Search Results: "jan"

24 September 2011

Biella Coleman: On Leaving NYU/NYC for Montreal/McGill

funny-pictures-cat-is-canadian Despite being on sabbatical last academic year, life was hectic and chaotic leaving me with next to no time to write entries here. Anonymous, which I had worked on for a few years, exploded. I was excommunicated from my house (due to a flood/something likely mold making be very sick) and had to commute to Princeton from the far reaches of Manhattan where I crashed at a friends house for 5 months, while fighting my landlords. I then decided to go on a job hunt primarily as I did not know what would happen with my housing situation in NYC but I was also pursuing some interesting opportunities. Though the housing issue was eventually resolved, in May a rare and enticing opportunity arose. Come January 2012 I will be joining the Art History and Communication Department at McGill University as the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy. The decision to leave MCC NYU was torturous. The faculty is stellar. The graduate students are top notch and cream of the crop. And the digital media faculty is a force of nature, perhaps one of the deepest and most dynamic departments when it comes to the study of digital media. They also know how to treat their junior faculty right, which made it a place I respected and am deeply indebted to. But this type of opportunity is rare and it helped that NYC as wonderful as it is, is not my cup of tea. I wanted to eventually settle in one of the large Canadian cities, and Montreal was on the top of my list. I get to join one of the best universities in the world and a department whose work on digital media, STS, and politics converges with much of my own. The position provides resources, time, and room to cultivate scholarly work, help build a program of some sort in Science Technology Studies at McGill, and also engage with the public about the ethics and politics of science and technology. I will be teaching a class to joint BA/BS majors on scientific and technological controversies, a topic close to my heart. I also hope to create an open courseware website for my hacker course, which I will teach sometime in the 2012-2013 academic year. It is all that I can ask for, well, except for the weather. I would be lying if I did not admit that the winter scares the heck out of me I know some days I will feel just like this . lolcat4823558

13 September 2011

Christian Perrier: 10 years being Debian Developer - part 4: NM process

So, this story begins in January 2001, when I applied in the Debian New Maintainer Process. I wanted to maintain Geneweb, which I was using to publish my genealogy research results. And I wanted to keep it up-to-date while upstream was doing a quite fast development. Moreover, I quickly noticed that Geneweb had big trouble in respecting the way data is organized on a Debian system, and respect the FHS. How to have weveral users able to publish their data on the same server without compromizing the overall system security, etc. Upstream development didn't really care about that. Daniel de Rauglaudre is an excellent genealogist and developer but he was not interested in making Geneweb clean "the Debian way". For instance, at that time, it wasn't easy to setup a server, where genealogy databases could be published without having to manually launch a daemon in user mode at each reboot. Arranging this was indeed my first contribution. I contributed a few patches to make it easier to turn Geneweb into something FHS-compliant...and I developed init scripts and an organization allowing one to have shared databases after system reboots. That was rapidly a great introduction to Debian maintainer scripts and even security-related challenges. And all this....because I needed it. Basically, in 2001, the geneweb package adopted the organization it still has in Debian and Ubuntu, 10 years later: While doing so, I was going through the New Maintainer Process. The Debian developer who had signed my key was Sam Tardieu, of of those longstanding "Freenix" dudes I was sometimes hanging around. I don't remember who did write my advocacy. Michael Mattice was my first Application Manager. Interestingly, here are the three first questions he asked my as part of the Policy and Procedures check : Mike actually asked the questions on February 17th and I probably answered immediately. Unfortunately it seems that I lost my answers. Maybe they are in some archive somewhere. Would be interesting to see how I ended giving an answer about the TeX exception.:-) Immediately, Mike moved to the Tasks and Skills step and checked my geneweb and lifelines packages (I already prepared a package for that other genealogy software). From my records, he found a few lintian warnings, which I probably made my best to fix, then later on, on March 12th, he answered me that thigns were OK and he was marking the T&S step as passed...handing things over to the NM database, asking me what username I wanted on debian.org (obviously, you know what I answered to this!). Then nothing happened..:-) I was not that impatient, but finally, around June 27th, I politely mailed NM Frontdesk (I guess) to get news...and I got a very quick answer by Martin Michlmayr. Martin was indeed worried about the situation (he told me I was on his radar....fun as, many years later, as many DDs, Martin probably went on mine because of pending localization work..:-)) Finally, Martin decided he was not entirely happy with the (maybe too short) processing for P&P and proposed me (very politely, you know how Martin is!) to do it again. So, some more questions...:-) Here, I have the answers. Really fun ro read. Hang on, pure bubulle style, very verbose! What a bunch of questions..:-). Reading my answers ten years after, I see that some answers are somehow naive but, after all, they're not so bad. I really remember spending hours in writing them (my English was somehow more shaky at that time) The last question was: "Please tell me about about yourself and what you intend to do for Debian". Here, Martin opened a big can of worms..:-) So, you'll learn about this in the next episode..:-)

9 September 2011

Raphaël Hertzog: People behind Debian: Enrico Zini, member of the New Maintainer Frontdesk

Enrico ZiniEven though Enrico is not smiling on this picture, he s one of the friendliest Debian person that I know. I always enjoy his presentations because he can t refrain from inserting jokes or other funny tricks. :-) That said he s serious too, there s lots of good stuff that he has developed over the years (starting with Debtags) and he has put a lot of effort in reforming the New Maintainer process. Read on to learn more about his various projects. Raphael: Who are you? Enrico: Hi, I m Enrico Zini, a DD from Italy. I m 35 and I work as a freelance Free Software developer. One of my historical roles in Debian is taking care of Debtags, but that is not all I do: my paid work led me to write and maintain some weather forecast related software in Debian, and recently I gained a Front Desk hat, and then a DAM hat. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Enrico: It was 2001, I was at uni, I was using Debian. At some point I wanted to learn packaging so I read through the whole Policy from top to bottom. Then I thought: why package only for myself? . There were many DDs at my uni, and it only seemed natural to me to join Debian as well. Evidently this was also natural for Zack [Note from editor: Stefano Zacchiroli], who had become DD 6 months earlier and didn t hesitate to advocate me. I found the Policy and the Developer s Reference to be very interesting things to read, and I welcomed my AM s questions as an excuse to learn more. I completely understand those people who have fun trying to answer all the questions in the NM templates while they wait for an AM. With my super DAM powers I can see that my AM report was submitted on October 16, 2001 by my AM Martin Michlmayr, and that James Troup created my account 9 days later, on October 25. Raphael: You have a special interest in the New Maintainer (NM) Process since you are a Debian Account Manager (DAM) and a member of the NM Frontdesk. Thanks to your work the process is much less academic/bureaucratic than it used to be. Can you remember us the main changes? Enrico: One of the first things I noticed when I become a Front Desk member is that there was a tendency to advocate people too early, thinking by the time they ll get an AM, they ll know enough . Unfortunately, this didn t always work, and once the real NM process started it would turn into a very long and demotivating experience both for the applicant and for the AM. So we tried raising the bar on advocacies, and that seems to have helped a lot. If people join NM when they are ready, it means that NM is quick and painless both for them and their AMs, who are therefore able to process more applicants. We also did a rather radical cleanup of the NM templates , which are a repository of questions that Application Managers can ask to their applicants. We realized that AMs were just sending the whole templates to their applicants, so we moved all non-essential questions to separate files, to drastically reduce the amounts of questions that are asked by default. Other improvements in the NM process came from other parts of Debian: nowadays there are lots of ways to learn and gradually gain experience and reputation inside the project before joining NM, which means that we get many candidates who we can process quickly. For example, packages can now be uploaded via sponsors, and the Mentors project helps new contributors to find sponsors and get their first packages reviewed. Then one can now become Debian Maintainer and take full responsibility of their own packages, gaining experience and reputation. The idea of working in teams also helped: big teams like the Perl, Python, KDE, Ocaml, Haskell teams (and many more) are excellent entry points for people who have something to package. But Debian is not just for packagers, and one could join teams like the Website team, the Press and Publicity team, the Events and Merchandise team or their local translation team. Becoming DDs the non-uploading way is not just for non-technical people: one could enjoy programming but not packaging. An interesting way to get involved in that way is to help writing or maintaining some of the many Debian services. Note that I m not suggesting this as a way to learn how to program, but as a way to get involved in Debian by writing code. Finally, we started to appreciate the importance of having people activities in Debian explicitly visible, which means that the more obviously good work one has done in Debian, the less questions we need to ask. Jan Dittberner s DDPortfolio is an excellent resource for AMs and Front Desk, and I m maintaining a service called minechangelogs that for people who have done lots of work in Debian is able to fully replace the Tasks&Skills parts of the NM process. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Enrico: For Wheezy I hope to be able to streamline and simplify Debtags a bit more. At Debconf11 I had a conversation with FTP-masters on how to make some tags more official, and I now have to work a bit more on that. I d also like to considerably downsize the codebase behind the debtags package, now that its job is quite clear and I don t need to experiment with fancy features the way I did in the past. I have to say that I enjoy programming more than I enjoy packaging, so most of my plans in Debian are not tied to releases. For example, I d like to finish and deploy the new NM website codebase soon: it would mean to have a codebase that s much easier to maintain, and in which it s much easier to implement new features. I d also like to design a way to allow maintainers to review the tag submission to their own packages instead of having to wait for me or David Paleino to do a regular review of all the submissions. Finally, I d like to promote the usage of apt-xapian-index in more cutting-edge packaging applications. And to design a way to maintain up to date popcon information in one s local index. And improve and promote those services that I maintain, and I tend to often have ideas for new ones. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Enrico: If I could spend all my time on Debian, I would do a lot of software development: I love doing software development, but most of my development energy is spent on my paid work. I guess I would start my all your time in Debian by taking better care of the things that I m already doing, and by promoting them better so that I wouldn t end up being the only person maintaining them. After that, however, I reckon that I do have a tendency of noticing new, interesting problems in need(?) of a solution, and I guess I would end up wildly experimenting new ideas in Debian much like a victorian mad scientist. Which reminds me that I most definitely need minions! Where can I find minions? Raphael: You re the author of the Debian Community Guidelines. I have always felt that this document should be more broadly advertised. For example by integrating it in the Developer s Reference. What do you think? Enrico: The DCG was really a collection of tips to improve one s online communication, based on ideas and feedback that I collected from pestering many experienced and well-respected people for some time. Like every repository of common sense, I think it should be widely promoted but never ever turned into law. It wouldn t be a bad idea to mention it in the Developer s Reference, or to package it as a separate file in the developers-reference package. The reasons I haven t actively been pushing for that to happen are two: there isn t much in the DCG that is specific to Debian, and I don t have the resources to do a proper job maintaining it. It d be great if somebody could take over its maintenance and make it become some proper, widespread, easy-to-quote online reference document, like one of those HOWTOs that all serious people have read at some point in their lives. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Enrico: It s sometimes hard to get feedback or help if you work on something unusual. That is partly to be expected, and partly probably due to me not having yet learnt how to get people involved in what I do. Raphael: What motivates you to continue to contribute year after year? Enrico: Debian keeps evolving, so there is always something to learn. And Debian is real, so everything I do is constantly measured against reality. What more intellectual stimulation could one possibly want? Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Enrico: I don t think I could reasonably list everyone I admire in Debian: pretty much in every corner of the project there is someone, sometimes not very well known, who is putting a lot of Quality in what they do. Someone who decided that X should work well in Debian or that Debian should work well for Y or that Z is something Debian people can rely on and makes sure that it is so. Those are the people who make sure Debian is and will be not just a hobby, but a base upon which I can rely for my personal and working life.
Thank you to Enrico for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

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3 September 2011

Soeren Sonnenburg: Hello World

I have finally managed to setup a blog using handcrafted html and django. Having had the experience to write mloss.org, largescale.ml.tu-berlin.de and mldata.org my homepage here was done rather quickly (one weekend of hacking). If anyone is interested in website design I can really only recommend to use django. Work your way through the awesome tutorial or the book and get inspired by the sources of the many django based websites out there. Finally keep an eye on django code snippets that often contain small but useful functions and are solutions to problems you might have.

28 August 2011

Christian Perrier: 10 years being Debian Developer - part 3: the news and genealogy years

I stopped my story in early 1994, after my Big Switch to the mysterious and new world of Linux. My home server, kheops, is now running Debian and is fed with news and mail by FrMug, formerly French Minix Users Group and now run by AFAU, the "Association Fran aise des Amateurs de Usenet". As I'm still console-challenged, I'm reading mail and news on another machine I have at home, named "khephren", which is running an, ahem, beta copy of Microsoft Windows 95. Yeah, I know...:-) These 1994-1999 years were mostly the Usenet years, for me. I gradually became more and more involved in several fr.* newsgroups, either related to the Linux world...or to the Windows world. The latter was professionnally a bonus for me as 1994 is also the year where I switched from the Material Science department at Onera to the Network and Computing Department. My mission there was to accompany the increasing prevalence of personal desktop workstations in the daily life of what was formerly the Big Castle of Computing at Onera, hosting various generations of Cray computers, most of which being in the Top500 world supercomputers (we even had one in the Top10, very briefly, at somepoint). So, I was "the PC and Windows guy" in this world of supercomputing, Unix and network wizards. But my hobby at home helped me keeping and growing skills in both "worlds" which, over the years, has proven to be a not so common profile..:-) Meanwhile, at home, I was spending hours and nights reading those newsgroups...or getting involved in fr.* hierarchy management..or expanding my friends network to many people in the news, Linux, BSD worlds. That lasted for about 3 years with ups and downs (with three young kids at home, you end up having slightly less time...). I was gradually improving my home server use, adding more functionalities to it, for instance setting it up as a file and print server with Samba 1.9.something (this will be the beginning of a long story with samba!). Unfortunately, my dear Ren had passed in the meantime. Ren did so much for Linux in France that he'll be the only link I give in this article. If you happen to go through P re Lachaise cemetery in Paris, go to its Memory garden instead of visiting Jim Morrison's grave and drink a whisky bottle in memory of Ren . Or just install one of the most funnily named Debian packages: le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc and, again, drink something to his memory (whisky is highly preferred). We then reached 1997 and a specific event: my father (who was very sick for years) passed during summer, some time after my grand-father passed too. As it apparently happens for many people, it triggerred me into the interest for family history. After all, those people who are going away are family memories. And, in some way, I wanted to keep track of this memory. As a consequence, I started collecting family memories, interviewing my close relatives (the oldest ones) and ending, of course, in tracking all this with my computers. That was the start of a long genealogy research that sent me on the track of the Perrier family (of course), but also all other branches, on my mother and father side, as well as reconstructing the tree of cousins we have, etc, etc. As anybody who did that knows, this is quite an endless task but I went very committed to it. I quickly ended up in joining research groups that were using the recent growth of personal access to Internet communication. Those groups were, in these 90's, building elaborated systems where people can help together in their research instead of having to travel to places where archives are stored. I participated to many such groups and even ended up animating one who was doing research in archives of the "Yvelines" "d partement", my place of living (even though I have no family branch there). At the same time, other groups were sending me research results for my own family in the French region where my roots are. Collective effort, help others for free, you can recognize things that are a constant all over these years, indeed. It actually helped me in tracking my Perrier ancestors up to about 1680, with 11 generations of men holding that name (from Jean-Baptiste, my son, up to tienne Perrier, who is born about 1640-1650, in the small village named Briant in Sa ne et Loire, in France). Or even climbing up to Laurent Polette, born circa 1510, mentioned in a document date February 1562. He his my oldest known ancestor.Those folks being 15 generations before me. My oldest ancestor is born under Fran ois the First, King of France, protector of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the time La Joconde was painted or the Chambord castle was built. Doh. Unfortunately, genealogy software, at that time, was quite poor for Unix systems. Lifelines was a quite strong development but wasn't that user-friendly and I ended up using a Windows-based "shareware" software written by an individual. Still, my Linux machine was used quite intensively: databases were stored there, and saved there, all important informations were there, my mail was received there, along with dozens of mailing lists I was reading. I even hosted a few mailing lists on my home server. Still, in the meantime also, again in 1997, in October, another event happened. We had a pollution peak in Paris area and October 1st was the first (and as of now the only ever) day where driving restrictions were applied. Up to that moment, I was driving to/from work (30 kilometers one way). I decided to use this opportunity to really test public transport, for one full month. As I knew it would take me much more time than driving, I tried to imagine a way to use that time. How about reading mail and news on a laptop instead of only at home? Done... In a few days, I found a used Compaq Aero laptop (486 16MHz), I installed Debian "bo" on it, switched my mail and news workflow to console programs (mutt and slrn) and here we go! So, finally, in October 1997, I was using Linux nearly all time long, the only exception being genealogy data handling. That laptop was named "mykerinos" (the small pyramid) and....my laptop is still named mykerinos, though it's now the 5th mykerinos I have..:-) Ah, and since then, I nearly always use public transport to go to/from work. Debian addiction is good for the planet! At some point (I don't remember exactly when...about 1999, I think), DSL connections appeared and one of the first DSL FAI emerged on France: Free. I was already using their services for dialup access, but DSL was then a revolution: persistent connection! And nearly immediately, static IP! I became one of their first DSL customers (and I'm still one). Moreover, I had then friends working there...and they had many Debian machines to host their services. So, with the help of my Freenix friends, some DNS hosting on their machines and the still tireless eu.org entirely free domain, perrier.eu.org was born. Immediately, this gave me opportunities for doing many interesting things with my home server: setting up www.perrier.eu.org and use it....for learning web things and sharing genealogical data. For instance, I ended up hosting some data sent by other genealogists such as digital copies of archives for some French regions, all served through my 512/128kbps DSL line (quickly upgraded to 2Mb, IIRC). And, very quickly, I felt the need to share my family tree, of course! And here comes Geneweb. Written (in Ocaml) by Daniel de Rauglaudre, Geneweb was (and still is) by far one of the best tools to share genealogy data over the Net. So, I ended up installing it on my home machine. Guess how I did that? "apt-get install geneweb", of course. Yes, it was packaged. Indeed by Brent Fulgham who did the initial release on July 22nd 2000. Here, my memory is a little bit vague. I think I actually packaged Geneweb for my own use and sharing it on upstream FTP site, forking Brent's package as a start, but updating to latest upstream release. Then I quickly ended up having discussions with Brent about this new upstream release, and that lead to: 
geneweb (3.10-3) unstable; urgency=low
  * Merging with unofficial package from Geneweb ftp site
    (in preparation of new maintainer [Christian Perrier] takeing
    over responsibility).  Note that all of this work is from
    Christian.
  * Default database dir is now writable by members of geneweb group
  * New geneweb group added at installation
  * Package tries to properly handle former installations of the
    unofficial Geneweb package available on Geneweb ftp site
  * Debconf dialogs translated in french
  * More languages available
  * Creation of /var/geneweb/etc, /var/geneweb/cnt, /var/geneweb/images
    with proper permission so that authorised users may use these also
  * When de-installed, all databases are exported with gwu (should allow
    smooth upgrades when the databse format changes)
 -- Brent A. Fulgham <bfulgham>  Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:30:47 -0800
See? Already "debconf translation to French"! "More languages available". Here we are. As discussed with Brent, he propsoed me to take the package over. So, on January 11th 2001, I had applied in the New Maintainer Process. I'm amazed how quickly it went indeed: there was a tool I needed, it needed to be packaged, I could handle the packaging...and then I decided to be involved. Here we are: bubulle is on his way to become one of those magicians who are building the best universal operating system. Yes, me, the clueless material scientist..:-) How did it go? You'll know this in next episode, of course...

27 August 2011

Thorsten Glaser: FrOSCon 2011, Day 0 and 2

On Day 0, we were at my favourite Jugoslawian restaurant, and during eating and verpeiling, Andi took some pictures:
Jana und Jupp ich habe die Macht cnuke@ Henni und ciruZ (Jonathan) gecko2@ geh weg und bsiegert@ waaah! deer in the headlights
Take special note of the fun expressions everyone has Day 2, nothing of note at the conference itself according to Jana, the only interesting talk (that tcpdump(8) GUI) was cancelled, and everything else was PHP and Web 2.0 crap. The food also was different, at least what I got, from Day 1. But it wasn t as hot as on the previous day, and we did more socialising. I also managed to get the MirBSD ISO distributed some more. Then I took my fellow DDs Enrico and madamezou geocaching for their first time, together with benz; they then took a Travelbug I found on Day 1 (with rsc) to Italy so it ll end up in Rome, a next step on its mission. Other rarely-seen people, such as Dr. Pfeffer, made an appearance, but overall the second day was quite relaxed. Ah, and Benny is a Doctor in Germany now as well. On Monday, I slept quite a bit

Michael Prokop: Open Source Projects using Jenkins

For a (german) talk I ll be giving soon I was interested in a list of open source projects which use Jenkins. Jenkins is a great open source continuous integration server. I was wondering whether such a list exists but since it doesn t exist yet I created my own and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (creator of Hudson/Jenkins) suggested to blog about it. There we go. :) Open source projects using Jenkins, though Jenkins service not accessible for the public (yet): And Cloudbees hosts some OSS projects providing Jenkins as a service. Update [2011-08-29]: thanks for all the feedback, I ve updated the list accordingly.
If you re aware of another open source project using Jenkins please leave it in the comments, I ll update the list accordingly then.

23 August 2011

Vincent Bernat: SSL termination: stunnel, nginx & stud

Here is the short version: to get better performance on your SSL terminator, use stud on 64bit system with patch from meric Brun for SSL session reuse with some AES cipher suite (128 or 256, does not really matter), without DHE, on as many cores as needed, a key size of 1024 bits unless more is needed.

Introduction A quick note: when I say SSL, you should read TLS v1 instead. Look at the article for TLS on Wikipedia for some background on this. One year ago, Adam Langley, from Google, stated SSL was not computationally expensive any more:
In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that. If you stop reading now you only need to remember one thing: SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more.
This is a very informative post containing tips on how to enhance SSL performance by reducing latency. However, unlike Gmail, you may still be worried by SSL raw performances. Maybe each of your frontends is able to serve 2000 requests per second and CPU overhead for SSL is therefore significative. Maybe you want to terminate SSL in your load balancer (even if you know this is not the best way to scale).

Tuning SSL There are a lot of knobs you can use to get better performances from SSL: choosing the best implementation, using more CPU cores, switching to 64bit system, choosing the right cipher suite and the appropriate key size and enabling a session cache. We will consider three SSL terminators. They all use OpenSSL behind the hood. stunnel is the oldest one and uses a threaded model. stud is a recent attempt to write a simple SSL terminator which is efficient and scalable. It uses the one-process-per-core model. nginx is a web server and it can be used as reverse proxy and therefore act as SSL terminator. It is known to be one of the most efficient web server, hence the choice here. It also features built-in basic load balancing. Since stud and stunnel does not have this feature, we use them with HAProxy, an high performance load-balancer that usually defers the SSL part to stunnel (but stud can act as a drop-in replacement here). Those implementations were already tested by Matt Stancliff. He first concluded nginx sucked at SSL then that nginx did not suck at SSL (in the first case, nginx was the only one to select a DHE cipher suite). The details were very scarce. I hope to bring here more details. This brings the importance of the selected cipher suite. The client and the server must agree on the cipher suite to use for symmetric encryption. The server will select the strongest one it supports from the list proposed by the client. If you enable some expensive cipher suite on your server, it is likely to be selected. The last important knob is SSL session reuse. It matters for both performance and latency. During the first handshake, the server will send a session ID. The client can use this session ID to request an abbreviated handshake. This handshake is shorter (latency improvement by one round-trip) and allows to reuse the previously negociated master secret (performance improvement by skipping the costliest part of the handshake). See the article from Adam Langley for additional information (with helpful drawings). The following table shows what cipher suite is selected by some major web sites. I have also indicated wheter they support session reuse. See this post from Matt Palmer to know how to check this.
Site Cipher Session reuse?
www.google.com RC4-SHA
www.facebook.com RC4-MD5
twitter.com AES256-SHA
windowsupdate.microsoft.com RC4-MD5
www.paypal.com AES256-SHA
www.cmcicpaiement.fr DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
RFC 5077 defines another mechanism for session resumption that does not require any server-side state. I did not investigate much how this works but it does not rely on the session ID.

Benchmarks All those benchmarks have been run on a HP DL 380 G7, with two Xeon L5630 (running at 2.13GHz for a total of 8 cores), without hyperthreading, using a 2.6.39 kernel (HZ is set to 250) and two Intel 82576 NIC. Linux conntrack subsystem has been disabled and file limits have been raised over 100,000. A Spirent Avalanche 2900 appliance is used to run the benchmarks. We are interested in raw SSL performances in term of handshakes per second. Because we want to observe the effects of session reuse, the scenario runs by most tests lets clients doing four successive requests and reusing the SSL session for three of them. There is no HTTP keepalive. There is no compression. The size of the HTTP answer from the server is 1024 bytes. Those choices are done because our primary target is the number of SSL handshakes per second. It should also be noted that HAProxy alone is able to handle 22,000 TPS on one core. During the tests, it was never the bottleneck.

Implementation We run a first bench to compare nginx, stud and stunnel on one core. This bench runs on a 32bit system, with AES128-SHA1 cipher suite and a 1024bit key size. Here is the result for stud (version 0.1, with meric Brun s patch for SSL session reuse): stud, 1 CPU The most important plot is the top one. The blue line is the attempted number of transactions per second (TPS) while the green one is the successful number of TPS. When the two lines start to diverge, this means we reach some kind of maximum: the number of unsuccessful TPS also starts to raise (the red line). There are several noticeable points: the maximum TPS (788 TPS), the maximum TPS with an average response time less than 100 ms (766 TPS), less than 500 ms (776 TPS) and the maximum TPS with less than 0.01% of packet loss (783 TPS). Let s have a look at nginx (version 1.0.5): nginx, 1 CPU It is able to get the same performance as stud (763 TPS). However, over 512 TPS, you get more than 100 ms of response time. Over 556 TPS, you even get more than 500 ms! I get this behaviour in every bench with nginx (with or without proxy_buffering, with or without tcp_nopush, with or without tcp_nodelay) and I am unable to explain it. Maybe there is something wrong in the configuration. After hitting this limit, nginx starts to process connections by bursts. Therefore, the number of successful TPS is plotted using a dotted line while the moving average over 20 seconds is plotted with a solid line. On the next plot, you can see the compared performance of the three implementations. On this kind of plot, the number of TPS that we keep is the maximum number of TPS where loss is less than 0.1% and average response time is less than 100 ms. stud achieves a performance of 766 TPS while nginx and stunnel are just above 500 TPS. stunnel vs stud vs nginx, 1 CPU

Number of cores With multiple cores, we can affect several of them to do SSL hard work. To get better performance, we pin each processes to a dedicated CPU. Here is the repartition used during the tests:
1 core 2 cores 4 cores 6 cores
CPU 1, Core 1 network network network network + haproxy
CPU 1, Core 2 haproxy haproxy haproxy SSL
CPU 1, Core 3 SSL SSL SSL SSL
CPU 1, Core 4 - SSL SSL SSL
CPU 2, Core 5 - - network SSL
CPU 2, Core 6 - - SSL SSL
CPU 2, Core 7 - - SSL SSL
CPU 2, Core 8 system system system system + haproxy
Remember, we have two CPU, 4 cores on each CPU. Cores on the same CPU share the same L2 cache (on this model). Therefore, the arrangement inside a CPU is not really important. When possible, we try to keep things together on the same CPU. The SSL processes always get exclusive use of a core since they will always be the most busy. The repartition is done with cpuset(7) for userland processes and by setting smp_affinity for network card interrupts. We keep one core for the system. It is quite important to be able to connect and monitor the system correctly even when it is loaded. With so many cores, we can afford to reserve one core for this usage. Beware! There is a trap when pining processes or IRQ to a core. You need to check /proc/cpuinfo to discover the mapping between kernel processors and physical cores. Sometimes, second kernel processor can be the first core of the second physical processor (instead of the second core of the first physical processor). stunnel vs stud vs nginx, 6 CPU As you can see in the plot above, only stud is able to scale properly. stunnel is not able to take advantage of the cores and its performances are worse than with a single core. I think this may be due to its threaded model and the fact that the userland for this 32bit system is a bit old. nginx is able to achieve the same TPS than stud but is disqualified because of the increased latency. We won t use stunnel in the remaining tests.

32bit vs 64bit The easiest way to achieve a performance boost is to switch to a 64bit system. TPS are doubled. On our 64bit system, thanks to the use of a version of OpenSSL with the appropriate support, AES-NI, a CPU extension to improve the speed of AES encryption/decryption, is enabled. Remaining tests are done with a 64bit system. stud vs nginx, 64bit

Ciphers and key sizes In our tests, the influence of ciphers is minimal. There is almost no difference between AES256 and AES128. Using RC4 adds some latency. The use of AES-NI may have helped to avoid this latency for AES. On the other hand, using a 2048bit key size has a huge performance hit. TPS are divided by 5. stud: cipher suites and key sizes

Session cache The last thing to check is the influence of SSL session reuse. Since we are on a local network, we see only one of the positive effects of session reuse: better TPS because of reduced CPU usages. If there was a latency penalty, we should also have seen better TPS thanks to the removed round-trip. stud: session reuse This plot also explains why stud performances fall after the maximum: because of the failed transactions, the session cache is not as efficient. This phenomenon does not exist when session reuse is not enabled.

Conclusion Here is a summary of the maximum TPS reached during the benchmark (with an average response time below 100ms). Our control use case is the following: 64bit, 6 cores, AES128, SHA1, 1024bit key, 4 requests into the same SSL session.
Context nginx 1.0.5 stunnel 4.41 stud 0.1 (patched)
1 core, 32bit 512 TPS 503 TPS 766 TPS
2 cores, 32bit 599 TPS - -
32bit 804 TPS 501 TPS 4251 TPS
- 1799 TPS - 9000 TPS
AES256 - - 8880 TPS
RC4-MD5 - - 7370 TPS
2048bit - - 1643 TPS
no session reuse - - 5844 TPS
80 requests per SSL session - - 10797 TPS
Therefore, stud in our control scenario is able to sustain 1500 TPS per core. It seems to be the best current option for a SSL termination. It is not available in Debian yet, but I intend to package it. Here is how stud is invoked: 
# ulimit -n 100000
# stud  -n 2 -f 172.31.200.15,443 -b 127.0.0.1,80 -c ALL \
>   -B 1000 -C 20000 --write-proxy \
>   =(cat server1024.crt server1024.key dhe1024)
You may also want to look at HAProxy configuration, nginx configuration and stunnel configuration.

16 August 2011

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: File System corruption and Recovery

So this is the 2nd time I ran into a problem like this again. My FAT32 file system on the external USB HDD, all of a sudden, started reporting:
00:47:32 rrs@champaran:/tmp$ sudo dosfsck /dev/sdb1
dosfsck 3.0.9, 31 Jan 2010, FAT32, LFN
Logical sector size is zero.

I had been taking a lot of care to ensure that I don't run into situation like this. No body likes losing data. The good part is that I've been lucky enough that, even without backups (now who's gonna backup a backup disk), I have recovered all my data. All thanks to Christophe GRENIER for Testdisk.read more

7 August 2011

Jan Wagner: (new and old) culture

After visiting the great Deadmau5 concert of his Europe Tour in Berlin 7 weeks ago, I m involved into a traditional cultural event on the technical side on the next weekend.

We are running the plattform for the online streaming of Lohengrin live from the Bayreuth Festival Theatre on Sunday, 14th August 2011. Usually we are coming together around noon and having a BBQ while keeping all the stuff up and running.

To get back into this millenium, we (yes, my girl and me) are at the Highfield festival the weekend afterwards. I guess you can find me at the white stage or at camp site. Keep on rocking!

Jan Wagner: Alone at home

Sometime it happens, that there are school holidays. As my lovely girl used to be a teacher, she has some time off at that period. So she left me with our kids yesterday to visit the grandparents.
It was two hours after leaving, when I was really surprized that I was sitting around and thinking about what to do next, as normaly the weekend are family time.
So I decided to take my bike and a paper map to get of for a trip. Since some years, I usually use my bike to escort the girls or when going to work, which is just a 5 minutes ride, so I thought that would be a great opportunitiy.
I took a backpack with raining clothes, mounted the bike helmet on it, in case I needed to go cross country, some water and my music player.
It was a great ride, beside that I realized I m not in the same condition as some years ago. Unfortunately this will likely not change in the next 12 mounth, as we have some projects in the queue we need to deal with. Hopefully we will solve that satisfactorily and have a bit more spare time afterwards.

Anyways .. 27,65km in 1h40 is not so bad, as it was hot and humid.
Ride summary:

6 August 2011

Andrew Pollock: [life] RIP Margaret Rutter

I got a call from Mum today to inform me that my grandmother had passed away last night, Brisbane time, at 94 years of age. Four generations If you want to get all genealogically correct, she's technically my step-maternal grandmother, but she's the grandmother I spent the most time with, growing up, so I'm not going to split hairs. It's come as a bit of a shock, because despite having had progressively worse dementia for probably over a decade, she's been in incredibly good physical condition. I think it was in her 70's that she had a heart valve replaced, and I for one had been expecting that to be the thing to wear out and take her down slowly. I last saw her in the flesh in January, when the above photo was taken, and more recently a few weeks ago on Skype. She was recently moved from an aged-care hostel in Toowoomba to a nursing home in Brisbane, as her dementia had progressed beyond the point that she could be cared for in the previous facility. Mum had visited her earlier in the day yesterday, and she was fine, but apparently the staff found her unconscious at around 5pm when they went to get her for dinner. She was taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital where it was determined she had suffered from a stroke, and she passed away later that evening at around 11:30pm. So all in all, she had a very good innings, and of all the ways to leave this world, this was one of the quicker and more painless ways to do it. That's the problem with a quick exit - it's usually completely unexpected. It's looking like the funeral will be on Friday, and I've got a flight tentatively booked to leave on Wednesday and get in on Friday morning and return again on Monday. At the time I arranged this, I'd completely forgotten that I was flying to Calgary on Monday night to babysit the son of friends, while they go to the US Consulate for a visa appointment. Fortunately this travel doesn't conflict with that travel, it just means I'll be away from work for longer, and spending a lot of time inside pressurized tubes. I'm fairly confident with all of the short international trips, I'm going to look like a drug mule or something, and someone's going to thoroughly cavity search me.

31 July 2011

Chris Lamb: Sysadmin-friendly deployment of Gunicorn in Debian

Over the last 18 months Gunicorn has replaced mod_wsgi as the de facto container for deploying Django projects. However, whilst it was first uploaded to Debian in April 2010, it was not particularly sysadmin friendly. In particular, it required custom initscripts (or some other mechanism) to manage each Gunicorn instance. To improve that, you can now place multiple configuration files inside /etc/gunicorn.d: 
# /etc/gunicorn.d/django.example: defaults are commented out
CONFIG =  
    'mode': 'django',
    'environment':  
        'PYTHONPATH': '/path/to/custom/python/packages',
     ,
    # 'working_dir': '/',
    # 'user': 'www-data',
    # 'group': 'www-data',
    'args': (
        # '--bind=127.0.0.1:8000',
        '--workers=4',
        # '--worker-class=egg:gunicorn#sync',
        # '--timeout=30',
       'settings',
    ),
All instances can then be restarted using: 
$ /etc/init.d/gunicorn restart
Stopping Gunicorn workers: [example] [site_a] [site_b].
Starting Gunicorn workers: [example] [site_a] [site_b].
Sites using plain WSGI can use the wsgi mode - see /etc/gunicorn.d/wsgi.example.

20 July 2011

Aigars Mahinovs: Debconf11 the arrival and Debcamp

Short version arrival was quite easy, the arrival wiki page is now up-to-date and my photos are uploaded every day to this Flickr set. I had a small problem departing from CDG to Zagreb after scanning my suit twice and complaining that it had too many electronic devices, they had me remove my Nexus S, Nokia N950 and Kindle 3 from the suit pockets and then scanned that all lot again. After that another security guy asked me to open my suitcase and started squishing my Ligo cheese and declaring in a grave voice that it was too soft to be legal . As I kept calm and explained the DebConf cheese party to him, he looked around, put the cheese back in the bag and said ok, ok, off you go . So I still have that softness for the party. I heard an even better anecdote from our next years hosts when they were travelling trough Germany, a border official asked a typical so, what are you here for? question. They answered that they were in transit for an IT conference and gave him the invitation letter. He read the letter, nodded and then said: DebConf, huh? So, who was the author of the Linux kernel? and when after the initial shock they gave the right answer, they were immediately waved trough. Now that s what I call good border security. :) Meeting point - cafe at the Zagreb airport I met up with the guys in the Zagreb airport caf , which was immediately after exiting the secure zone. We waited for dkg to arrive and get his baggage. The passport check too a couple of minutes, but the baggage claim looked to be taking almost a half an hour. The airport bus After that was sorted out, we took out some local money in one of the 5 ATMs around and went to the bus. We were waived to just put our bags into the bus luggage space and get on, the driver went around to sell us tickets just before we drove off. It was one of the most comfortable and well air-conditioned buses I have been on in a long time. We were in the Zagreb bus station in less than half an hour. Non-official bus that tried to lure us Then a funny part started an old man came up to dkg and immediately asked Are you going to Banja Luka? , and when he said yes, the man started dragging us along to the bus station saying that there is a bus to there that will leave in a couple minutes, but we were in luck, so we should follow him right to the bus. Driven by curiosity, we went on. The man dragged us to the far side of the bus terminal bus stops where there was a minibus with Bosnian number plates, but no official designation as a passenger transit bus and no other passengers. They asked a reasonable 120 kuna for the trip, but they looked very shady to me, so we refused. I think that if we agreed and we were lucky enough that they actually did get us to Banja Luka, the price would have risen along the way, for example using the highway tolls as an excuse. Bus ticket to Banja Luka After getting cursed at by the old man and being demanded to buy him a beer for his efforts, we went upstairs to the real bus station where we were told that there were two buses to Banja Luka: one at 15:00 and another at 16:30, but that those two buses arrive in Banja Luka almost at the same time, so we got us tickets for the latter bus and went to a local bar to get some food and drinks. I somehow managed to get sausages in deepfried bread that for some reason cost almost triple of a hamburger and fries that others got, but it sure helped to pass the time and after all those 9 was not a bad price for a good meal. Bus to Banja Luka at Zagreb bus station We were a bit surprised by the bus drivers asking us to pay 1 (or 8 kuna) for bags to be put into bus bag storage, especially as we for several minutes could not quite understand what they want of us as neither of them spoke either English, Russian or German. Border crossing I don t remember when was the last time I crossed a real (i.e. non-Shengen) border in a bus, so getting out of the bus and walking one-by-one to the border official was a new experience. On the other border of two bus drivers collected the passports an then brought them back later, so that was less painful. And by then we were in Bosnia! And of the things that greeted us was a billboard for the casino in Banja Luka Hotel Bosna. :) By the time we got to Banja Luka, dkg had already made friends with an official from Croatian ministry of regional development that sat behind us on the bus and knew English very well (after living in Canada for some time). The bus station in Banja Luka looked almost abandoned like the bus stopped in the field with only a few taxi drivers and a bunch of buildings some distance away showing that this was indeed part of civilization. Banja Luka taxis The taxi drivers would take you to the venue for 8-10 KM 5 or 50-100 kuna (if their meter is broken and you look to be really ignorant of the exchange rates). If you walk on a bit, there is a bus station with an ATM taking Visa cards and a bit further on a bus stop that will take you to the centre of the city for 1.5 KM. The train station looked fully abandoned when we went there, only a news kiosk was working there. The bus driver reacted well to the name Hotel Bosna and wave toward it when we passed by it. Central bus stop - get off here Meeting first Debian peoples at the hotel It is hard to miss, especially the blinking Casino sign or the white pillars with black letters Hotel Bosna on top. You just get off at the bus station Central and walk back a couple hundred meters. Then see all you Debian friends drinking in the cool bar and walk around the corner to the main entrance of the hotel to check in. Church at sunset Main event location Hotel room The rooms are looking really great this is the best DebConf location that I have been to (I was not in Argentina). Soft beds with linens changed daily, nice air conditioning, towels (changed daily, if used), good shower, It is lacking in the speed and power of its free WiFi and in some place there is a clear impression that the hotel was built as a top of the line hotel a couple decades ago, but somehow has fallen into a disrepair since. Or it is simply used much more than expected. IMG_4973 So far I would say that the DebCamp is running full steam two hacklabs have desks, chairs, power and network connection, one of them even has sufficient air conditioning. The network works great for me so far, at least in the venue. The hotel wireless is barely usable to read a blog post, preferably without photos. Dinner buffet The food is being served well and on time. So far for lunch and dinner you walk up to the reception and get a food ticket based on your room number and go to the M level for the food (the M level is between the ground floor, labelled as PR , and first floor) where for breakfast and dinner there is a buffet, but for lunch you sit at a table and they bring you food. Vegetarians should clearly say vegetarian while pointing at themselves to get the special vegetarian option. So far food has been very good, except that that they often run out of popular items, such as fries, in the buffet. You can also ask for beer and other extra drinks with your food, but know that they cost extra up to 2.5KM for a beer, for example.

17 June 2011

John Goerzen: APRS: World s Best Social Mapping and Wide-Area Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Network

That was quite a headline, and I m going to try to back it up below. APRS is the Automatic Packet Reporting System. It s a system for exchanging brief packets of information. It is most frequently used for mapping applications, but it really does a lot more than that. It has its biggest home in the amateur radio world, but isn t limited to that, either. The most common way to use APRS is to have some device hooked up to a GPS transmit packets with the GPS information in them. These packets can then be plotted on a map in real-time or with history. That in itself isn t particularly newsworthy these days. An interesting thing about APRS is that it s not just positioning. Let s say that there was a search-and-rescue operation. A person could draw a rectangle on the map indicating the search area, and within about 3 seconds everyone else s map also shows that rectangle. People have even been known to play chess by sharing and moving objects on APRS! The next piece that makes this interesting is that APRS is an ad-hoc mesh network. In its traditional implementation, VHF amateur radio, a radio emits a packet with a geolocation in it (a beacon ) and any other radio within direct range of that can receive it. Radios can display basic information (such as distance to the other radio, heading, etc.) or hooked up to a laptop or mapping device for a better display. So if everyone is within a few miles, APRS works without any pre-existing infrastructure at all. This makes it wonderful for use in disaster areas, and was put to heavy use in Joplin after the tornado there. But what about radios that are too far away? Any APRS station could also be a digipeater. When a packet is transmitted, it has a maximum hop count. A digipeater hears the packet, decrements the maximum hop count, and re-transmits it. With this mechanism, packets can travel hundreds of miles. It creates a highly resilient network, one that can route around trouble without even having to have an explicit backup route. I could bring in a digipeater in my car it can be small enough to hold in my hand and instantly improve APRS reception in an area. One interesting aspect is that packets can be digipeated more than the maximum hop count. For instance, if a packet leaves my radio and is picked up by a digipeater to my west and one to my east, it can keep on traveling in both directions. This is part of what leads to resiliency. APRS also functions over the Internet. There is a large network of interconnected Internet servers that exchange all global APRS traffic amongst themselves. Gateways between the radio (RF) and Internet (APRS-IS) services exist, and are called iGates. They are not generally required, but make useful websites like aprs.fi and email gateways possible. As long as an iGate is within a reasonable number of hops from you, you re effectively linked. And again, if one iGate drops off, another iGate is probably monitoring your traffic too and you never notice. It s an ad-hoc mesh network that is actually reliable how about that? On the PC side, there are many programs for using APRS. The most common one for Windows is called UI-View, but I don t use Windows so I can t comment. On Linux, there are programs (such as aprx) for running your digipeater, but the best-known program is Xastir. Xastir lets you download map files to your local disk, and can interface with the APRS-IS Internet service, radios, weather stations, or simply other arbitrary machines to exchange information. Xastir is a very nice program and is well worth the install, despite its somewhat dated-looking interface. APRS clients, such as APRSDroid, exist for Android and iOS platforms as well. So let s say you re doing something like helping handle food/water stations for a long bike ride. Even if you don t have anybody with an amateur radio license, you can use APRS to great effect. At your headquarters, you can run Xastir and turn on its server mode . This puts everyone on a map. Then you can have everyone turn on APRS on their phone, and have it report to your custom server instead of APRS-IS. Now you have instant visibility into your entire team s location and status. If you have transport people driving supplies between locations, that s especially helpful. In an amateur radio scenario, you would instead have people with radios at each location, and one laptop hooked up to a radio at HQ. This provides an added bonus of not relying on third-party infrastructure such as cellphone towers. APRS also has a messaging system, similar in concept to text messaging. It works the same as other things. If I want to send a message to Jane, my radio simply emits a packet that lists the message and Jane as a recipient. It s digipeated up to its maximum hop count. If Jane is within RF range of one of those digipeaters, she gets the message and her radio ACKs it. Otherwise, it s delivered into the APRS-IS network probably several times, which isn t a problem and the APRS-IS network delivers it to the iGate closest to her, and from there it gets digipeated the rest of the way to her. Here s an example of something created with APRS. While I was on a bus choir tour last weekend, I had a radio with me that was beaconing all the while. Now it was a small handheld radio inside a large metal bus, so it didn t always have a digipeater in range. But still, you can go see a detailed map with the trail and even see exactly what path each packet took before it hit the Internet. If you want to try out Xastir, please grab at least version 2.0 the version in squeeze has some bugs.

Timo Jyrinki: Betawikiss tuhannen euron porkkana

--- cut ---
Vuoden 2007 lopussa Siebrand asetti lokalisointitavoitteet MediaWikille.Tavoitteet olivat todella kunnianhimoisia. N ytt kin silt , ett n ihin ei p st . Emme kuitenkaan aio luovuttaa ilman taistelua. Viel on vajaa viikko aikaa saavuttaa nuo tavoitteet. Sin voit auttaa saavuttamaan tavoitteet suomen kielen osalta.

Yhteisty ss Stichting Open Progressin kanssa pystymme tarjoamaan sinulle kannustusta. Tarjoamme 1000 euroa jaettuna kaikkien k nt jien kesken, jotka ovat tehneet yli 500 uutta k nn st MediaWikiin ja sen laajennuksiin vuoden loppuun menness .

My s muut Betawikin projektit kaipaavat apua. Kiinnostaisiko sinua k nt vaikkapa FreeCol-peli tai Mantis-virheenseurantaj rjestelm . Yst v llinen ja yhteisty kykyinen ymp rist saattaa sinut vauhtiin sek auttaa sinua kehittym n suomentajana parantamalla k nn ksi yhdess .

Betawiki l ytyy osoitteesta http://translatewiki.net.
--- cut ---
(l hde)

Katso my s http://lokalisointi.org/.

Timo Jyrinki: Ubuntu 10.04 and 3G modems usb-modeswitch or not?

I'm writing a blog entry instead of just replying to myself on a mailing list, since this subject might be interesting to a largish portion of the community. Most people assume things just magically work out by themselves and then after a release wonder why it wasn't so.

So, I raised a question on ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list about whether usb-modeswitch should be included in the default Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation instead of it only being in the universe repository. Reason was simply that firstly, I've read some general wonderings from the community about why it isn't already so. Secondly, without it my 3G modem (Huawei E1552) was first not functional, but right after installing usb-modeswitch package Network Manager worked smoothly with it.

Since I didn't get much discussion going on besides some statements that it doesn't work for everybody and even has caused extra problems for some others (in 9.10), I asked for a small round of comments on the subject on IRC. The channels are logged so I believe I can quote those a bit.

Colin Watson said among else:
"surely we just want the kernel to DTRT [do the right thing] by default ... this is the upstream trend ... it already DTRT for quite a few devices"
"I'd be very concerned about advertising that it's the Way to get things to work, and thus undermining getting things fixed in the kernel"
"I agree that usb-modeswitch is often a way to get otherwise non-working hardware to work ... I'm just not very convinced it's a real properly supportable option"
"but I'm just another user from this point of view, albeit one who ended up in quite a few discussions with various appropriate upstreams last time round :)"
Later on Paul Sladen continued a bit, among else:
"usb-modeswitch is a very long-winded way of sending a single usb-mass-storage command to the device's first profile"
"grep -hr MessageContent usb_modeswitch.d/ sort -n uniq -c sort -rn shows the level of duplication in the configuration files"
"...I do like that it is done in userspace though, as so easy to disable if you wanted something else".
Meanwhile I also IM:d a bit with Antti Kaijanm ki from whom I probably originally coined the idea of following whether usb-modeswitch is integrated into Ubuntu or not. He mainly said that he doubts the feasibility of updating kernel's USB storage quirks in a stable release, compared to having stable release upgrades about the usb-modeswitch-data udev rules. He also proposed discussing maintainability and usability by distros with the Debian maintainer and upstream, although it sounds like Colin might have had some talks already.

So there we are now. Apparently at this point it is hoped that as many quirks as possible are inserted in the kernel, see for example drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h in the kernel. But if you have concerns about if 10.04 LTS will be kept up-to-date regarding 3G modems and want to somehow participate in bringing usb-modeswitch into Ubuntu default installation or simply discuss how to handle the kernel SRUs properly, it's time to stand up and do something.

Should there perhaps be a process with which the usb-modeswitch developers would get the information they are gathering more easily to the upstream kernel _and_ (older) distribution kernels? Is this simply a case of being easier to address an issue with a "hackish" approach, or is the usb-modeswitch actually the right way to go?

Note that I'm no expert in this area, I simply become interested in various subject from time to time :)

-Timo, going to figure out a kernel quirk for his 3G modem

15 June 2011

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Lack of time

You can see it from my blog activity as well, I simply lack time for lot of things. My Gammu mail folders are horribly full of unread mail, it took me there three months to release a new testing version and there are still some patches pending for review. On phpMyAdmin side I spend most time with my GSoC students, who progress really well, but that's pretty much all I can do there. The good news is that phpmyadmin.cz website has new maintainer and is again getting new content. Hopefully it will stay alive for longer time to bring back lost visitors. My Debian contributions are in still pretty good shape and I manage to fix important bugs, though my MPD related packages are still for sale. Still considering whether to go or not to go to Debconf, my decision will be probably based on fact whether I will get travel sponsorship or not (and when it would happen). Besides these free software activities I began to be more active in Spole n aktivity (in Czech) project for organizing various activities to spend free time. Occasionally I also contribute to OpenStretMap, but it's more or less random time when I notice something is wrong or when I manage to visit some place which is not that good mapped. The good thing is that Prague is pretty good shape there, so it does not motivate me to spend too much time on this :-). And of course there is my work at SUSE, working on usual L3 front and improving our Django based incident tracking tool. Maybe I should step down from some of these, but it would be pretty hard for me to choose which one...

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Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

13 June 2011

Christian Perrier: So, what happened with Kikithon?

I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but now I'll try to summarize the story of a great surprise and a big moment for me. All this started when my wife Elizabeth and my son Jean-Baptiste wanted to do something special for my 50th birthday. So, it indeed all started months ago, probably early March or something (I don't yet have all the details). Jean-Baptiste described this well on the web site, so I won't go again into details, but basically, this was about getting birthday wishes from my "free software family" in, as you might guess, as many languages as possible. Elizabeth brought the original idea and JB helped her by setting up the website and collecting e-mail addresses of people I usually work with: he grabbed addresses from PO files on Debian website, plus some in his own set of GPG signatures and here we go. And then he started poking dozens of you folks in order to get your wishes for this birthday. Gradually, contributions accumulated on the website, with many challenges for them: be sure to get as many people as possible, poking and re-poking all those FLOSS people who keep forgetting things... It seems that poking people is something that's probably in the Perrier's genes! And they were doing all this without me noticing. As usually in Debian, releasing on time is a no-no. So, it quickly turned out that having everything ready by April 2nd wouldn't be possible. So, their new goal was offering this to me on Pentecost Sunday, which was yesterday. And...here comes the gift. Aha, this looks like a photo album. Could it be a "50 years of Christian" album? But, EH, why is that pic of me, with the red Debconf5 tee-shirt (that features a world map) and a "bubulle" sign, in front of the book? But, EH EH EH, what the .... are doing these word by H0lger, then Fil, then Joey doing on the following pages? And only then, OMG, I discover the real gift they prepared. 106, often bilingual, wishes from 110 people (some were couples!). 18 postcards (one made of wood). 45 languages. One postcard with wishes from nearly every distro representatives at LinuxTag 2011. Dozens of photos from my friends all around the world. All this in a wonderful album. I can't tell what I said. Anyway, JB was shooting a video, so...we'll see. OK, I didn't cry...but it wasn't that far and emotion was really really intense. Guys, ladies, gentlemen, friends....it took me a while to realize what you contributed to. It took me the entire afternoon to realize the investment put by Elizabeth and JB (and JB's sisters support) into this. Yes, as many of you wrote, I have an awesome family and they really know how to share their love. I also have an awesome virtual family all around the world. Your words are wholeheartedly appreciated and some were indeed much much much appreciated. Of course, I'll have the book in Banja Luka so that you can see the result. I know (because JB and Elizabeth told me) that many of you were really awaiting to see how it would be received (yes, that includes you, in Germany, who I visited in early May!!!). Again, thank you so much for this incredible gift. Thank you Holger Levsen, Phil Hands, Joey Hess, Lior Kaplan, Martin Michlmayr, Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta, Kenshi "best friend" Muto, Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel, Ana Carolina Comandulli (5 postcards!), Stefano Zacchiroli (1st contribution received by JB, of course), Gunnar Wolf, Enriiiiiico Zini, Clytie Siddall, Frans Pop (by way of Clytie), Tenzin Dendup, Otavio Salvador, Neil McGovern, Konstantinos Margaritis, Luk Claes, Jonas Smedegaard, Pema Geyleg, Meike "sp tzle queen" Reichle, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, Torsten Werner, "nette BSD" folks, CentOS Ralph and Brian, Fedora people, SUSE's Jan, Ubuntu's Lucia Tamara, Skolelinux' Paul, Rapha l Hertzog, Lars Wirzenius, Andrew McMillan (revenge in September!), Yasa Giridhar Appaji Nag (now I know my name in Telugu), Amaya Rodrigo, St phane Glondu, Martin Krafft, Jon "maddog" Hall (and God save the queen), Eddy Petri or, Daniel Nylander, Aiet Kolkhi, Andreas "die Katze geht in die K che, wunderbar" Tille, Paul "lets bend the elbow" Wise, Jordi "half-marathon in Banja Luka" Mallach, Steve "as ever-young as I am" Langasek, Obey Arthur Liu, YAMANE Hideki, Jaldhar H. Vyas, Vikram Vincent, Margarita "Bronx cross-country queen" Manterola, Patty Langasek, Aigars Mahinovs (finding a pic *with* you on it is tricky!), Thepittak Karoonboonyanan, Javier "nobody expects the Spanish inquisition" Fern ndez-Sanguino, Varun Hiremath, Moray Allan, David Moreno Garza, Ralf "marathon-man" Treinen, Arief S Fitrianto, Penny Leach, Adam D. Barrat, Wolfgang Martin Borgert, Christine "the mentee overtakes the mentor" Spang, Arjuna Rao Chevala, Gerfried "my best contradictor" Fuchs, Stefano Canepa, Samuel Thibault, Eloy "first samba maintainer" Par s, Josip Rodin, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Steve McIntyre, Guntupalli Karunakar, Jano Gulja , Karolina Kali , Ben Hutchings, Matej Kova i , Khoem Sokhem, Lisandro "I have the longest name in this list" Dami n Nicanor P rez-Meyer, Amanpreet Singh Alam, H ctor Or n, Hans Nordhaugn, Ivan Mas r, Dr. Tirumurti Vasudevan, John "yes, Kansas is as flat as you can imagine" Goerzen, Jean-Baptiste "Piwet" Perrier, Elizabeth "I love you" Perrier, Peter Eisentraut, Jesus "enemy by nature" Climent, Peter Palfrader, Vasudev Kamath, Miroslav "Chicky" Ku e, Mart n Ferrari, Ollivier Robert, Jure uhalev, Yunqiang Su, Jonathan McDowell, Sampada Nakhare, Nayan Nakhare, Dirk "rendez-vous for Chicago marathon" Eddelbuettel, Elian Myftiu, Tim Retout, Giuseppe Sacco, Changwoo Ryu, Pedro Ribeoro, Miguel "oh no, not him again" Figueiredo, Ana Guerrero, Aur lien Jarno, Kumar Appaiah, Arangel Angov, Faidon Liambotis, Mehdi Dogguy, Andrew Lee, Russ Allbery, Bj rn Steensrud, Mathieu Parent, Davide Viti, Steinar H. Gunderson, Kurt Gramlich, Vanja Cvelbar, Adam Conrad, Armi Be irovi , Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Joerg "dis shuld be REJECTed" Jaspert and Luca Capello. Let's say it gain:

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