverts. After the postcode-takedown, I suggested deleting postcodes from all our co-op s websites. Instead, another member has persuaded me to contribute to something like free the postcode, which I first saw on CycleStreets blog. As well as slapping its customers, Royal Mail is also currently taking on its workers who are campaigning for sustainable jobs and against the recent increase in bullying and harassment cases. I already send most of my letters, invoices and so on electronically since our three nearest post offices closed last year. I ve noticed Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op switching to DPD and Terry Lane suggesting more online use. Are those good approaches? How are you adapting to the postal delays? Have you put your postcode into free the postcode or a similar site?

20 October 2009

Eddy Petrișor: Microblogging, let's try it...

I have figured that I might try to use some microblogging service, so I decided to use identi.ca because is a free platform, as opposed to twitter.

I will probably post really occasionally, but since I have a client for ideni.ca on my phone I expect to update more often than the full blog:

Follow me at: http://identi.ca/eddyp

Russell Coker: Virtual Hosting Features

I ve just been setting up new virtual servers at Linode [1] and Slicehost [2]. I have previously written a review of both those services [3], based on that review (and some other discussions) one of my clients now has a policy of setting up pairs of virtual servers for various projects, one server at Linode and one at Slicehost. Now both virtual hosting providers work very well and I m generally happy with both of them. But Linode seems to be a better offering. Linode has graphs of various types of usage, I can look at graphs of disk IO, CPU use, and network IO for the last 24 hours, 30 days, or for previous months. The three graphs have the same scale of the X axis so I can correlate them. The stats on Slicehost just allow you to get the current raw numbers, which doesn t help if I want to know what happened last night when performance sucked. When I build a Linode instance I can have multiple filesystems configured (Slicehost can t do any of this). I can use less disk space than is available to reserve space for other filesystems. Separating filesystems makes it easier to track IO performance and also allows some bounds to be set on the amount of disk space used for various tasks. Nowadays the use of multiple partitions is not as popular as it once was, but it s still a real benefit. Of course one of the benefits of this is that I can have two partitions on Linode that are suitable for running as the root filesystem. If an upgrade fails then it would be an option to boot with the other filesystem (I haven t actually done this but it s good to have the option). I believe that this feature of Linode could do with some improvements. Firstly when creating or resizing filesystem it should be possible to specify the number of Inodes when using Ext3. The fsck time for a large Ext3 filesystem that has the default number of Inodes is quite unreasonable. It would also be good if other filesystems such as XFS were supported, for some use cases XFS can significantly outperform Ext3 and choice is always good. When BTRFS becomes stable I expect that every hosting provider will be compelled to support it (any provider that wants my continued business will do so). Now Linode and Slicehost both allow sharing bandwidth allowances between virtual servers. So if you run one server that uses little bandwidth you can run a second server that needs a lot of bandwidth and reduce the potential for excess bandwidth use problems. The next logical extension to this is to allow sharing disk allocation between servers on the same physical system. So for example I might want to run a web server for the purpose of sending out large files, 360M of RAM as provided by the Linode 360 offering would be plenty. But the 128G of storage and 1600GB per month of bandwidth usage that is provided with the Linode 2880 plan would be really useful. At the same time a system that does computationally expensive tasks (such as a build and test server) might require a large amount of RAM such as 2880MB while requiring little disk space or bandwidth. Currently Linode allows sharing bandwidth arbitrarily between the various servers but not disk space or RAM. I don t think that this would be a really difficult feature to implement. Finally Linode has a Pending Jobs Queue that shows the last few requests to the management system and their status. It s not really necessary, but it is handy to see what has been done and it gives the sysadmin a feeling of control over the process. These management features provide enough value to me that if I was going to use a single virtual hosting provider then I would choose Linode. For certain reliability requirements it simply wouldn t be a responsible decision to trust any single hosting company. In that case I m happy to recommend both Linode and Slicehost as providers.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Revoking the Ubuntu Community Code of Conduct

I've just revoked my signature over the Ubuntu Code of Conduct 1.0.1. I did this because Ubuntu's CoC (perhaps jokingly?) singles out Mark Shuttleworth as someone who should be held to a super-human standard (as pointed out recently by Rhonda, as well as earlier in ubuntu bug 53848). I think that the CoC is a good document, and good guidelines in general for reasonable participation in online communities. When i originally signed the document, i thought the Shuttleworth-exceptionalism was odd, but decided i'd be willing to hold him to a higher standard than the rest of the community, if he wanted me to. That is, i figured his position as project leader meant that he could have made the CoC different than it is, thus he was (perhaps indirectly) asking me to hold him to a higher standard. Why does this matter to me now? Shuttleworth has apparently signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, but as i wrote about earlier, his recent sexist comments at LinuxCon were a Bad Thing for the community, and his apparent lack of an apology or open discussion with the community concerned about it was even worse. So i'm asking Mark Shuttleworth to abide by the following points in the Code of Conduct that he has signed: I've signed a revised version of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct 1.01 (with the Shuttleworth-exceptionalism clause removed), to reaffirm my commitment to these principles, and to acknowledge that, yes, the SABDFL can make a mistake, and to encourage him to address his mistakes in a fashion befitting a mature participant in this community we both care about. UPDATE: It seems that Mako and Daniel Holbach have recently revised the CoC resulting in a new version (1.1) which has just been approved by the the Ubuntu Community Council. The new version 1.1 looks good to me (i like its broadening of scope beyond developers, and its lack of superhuman claims for Shuttleworth) and when it is available on Launchpad, i'll most likely sign it there. Thanks to the two of them for their work! I hope Shuttleworth will consider abiding by this new version.Tags: code of conduct, sexism, ubuntu

Steve Kemp: Big change. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.

Over the weekend I bit the bullet and purchased a new camera, a Canon EOS 1000d (many page revie). I've taken a few hundred shots with it so far, trying to get a feel for what it can do, and what I can do now that I couldn't before </Lady Teldra>. As my first DSLR its a pretty significant upgrade and I'm enjoying it a lot - especially since I've managed to persuade a few local people to pose for me. Now is the time to wonder how to store, share, and organise the pictures I've taken and will be taking in the future. Currently all my pictures are beneath ~/Images, replicated across a number of machines for redundancy. As a sample I have: 
skx@gold:~$ ls /home/skx/Images/
Computer  Flat  Misc  Parties  People  Pets & Animals  Travel
Beneath these top-level directories I have more directories for specific items, such as ~/Images/Travel/2009/York, or ~/Images/People/kelly. I think that I should probably be looking at using some image-manager application to allow me to tag, date, and export images more easily though. Right now I'm not really sharing anything except a few sample shots: Those are quite nice shots, but I suspect sooner or later I will have pictures I do wish to share properly. So I need to come up with an URL scheme, or a library tool which will export specific shots and keep the rest of my archive private by default. Any suggestions are welcome .. ObFilm: The Dark Crystal

Gunnar Wolf: Among the reasons that brought me to Debian...

Every now and then, people ask me why Debian? Why, among so many projects to choose from, I first liked, then got into, and finally I got committed into Debian, and not anything else? Of course, one of the main points back in 2000-2001 when I started using it, and still to this very day is a strong identification with the ideological side. Yes, I am a strong Free Software believer, and Debian is what best suites my ideology. Still, I did not only get into Debian because of this And I was reminded about this by an article in this month's Usenix ;login: magazine: An anecdotal piece by Thomas A. Limoncelli titled Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (article requires ;login: subscription, but I'll be glad to share it with whoever requests it to me I have of course no permission to openly put it here in whole online. Yes, I am expressly sending a copy of this text to the author, I will update this if/when I hear from him) [update] The author has kindly allowed me to redistribute his article's PDF Download it here. Before anything else I'll go on a short digression: I am writing a bit regarding the Free Software participants' culture, and this is a trait I love about it: The lack of formality. Even though ;login: (and Usenix as a whole) is not exactly Free Software, it runs quite close to it), it is a well regarded magazine (and association) with an academic format and good (not deep or highly theoretical, but good) contents. Still, it is quite usual to see titles as informal and inviting as this one. And it happens not only here I have been fearing having to explain at work, over and over, why I have requesting permissions to go to Yet Another Perl Conference, Festival de Software Libre or DebCamp, tagging them as academic settings. Or why I am wasting our library's resources on buying cookbooks, recipes and similar material on the most strange-sounding subjects. Anyway, back on track This article I found refers to the lack of value given to the system administrator's time when selling or purchasing (or more in general, as it happens also in Free Software, when offering or adopting) a product. Quoting Thomas:
A person purchasing a product is focused on the features and benefits and the salesperson is focused on closing the deal. If the topic of installation does come up, a user thinks, Who cares! My sysadmin will install it for me! as if such services are free. Ironically, it is the same non-technical executive who dismisses installation and upkeep as if they are free who might complain that IT costs are too high and go on a quest to kill IT spending. But I digress. I can understand why a product might be difficult to install. It is hard enough to write software, and with the shortage of software developers it seems perfectly reasonable that the installation script becomes an afterthought, possibly given to a low-ranking developer. The person purchasing the product usually requires certain features, and ease of installation is not a consideration during the procurement process. However, my ability to install a product affects my willingness to purchase more of the product.
Thomas goes on to explain his experience with Silicon Graphics, how Irix was so great regarding install automation and how they blew it when switching to Windows NT; talks very briefly about IBM AIX's smit, a very nifty sysadmin aid which is basically a point-and-click interface to system administration with the very nice extra that allows you to view the commands smit executes to perform a given action (and then you can copy into a script and send over to your hundreds of AIX machines) Incidentally, by the time I started digging out of what became the RedHat mess of the late 1990s and passed briefly through OpenBSD on my way to Debian enlightenment, I was temporarily the sysadmin for an AIX machine And I too loved this Smit approach, having it as the ultimate pedagogical tool you could ever find. Anyway, I won't comment and paraphrase the full article. I'll just point out to the fact that this was what ultimately sold me into Debian. The fact that I could just install anything and (by far) most of the times it will be configured and ready to use. Debian made my life so much easier! As a sysadmin, I didn't have to download, browse documentation, scratch head, redo from start until I got a package working Just apt-get into it, and I'd be set. Of course, one of the bits I learnt back then was that Debian was for lazy people Everything works in a certain way. Policy is enforced throughout. So as a sysadmin, I should better get well acquinted with the Debian policy and know it by heart. In order to be able to enjoy my laziness, I should read it and study it. And so I did, and fell in love. And that is where my journey into becoming a Debian Developer started. Why am I talking so nostalgic here? Because I got this magazine on the mail just last weekend And coincidentally, I also got bug report #551258 I packaged and uploaded the Haml Ruby library (Gem, as the Rubyists would call it). Haml is a great, succint markup language which makes HTML generation less of a mess. It is even fun and amazing to write Haml, and the result is always nicely formatted, valid HTML! And well, one of Haml's components is haml-elisp, the Emacs Lisp major mode to do proper syntax highlighting in Haml files. Of course, I am an Emacs guy (and have been for over 25 years), so I had to package it. But I don't do Emacs Lisp! So I just stuffed the file in its (supposed) place, copying some stuff over from other Emacs packages. During DebConf, I got the very valuable help of Axel Beckert to fix a simple bug which prevented my package from properly being installed, and thought I was basically done with it. I was happy just to add this to my ~/.emacs and get over with it: 
  1. (require 'haml-mode)
  2. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml$" . haml-mode))
  3. (require 'sass-mode)
  4. (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass$" . sass-mode))
However As Mike Castleman points out: This requires manual intervention. So it is not the Debian Way! Reading Mike's bug report, and reading Thomas' article, made me realize I was dilluting something I held so dearly as to commit myself to the best Free Software-based distribution out there. And the solution, of course, was very simple: Debian allows us to be very lazy, not only as sysadmins, but as Debian packagers. Just drop this (simplified version) as $pkgroot/debian/haml-elisp.emacsen.startup and you are set! 
  1. (let ((package-dir (concat "/usr/share/"
  2.                            (symbol-name flavor)
  3.                            "/site-lisp/haml-elisp")))
  4. ;; If package-dir does not exist, the haml-mode package must have
  5. ;; removed but not purged, and we should skip the setup.
  6.   (when (file-directory-p package-dir)
  7.     ;; Use debian-pkg-add-load-path-item per  9 of debian emacs subpolicy
  8.     (debian-pkg-add-load-path-item package-dir )
  9.     (autoload 'haml-mode "haml-mode"
  10.       "Major mode for editing haml-mode files." t)
  11.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.haml\\'" . haml-mode))
  12.     ;; The same package provides HAML and SASS modes in the same
  13.     ;; directory - So repeat only the last two instructions for sass
  14.     (autoload 'sass-mode "sass-mode"
  15.       "Major mode for editing sass-mode files." t)
  16.     (add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.sass\\'" . sass-mode))
  17.     ))
This will make the package just work as soon as it is installed, with no manual intervention required from the user. And it does not, contrary to what I feared, bloat up Emacs Adding it to the auto-mode-alist leaves it as known to Emacs, but is not loaded or compiled unless it is required. Deepest thanks to both of you! (and of course, thanks also to Manoj, for pointing out at the right spells in emacs-land)
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Thomas A. Limoncelli: Hey! I have to install and maintain this crap too, ya know! (Usenix's ;login: October 2009144.5 KB

Andrew McMillan: Using incron to autocommit changes in a folder

A friend e-mailed me this morning asking for some help with a problem he had where he wanted to make a folder writable by a group of people without making the files deletable. Stepping back from his question, I first pointed out that if the files are editable then they can be effectively deleted by removing the content from them, regardless of whether the directory entries themselves are retained. One solution which occurred to me would be to automatically version the content of the directory, and this reminds me of why versioning of /etc has never worked for me: it only happens when I remember to commit.
<!--break-->
Normally when I edit files in /etc, I am focused on achieving something now, and not on being able to undo it later. To this end I have written myself a script which will commit the contents of a directory (including adding new files and removing deleted ones) into a git repository, as follows: 
#!/bin/sh
#
# Allow for debugging.
[ -n "$DEBUG" ] && set -o xtrace
cd $1
MESSAGE="Autocommit"
# Initialise the directory if it's not in Git currently
if [ ! -d .git ]; then
  git init
  MESSAGE="Initial commit"
fi
# Any files that aren't in the directory, but are in the repository can be removed.
for F in  git ls-tree HEAD   cut -f2 ; do
  [ -e "$ F " -o -L "$ F " ]   git rm "$ F "
done
# Any files that are in the directory, but aren't in the repository can be added
git add .
# And commit...
git commit -m "$MESSAGE"
So this script takes one parameter: the name of the directory where changes have (presumably) occurred, and just blindly commits everything there. The magic glue, then, is the awesomeness that is 'incron' :-) My first target is the ~/bin directory of all of those useful little scripts that I tend to randomly edit without nearly enough version control: 
incrontab -e
home/andrew/bin IN_MODIFY,IN_DELETE,IN_CLOSE_WRITE,IN_MOVE \
     /home/andrew/bin/commit-directory /home/andrew/bin 2>&1   logger -t andrew-bin
With this, it means that whenever a file changes, is deleted from, moved into, or out of the directory we are monitoring, our commit-directory script is run. Just for testing I delete some ancient files that should have been killed a few computers back. A quick 'git status' in the directory shows everything was committed nicely. I edit a file and make some quick changes. Once again, I go into gitk and can see all the history. I sit back and ratchet my laziness another notch with a nice cup of tea, happy that, for now, at least, changes to my scripts are under revision control at last. Outstanding Issues Well, ok: it's usable as is, but there are a few small things that could be improved: I'll keep monitoring in the real world if these are real annoyances, and whatever other annoyances I find, and maybe I'll tweak that commit script a bit more - add a delay and/or some locking too it. I don't think that adding some push would be too big a deal either, and I'd love to get suggestions from Git geeks as to how to do this more simply/reliably too.

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