The term Cloud Computing seems to be poorly defined at the moment, as an example the Wikipedia page about it is rather incoherent [1]. The one area in which all definitions of the term agree is that a service is provided by a varying number of servers of which the details are unknown to the people who use the services - including the people who program them. There seem to be four main definitions of cloud computing. The first one is Distributed Computing [2] (multiple machines in different administrative domains being used to perform a single task or several tasks), this definition does not seem to be well accepted and will probably disappear. The next one is Software As A Service [3] which is usually based on the concept of outsourcing the ownership and management of some software and accessing it over the Internet. An example is the companies that offer outsourced management of mail servers that are compatible with MS Exchange (a notoriously difficult system to manage). For an annual fee per email address you can have someone else run an Exchange compatible mail server which can talk to Blackberries etc. The main benefit of SAAS is that it saves the risk and expense of managing the software, having the software deployed at a central location is merely a way of providing further cost reductions (some companies that offer SAAS services will also install the software on your servers at greater expense). The last two definitions are the ones that I consider the most interesting, that is virtual machines (also known as Cloud Infrastructure [4]) and virtual hosting of applications (also known as Cloud Platforms [5]). The Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service [6] seems to be the leading virtual machine cloud service at the moment. Google App Engine [7] seems to be the leading cloud application hosting service at the moment. It is also claimed that “Cloud Storage” is part of cloud computing. It seems to me that storing data on servers all over the world is something that was done long before the term “Cloud Computing” was invented, so I don’t think it’s deserving of the term.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service


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


• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cloud_platforms


• [6] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/04/getting-started-with-amazon-ec2/


• [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Engine

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I've been looking at DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) to see if it's useful. My main interest is reducing bounced mail that I didn't send and other people receiving less spam that appears to come from me. It seems there isn't a lot of documentation about it around, and I had to go and read some of the RFCs and drafts to understand things. So I hope this is useful for someone. According to the wikipedia article it can be used to verify that the message comes from the domain that it claims to have come from. On the other hand the DKIM FAQ says it's all about the reputation of the organization the messages passed by. There is a project that creates a reputation database that then can be used in anti-spam software like spamassassin. So I at first sight this didn't look useful at all to me. It basically seems like a way to verify the Received lines in the message header. And it seems that that is what most of the software is doing. But there also seems to be an Author Domain Signing Practices (ADSP). It allows you to say that if the message isn't signed it can be dropped because it's spam. There is nothing else in DKIM other than reputation on which you can base that something might be spam or not. So I started looking in software that supported that. It seems that dkim-milter is the only software available in Debian that implements it. But it seems to be using the _asp._domainkey DNS entry from an old draft instead of the _adsp._domainkey as used in latest draft. Older drafts even used _ssp._domainkey. So it seems to me that it's not useful yet and I'll wait until the ADSP RFC is actually published and there is software available that supports it. Update:
It seems that dkim-milter from version 2.7.0 now uses _adsp._domainkey, but we currently only have 2.6.0 in Debian. But the wizard of sendmail.org still generates the _asp._domainkey. I've filed enhancement requests for spamassassin and dkimproxy / Mail::DKIM.

sarge archived As already written a few days ago I was going to archive Sarge on archive.debian.org. That is done, you can get sarge from there now. The dists/sarge directory also already disappeared from the regular mirrors a few days ago. Im not simply deleting all source and binary packages from Sarge. Instead I am doing a removal of 1000 packages every second day, which ends up in batches of about 10000 removed files every other day. While that is a little more work on the archive side I think it pays off - many mirrors, including Debians own ones, limit the amount of files they delete in one mirror run and it is much less work than asking every mirror admin to make sure it will work on their system. Oh, just in case you mirror archive.debian.org somewhere: Make sure to use -H in your rsync call, will save about 30G of disk space.

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Sarge AMD64, volatile and backports Now, while I was already working on archive.debian.org I thought it could do a little more than it did in the past. So I also went and put the Sarge AMD64 release on it, in a seperate directory. And as it would have felt lonely I put sarge-backports and sagre-volatile right beside it.

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security and non-us non-us.debian.org is a service thats dead since the sarge release. Finally it also got archived on archive.debian.org (it helps that this service is, since a long time, no longer on a host in the US). security.debian.org now also appears on archive.debian.org, and the security archive will soon lose the files of old releases like slink, potato, woody and also sarge.

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0.93R6, Rex and Buzz I got a few responses to my post about old releases and now we also provide 0.93R6. And to make it even better we now also have the binary packages for Rex and Buzz again. I still would like to see even older releases, including alpha and beta versions, so if you have such old things somewhere - tell me. Just make sure they somehow include the source too. I do have 0.91 for example, but it is missing any kind of source except for one package and one patchset. :(

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Old list archives, old bugs On one of the CD images I thankfully got from J.H.M. Dassen I found another nice thing - old mailinglist archives from 1995 and 1996 as well as old bugs, #350 - #1626. The list- and bugpeople both got a tarball and just need to import them to make them available again. (Well, Don will kill me for that just, the bugs are html and textfile dumps, so he needs to parse them to get them in the right format for debbugs. But I’m sure he will manage. :) ). Comments: 2

First, let me make one thing clear. This isn't constructive criticism. This is just criticism. It's directed at software that's so wrong-headed that there's no way to make it significantly better, and everyone involved would be much better spending their time doing something else instead of trying to fix any of what I'm about to describe. It's not worth it. Sit in a park or something instead. Meet new and interesting people. Take up a hobby that doesn't involve writing shell scripts for Linux. You'll be happier. I'll be happier. Everyone wins.

Anyway. I wrote about Automatix some time ago. It died and the world became a better place. More recently it's been resurrected as something called Ultamatix. In summary, don't bother. It's crap. And dangerous. But mostly crap. Again, I'm going to utterly ignore the UI code and just concentrate on what it runs.

• function cleanup  
  echo "Cleaning up..."
  sudo apt-get autoremove --assume-yes --force-yes
   

  In other words, "Remove a bunch of packages that might have nothing to do with anything Ultamatix has installed, and don't ask the user first. Oh, and assume yes when asked whether to do anything potentially damaging". This gets called 103 times in various bits of Ultamatix.
  
  
• Oh, notice the sudo in there? Ultamatix is running as root already. Despite this, there are 429 separate calls to sudo.
  

• #Test O/S 64 or 32 bit...
  architecture= uname -m 
  targetarch="x86" #Set 64-bit machines to download 32-bit if no options are set
  if [ "$architecture" != "x86_64" ] && [ "$architecture" != "ia64" ]; then
      architecture="x86"
  else
      architecture="x86_64"
  fi

  It turns out that ia64 is not especially good at running x86_64 binaries. Never mind, eh?
  

• rm -rf $AXHOME/.gstreamer-0.10
  gst-inspect
  sudo gst-inspect
  

  Which translates as "Delete any self-installed plugins, run gst-inspect as root in an attempt to regenerate the plugin database, really run gst-inspect as root in an attempt to regenerate the plugin database". The flaws in this are left as an exercise for the reader.
  

• sudo apt-get --assume-yes --force-yes remove --purge

  Used 111 times. Will remove the packages it installed, but also any other packages the user has installed that happen to depend on them. Without asking.
  

• sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.bak
  sudo echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update
  if !    sudo apt-get install --assume-yes --force-yes amarok-nightly amarok-nightly-tools amarok-nightly-taglib
  then
          AX_fatal "An apt-based error occurred and installation was unsuccessful";
  fi
  echo "Restoring sources."
  sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.bak /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update

  The good news is that it backs up your sources.list before breaking things. The bad news is that it's still utterly horrifying.
  

• #since we have root we need to discover normal username so we can create the shortcut & set proper permissions
  NU=$(cat /etc/passwd   grep 1000   cut -d: -f1)
  sudo chown $NU:$NU "legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb"
  sudo chmod +x legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb
  sudo dpkg -i legends_linux-0.4.1.43.deb

  List of fail:
  1. Assuming that the user has uid 1000
  2. Chowning a deb to the user for no obvious reason (hint: a user can delete root owned files that are in the user's home directory)
  3. Making a deb executable for no reason whatsoever
  4. Assuming that user information will be in /etc/passwd
  5. Not just, say, passing the user's name to the application IN THE FIRST PLACE

• sudo apt-get --assume-yes --force-yes install f-spot dvgrab kino devede gtkpod-aac ipod gnupod-tools libgpod-common
  libipod-cil libipoddevice0 libipodui-cil libhfsp0 hfsplus hfsutils libipod0

  If only we had some way of saying that libraries used by programs should automatically be installed when a program is. Wouldn't that be great?
  

• echo "Adding mediabuntu repository"
  sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.bak
  sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
  ...
  echo "Restoring sources."
  sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.bak /etc/apt/sources.list

  Yeah. that'll help.
  
  
• The Swiftweasel install that checks your CPU type and then has some insane number of cut and paste code chunks that differ only by the filename of the tarball it grabs. Rather than, say, using a variable and writing the code once.
  
  
• The cutting and pasting of the same code in order to install swiftdove.
  
  
• Code that installs packages differently depending on whether they happened to be in your home directory to start with or whether it had to download them for you
  

• if !    DEBIAN_FRONTEND=kde sudo apt-get --assume-yes --force-yesinstall virtualbox

  No, I didn't remove any spaces from that.
  

• #create directory incase they installed it elsewhere, no sense in scraping all thier games
  sudo mkdir /usr/local/games/WoP/ 2>/dev/null
  ...
  sudo rm -R /usr/local/games/WoP/ 2>/dev/null

  What, create a directory and then immediately delete it? How is this useful in any way whatsoever?

There's almost certainly more. I got bored. The worrying thing about this is that the Ultamatix author read my criticisms of Automatix and appears to have attempted to fix all of them. The problem with this is that there's clearly a complete lack of understanding of the fundamental problem in several cases. For example, one of my criticisms of Automatix:

sudo sed -i "s/^vboxusers\(.*\):$/vboxusers\1:$AXUSER/" /etc/group

- assumes that the system isn't using some sort of user directory service.

and the Ultamatix response:

Fixed...Got rid of Virtualbox

Except exactly the same problem is present at other points in Ultamatix, as noted above. Taking a bug list and slavishly fixing or deleting all the bugs isn't helpful if you then proceed to add the same bug back in 24 other places. In that respect, it's even worse than Automatix - the author's managed to produce a huge steaming pile of shite despite having been told how to avoid doing so beforehand. He may be no newbie to programming, but if not it's a perfect example of how experience doesn't imply competence.

Don't install this package. Don't let anyone else install this package. If you see anyone advocating the installation of this package, call them a fool. There's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for the existence of this kind of crap.

Minor update:
The above was looking at 1.8.0-4. It turns out that there's a 1.8.0-5 that's not linked off the website. There's no substantive difference, but some of the numbers may be slightly different.

One significant dividing factor between mailing lists is the difference between summary lists (where the person who asks a question receives replies off-list and then sends a summary to the list) and the majority of mailing lists which are discussion lists (where every reply goes to the list by default). I have seen an argument put forward that trusting the answers on a mailing list that operates under the summary list model is inherently risky and that peer review is required. It could be argued that the process of sending a summary to the list is the peer review. I’m sure that if someone posts a summary which includes some outrageously bad idea then there will be some commentary in response. Of course the down-side to this is that it takes a few days for responses to the question to arrive and as it’s common that computer problems need to be solved in hours not days the problem will be solved (one way or another) before the summary message is written. But the idea of peer review in mailing lists seems to fall down in many other ways. The first problem with the idea of peer review is that the usual aim of mailing lists is that most people will first ask google and only ask the list if a reasonable google search fails (probably most mailing lists would fall apart under the load of repeated questions otherwise). Therefore I expect that the majority of such problems to be solved by reading a web page (with no peer review that is easily accessible). Some of those web pages contain bad advice and part of the skill involved in solving any problem relates to recognising which advice to follow. Also it’s not uncommon for a question on a discussion list to result in a discussion with two or more radically different points of view being strongly supported. I think that as a general rule there is little benefit in asking for advice if you lack any ability to determine whether the advice is any good, and which of the possible pieces of good advice actually apply to your situation. Sometimes you can recognise good advice by the people who offer it, in a small community such as a mailing list it’s easy to recognise the people who have a history of offering reasonable advice. It seems that the main disadvantage of asking google when compared to asking a mailing list is that the google results will in most cases contain links to web sites written by people who you don’t know. Sometimes the advice is easy to assess, for example if someone recommends a little-known and badly documented command-line option for a utility it’s easy to read the man page and not overly difficult to read the source to discover whether it is a useful solution. Even testing a suggested solution is usually a viable option. Also it’s often the case that doing a google search on a recommended solution will be very informative (sometimes you see web pages saying “here’s something I tried which failed”). Recommendations based on personal experience are less reliable due to statistical issues (consider the the regular disagreements about the reliability of hard disks where some people claim that RAID is not necessary due to not having seen failures while others claim that RAID-5 is inadequate because it has failed them). There are also issues of different requirements, trivial issues such as the amount of money that can be spent will often determine which (if any) of the pieces of good advice can be adopted. The fact that a large number of people (possibly the majority of Internet users) regularly forward as fact rumors that are debunked by Snopes.com (the main site for debunking urban legends) seems to indicate that it is always going to be impossible to increase the quality of advice beyond a certain level. A significant portion of the people on the net are either unwilling to spend a small amount of effort in determining the accuracy of information that they send around or are so gullible that they believe such things beyond the possibility of doubt. Consider that the next time you ask for advice on a technical issue, you may receive a response from someone who forwarded a rumor that was debunked by Snopes. Sometimes technical advice is just inherently dangerous because it is impossible to verify the integrity of some code that is being shared, or because it may be based on different versions of software. In a previous blog post I analyse some issues related to security of the Amazon EC2 service [1]. While the EC2 service is great in many ways (and implements a good well-documented set of security features on the servers) the unsigned code for managing it and the old versions of the images that they offer to customers raise some serious issues that provide avenues for attack. Getting the EC2 management tools to work correctly on Debian is not trivial, I have released patches but will not release packages for legal reasons. It seems most likely to me that someone will release packages based on my patches (either because they don’t care about the legal issues or they have legal advice suggesting that such things are OK - maybe due to residing in a different jurisdiction). Then people who download such packages will have to determine whether they trust the person who built them. They may also have the issue of Amazon offering a newer version of the software than that which is packaged for Debian (for all I know Amazon released a new version yesterday). The term integrity when applied to computers refers to either accidental or malicious damage to data [2]. In the context of mailing list discussions this means both poorly considered advice and acts of malice (which when you consider spam and undisclosed conflicts of interest are actually quite common). If you ask for advice in any forum (and I use the term in it’s broadest sense to cover web “forums”, IRC, twitter, etc) then getting a useful result will depend on having the majority of members of the forum possessing sufficient integrity and skill, being able to recognise the people whose advice should be followed, or being able to recognise good advice on it’s own. I can think of few examples of forums of which I have been involved where the level of skill was sufficient to provide quality answers (and refutations for bad answers) for all areas of discussion that were on topic. People whose advice should generally be followed will often offer advice on areas where their skills are less well developed, someone whose advice can be blindly followed in regard to topic A may not be a reliable source for advice on topic B - which can cause confusion if the topics in question are closely related. Finally a fundamental difference between “peer review” (as applied to conferences and academic journals) is that review for conferences and journals is conducted before the presentation. Not only does the work have to be good enough to pass the review, but the people doing it will never be sure what the threshold is (and will generally want to do more than a minimal effort) so the quality will be quite high. While peer review in mailing lists is mostly based around the presence or absence of flames. A message which doesn’t attract flames will either have some minimal quality or be related to a topic that is not well known (so no-one regards it as being obviously wrong). Update: The “peer review” process of publishing a post on my blog revealed that I had incorrectly used who’s instead of whose.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/10/13/ec2-security/


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_integrity

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Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now. The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that. Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage. Updated After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.

Well, it seems that there were few problems with the pre-release of DAViCal I pushed out last week, so 0.9.6 is out now. The full release notes are on the wiki. The biggest change is that this release now supports free/busy using the method defined in the draft scheduling extensions for CalDAV, so it's possible to schedule meetings with Sunbird/Lightning or iCal, and possibly other clients if they support that. Now I can concentrate on getting some paid work done for a few weeks before I start on the next stage. Updated After release I discovered that due to the changed behaviour of DAViCal, interoperation with Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning 0.8 was no longer working. A new 0.9.6.1 version has been released to resolve this issue.

It's been a full day. We started with a visit to Tattered Rose antiques in Goessel. It's one of those places that is open only a few days each year. Jacob would normally be OK with going there, but he knew he would be visiting his Uncle Peter and Aunt Katherine later in the day, and although he knew we'd go to the antique store first, he was still very displeased when the car pulled up there instead of Peter and Katherine's place.

So we went in, and he was rather grumpy. Despite that, the owner came over and commented on him being one of the best behaved 2-year-olds that's ever been in her store. She gave him some wood pieces painted to look like watermelon slices, and box perfect for putting them in and shaking. Meanwhile, Terah and I browsed, and wound up walking out with an old "machine table" complete with flywheel for a sewing machine, and a German wall painting thingy. Not quite sure how to describe that.

Jacob said "ready go?" many times, and so we went home, dropped off the purchases, then took him to Peter and Katherine's place. He walked in, looked around, and made himself at home right away. "Candles - FIRE!" he exclaimed, as he saw some (unlit) candles within reach. Jacob spent the afternoon with them, and Terah and I drove up to Abilene.

We visited 4 or 5 different antique stores there. Lots of interesting things to look at, but we only wound up purchasing a wooden duck. Then dinner at the Brookville Hotel (fried chicken and excellent coleslaw), and back to pick up Jacob.

He was so excited he didn't take a nap, or sleep at all, even though it was well past his bedtime when we got there. We heard of him getting a ride behind a bicycle in a child trailer, shoving a big ball down the stairs and then watching as it bounces down, and watching Uncle Peter dunk a roll in his soup and copying him by dunking a roll in his water glass. But Jacob was "ready go" so we went on home.

He fell asleep about a minute before we got home. He stayed asleep while his car seat was unbuckled, while he was carried inside, while his diaper and clothes were changed, while he was laid down in his crib, and even while the vacuum cleaner was run right outside his door. A sure sign he had a fun day.

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If someone by any chance has noticed in
DEHS' stats page
that there was a bump in the number of failing watch files and is
wondering why it hasn't gone down like it used to, here's the answer:
I'm testing how DEHS' can heal itself, and how long it takes.

In the past when such kind of bumps occurred I used to start a special
DEHS run which retries all the failed watch files, but since doing
that is probably the reason why some of the normal runs process many
more watch files and take longer to finish I decided to let DEHS
automatically recover.

According to my plan it should take from 6 to 7 days to completely
recover from the last mass-failure which was caused by sourceforge's
garr mirror going down abruptly. And I hope this information will be
of some use to design a proper self-healing/recovery mechanism for
DEHS2 (or should it be DEHS-ng? I don't know yet, feel free to propose
names)

Some weeks ago, I accidentally deleted half of my /usr/lib. I didn't lose anything important and was able to restore everything (thanks to my Ctrl+C'ing the process in time) but that user error did strike me as too easy to make (apparently, I'm not alone). So I started thinking about how I could prevent something like that from happening again.

I realized one thing: there is no way I would ever want to delete /usr or /etc for example. I figured that "rm" should, by default, refuse to delete certain critical directories (or files). Of course, that would be a very controversial patch to "rm" itself and the chances of this approach succeeding were pretty close to zero.

So instead, I decided to build a wrapper around "rm" which prevents the deletion of important files by checking each one against a blacklist. Anything you add to the blacklist will not be deletable using "rm" unless you override this protection by calling "rm.real" directly.



This tool, safe-rm, ships with a default system-wide configuration file (/etc/safe-rm.conf), but each user can supplement that list of "protected" directories and files by adding lines to ~/.safe-rm.

Debian and Ubuntu packages are available from the usual places.

There are of course different approaches to preventing these kinds of problems...

When Heather designed a logo for me for Morphoss she did it with a bitmap editor, naturally enough because that's the tool she's most familiar with using. I'd rather not use a bitmap as the source format for the logo though, because it will degrade when it gets resized, so I redrew it as a vector graphic. One of the best free, open-source tools around for vector graphics seems to be Inkscape and I've mucked around with it for many years, so I naturally used that. Once you have a logo though, you naturally want to use it in documents, and the importing of SVG graphics into OpenOffice.org documents is a long-outstanding bug (let alone embedding SVG graphics) so I needed to convert them to another format. It's actually the most requested feature in OOo, appearing twice in the top 10, and even spawning an external SVG importer project. Since both programs support encapsulated postscript I was able to save the logo from Inkscape as .eps and use it directly in OpenOffice.org. While this initially seemed satisfactory, after a few weeks of using documents with the .eps logo embedded in them I started to get annoyed with the strange pauses when my CPU was maxed out while paging up and down. I was sure that that had not happened in the past when I was using a logo in WMF format, which OOo inevitably has to support well for compatibility with other Office Suites. After some searching around for more complicated ways to convert SVG or EPS to WMF, I discovered that what I could do was simply to open the EPS in OpenOffice.org draw, and save it from there as a WMF. This seems to work well, for my purposes anyway, so now when I use my logo in my OpenOffice.org documents I don't see any annoying slowdown paging up and down within the document, and I didn't have to download the SVG importer for OpenOffice.org either. Well alright, I did download the SVG importer as well, but my logo didn't look nearly so good without it's text, and with everything displaced up and to the right at various offsets!

I just managed to chat with the nurse at the doctors office. The chest x-rays confirm Pneumonia, and I'm now on antibiotics. They've also done two throat swabs. The first came back negative for Strep Throat, but I apparently clearly have a throat infection of some sort. They also did blood work to check for mono. The rest of the lab work will come back in 48-72 hours. The antibiotics will almost certainly cover everything already, though. I should apparently be non-contagious by Wednesday and back to work then.

I'd planned to mention this a little closer to New Years, but may as well post it now: We're not the only ones who've had a crappy year. Two of the couple I know who've been together longer than Angie and I have been broke up this year. Other people have had problems with their kids, or been fighting, or been fucked by the stock market.

So I'm proposing a "Global Fuck You". At 00h15 GMT (So that folks in Brittan can celebrate New Years and then participate), I'm proposing that anyone who feels like they could've done without some piece of 2008 go out and burn something. If you feel so inclined, write the list on a sheet of paper of the items, and torch it over a candle (In the parking lot! Don't start 2009 homeless!) If you choose to burn something more creative, I probably don't want to hear about it (I'm looking at you, students in France!). =) I don't know if it'll do any good, but it will certainly feel good.

I'll post again in mid-December about this. In the meantime, tell your friends! Start a Facebook group. Or something. Next year's gotta be better.

Hugs and love, friends. Thanks for the b-day wishes. Congrats to those doing the Ubuntu release! =)

Update: On the other hand, I'm *really* glad we're not moving tomorrow anymore! =)

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

Phew... that was a lot of work. I have a bunch of small sites that I migrated to slicehost, and at the same time upgraded to Rails 2.1. Here are my notes:

• x86_64 sucks up memory in a bad way. On a 32-bit x86 system davidw 20089 0.0 0.1 3320 1428 pts/1 S+ 11:41 0:00 ruby and on x86-64: davidw 24197 0.0 0.1 16756 1968 pts/0 S+ 18:33 0:00 ruby Ouch! That means that you'll need more memory, and thus to spend more money, to run code that might have fit decently in a similar amount of memory on an x86 machine. For instance, my old server had a gig, and was running low on memory, so on slicehost, I set up one 512 meg slice to handle PostgreSQL, and a gig slice to handle Apache and Rails. The database slice is performing ok, but the 'web' one is kind of iffy in terms of memory. Part of the problem here, I will admit, is that Rails is a memory hog, but still, I had hoped to come out ahead by moving from a machine with 1 gig to two machines with 1.5 gigs between them, and instead I'm more or less where I was before.
• I got caught up in a bit of a mess with Rails and the Ubuntu Intrepid update. I prefer to manage the Ruby stuff with gems, rather than traditional .deb package management, as I've had better luck with that in the past. I do use some of the system packages though, such as libpgsql-ruby1.8. However, the maintainers did something kind of ugly with the package: they swapped out the actual code from one code base to another - "Switched upstream source from ruby-postgres to ruby-pg". Which changes the way you load it, and perhaps a few other things as well. I think I would have been happier seeing the package renamed or something, as all of a sudden, programs stopped working.
• I really like the ability to resize slices. I started both my slices at the 256 size, and then made them bigger when I was ready to put them into production. The process is not instantaneous, but it's pretty handy if you need more capacity in a hurry. Adding new slices is also fast.

So, all in all, I'm happy with the move, although the memory issue is irritating.

“I can understand, accept and respect that there are people with different sexual trends, but that they feel proud to be gay? That they go out on parades and demonstrations?” , Said the Queen of Spain to Pilar Urbano, the author of a biography about her (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “If these people want to live together, dress up for a wedding and to marry, they might have right to do so or not, according to their country’s laws: but they shouldn’t call that marriage, because it’s not. There are many possible names: social contract, union contract.“, she added. “Puedo comprender, aceptar y respetar que haya personas con otra tendencia sexual, pero que se sientan orgullosos por ser gays? Que se suban a una carroza y salgan en manifestaciones?“, dijo la Reina de Espa a a Pilar Urbano, autora de una biograf a sobre ella (”La Reina muy de cerca“). “Si esas personas quieren vivir juntas, vestirse de novios y casarse, pueden estar en su derecho, o no, seg n las leyes de su pa s: pero que a eso no le llamen matrimonio, porque no lo es. Hay muchos nombres posibles: contrato social, contrato de uni n.“, a adi . She has also spoken against abortion and euthanasia and in favor of forcing all the children to learn religion (catholic) at school. The Royal Family is supposed not to have a public political opinion, as they should theoretically represent every Spanish person. Fortunately many of us don’t believe in blue blood, kings, queens and all that stuff, so she definitely doesn’t represent us God shave the Queen!

Systems Expo 2008 As the last years, Debian was offered a booth at last week's Systems expo here in Munich again. However, this year the Free Projects area was not organized by Rosa Riebl from C&L publishing, but by Wolfgang Drotschmann from LinuxTag e.V.. This made some things a bit more difficult, e.g. we did not know our exact booth number until a couple of days before the expo and the small conference programme was made up in an ad-hoc fashion after the expo started, but in the end most things worked out fine in some way or the other. While the booth (a demo-point, really) was as big (or rather small) as last year, there was much more space around the booth this year (something which seemed to apply to all of Systems), so things did not get too crowded even when a handful of visitors approached the booth at once. Also, the visibility was much improved as our demo point was visible by strolling visitors this year (last year, our demo point was just facing the wall). As nobody else stepped up, I had to organize the booth again. Fewer people than last year were around; only Robert Grimm, Arne Wichmann, Franziska Lichtblau, Johannes Wiedersich, Andreas Barth and I were able to commit to staffing the booth; other people were busy over the week or moved away from Munich since last year, like Robert Lemmen or Wolfgang Lonien. Luckily, we still had the computer the GNOME project donated to us last year, and I took a TFT, keyboard and mouse from the university along. This year, I decided to not show up for the booth build-up the day before Systems starts. On the one hand, I had made the experience that there is not much one can do then anyway, and would have to put the computer/TFT into the central locker room overnight anyway. On the other hand, there was as always a very low attendence in the first few hours of the expo so building up the booth in the morning turned out to be no problem. The Credativ people again provided us with merchandise (due to some miscommunication on my part the package had to arrive directly at the expo, but in the end I was glad about this as I had enough trouble carrying the computer and TFT to the expo). This year, thanks to Credativ, we were able to provide some t-shirts for the first time, something quite some visitors had requested over the years. Besides t-shirts, we had some swirl stickers and the popular Debian keychains provided by Joerg Jaspert through Credativ. In the end the booth mostly consisted of the computer (demonstrating Lenny most of the time) and some A4 sized Swirls I had printed out the day before. From Wednesday on we were able to provide Lenny Beta2 CDs as well thanks to Johannes Wiedersich who organized them. Initially, I asked ADR whether they would produce some CDs for us again as they did last year, but they did not bring the appropriate hardware this time. But thanks to Johannes we were still able to provide interested visitors with CDs through LSK. In the end, we ran out of most t-shirts at some point on Thursday and managed to sell the two remaining Lady shirts on Friday. All the other merchandise was gone by the end of the show as well so the way back was not that difficult, even more so as Andreas Barth helped me carry the computer to the subway and my car. The days I was at Systems (first and last day) the attendance was rather low, so not that many interesting discussions happened. Almost everybody who stepped by knew Debian already and the majority was using it themselves as well, at least on their servers. Those people were also really quite happy, we rarely heard much critizism, even after asking people for some. The most frequently asked question was undoubtly "when will Lenny release?", followed by "do you have that cool t-shirt in L or XL as well?". Overall it was a pretty good experience, albeit slightly stressful organizing it. In any case, this was probably the last time I had to do this as the Systems organizers announced they will rethink their concept and there will be no Systems 2009.

One of the things I wished for last month was a decent cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service. About the same time, Ofcom started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Now there’s an excellent presentation by Vivian Woodall, Chief Executive of The Phone Co-op that was given to FCS’ Comms Provider 08 event. Ofcom’s Mobile citizens, mobile consumers: the importance of mobile suggests the idea of re-regulating is “controversial”. I’ve left a comment there that asks why. It seems obvious to me that UK mobile phone service is currently a market for lemons - useful independent measurements are few and far between, there are no trial periods and it’s often expensive to change provider. Maybe it’s different in the big cities. Meanwhile, real complaints like An Orange-coloured hell, T-Mobile is the new Orange.. and Cancelling a Three mobile contract FAIL keep appearing with depressing frequency. Just how big does the FAIL need to be before Ofcom actually intervene?

One of the things I wished for last month was a decent cooperative pay-as-you-go mobile phone service. About the same time, Ofcom started a social web consultation about mobile phone services. Now there’s an excellent presentation by Vivian Woodall, Chief Executive of The Phone Co-op that was given to FCS’ Comms Provider 08 event. Ofcom’s Mobile citizens, mobile consumers: the importance of mobile suggests the idea of re-regulating is “controversial”. I’ve left a comment there that asks why. It seems obvious to me that UK mobile phone service is currently a market for lemons - useful independent measurements are few and far between, there are no trial periods and it’s often expensive to change provider. Maybe it’s different in the big cities. Meanwhile, real complaints like An Orange-coloured hell, T-Mobile is the new Orange.. and Cancelling a Three mobile contract FAIL keep appearing with depressing frequency. Just how big does the FAIL need to be before Ofcom actually intervene?

The Debian Lenny release has still quite a big list of Release Critical bugs, and as Debian developer I feel that I should do my share, and at least look at the list of bugs and see if there's any I could do something for.

Almost always though, I find that I won't touch the remaining bugs in the list.because of one or more of these reasons:

1. a package I really don't care about
2. hugely complex package or might also use something obscure like cddb
3. it seems like people are already looking into it
4. it requires a political solution, not a technical one
   

As part of the effort to get Lenny released, Joss Mouette started the Debian Bug Sprint.
This is really a cool concept, and it is a shame not more people participated.

The reason for me it is cool is that it forced me to break the rules I mentioned above, because I got a bug which fitted 1 and 4 of my list above!

Turned out this bug is really a border case in interpretation of Debian policy.

The package is perfectly usable without any extern dependencies, hence it is currently in the main section of Debian. However it doesn't end there. The package also has a download script that can fetch firmware images for certain printers. It appears for people with these printers the package is NOT usable without external files.

Aparantly though, the current, as one person involved in the bug calls it, "spirit" of Debian is to tolerate this, as it is good enough that it is usable without external dependencies for SOME persons.

However the bug submitter doesn't agree, and thinks this is a case that needs addressing withing the Debian project.

I suggested splitting up the package and moving the download script to contrib, but this was mostly dismissed as idea.

The end result is that the maintainer decided to escalate the problem to the Debian CTTE.
This means it probable won't be solved by today, soo I will have to bake cookies for someone :)