Actual I’m involved into a project which maybe of interest for you if you like opera particular when you are a Richard Wagner enthusiast.
Since long time, the waiting period for obtaining tickets increases a lot. At the moment I think you have to wait around 8 years, which is a worse.
Time changes also at Bayreuth Festival, they seems to refocus their audience. Looks like the aspects of huge waiting list and new medias influenced that process. This year the opera “Die Meistersinger” is broadcasted online under the slogan “live dabei” (live there) via the great thing called “Internet” and to a public viewing area in Bayreuth, which is a premiere in both cases. So if you don’t have a ticket for the Festspielhaus and not in a position to make use of the public viewing but interested to have a look at the opera, you may want to check if your system matches the technical requirements and give it a try.

I already mentioned a few times in the blog that I’m working on a Debian package of the Conkeror web browser. And now, after a lot of fine-tuning (and I still further new ideas how to improve the package ;-) Conkeror is finally in the NEW queue and hopefully will hit unstable in a few days. (Update Thursday, 03-Jul-2008, 18:13 CEST: The package has been accepted by Jörg and should be included on most architectures in tonight’s updates.) Those who could hardly await it can fetch Conkeror .debs from http://noone.org/debian/. The conkeror package itself is a non-architecture specific package (but needs xulrunner-1.9 to be available), and its small C-written helper program spawn-process-helper is available as package conkeror-spawn-process-helper for i386, amd64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64. There are no backported packages for Etch available, though, since I don’t know of anyone yet, who has successfully backported xulrunner-1.9 to Etch. Interestingly the interest in Conkeror seems to have risen in the Debian community independently of its Debian packaging. Luca Capello, who sponsored the upload of my Conkeror package, pointed me to two blog post on Planet Debian, written by people being fed up with Firefox 3 already and are looking for a more lean, but still Gecko based web browser: Decklin Foster is fed up with Firefox’ -eh- Iceweasel’s arrogance and MJ Ray is fed up with Firefox 3 and its SSL problems. Since my previously favourited Gecko based web browser Kazehakase never became really stable but instead became slow and leaking memory (and therefore not much better than Firefox 2), I can imagine that it’s no more an candidate for people seaking for a lean and fast web browser. Conkeror has some “strange” concepts of which the primary one is that it looks and feels like Emacs:

• The current location is shown in a status bar below the website, where Emacs usually shows buffer names. All input, even entering new URLs to go to, is done via the mini-buffer, an input line below the status bar.
• Instead of tabs it uses Emacs’ concept of buffers. So no tab bar clutter and though easy access to all currently open pages.
• It has no buttons, menu-bar or such. And except the status bar and mini-buffer, it uses the whole size of the window for the displayed web page. This is the main reason why I prefer Conkeror on the 7” EeePC: I don’t want to waste any pixels for buttons or menu bars and still have a fully functional web browser.
• It of course has Emacs alike keybindings (with a slight touch of Lynx). While this may seem awkward for the vi world (Hey, they have the vimperator^*, also in Debian since a few days!), as an Emacs user you just have to remember that you web browser now also expects to be treated like an Emacs. It just works:

  C-x C-c

  Exit Emacs -eh- Conkeror

  C-x C-f

  Open File -eh- web page in new buffer

  C-x C-b

  Change to some other tab -eh- buffer

  C-x C-v

  Replace web page in this buffer and use the current URL as start for entering the new one

  C-x 5 2

  Open new frame -eh- window

  C-x 5 0

  Close current frame -eh- window

  C-x k

  Close tab, -eh- kill buffer

  C-h i

  Documentation

  C-s

  Incremental search forward

  C-r

  Incremental search backward

  C-g

  Stop

  l

  Go back (Think info-mode)

  g

  Go to (Open web page in this buffer)

  (Hehe, I like the faces of vi users having read these keybindings and now wondering how to remember them. SCNR. Well, sometimes vi key bindings are a mystery to me, too. :-) There are of course many more and nearly all are the same as in Emacs, even the universal argument C-u and the M-x command-line are there. E.g. C-u g lets you open a web page in a new buffer, too.
• Conkeror also has very promising concept for following and copying links with the keyboard only. Opera is very inefficient here since you have to jump from link to link to get to the one you want. In Conkeror you just press f for following or c for copying links and then all links on the currently shown part of the page show a small number attached to it. Then you just enter the number (and additionally press enter if the number is ambigous) and the link is either opened or copied to the clipboard. A funny anecdote about how this concept grew over the time: Early versions of Conkeror (back in the days when it just was a Firefox externsion as vimperator) numbered all links on the page, not only the visible ones. On large pages with many links or buttons (e.g. my blog ;-), this took minutes to complete. The idea to just number the visible links is so simple and important – but someone first needed to have it. :-)

Footnotes *) I just noticed that there is now also muttator, making Thunderbird look and behave like vim (and probably also mutt), too. Wonder into which e-mail client the Emacs community will convert Thunderbird. GNUS? RMAIL? VM? Wanderslust? What will it be called? Wunderbird? Thunderslust? (SCNRE ;-)

We've switched on personal schedule sharing on the OSCON web site. When you've put together your desired schedule by starring sessions of interest, just hand out the "public view" link to let others know what you want to see. Here's my personal schedule. In it you'll find all the plenary sessions (as co-chair I simply cannot miss these, and neither should you, however late the party!) Also there's a fair smattering of my pet topics such as open web technologies, virtualization and dynamic languages, and a bunch of things I want to hear more about: Prophet, female participation in open source, Clutter, and of course Erlang. I'm fascinated to find out what other people have got planned, so please publish your schedules too and let's compare notes.Join the conversation about this post

Just some stuff I've been rotting my mind with late at night lately..

• The British reality series Shipwrecked (of all things!!) is the only reality TV I've ever really enjoyed beyond the first few seasons of the Amazing Race. I enjoy it for many low reasons, plus it tickles a sociological interest, without being real enough for that to be anything but an idle entertainment. But the best parts are that many of the people don't treat it as a game (especially the thirdies after 3 months), and that they seem to have come up with a format this season that can never be done again. So, mind rotting entertainment with a built-in expiration date, and a pesudo-intellectual tang. What's not to like?
• David Gerrold's Jumping Off The Planet channels Heinlein basically perfectly, modulo being written for a comtemporary audience. Sorry, Spider, I know you tried, but I could actually hear RAH talking in the pages of this juvenile.
• The Website Is Down is both the funniest and the most depressing web video ever. Meanwhile, the mini-documentary Possessed explores a trap that's hardwired into us -- I wish that other human foibles could be highlighted like this does, because if you identify with the people in it at all, you'll change. (If you still can.)

Jeff Bailey writes about the last 26 years of Microsoft [1]. He gives Microsoft credit for “saving us from the TRS 80″, however CP/M-86 was also an option for the OS on the IBM PC [2]. If MS hadn’t produced MS-DOS for a lower price then CP/M would have been used (in those days CP/M and MS-DOS had the same features and essentially the same design). He notes the use of the Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) [3] programs. As far as I recall the TSR operation was undocumented and was discovered by disassembling DOS (something that the modern MS EULAs forbid). Intel designed the 8086 and 80286 CPUs to permit code written for an 8086 to run unchanged in “protected mode” on an 80286 (as noted in the Wikipedia page about the 80286 [4]). Basically all that you needed to do to write a DOS program with the potential of being run directly in protected mode (or easily ported) was to allocate memory by requesting it from the OS (not just assuming that every address above your heap was available to write on) and by addressing memory only by the segment register returned from the OS when allocating memory (IE not assuming that incrementing a segment register is equivalent to adding 16 to the offset). There were some programs written in such a manner which could run on both DOS and text-mode OS/2 (both 1.x and 2.x), I believe that such programs were linked differently. The term Fat Binary [5] is often used to refer to an executable which has binary code for multiple CPUs (EG PPC and M68K CPUs on the Macintosh), I believe that a similar concept was used for DOS / OS/2 programs but the main code of the application was shared. Also compilers which produce object code which doesn’t do nasty things could have their object code linked to run in protected mode. Some people produced a set of libraries that allowed linking Borland Turbo Pascal code to run as OS/2 16bit text-mode applications. The fact that OS/2 (the protected-mode preemptively multi-tasking DOS) didn’t succeed in the market was largely due to MS. I never used Windows/386 (a version of Windows 2.x) but used Windows 3.0 a lot. Windows 3.0 ran in three modes, “Real Mode” (8086), “Standard Mode” (80286), and “Enhanced Mode” (80386). Real Mode was used for 8086 and 8088 CPUs, for 80286 systems if you needed to run one DOS program (there was no memory for running more than one), and for creating or adjusting the swap-file size for an 80386 system (if your 80386 system didn’t have enough swap you had to shut everything down, start Real Mode, adjust the swap file, and then start it again in Enhanced Mode). Standard Mode was the best mode for running Windows programs (apart from the badly written ones which only ran on Real Mode), but due to the bad practices implemented by almost everyone who wrote DOS programs MS didn’t even try to run DOS programs in 286 protected mode and thus Standard Mode didn’t support DOS programs. Enhanced Mode allowed multitasking DOS programs but as hardly anyone had an 80386 class system at that time it didn’t get much use. It was just before the release of Windows 3.1 that I decided to never again use Windows unless I was paid to do so. I was at a MS presentation about Windows 3.1 and after the marketing stuff they had a technical Q/A session. The questions were generally about how to work around bugs in MS software (mainly Windows 3.0) and the MS people had a very detailed list of work-arounds. Someone asked “why don’t you just fix those bugs” and we were told “it’s easier to teach you how to work around them than to fix them“. I left the presentation before it finished, went straight home and deleted Windows from my computer. I am not going to use software written by people with such a poor attitude if given a choice. After that I ran the DOS multi-tasker DesqView [6] until OS/2 2.0 was released. Desqview allowed multitasking well written DOS programs in real mode, Quarterdeck was the first company to discover that almost 64K of address space could be used above the 1MB boundary from real-mode on a 80286 (a significant benefit when you were limited to 640K of RAM), as well as multitasking less well behaved DOS programs with more memory use on an 80386 or better CPU. OS/2 [7] 2.x was described as “A Better DOS than DOS, a Better Windows than Windows”. That claim seemed accurate to me. I could run DOS VM86 sessions under OS/2 which could do things that even Desqview couldn’t manage (such as having a non-graphical DOS session with 716K of base memory in one window and a graphical DOS session in another). I could also run combinations of Windows programs that could not run under MS Windows (such as badly written windows programs that needed Real Mode as well as programs that needed the amount of memory that only Standard or Enhanced mode could provide). Back to Bill Gates, I recently read a blog post Eight Years of Wrongness [5] which described how Steve Ballmer has failed MS stockholders by his poor management. It seems that he paid more attention to fighting Linux, implementing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and generally trying to avoid compatibility with other software than to actually making money. While this could be seen as a tribute to Bill Gates (Steve Ballmer couldn’t do the job as well), I think that Bill would have made the same mistakes for the same reasons. MS has always had a history of treating it’s customers as the enemy. Jeff suggests that we should learn from MS that the freedom to tinker is important as is access to our data. These are good points but another important point is that we need to develop software that does what users want and acts primarily in the best interests of the users. Overall I think that free software is quite well written in regard to acting on behalf of the users. The issue we have is in determining who the “user” is, whether it’s a developer, sys-admin, or someone who wants to just play games and do some word-processing.

• [1] http://jbailey.livejournal.com/55585.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M-86


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


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80286


• [5] http://msftextrememakeover.blogspot.com/2008/06/eight-years-of-wrongness.html


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desqview


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

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I'm in the process of converting all of my software repositories to Git, but to date I've only converted either Debian packaging repositories for software I don't personally maintain or repositories for software without a corresponding Debian package. But next on my list to tackle are pam-afs-session and pam-krb5, for which I'm both packager and upstream. Currently, the upstream development is in bzr and the Debian packaging is in svk. What I used to do, with Subversion, is keep the upstream development and Debian packaging in the same repository. I'd exclude debian/* when doing releases and then export it into an unpack of the release tarball to do Debian package builds. That worked great for me, but had some significant drawbacks: the Subversion repositories generally weren't public (I don't want to host upstream development on Alioth), and manual work is required to get the upstream tarball to use with the Debian package build. pristine-tar, which lets you commit a tarball to a Git repository in a space-efficient manner by basing it off of an upstream branch, is awesome. It's one of the best ideas in revision control since DVCSes. Debian package builds can be done using only the information in the repository without bloating the repository with huge binary blobs. And for upstream development, I can capture in the repository exactly what I released. However, for pristine-tar to work properly, I need to have a branch that represents the full release tarball, including the stuff that I don't want to normally track in the repository for regular development (generated files like configure that are created with make dist). I could let all that stuff be added with an xdelta, but I think that's ugly and won't be space-efficient. That means that when I combine Debian packaging and upstream development into one repository, I can't easily use the upstream development branch as the basis for the Debian packaging and pristine-tar, since it's missing all those generated files that are part of the tarball release. I could use two separate repositories, but that makes it harder to cherry-pick upstream commits and also requires that I have two separate directories for working on the same package, which I don't like. What I'm leaning towards doing at the moment is doing development on master, importing released tarballs into an upstream branch that shares no common commits with master, checking in the release tarballs under both the upstream release name and the Debian .orig.tar.gz name using pristine-tar based on the upstream branch, and branching a debian branch off of upstream instead of master. It's a little weird to have two separate lines of development that share no common ancestor but have the same files, but it's the solution that seems to work best for what I want and lets me store space-efficient tarballs and use git-buildpackage to do Debian builds without needing anything outside of the repository.

This is the third installment of my article about the Serial Console Server for the Poor. First installment here, Second installment here. The first part of the article having covered the hardware and the udev part creating the device nodes, and the second part explaining how to solve the software part using ser2net, this part explains why ser2net was ditched in favor of cereal and how the console server operates with cereal now. Cereal (which I was pointed to on IRC as a reaction to article II) is a nifty combination of runit’s runsv and screen. One of the less-known features of screen is that screen can also connect to a serial port instead of a “real” console. cereal makes use of this feature, putting up with the fact that screen can only set a baud rate. I have not seen a serial application with other parameters than 8n1 (8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit) in a decade, so I cannot comment whether this is a real disadvantage. I guess that it might be possible to set the serial port to the desired set of parameters before starting up screen, but I didn’t actually try it since I do not need it. Cereal uses a set of configuration parameters and processes called a “session” to associate a serial port with a baud rate and a set of user/group settings to control who is able to start, stop, attach or detach a session. It doesn’t have a “real” configuration file. Instead, it has an admin program, cereal_admin, which takes the parameters associated with a session and writes them to an (intentionally? undocumented?) set of config files in /var/lib/cereal. Only a single user is able to attach to a session read/write, while an entire group can attach to a session read-only and can thus access the logs. A session is automatically started when the sysem boots and can be stopped and started using cereal_admin as well. Once a session is running, a specially configured screen process runs attached to the serial port, and users simply attach and detach to and from it as one would to a normally running screen. That way, one can scroll back and examine what was shown on the serial port while nobody was attached. This is quite handy when the device connected to the port prints out warnings, errors and status information to its serial port. The screen configuration that is used is rather sophisticated. So, a permanent log file is written, which is also used for read-only access to the serial session. Also, a very informative status line is configured. Unfortunately, one of screen’s biggest disadvantages applies here as well: User X cannot attach to a session started by User Y unless Y has access privileges for X’s pty (or vice versa, I never can remember), which can be a security risk. Additionally, it is not possible to su or sudo to X and then to attach to the session - one needs to have the original pty opened by the correct user, which usually means that one needs to do a “real” log in with the correct account (via /bin/login or sshing in to the box). If one has the privileges necessary, one can use the cereal executeable to attach to the screen (which gives read-write access) or to tail -F the log file (giving timestamped read-only access). That way, one never knows that one is actually working with an appropriately configured screen that is kept running by runit. The restrictions coming with cereal suggest a setup similiar to what I did with ser2net previously: Each session has its own user account, which forces an attach to the appropriately named cereal shell on login:

my-device-name:x:1801:1801:my-device-name,,,:/home/my-device-name:/usr/local/sbin/cerealshell

$ cat /usr/local/sbin/cerealshell
#!/bin/bash
set -eu
cereal attach $(id --user --name)
$

You can see that I decided to name the sessions after the actual device name, allowing the unterlying ttyUSB device name to change without change in the user interface. The actual users and sessions were created with a small shell script:

#!/bin/bash
createconsole()  
  NAME=“$1”
  PORT=“$2”
  BAUD=“$3”
  MUID=“$ PORT/USBserial/180 ”
  echo sudo addgroup --force-badname --gid $MUID $NAME
  echo sudo adduser --force-badname --gecos “$NAME,,,” --ingroup $NAME --uid $MUID --disabled-password
$NAME
  echo sudo adduser $NAME dialout
  echo sudo mkdir -p /home/$NAME/.ssh
  echo sudo chmod 755 /home/$NAME/.ssh
  echo sudo touch /home/$NAME/.ssh/authorized_keys
  echo sudo chmod 644 /home/$NAME/.ssh/authorized_keys
  echo sudo chown $NAME:$NAME /home/$NAME/.ssh /home/$NAME/.ssh/authorized_keys
  echo sudo cereal-admin create $1 /dev/$2 $3 $1 $1
  echo sleep 2
    echo sudo cereal-admin start $1
  echo echo -----
 
createconsole my-device-1 USBserial1 9600
createconsole my-device-2 USBserial3 115200

Note that the script also uses a hardcoded UID range which might need adaption to your local needs (and breaks for more than ten serial ports), and that it also takes care of creating an empty authorized_keys file with correct permissions. That way one can simply ssh to my-devlce-1@consoleserver and find oneself immediately connected to the serial console, seeing the last things that happened on the serial port, and immediately being able to work with the device. That’s fine, comfortable and useable. I actually like that better than what I built with ser2net previously.

It's been a while since I've posted anything except reviews and I'm overdue for a general update. With the Kerberos upgrade project finished last month, I'm currently in the wonderful situation of not having any large active projects at work and being given time to generally catch up. With luck, I'll have a couple more months of that before things really heat up. I only have to consult on a few projects and otherwise can deal with all the operational issues that I'd been putting off. A lot of my time lately has been spent on Puppet configuration cleanup and improvements, and there's at least another solid week of that to go, as well as a pile of overdue documentation to write. On the Debian side, Lintian has moved to a new Git repository and Adam D. Barratt has started committing directly. Frank has also had time to do a lot of work, which means that Lintian development is proceeding quite well without a lot of active attention on my part. That's been wonderful and has given me time to focus on other things. Most of my Debian effort of late has gone into the new Shibboleth packaging team and review of Shibboleth 2.0 packages, the last of which was uploaded last week and is sitting in NEW. Thanks to Ferenc W gner for the fine work! All the packages are now in Git and migrated to Alioth and there's a wiki page for the packaging team. Scott Cantor, the primary upstream developer, has joined the mailing list and has been extremely helpful and responsive. Sam Hartman has also migrated the krb5 packaging repository to Git and Alioth, and last Friday I finally finished migrating the openafs repository. Both are unfortunately rather huge since they contain all the historic upstream tarballs (extracting that would have been hideously complicated to do as part of the migration), but they shouldn't grow nearly as much now that we can use pristine-tar. This is the heart of the Kerberos and AFS packaging; there's now just kerberos-configs and my two PAM modules to move (more on the complexities of the PAM module Git migration in a later post). On the personal front, I've been travelling a lot lately, but that will now calm down for a while. I have some company next month, though, and hopefully will be up for it by then (right now, I just want to hole up in my apartment and do my own thing and not interact for a bit). I've been reading George Orwell: An Age Like This (1920-1940), the first of a four-volume collection of his letters, essays, and reviews. I was inspired to buy the first volume after reading one of his essays on-line after a Usenet discussion some time back, and I'm delighted I did. It took me a bit to get into it, but now I'm finding it absolutely fascinating. Orwell has a talent for concise and accurate descriptions of life (primarily of the poor) that capture the emotional tone as well as the surface details. That's mixed with interesting book reviews (I love reading book reviews), intriguing tidbits on his writing process and how he viewed being a writer, and snippets of the day-to-day of his life that have survived in letters. It's rather like reading a blog, and Orwell is a good enough writer that even his unparagraphed, abbreviated commentary in letters is full of memorable turns of phrase or observations. If you like that sort of thing, I recommend it highly. I'm going to buy the remaining three volumes and read the whole collection, plus quite likely pick up Orwell's other books besides 1984 and Animal Farm.

• Updated the debian packaging and debian patches of KDE4 to the 4.0.84 tarballs
• Pushed kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime and kdebase-workspace 4.0.84 to experimental
• Prepared the rest of the packages ready to be pushed to experimental when the auto-builders have built this
• Updated Arora packages to the 0.2 release

Ana guessed slightly wrong when trying to guess next update of kde4.1 in debian, but her howto still works. Give it a bit for the autobuliders to catch up though. But I guess I should find a rich uncle to give me newer hardware - my computer was only idle a few hours since friday evening. I do hope that plasma people soon reaches a stable ABI. And by the way:

Thanks to frisoftware.dk

alex@brithombar:~$ finger tolimar@db.debian.org
[db.debian.org]
uid=tolimar,ou=users,dc=debian,dc=org
First name: Alexander
Last name: Reichle-Schmehl
Email: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
URL: http://www.schmehl.info/
IRC nickname: Tolimar
Jabber ID: tolimar@jabber.ccc.de
Fingerprint: 46CD D292 0692 D5A2 8F81 2E48 0717 74E0 00D8 CD16
Key block: finger tolimar/key@db.debian.org

alex@brithombar$ gpg --edit-key 00D8CD16
Secret key is available.

pub 1024D/00D8CD16 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
sub 1024g/C5F3F285 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@cs.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (2) Alexander Schmehl (privat) <alexander@schmehl.info>
[ultimate] (3) Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (4) Alexander Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>
[ revoked] (5) Alexander Schmehl < deleted >
[ultimate] (6) Alexander Schmehl <schmehl@uni-hildesheim.de>
Please note that the shown key validity is not necessarily correct
unless you restart the program.

Command> adduid
Real name: Alexander Reichle-Schmehl
Email address: tolimar@debian.org
Comment:
You selected this USER-ID:
"Alexander Reichle-Schmehl "

Change (N)ame, (C)omment, (E)mail or (O)kay/(Q)uit? o

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Alexander Schmehl (university) "
1024-bit DSA key, ID 00D8CD16, created 2002-09-28


pub 1024D/00D8CD16 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: SC
trust: ultimate validity: ultimate
sub 1024g/C5F3F285 created: 2002-09-28 expires: never usage: E
[ultimate] (1). Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@cs.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (2) Alexander Schmehl (privat) <alexander@schmehl.info>
[ultimate] (3) Alexander Schmehl (university) <schmehl@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
[ultimate] (4) Alexander Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>
[ revoked] (5) Alexander Schmehl < deleted >
[ultimate] (6) Alexander Schmehl <schmehl@uni-hildesheim.de>
[ultimate] (7) Alexander Reichle-Schmehl <tolimar@debian.org>

Command> save

alex@brithombar$ gpg --send-key 00D8CD16
gpg: sending key 00D8CD16 to hkp server keyserver.noreply.org

There exist many bayasian/statistical spam filters, ranging from products such as spambayes, and spamassassin, to crm114. Each of them works in their own way. Having used and tested almost all of them I've noticed a common flaw. The vast majority of spam-filters struggle to correctly classify "419 scam" mails, lottery fraud, and similar mails. Why is that? In general, having read hundreds of these mails, I can see several things that are common in these kind of the mails:

• Mention of currency in both numeric and word forms. ($1,000,000 + 1 million US dollars)
• Mention of a country / nationality (Sierra Lione, Nigerian)
• Mention of a reference/claim number and often "official address".
• Christian references.
• Greetings such as "dear friend", and mentions of discretion/secrecy.
• Size. (A scam mail is typically greater in length than an average spam mail).

Whilst none of these individually are indicative of a scam mail it is interesting to count their combined occurance. I've written a toy program to count these things, and so far the success rate is >60% which is a reasonable start - providing this kind of detection occurs after normal filtering. I may experiment further, but I figured a public query on scam detection might be appropriate. Whilst the detecting a scam mail is a subset of detecting a spam email there are probably simplifications that may be made, and exploring those wouldn't be a bad thing. ObQuote: Buffy.

I read 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science, and thought it would be an interesting read. It was, but I don't think it really made sense. Let's look at the 7 ways they highlighted:

1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites

The article states:

Faith is a belief in an idea regardless of the evidence for or against it.

Actually, that's not true at all, at least for traditional Christianity. (Note that traditional Christianity is not the same as fundamentalism). Marcus J. Borg describes faith in four ways:

Fiducia -- trusting in God. Borg says, "Faith . . . [means] we trust in God as the one upon whom we rely, as our support and foundation and ground, as our safe place."

Fidelitas -- loyalty, or "the comment of the self at its deepest level, the commitment of the 'heart'. Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God. . . Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God."

Visio -- a way of seeing -- "a way of seeing the whole, a way of seeing 'what is'. . . the ability to love and to be present to the moment. It generates a 'willingness to spend and be spent' for the sake of a vision that goes beyond ourselves."

Assensus -- perhaps the closest to what the author meant, is "faith as belief." Borg goes on to add:

The notion that Christian faith is primarily . . . about belief, about a "head" matter, is recent. . . For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true. . . this is the most widespread contemporary understanding of "belief".

This is very different from what faith as assensus meant. . . A deep but humble (and therefore imprecise) understanding of Christian faith as assensus, as involving affirmation of the centrality of God as known in the Bible and Jesus, is very close to faith as vision. It is a way of seeing reality.

As a Christian, I do not find the scientific method to be a problem. I find it to be enlightening in all sorts of matters, including even the history of religion in some instances. Christian faith is not about believing in certain ideas (such as the world being created in 6 literal 24-hour days), though there are those that distort it to be so. Rather, Christian faith is about living your life a certain way, about the meaning of life, about our duties to make the world a better place.

2. People Vote Base on Religious Ideas

The author says that "Stem Cells weren t the first time a body of research didn t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs." Well, I agree that that was a problem. Non-religious people can vote in odd ways too. I argue that the rejection of stem-cell research goes against Christian teaching; after all, we are to help the least among us, and do not people with Alzheimer's qualify?

I think the author's point should have been "exremists have odd views." Extremists can be atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or other religions. Religion does not have a monopoly on them.

3. Religion Removes the Need For Science

The author says:

When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct.

That is incorrect on several levels. First, science cannot explain why we are here. It can explain some of the mechanics. As an example, let us take for granted that modern scientific thought on the origin of humanity is correct: that there was a Big Bang, that single-celled creatures evolved on earth, and that human life eventually evolved through a complex process of evolution and natural selection. Fine; this does not contradict religion in any way. Science and religion answer different questions. Science answers "how". Religion answers "why". Science cannot answer the question "Why was there a big bang?" or "Did the evolution of humanity serve a larger purpose?"

Moreover, religion should not assume that they have all the answers, either. The canonical Christian Bible was mostly fixed within a few centuries AD. Life in 200AD was a lot different from life today. Part of the reason there are many different groups of Christians is the complexity of applying the stories in the Bible to modern life. The ideas in any given denomination evolve over time, too. I think it would be the height of hubris for anyone, religious or not, to claim that he or she had all the answers. Again, I know that some religious people act that way, but then so do some atheists or agnostics.

4. People Lean on Religion, When They Could Benefit From Science

The author of "7 Ways" cites the quite rare case where a child dies of a curable disease while his/her parents pray, refusing medical care. This is an extreme position that is not shared by the vast majority of religious people. Most religious people are perfectly content to use the latest medical care.

Meditation or prayer does not replace medical care; it supplements it. Scientific studies have even demonstrated its effectiveness.

5. The Church Takes Up Natural Resources

The original author states that "The land that churches take up around the world could be used to build schools, homes, recreational buildings and commercial operations." This is perhaps the most frivolous of arguments. Putting aside the fact that many churches operate schools, churches are often one of the few ways that modern city dwellers have to form a sense of community. They are not just places to engage in religion. They are places to meditate, to get away from it all, to meet your neighbors, to vote.

6. The Church Takes Up Monetary Resources

The original author says "if people donated to scientific advancement like they did to the church, imagine where we would be today." It's not a pleasant picture. Religion, and institutions supported primarily because of the teaching of religion, are the people that feed the hungry after natural disasters, that operate food pantries (our church operates the only one in our community, and it's open to anyone without any questions or talk about religion), that operate schools in disadvantaged areas, that have spread the whole idea of fair trade for third-world artisans, etc.

It is true that acts of evil have been committed in the name of the church, too. It is also unquestionably true that some church groups spend money more carefully than others. As with any donation, people should be careful where they give. Government-operated research studies are not necessarily a good use of money, either.

7. Religion is A Strong Meme

The author of the original story seems to be responding to a particular brand of Christianity: what Borg calls "literal-factual" religion. There are quite a few people that take that stand. They are sometimes inaccurately referred to as "evangelicals" or the "religious right"; while there is some overlap between the groups, they are not one and the same. The people with the literal-factual view are not representative of the whole.

More interestingly, Borg points out that the literal-factual view was actually a response to the development of the scientific method during the Enlightenment. As the modern idea of truth moved to literal, factual, provable truth, some Christians grew defensive about their faith, and started to look for "scientific" ways to prove that the world was created in 6 days, etc. in an attempt to show the world that Christianity fit their new notion of truth.

That makes a compelling argument that the scientific method is the stronger meme in today's Western world -- so strong that the author of the rant against religion has apparently forgotten the more prevalant -- both throughout history and today -- view of Christianity that is "more than" Science, not at odds with science.

It's interesting to think about Bill Gates retiring. When I think back to how much Microsoft has brought us over the years, both happiness and grief, it's a bit of a happy/sad end to an era for me.

Microsoft is what saved us from the TRS-80, and brought us into a world where clone hardware drove prices down to where everyone could afford them. MS-DOS may have been a bad rip off of CP/M and Unix, but to business operations brought us the ability to bring computing power right down to the desk and generally got out of the way. Dos had the neat ability to have TSRs that could deliver waiting applications at a keystroke (remember Sidekick?) Windows 386 and 3.0 brought us preemptive multitasking for DOS apps that weren't written for that in mind, and brought us the first environment the mass market had seen where any manufacturer could write drivers to a known programming interface and bring their hardware to the world. They brought us a world where hardware innovation was bringing crazy new things to us that had only been possible in Sci-Fi movies before. My first voice-recognition system on the computer was in 1990. =)

Windows 95 pushed that even further. No longer were drivers crazy TSRs, but actually loaded into the control panel with standard was of using them for established services such as Networking and Sound. For everything else, the model was extensible so that if you had a neat idea, you could bring it out to the world. I remember installing TwinBridge at work so that people could type in double-wide Chinese characters, despite the OS not being intended for that in the slightest.

Windows 98 brought us games that were better than we were seeing in DOS. DirectX and DirectSound were finally providing a good enough abstraction on top of the hardware that it was easier for authors to code to that than to code right to your Adlib card and whatever display adapter you had (were we using S3s yet, then?)

But that seems to have been the top point of their reign. At this point, as a user I was now so far from the guts of the machine, I no longer could easily tinker. I'd once coded in Z80 asm and 8086 asm to write little hacks, but Windows 98 was getting to the opinionated software stage: There were things you just couldn't do, for no reason other than the designers at Microsoft didn't think it was important.

I realise I'm not the usual mass-market type, but now the system that had been such a source of inspiration was now becoming a barrier to trying new ideas.

I had started playing with Linux in 1995, but 1998 had started to use it as my main machine at home. I had a roommate who had a dumb cheap machine that was slaved off of my main machine so that he could play Medievia all day and night. Setting up this networking, and the on-demand ISDN dialing was trivial to do under Linux, and nearly impossible under the Windows systems of the time.

The only thing one could say for FVWM95 at the time was that it was better than twm. We suffered through Enlightenment, said hello to wine, and joined an online community of people who'd all come together from various places in order to be free to play with the systems we had.

Microsoft became steadily less relevant to my day to day computing. My girlfriend (now wife) suffered through early incarnations of MS Word for windows 2.0 under Wine because it was still easier than teaching her emacs. And steadily, the system got better until we could honestly look at our family members and tell them that if they wanted to run Windows that was fine, but please don't call me about it.

We need to both say thank-you to Microsoft and learn from it. Microsoft made a business model of bringing us the technology we craved as geeks, and that society wanted to play with and integrated into our lives. Microsoft also taught us what it means to be the dominant player. For most of us, I suspect it was our only view into the world where a single player dominates and strives to cut down its competition. It's easy to romanticise the small business owner, and just as easy to forget that just about every small business owner wants to be a millionaire and a large business owner.

We need to remember that the pretty fancy interfaces can be as much about helping people do things as keeping them from doing things. We need to demand the freedom to tinker with our software and our devices, even if we choose to never do so. And after all that, we need to be able to take our data from a device, and take it to somewhere else. I think ultimately, this is what Microsoft has taught us. As we look for new companies to deliver us greater and shinier technology, this is a lesson we need to keep close at hand.

Who knew that rants at Starbucks could be the subject of a seemingly interesting lingustic article.

I put the Nokia E51, which I had previously acquired, onto Ebay last night, and it sold within minutes. Even though I made a 50 loss on the whole affair, this made me very happy! The phone is crap in so many ways that it made me quite angry. I now consider those 50 the investment I had to make to bring you this post: First of all, the reason why I bought the phone was because it sports wireless LAN as well as Voice-over-IP. Since I ve recently gotten into VoIP, I was looking for reasonable VoIP phones and even though the Siemens C450IP DECT phone works very well, it only does so at home, or where I find a switch port for it. So my theory was to get this Wifi+VoIP phone and be able to use my VoIP infrastructure from anywhere around the world. Penny has the Nokia E65 and loves it, so I went for the E51, a newer model that promised to address some of the issues she had with hers. All of the following is based on the E51 with the 100.34.20 firmware dated 29 September 2007, which runs the (crippled) Symbian S60r3 operating system.

Good things Let s start with the few good things up front: the E51 comes with a regular USB jack, allowing you to plug it into any computer and use it as mass storage device without the need for any Nokia-specific cables. I also liked the remote lock functionality: in the event of a stolen phone, you could send it a pre-defined passphrase that would cause the phone to lock itself. Also, the phone could be configured to lock itself (like a screensaver) after a given amount of idle time. Other than that, I could not find anything outstanding, so let s turn to the downsides, of which there are many more:

VoIP/SIP shortcomings I had previously dismissed the E series phones for good reasons, but both the E65 and the E51 improved their SIP clients a fair bit, and with the SIP VoIP settings utility, it was even possible to configure STUN. But unfortunately, the SIP client, while a nice toy, ended up being unusable in production. Here are some of the reasons: I got VoIP working at home and in some other places, but definitely not everywhere. It may be that some of those networks blocked the SIP port (5060/udp), or that the phone didn t feel well on the day, but in the majority of cases, I could not get the SIP client to connect. And there was no way to find out what was going on, as the client would just claim that registration failed without any additional information. It was also hard to retry, often requiring the phone to be restarted. Whenever if failed, the client would helpfully tell me that it could not establish a connection to the connection network . To get the phone to log on to the SIP server automatically, I had to define a home network for the SIP profile. Changing the access point for that network required a phone reboot to get SIP working again. It was possible to define multiple SIP profiles with different access points and add them all to the one, global VoIP profile, and theoretically get auto-login to work across multiple Wifi networks; unfortunately, I cannot say that this worked, there were always some problems requiring me to change defaults and shift things around. Also, after I had defined a few of those profiles and needed to make a change to the SIP settings (move the SIP port to 53/udp), I had to modify all profiles in turn; it was not possible to share settings. On the other hand, NAT traversal settings and timeouts, which can only be configured with the aforementioned SIP VoIP settings utility, applied to a VoIP profile and thus to all SIP profiles, without exception. I found it mildly annoying that I couldn t use # and * as part of the number/SIP address to call, nor was it possible to dial single-digit extensions the phone will ask you to associate a quick dial number with the key, even if quick dial has been explicitly disabled). I could also not dial a SIP address ad-hoc if I wanted to call sip:someone@sip.somewhere.org, I had to define a contact and add the Internet phone address. One can define Internet calls to be the default call type, thus routing all calls via VoIP if available. Unfortunately, once I dialed a number, the event was hardwired to the call type: I could not redial a number used previously for a VoIP call when all I had available was GSM coverage.

Gripes with the IMAP client The IMAP client, while an interesting addition to my day, turned out to be pretty unusable. The first mistake I made was to tell it to synchronise all messages in some of my larger mailboxes, which caused the phone to take tens of seconds until it switched a folder, and a few seconds just to scroll to the next screen in any given folder. I found that once any mailbox accumulates more than 100 messages, the client turns useless (Nokia s default is to synchronise 30 messages). I could tell the client to synchronise every hour, but only if I locked it to an access point, the home network . If I roamed to a different Wifi network, I could no longer connect to the IMAP server, as this access point would not be found. The phone would not let me use a different access point unless I changed the home access point, but changing that turned off the automatic mail sycnhronisation. If I say mail synchronisation, I mean header synchronisation. Even though there is an option for Headers only , it only applies to POP3; it is impossible to have the phone download message bodies automatically, only manually and then only per-message or per-folder, not for all folders at once. The IMAP client could delete messages, but it could not move a message to a different folder, nor create or delete folders. And even though I could turn off the message tone the phone would play when it received new email, it insisted on vibrating nevertheless. The only other IMAP client I found for Symbian phones is ProfiMail, which looked interesting and much more powerful, but which would randomly crash on me while browsing or operating on larger mailboxes.

Connection hickups While the an application was running that was using the network, the Wifi connection stayed open, but I could not make it stay open between sessions. The phone would obtains an IP, do what I asked it to, and then immediately close the connection. From a power management perspective, this makes sense, but not from the usability angle. I could not make the phone connect to a Wifi network that advertised both, WPA and WPA2 and had to disable WPA at home to let it connect. At times, it was not possible to reuse an existing connection. I haven t been able to figure out the details, but it seemed to me that whenever an application like the IMAP client was locked to an access point, it would be unable to make a connection to the IMAP server, even if e.g. the VoIP client was connected to the server by way of exactly the same access point. The phone would just say that a connection was already active and that I should close it and try again . I had a really hard time working with SSL-enabled websites and IMAP servers, because even though the phone presented me with the server certificate and offered the choice of accepting it permanently, it didn t and would ask the question again and again (which made the phone pretty unusable if the IMAP client was running in the background). Only after I had found out how to import the CACert root certificates, did this problem become irrelevant.

Other pet-peeves The phone came with a lot of smaller issues that made me ask the question of whether its designed ever had to use it too often. Possibly the most annoying aspect of the phone was its speed. It s a lot faster than the E61, but it still takes on the order of seconds to update screens or display simple text messages. Speaking of text messages, I am a little spoiled by the Sony Ericsson K610i (to which I now return), which would offer the contacts with whom I d recently interacted instead of presenting me with the full list, like the E51 does. I could filter the full list, but only by typing the start of the name substring matching was not implemented. It was impossible to receive text files via bluetooth and have them put onto the filesystem. On receipt, the phone just said text file saved , and it took me a while to figure out that it had stored them into the notepad, from where it could not be exported. To get my SSH identity onto the filesystem for PuTTY to use required me to access the phone via USB. The phone could receive vCards with new contacts, but it only offered to import the first contact, even though the standard allows for an arbitrary number of contacts per file. What s even worse though is that the phone silently failed to import contacts with non-ASCII characters in their name, such as or they just didn t show up even though the phone gave every indication of a successful import; creating such contacts on the phone worked, on the other hand. Each time I started the phone, the Nokia greeting screen would show up, accompanied with the Nokia tune, which could not be disabled. Enough said. The last problem I feel worth mentioning is hardly a Nokia or Symbian problem: battery life. With Wifi turned on, the phone would last about 24 hours on standby, which makes it pretty unusable for roaming Wifi or even VoIP usage.

Summing up I am happy to have sold the phone and look forward to returning to my Sony Ericsson K610i. After checking out the E61/E71 a bit, playing with the E65, and trying the E51 out for several weeks, I can conclude that Nokia has a long way to go before they can offer a usable smartphone with Wifi/VoIP capability. It would be a good step forward if they would open-source the Symbian operating system, but until that s done, I am going to look at the OpenMoko FreeRunner next. The E51 once again made it perfectly clear for me that proprietary software is no alternative for my use case. NP: Fat Freddy s Drop: Live at the Matterhorn

I managed to get my hands on a HP Media Vault mv2120, a nice ARM based NAS device, a few months ago with the intentions of porting Debian to it. Unfortunately, I have been really busy lately and most of my time was spent on adding support for the QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 (which required a lot of generic work to get Marvell Orion support into Debian, a new SoC used in many NAS devices, including the QNAP TS-x09 and HP mv2120). There were a number of things that had to be worked out before Debian would run on the mv2120. The good news is that Marc Singer and Eugene San have done all of the heavy lifting in the last few weeks in figuring out how the mv2120 works and that now it's just a matter of putting everything together for Debian to work. Here are the issues that had to be worked out:

• Figure out how the rescue mode works and how to construct a rescue image that the device can boot: I knew that the mv2120 had a rescue mode that can be activated by keeping the the power and reset buttons pressed when starting that would request a rescue image via the network. This rescue mode can be used to start the Debian installer. Eugene San figured out how to construct a rescue image that the mv2120 would accept. Marc Singer has also written a tool, uphpmvault, to serve such rescue images from Linux.
• Figure out the best way to make one image that contains the kernel and ramdisk: the mv2120 only loads a kernel and no ramdisk, but a ramdisk is needed to start Debian. I discussed some really ugly hacks with Marc Singer to get the mv2120 to accept an image consisting of kernel and ramdisk but Marc wanted to try something else first. u-boot, the boot loader used on the mv2120, can accept something called a multipart image which can consist of a kernel and a ramdisk. When Eugene San heard that we were trying to load a multipart image, he went ahead and figured out how to construct an image that the mv2120 would boot.

Now that these two issues are resolved, I simply need to put everything together and add support for the mv2120 to a number of debian-installer components. We already have Orion kernel images in unstable that support the HP mv2120 (along with a number of other Orion based NAS devices) and the rest shouldn't take too long.

When I got home last night, I couldn t sleep and instead popped a DVD into the drive and sat back to watch an episode of the famous Tatort series (German only). Tatort ( crime site ) episodes tell the tale of police investigations, but without stuntmen and special effects, without sci-fi elements or threadbare settings and stories, without technology and gadgets. In fact, it just feels plain as if it could happen next door tomorrow. The characters are normal as you and I, but played beautifully, with witty and enjoyable dialogues, which seem familiar and natural to me as a German, rather than trying to be funny or cool. Yet, the two main investigators, Batic and Leitmayr, are awesome and it s good fun to watch them inch towards solving the mysteries. I watched the episode Norbert , and I really enjoyed it. The plot is full of surprises, and the viewer is (purposely) mislead on various occasions. It was suspenseful until the end. I ve seen maybe 20 of the thousands of episodes (it airs every Sunday night since 1970), and this one was so far my favourite. Quality television! It s a shame the (Dutch) DVDs I have do not have English subtitles. NP: Dimmer: I Believe You Are a Star