I only start believing I'm visiting some new place when I've finally spent way too many hours looking at flight websites in an attempt to find a flight that is slightly cheaper than the only option everyone else is offering you, and after a few days prices have gone up enough so you give up and end up buying. And, two weeks ago, I finally did. Barcelona-Istanbul means the third chapter of the unplanned saga Chistmas in Islam . Two years ago I started 2007 visiting Tunisia, and last year we enjoyed a 10 day trip around the South of Morocco, which was absolutely fantastic (and I've still haven't blogged about). This year I'll be discovering Istanbul, Cappadocia and other parts of Turkey with Maria. The idea is to try to avoid visiting too many places in a rush, and follow the good advice of our Moroccan friends, La prisa mata, amigo . We have plenty of days to explore Turkey's secrets, but I want to be able to enjoy them, and avoid being in a constant hurry. As always, I'll be glad to get suggestions on must not miss places or things, and advice on how to move around, where to stay, what to do or what not to do is extremely welcome. I'm totally looking forward to this, after I missed this years's GUADEC!

Since version 3.1, awesome is bundled with naughty, a notification library which allow to raise pop-up in front of the screen to display information you chose. A sort of notification-daemon, but not plugged into D-Bus. Last days I've began to work on awesome 3.2 (aka the 'next' branch in awesome repository). I've started to chat with Leon Winter on IRC about the possibility to implement notification specifications into awesome. awesome had since version 3.0 a very light D-Bus support, since it only allowed to evaluate Lua remotely, without getting an answer anyway. I've hacked it so now there's a D-Bus hook, which is called upon a D-Bus message received. This, plus the possibility to return various data type (not all are implemented as of this day) allowed Leon to enhance the naughty library and to add support for a primary notification support. I just have to add more D-Bus data type support, and we may be able to support all the specs, with icons support, etc.

I really did not like phpMyAdmin project website for some time and wanted to change it. However it is harder and harder to find time to do some bigger thing, so this task was stuck in my queue for quite a long time. One of biggest problem is that the website is hosted on SourceForge.net and they limit quite a lot what you can do there. Especially including external resources is hard - the website should include lot of information from SourceForge.net as news posts, file releases etc. The only reasonable option to get all external data into the website is to generate static content and push it to SourceForge.net web server. This decision was quite clear to me and it lead me to using Python with Genshi templating to generate the website. Yes, you read it correctly - one of most popular PHP applications is using Python to generate its website. I started to play with Genshi and feedparser about one month ago, with no clear concept of pages design, just to learn the technologies. However after creating first proposal and showing it to some friends, phpMyAdmin team members and frequent visitors to phpmyadmin IRC channel, I was quite surprised about positive feedback, so I started to work a bit harder to make it possible to have new website before we release 3.1.0. And here it comes, just check it out at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/.

This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I'll only have to give more background information.
This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners' minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that's only the major symptom - The Revolution had many, many other consequences. About one million (out of a 10 million population) people died. There was a very significative rearrangement of the society, a rearrangement that took about half a century to settle. But I won't write more background - You can always ask the wikipedia about our Revolution.
The reason I am posting this is that, as it usually happens in this time of year, several so-called analysts in the media have started asking, was the Revolution really worth it? Did it change anything at all? Did the Revolution in the end win, or was it defeated from within? Should we still celebrate it?
And there are, yes, reasons to doubt it. Renato Leduc, at the same time a great journalist and a delicious poet, says it as many - while at the same time, as nobody else: Tiempos en que era Dios omnipotente / y el se or Don Porfirio presidente / Tiempos, ay! tan iguales al presente, or ya se est n muriendo todos / Jes s qu desilusi n...! / se est volviendo gobierno / Ay dios...! La revoluci n.
Anyway... Our media overlords insist on us forgetting the struggles and the real changes that came from them, on rewriting the history... Probably they will push us later on to have the cristeros as the real fathers of the Nation?
Even if so many bits of reality didn't change after Porfirio Diaz's regime fell in 1910, I find it insulting to think that even 70 years of PRI -with very sharp differences between periods, with huge differences between the PRI-born governments- are comparable to 30 years of a one-man rule; even with brutal repressions such as the dirty war against so many subversive movements in the 50s-80s (as officially There Was No Armed Struggle Anymore, just some pesky communist subversives), it cannot be compared to the Porfirian Peace (ask Cananea and R o Blanco). Today we might have a shameful concentration of money and power in very few hands (including the world's richest man), but it certainly does not reach the point of 1910 where most of the Mexican soil was owned by less than 30 families, with latifundios as big as many states...
Anyway - So far, nothing new - just bits I heard here and there, and my reactions to them. But this morning, around 8:25, I tuned in to Noticias IMER, the news program of one of the few public, non-gubernamental, independent radio stations. An interview was under way, but I could not get the interviewed person's name (I guess, a historian - will write to ask for his data). His comments were very interesting, and very worth echoing. I'll try not to distort him.
The Revolution started off very organized, and with a very simple goal: Get Porfirio Diaz out, and call for real federal elections. Sufragio efectivo, no reelecci n. Of course, the fight was very short, and Madero became the president, with an overwhelming majority. Of course, also, the reactionary sectors set up a coup and killed Madero. Victoriano Huerta seized the power - and that's where the real revolution really began. Groups all over the country (some of which were at unrest since Madero, as they were not seeing the changes they needed - changes that would bring an end to the huge class differences and disrespect to the native Mexican population) rose in arms, and forced Huerta into exile. Then, they battled each other for many more years. It became known as la bola - When somebody joined the revolutionary forces, people said he went to fight with the crowd. But, inside the crowd, there were very different points of view. No, Carranza, Villa and Zapata (the foremost leaders in the hardest part of the fight) were not power-hungry barbarians - much to the contrary. They had very full, very complex views of the problem and possible solutions. I won't delve much into them, also, as I'm not an expert...
Villa and Zapata had the most compatible approaches, seeking an aggresive land redistribution, a communal property system (closest to most of the indigenous population's roots, what we would now call usos y costumbres). For the government, both favored going towards a Europe-like parliamentary system, where the parliament were the real force, and the president (or prime minister or whatever) would only be the designated person to implement the parliament's decision. Both Villa and Zapata feared the evil stemming from the unlimited power that the Presidential Chair symbolized (Fui soldado de Francisco Villa / de aquel hombre de fama mundial, / que aunque estuvo sentado en la silla / no envidiaba la presidencial). They met at the Aguascalientes convention, and were quite close to each other - but were defeated by the superior Venustiano Carranza (Constitucionalista) army.
Carranza, although vilified for his corruption (nowadays, carrancear is still a synonim for stealing), had an opposite view - also originating from a very deep analysis. Carranza saw that what brought down Madero was, in the end, the lack of power of the President to rule the country without support from the legislative power. So, he pushed a political program making the President the strongest man in Mexico. He and his people wrote and passed the 1917 Constitution, valid today. This constitution goes to great lengths pushing revolutionary ideals - Land and wealth redistribution, universal and free education, keeps a complete separation between state and church, ensures state control over strategic areas... The 1917 constitution is one of our history's greatest achievements.
But, of course, it is not perfect - it paved the way for a hegemonic party controlling the real power behind it all. PRI started as a very heterogeneous mixture of the whole revolutionary family, but slowly became a bureaucratic, stagnated monolith.
And in a somehow ironic twist of destiny, the forces that today push for deepest changes, and precisely in the same direction that Villa and Zapata wished, are... Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional (EZLN) and Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV). EZLN is far more successful and advanced in its social experiment. Again, I won't comment further in what I don't really understand.
As a last point, the commenter I'm quoting (and whose name I must get, to update this post!), said that practically in every country that has transited from any sort of dictatorship towards a more-or-less believable democracy (say, everywhere in South America, or Spain, or Eastern Europe, or...), one of the first steps has been to update or replace the constitution with a new one, preventing the mistakes overlooked by the previous one from being reinstated. In our country, we have long heard about the "Reforma del Estado", a very nice-sounding-term which nobody believes in. After the 2006 electoral mess (no matter who won in the end, everybody will agree it was a mess that should be prevented from happening again, we had high hopes of real changes being introduced. A parliamentary, or at least semi-presidentialist regime was strongly suggested as a way forward. Changing the electoral system towards having second-rounds if needed. _anything!_ But no, we were stuck with... The same as always.
So, did the Revolution win or lose? It is clear to me. It won, and it really shaped -for better- what would happen in the next 100 years. However, in a century, we have been able to twist the law to make it turn against itself. I have to agree with my EZLN-minded friends (I sympathize with EZLN's general goals, but don't think its way forward is the right way to go): Pushing the change from within the government is just wishful thinking, but a strong delusion. However, is there a way to push our country forward without repeating a violent cycle? I really hope so. Our current situation is simply pathetic.
I lack a good closing for this post... So I'll let good old Jefe Pluma Blanca, Renato Leduc, do it for me.
Tiempos de Pancho Villa
y de la guerra de mentadas y tiros en la sierra.
Tiempos de fe
no en Dios sino en la tierra Por el cerro de la Pila
fueron entrando a Torre n
mi general Pancho Villa
y atr s la revoluci n...
Ay jijos...! ya se nos hizo
cu nto diablo bigot n... Ya viene Toribio Ortega
subiendo y bajando cerros
y no te enredes ni enga es
que ah anda Pablito Se ez
haciendo ladrar los perros. Cu nto usurero barb n...!
Ay jijos... c mo les vuela
de la levita el fald n...!
Ay jijos... ya se nos hizo:
triunf la revoluci n...! Tenemos camino andado...
No hay que juntarse con rotos
siempre te juegan traici n
ya Madero est vengado
ya muri la usurpaci n. En su caballo retinto
lleg Emiliano Zapata
bonita su silla charra
y sus botones de plata
pero mucho m s bonito
su famoso Plan de Ayala... Este gallo es de navaja
y no es gallo de espol n
si quieres tierra trabaja
trabaja no seas huev n... Ya lleg don Venustiano
con sus anteojos oscuros
y Villa y Zapata gritan:
No s que tengo en los ojos...
porque ya en Pablo Gonz lez
se vislumbra la traici n
Ay reata no te revientes
que es el ltimo jal n...! ya se est n muriendo todos
Jes s qu desilusi n...!
se est volviendo gobierno
Ay dios...! La revoluci n.

It is often argued that companies have to work with the FOSS community and there are good reasons for doing so. I've tried to collect a number of case stories of good and bad community interaction that may help as a starting point for further exploration of this topic:

• NVidia is probably the best example of a company that is not interested in providing open source drivers for their graphics chips. There are lots of folks who won't buy hardware with NVidia chips for this reason. Intel is the number 1 choice at the moment because they work closely with the community. Related to this, the Linux Foundation and kernel community released a statement regarding open drivers.
• When Sun finally made Java available as open source, they argued that it would help inclusion and distribution of Java (e.g. inclusion into Debian). Sun also felt that the GPL provides the strongest protection "against misbehaviour by monopolists in the Java platform".
• The Novell/Microsoft deal was not perceived well by the community, which led to web sites like http://boycottnovell.com
• Nokia recently had an insightful blog posting about the problems when nobody knows about the open source contributions you make: for example, you cannot influence decisions in a project as easily.
• Sun is often criticized for dominating all open source projects they run. They can be used as a good example that you have to give up some control in order to get outside participation.
• The fact that Xen is not in the mainline kernel is a key reason why a number of companies (e.g. IBM, Red Hat) are looking at KVM (which is in the mainline kernel and actively developed in the community). In fact, "looking" is probably not the best word. IBM is actively working on KVM to make it a viable solution and Red Hat recently acquired Qumranet, the company behind KVM.
• Oracle got fairly bad press for copying the Red Hat distribution and changing Red Hat to Oracle, without engaging in the Red Hat community.
• There's a paper that looks at "empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in OS activities." They look at 146 Italian companies supplying open source solutions, but unfortunately the study doesn't include any major company.

Can you think of other examples? (Originally published on FOSSBazaar where comments are possible)

I’m sceptical about Global Enterpreneurship Week after last year’s problems, but today is Social Enterprise Day, so I’ve tried to get involved with the WalesCoop Ethical Entrepreneurs Online Discussion from 1-2pm and 7-8pm today. Come join us!

Yep, they are back. Starting tomorrow on Channel 4. Don’t miss it.

The Open Rights Group is 3, and now has reached over 1000 fivers a month. To celebrate ORG have issued each of the first 1000 members with web badges, I have added my ORG badges into the sidebar. If you care about any of these: * Automatic Vehicle Tracking
* Copyright
* Creative Commons
* Data Protection
* DRM
* e-Voting
* Freedom of Information
* Identity
* Intellectual Property
* Net Neutrality
* Open Geodata
* Open Source
* Police Records
* Privacy
* Public Domain
* Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
* Release The Music
* RFID visit the site and sign up to help reach them target of 1500 fivers a month by December.

Bear with me that I keep you posted with boring news of screenshots.debian.net. But after further optimisation (caching the start page, serving screenshots directly from nginx instead of via Pylons) we decided that it’s time to get us on Slashdot. Thanks a lot to zepolen for teaching me about memcached and threading! The slashdot people have approved my announcement and we are already getting hammered by people following the link to screenshots.debian.net. Currently the server load is still near 100%, we have 10 Mbps network traffic and 60 request/second. Watching the web server logs is currently pretty cool. 21:08:30 up 455 days, 15:08, 2 users, load average: 1.27, 0.94, 0.69 Honestly I hardly ever read Slashdot. But apparently many others do. And if you are especially bored you can read the comments on the posting there. So much childishness. “You should have made it a distribution-independent site.” “How should I make a screenshot of libfoo-bar?” Why can’t people just be happy with what they get for free and make proper suggestions? Well, go create something yourself. Expecting something perfect from the start is pretty naive. But not unexpected.

The next Software in the Public Interest board meeting will take at 2000 UTC (noon PST / 15:00 EST / 20:00 GMT / 21:00 CET) on Wednesday 19 November 2008 on irc.oftc.net #spi. The agenda is online, but I’ve not seen an announcement yet. I’m surprised there’s not much on the agenda. Missing topics include supporting FACIL. What else do you think SPI should be doing?

Let’s start with a photo: That’s Jacob over at the pumpkin patch near us. He found something to inspect, and spent awhile doing it. As he does. He’s taken a liking to our cat, Nash. Jacob calls him “cat Nash”. Never just “Nash”. When we get home from somewhere, if the cat is around, Jacob will say, “Hi cat Nash! Hi cat Nash!” Then he’ll bend over, touch his head to Nash’s back, and try to give him a hug. Nash, surprisingly, doesn’t mind this. Jacob enjoys being a part of — well, everything. He will repeat back new words and phrases, trying to learn how to say them, even if he doesn’t understand what they mean yet. His favorite recent outdoor discovery is that grain silos are all over the place. He’ll point them out excitedly as we drive down the road. I had never noticed just how many there are. One day, he pointed at a water tower and said “SILO!” I understood why he said that, but I told him it was a water tower. He remembered that, and learned to tell them apart in a day or two. Then one morning he surprised me with, “Water tower. Water inside.” How he figured that out, I don’t know. There’s another photo of him at the pumpkin patch. The other day, I accidentally triggered our smoke alarms while checking one for a battery. After that, Jacob loved to say “BEEP! BEEP!” Sometimes followed by “Smoke larm. Hurt ears.” We learned how to say BEEP BEEP loud and also quiet. He’s certainly a lot of fun at this age.

Q: is a mobile phone (nice hardware, shitty firmware, btw) waterproof? A: I now got this new toy (Sony Ericsson S500i) as aresult. And because I don't really like losing contacts again (I never managed to connect to the old phone from Linux and was too lazy to use the Windows software), I have now fired up kitchensync with the OBEX SyncML client from the OpenSync project. And was very surprised that after only very little fiddling with the configuration I could indeed copy the contacts from the phone to KDE's addressbook. There seems to be a — not so usual anymore in this decade — utf8 problem somewhere (it looks as if the encoding from the phone is converted to utf8 twice, or it is latin1 to utf8 encoded but was already utf8 on the phone), and synchronisation is only one way so far (from the phone to KDE-PIM), with changes on the KDE side being overwritten. No idea which component those bugs are in, and documentation I've found is not very verbose. So, to start with: I've gotten this nice dump with hcidump. Now, how do I extract the actual data streams from that dump? I know I have to use wbxml2xml on the data, but first I need to unwrap the network data, and I haven't found that (probably read past it in the manpage of hcidump because I'm a bit tired.) Of course, if anybody out there has solved my issues I'd be just as happy with information on how that was done instead. In the mean time, I at least have reasonable back up of my phone's contact database again.

I'm somewhat known for triggering bugs nobody else hits. This was appreciated by several developers in good old days when I still used my Amiga as main machine (that's a decade ago in the meanwhile) where I was a betatester for some applications. But it seems I still got the talent to trigger strange bugs.

Today: Upgrading from kernel 2.6.26.2 to 2.6.27.6 breaks your OpenVPN tunnel for your DD-Wrt routers PPPoE session.

Yes, it's true. When using 2.6.27.6, DD-Wrt can't connect to the pppoe-server on my dedicated server anymore, instead it brings this kind of errors:

Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[513]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[495]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[486]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[369]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[1176]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[1399]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:59 vpn daemon.err pppd[1384]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)

The OpenVPN tunnel itself does work. I can see pppoe packets on both ends of the tunnel, alas the PPPoE session can't be started. When I reboot 2.6.26.2 again, everything works again.
Note: I booted into 2.6.27.6 because I wanted to try out if gphoto2 works better with a newer kernel because of maybe-fixed bugs in the USB stack.

Whee! Just another problem to deal with in the next days... ;-)

I just had a very nice chat on the phone with a man whose first attempt at online shopping seemed to have resulted in a fraudster using his card to buy mobile phone top-ups. I don’t understand why he called us (it wasn’t one of my web shops), but I hope I did the right thing by directing him back to his credit card company’s fraud department. While I was talking to him, I was checking the shop he had problems with. I wouldn’t have bought from it. Here’s how I checked it:- 1. Check the Page Open the front page of the site in one browser window and then use another window to get to a page that ought to be secure (the payment/checkout page is my usual one). Look at them both. Do either of them show any logos from well-known payment (Barclays, RBS, Protx, …) or security-checking services (thawte - who else?)? That’s not entirely reliable, but it’s usually a good sign because those companies attack people using their marks without permission. Look at the payment/checkout page - does the address in the address bar start “https”? If so, is the padlock in the browser status bar (usually bottom right) closed? That usually means it’s encrypted with a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. 2. Check the Certificate Open the certificate details. In Firefox-based browsers, double-click the padlock, then click the “View Certificate” button. Then pick “Subject” in the second list box. Usually, it looks like this:-

in that case, as long as the “CN” (common name) is the webserver you thought you were using and the “O” (organisation) and country code (C) make sense, then there’s nothing wrong. Some shops now use Extended Validation certificates and give a bit more information. Here’s one from a train company:-

In addition to the CN and O, it shows Organisational Unit (OU), Location (L), State (ST) and also other address parts and company number that Firefox doesn’t display neatly. This is a bit more reassuring, but also a lot more expensive for the shop owner (around 20 times more, last I checked), so I don’t blame shops for not using them. 3. Check the Registrations By this point, the payment processing and actual transaction are looking pretty good. Finally, I check the recipient. Find the business details on the web shop. Does it include a geographic address? If it contains a company registration number, look it up on the Companies House website. Then I find the business details on the domain names - you can use CoolWhois to look up domain names. If any of the addresses or numbers don’t match (Website, SSL Certificate, Whois), then I call them to ask why their website says they’re based in Bristol but their domain name is registered to Bolton. If they don’t answer messages, or - worse - the domain name says “Non-trading Individual” and the address has been omitted from the public listing, I give up on them and look for another shop. There’s no point securely paying someone that you can never reach if there’s a problem. 4. Buy Stuff and Check the Statements All being well, I then buy stuff and check my credit card statement each month before I pay it. I think any web shop owner (or webmaster - I help some people with this sort of thing) should be taking care of the basics above. Do your shops measure up? Despite the above checks, I can only remember not buying something online once in the last year. A couple of times, I’ve worked through the above steps and it’s changed which shop I bought from - and I’m pretty sure it saved me from losing 400 on one purchase.

Some time ago I spoke to Craig Keating about his plans for a new secondary school in the center of Melbourne. His plan was to focus on the core academic areas and cater to academically gifted students. He had some interesting ideas for his business, one of which was to pay teachers rates that are typical for private schools (higher rates than government schools) but not have any sport programs in the evenings or weekends (private schools typically require teachers to work every Saturday and one evening every week in coaching a sport). This would therefore give an hourly pay rate that was significantly higher than most private schools offered and would thus allow recruiting some of the most skilled teachers. One of his ideas was to intentionally keep the school small so that every teacher could know every student. One of the problems with most schools is that they take no feedback from the students. It seems that this serious deficiency would be largely addressed if the teachers knew the students and talked to them. He pointed out that in the history of our school system (which largely derived from the UK system) the private schools had a lot of sporting activities as a way of filling time for boarding students, given that few schools accept boarders (and those that do have only a small portion of the students boarding) the sports are just a distraction from study. This is not to say that sports are inherently bad or should be avoided. He encouraged parents to take their children to sporting activities that suit the interests of the child and the beliefs of the parents instead of having the child be drafted into a school sport and the parents being forced to take an unwilling child to sporting activities that they detest (which I believe is a common school experience). My own observation of school sport is that it is the epicentre of school bullying. There is an inherent risk of getting hurt when engaging in a sport. Some children get hurt every lesson, an intelligent person who ran a school with an intensive sports program might statistically analyse the injuries incurred and look for patterns. Children who are not good at sport are targeted for attack, for example when I was in year 7 (the first year of high school) one of my friends was assigned to the “cork bobbing” team in the swimming contest - this involved a contest to collect corks floating in the toddler pool for the students who were really bad at swimming. At that moment I knew that my friend would leave the school as the teachers had set him up for more intensive bullying than he could handle. Yet somehow the government still seems to believe that school sports are good! This is not to say that physical activity is bad, the PE 4 Life program [1] (which is given a positive review in the movie Supersize Me [2]) seems useful. It has a focus on fitness for everyone rather than pointless competition for the most skilled. I have just seen a sad announcement on the Keating College web site [3] that they will not be opening next year (and probably not opening at all). The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VCRA) announced in November that the application to be registered as a school (which was submitted in March) was rejected. The first reason for the rejection was the lack of facilities for teaching woodwork and metalwork. As the VCRA apparently has no problems registering girls’ schools that don’t teach hard maths (a teacher at one such school told me that not enough girls wanted to study maths) it seems unreasonable to deny registration to a school that doesn’t teach some crafts subjects and caters to students who aren’t interested in those areas. The second reason was the lack of facilities for sport and PE. Given the number of gyms in the city area it seems most likely that if specific objections were provided eight months earlier then something could have been easily arranged to cover the health and fitness issues. When I spoke to Craig he had specific plans for using the city baths, gyms, and parks for sporting activities, I expect that most parents who aren’t sports fanatics would find that his plans for PE were quite acceptable. The third reason is the claim that 600 square meters of office space is only enough to teach one class of 24 students. That would mean that 25 square meters is needed for each student! I wonder if students are expected to bring their own binoculars to see the teacher or whether the school is expected to provide them. :-# The government has a list of schools that work with the Australian Institute of Sport [4]. These schools provide additional flexibility in studies for athletes and probably some other benefits that aren’t mentioned in the brief web page. I don’t object to such special facilities being made available for the small number of students who might end up representing Australia in the Olympics at some future time. But I think that a greater benefit could be provided to a greater number of students if there were a number of schools opened to focus on the needs of students who are academically gifted. This doesn’t require that the government spend any money (they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the AIS), merely that they not oppose schools that want to focus on teaching. Currently the government is trying to force Internet censorship upon us with the claim that it will “protect children” [5]. It seems obvious to me that encouraging the establishment of schools such as Keating College will protect children from bullying (which is a very real threat and is the direct cause of some suicides). While so far no-one has shown any evidence that censoring the net will protect any child.

• [1] http://www.pe4life.org/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/09/22/supersize-me/


• [3] http://www.keatingcollege.com.au/


• [4] https://secure.ausport.gov.au/asc_internet/ais/scholarships/ais_athlete_career_and_education/ais_ace_-_what_we_do/educational_guidance


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/11/18/other-reasons-for-not-censoring/

I have been using Serendipity on my blog for some time now. Overall, I’ve been pleased with it, but the conversion was a pain. Serendipity is a simple blog engine, and has a wonderful built-in plugin system. It can detect what plugins need upgrading, and install those upgrades, all from directly within the management interface. There’s no unzipping stuff in install directories as with WordPress.

On the other hand, Serendipity has had some long-standing issues. #1 in the list is spam protection. I’ve been using the Captha system, but as some others have commented on here periodically, it can be a hassle for legitimate humans. The Serendipity implementation in particular, I mean. Another issue was with the plugins themselves. Because the software does updates itself, and plugins tend to write things in the install directory, your Serendipity install directory has to be writable by the webserver. Morever, it is difficult to keep track of local changes — forcing me to use git on the tree, and even then, it’s difficult. Finally, there has been some long-standing weirdness with the RSS feeds. I switched to WordPress over the weekend. It doesn’t solve everything, but it is a nice improvement. It has a ton of themes available, though many of them are not as high-quality as the themes in Serendipity, and it is hard to pick out the good ones quickly. WordPress has a larger development community and seems to be getting new features and improvements at a more rapid rate than Serendipity. I particularly like how it automatically saves drafts as I’m typing. That is a wonderful feature. I can’t tell how many draft posts I’ve lost by accidentally clicking on the wrong thing. Serendipity has a ton of plugins as well. I looked for Twitter plugins today. There are maybe a dozen of them. But there is no central tracking of them, so I have no idea which ones might be nicely peer-reviewed and which ones might rm -rf / on my server. Also, I don’t know which ones are going to be supported and upgraded over time. I’m happy with the way most WordPress themes work nicely with widgets. Though I am baffled that some WP themes hard-code in things like the calendar or archives when they could just let people insert a widget for it. The Conversion Process This was a real pain. I started with a Serendipity to WordPress converter. But alas, it only supports Serendipity databases in MySQL and mine’s in PostgreSQL. I used SQuirreL SQL with the DBCopy plugin to convert it. This worked… sorta. A few tables didn’t convert, but I didn’t need those. Some others had indexes that wouldn’t convert, and after re-trying it enough times, it went. Then I ran the converter. Alas it had some bugs and had to be fixed up with current table names and some things like that. Also I hacked it to preserve ID numbers. So eventually this migrated over the posts and categories. It did not preserve the category hierarchy. It also didn’t recognize when nl2br was disabled, and munge the post appropriately. And it didn’t migrate over tags, so I wrote a Haskell program to do that. Then it was a matter of crafting a bunch of RedirectPermanent and RewriteRule entries for Apache to try to redirect the old article pages and RSS feeds to their new locations as much as possible. Final Thoughts I’m glad I did it, and I don’t plan to do this again for a long time.

I started building the Debian archive with GCC 4.4 ten days ago to report build errors. I've completed the archive build now and reported about 220 bugs (the majority with patches). There are roughly 30 build failures left that I haven't analyzed yet. There are also about 35 packages that fail because the boost headers don't work with GCC 4.4. I'll try to build them when the boost headers get fixed. The majority of GCC 4.4 build errors are trivial. The large majority of failures is because of missing #include statements. There are also about 20 build errors because of improved preprocessor checks. I'll try to do another archive build when the gcc-4.4 package is in Debian.

Finally, it happened: the infamous nspluginwrapper is not needed to use the proprietary flash plugin on amd64. Get your plugin from adobe themselves. It’s supposedly alpha quality, but it really can’t be worse than having nswrapper.bin either eating your cpu or crashing, or only seeing a grey area instead of flash content.

Australia has slow Internet access when compared to other first-world countries. The costs of hosting servers are larger and the cost of residential access is greater with smaller limits. I read news reports with people in other countries complaining about having their home net connection restricted after they transfer 300G in one month, I have two net connections at the moment and the big (expensive) one allows me 25G of downloads per month. I use Internode, here are their current prices [1] (which are typical for Australia - they weren’t the cheapest last time I compared but they offer a good service and I am quite happy with them). Most people in Australia don’t want to pay $70 per month for net access, I believe that the plans which have limits of 10G of download or less are considerably more popular. Last time I investigated hosting servers in Australia I found that it would be totally impractical. The prices offered for limits such as 10G per month (for a server!) were comparable to prices offered by Linode [2] (and other ISPs in the US) for hundreds of gigs of transfer per month. I have recently configured a DomU at Linode for a client, Linode conveniently offers a choice of server rooms around the US so I chose a server room that was in the same region as my client’s other servers - giving 7 hops according to traceroute and a ping time as low as 2.5ms! Currently I am hosting www.coker.com.au and my blog in Germany thanks to the generosity of a German friend. An amount of bandwidth that would be rather expensive for hosting in Australia is by German standards unused capacity in a standard hosting plan. So I get to host my blog in Germany with higher speeds than my previous Australian hosting (which was bottlenecked due to overuse of it’s capacity) and no bandwidth quotas that I am likely to hit in the near future. This also allows me to do new and bigger things, for example one of my future plans is to assemble a collection of Xen images of SE Linux installations - that will be a set of archives that are about 100MB in size. Even when using bittorrent transferring 100MB files from a server in Australia becomes unusable. Most Australians who access my blog and have reasonably fast net connections (cable or ADSL2+) will notice a performance improvement. Australians who use modems might notice a performance drop due to longer latencies of connections to Germany (an increase of about 350ms in ping times). But if I could have had a fast cheap server in Australia then all Australians would have benefited. People who access my blog and my web site from Europe (and to a slightly lesser extent from the US) should notice a massive performance increase, particularly when I start hosting big files. It seems to me that the disadvantages of hosting in Australia due to bandwidth costs are hurting the country in many ways. For example I run servers in the US (both physical and Xen DomUs) for clients. My clients pay the US companies for managing the servers, these companies employ skilled staff in the US (who pay US income tax). It seems that the career opportunities for system administrators in the US and Europe are better than for Australia - which is why so many Australians choose to work in the US and Europe. Not only does this cost the country the tax money that they might pay if employed here, but it also costs the training of other people. It is impossible to estimate the cost of having some of the most skilled and dedicated people (the ones who desire the career opportunities that they can’t get at home) working in another country, contributing to users’ groups and professional societies, and sharing their skills with citizens of the country where they work. Companies based in Europe and the US have an advantage in that they can pay for hosting in their own currency and not be subject to currency variations. People who run Australian based companies that rent servers in the US get anxious whenever the US dollar goes up in value. To quickly investigate the hosting options chosen for various blogs I used the command “traceroute -T -p80” to do SYN traces to port 80 for some of the blogs syndicated on Planet Linux Australia [3]. Of the blogs I checked there were 13 hosted in Australia, 11 hosted independently in the US, and 5 hosted with major US based blog hosting services (Wordpress.com, Blogspot, and LiveJournal). While this is a small fraction of the blogs syndicated on that Planet, and blog hosting is also a small fraction of the overall Internet traffic, I think it does give an indication of what choices people are making in terms of hosting. Currently the Australian government is planning to censor the Internet with the aim of stopping child porn. Their general plan is to spend huge amounts of money filtering HTTP traffic in the hope that pedophiles don’t realise that they can use encrypted email, HTTPS, or even a VPN to transfer files without them getting blocked. If someone wanted to bring serious amounts of data to Australia, getting a tourist to bring back a few terabyte hard disks in their luggage would probably be the easiest and cheapest way to do it. Posting DVDs is also a viable option. Given that the Internet censorship plan is doomed to failure, it would be best if they could spend the money on something useful. Getting a better Internet infrastructure in the country would be one option to consider. The cost of Internet connection to other countries is determined by the cost of the international cables - which can not be upgraded quickly or cheaply. But even within Australia bandwidth is not as cheap as it could be. If the Telstra monopoly on the local loop was broken and the highest possible ADSL speeds were offered to everyone then it would be a good start towards improving Australia’s Internet access. Australia and NZ seem to have a unique position on the Internet in terms of being first-world countries that are a long way from the nearest net connections and which therefore have slow net access to the rest of the world. It seems that the development of Content Delivery Network [4] technology could potentially provide more benefits for Australia than for most countries. CDN enabling some common applications (such as Wordpress) would not require a huge investment but has the potential to decrease international data transfer while improving the performance for everyone. For example if I could have a Wordpress slave server in Australia which directed all writes to my server in Germany and have my DNS server return an IP address for the server which matches the region where the request came from then I could give better performance to the 7% of my blog readers who appear to reside in Australia while decreasing International data transfer by about 300MB per month.

• [1] http://www.internode.on.net/residential/internet/home_adsl/nakedextreme/pricing/


• [2] http://www.linode.com/


• [3] http://planet.linux.org.au/


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Delivery_Network