Search Results: "evo"

31 December 2009

John Goerzen: My Reading List for 2010

I can hear the question now: What kind of guy puts The Iliad and War and Peace on a list of things to read for fun? Well, me. I think that reading things by authors I ve never read before, people that take positions I haven t heard of before or don t agree with, or works that are challenging, will teach me something. And learning is fun. My entire list for 2010 is at Goodreads. I ve highlighted a few below. I don t expect to read all 34 books on the Goodreads list necessarily, but there is the chance. The Iliad by Homer, 750BC, trans. by Alexander Pope, 704 pages. A recent NPR story kindled my interest in this work. I m looking forward to it. The Oxford History of the Classical World by Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, 1986, 882 pages. It covers ancient Greece and Rome up through the fall of the Roman empire. The Fires of Heaven (Wheel of Time #5) by Robert Jordan, 1994, 912 pages. I ve read books 1 through 4 already, and would like to continue on the series. War and Peace by Lev Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1869, 1392 pages. Been on my list for way too long. Time to get to it. Haven t read anything by Tolstoy before. The Politics of Jesus by John Howard Yoder, 1972, 2nd ed., 270 pages. Aims to dispel the notion of Jesus as apolitical. An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin, 1996, 496 pages. Picked this up at Powell s in Portland on a whim, and it s about time I get to it. The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church by Gregory A. Boyd, 2007, 224 pages. An argument that the American evangelical church allowed itself to be co-opted by the political right (and some on the left) and argues this is harmful to the church. Also challenges the notion that America ever was a Christian nation. Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of the Empire, by Jerome Carcopino, 2003, 368 pages. I ve always been fascinated with how things were on the ground rather than at the perspective of generals and kings, and this promises to be interesting. Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Conrad Grebel Lectures) by Willard M. Swartley, 1983, 368 pages. Looking at how people have argued from different Biblical perspectives about various issues over the years. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927, 252 pages. I can t believe I ve never read Woolf before. Yet another one I m really looking forward to. Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922, 319 pages. Per Goodreads: This book of five confessional essays from the 1930s follows Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda from the height of their celebrity as the darlings of the 1920s to years of rapid decline leading to the self-proclaimed Crack Up in 1936. Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (1961 unabridged version), 783 pages. The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox, 2009, 256 pages. Per Goodreads, Cox explains why Christian beliefs and dogma are giving way to new grassroots movements rooted in social justice and spiritual experience. Heard about this one in an interview with Diane Rehm. Being There by Jerzy Kosi ski, 1970, 128 pages. Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary by Marcus Borg, 2006, 352 pages. Whether or not you agree with Borg, this has got to be a thought-provoking title. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, 1844, 640 pages. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura, 1906, 154 pages. Per Goodreads: In 1906 in turn-of-the century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Nearly a century later, Kakuzo s The Book of Tea is still beloved the world over. Interwoven with a rich history of tea and its place in Japanese society is poignant commentary on Eastern culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more. More of my list is at Goodreads.

29 December 2009

John Goerzen: Review: The Happiest Days of Our Lives (by Wil Wheaton)

I started to write this review last night, and went looking for Wil Wheaton s blog, where many of the stories came from, so I can link to it from my review. It was getting late, I was tired, and so I was a bit disoriented for a few seconds when I saw my own words flash up on the screen. At the time, his most recent story had excerpted my review of paper books. Wow, I thought. This never happens when I m about to review Dickens. And actually, it s never happened before, ever. I ll admit to owning a big grin when I saw that one of my favorite authors liked one of my blog posts. And Wil Wheaton is one of my favorite authors for sure. I enjoy reading others too, of course, but Wil s writing is something I can really identify with like no other. My parents were never in a London debtor s prison like Dickens were; I was never a promising medical student like A. C. Doyle. But I was, and am, a geek, and Wil Wheaton captures that more perfectly than anyone. After I read Just a Geek a few years ago, I gave it to my wife to read, claiming it would help her understand me better. I think it did. In The Happiest Days of Our Lives, Wil recounts memories of his childhood, and of more recent days. He talks of flashbacks to his elementary school days, when he and his classmates tried to have the coolest Star Wars action figures (for me: calculator watches). Or how his aunt introduced him to D&D, which reminded me of how my uncle got me interested in computers. Teaching himself D&D was an escape for the geeky kid that wasn t good at sports, as teaching myself Pascal and C was for me. Between us, the names and activities are different, but the story is the same. I particularly appreciated Wil s reflections on his teenage years. Like him, at that age, I often found myself as the youngest person in a room full of adults. Yet I was still a teenager, and like any teenager, did some things that I look back on with some embarrassment now. Wil was completely honest with himself he admitted crashing a golf cart on the Paramount studio lot, for instance, but also reminds me that he was a teenager then. He recognizes that he didn t always make the best choices and wasn t always successful with what he did, but isn t ashamed of himself either. That s helpful for me to remember; I shouldn t be unreasonably harsh on my 16-year-old self, and need to remember that I had to be a teenager too. I also identify with him as a dad. He wrote of counting the days until he could teach his boys about D&D, about passing on being a geek to his sons. I ve had a similar excitement about being able to help Jacob build his first computer. Already Jacob, who is 3, loves using the manual typewriter I cleaned up for him, and spent an hour using the adding machine I dug out on Sunday while I was watching the boys. (I regret that I didn t have time to take it apart and show him how it worked right then when he asked). And perhaps his 2nd-favorite present of Christmas was the $3.50 large-button calculator with solar cell power I got him as an impulse buy at the pharmacy the other day. He is particularly enamored with the square root button because a single press replaces all the numbers on the screen with completely different numbers! I can t find the exact passage now, but Wil wrote at one point about his transition from a career in acting to a career in writing. He said that he likes the feeling he gets when his writing can touch people. He s been able to redefine himself not as a guy that used to be an actor on Star Trek but a person that is a good author, now. I agree, and think his best work has been done with a keyboard instead of a camera. And that leaves me wondering where my career will take me. Yes, I m an author, but of technical books. Authors of technical books rarely touch people s hearts. There s a reason we read Shakespeare and Dickens in literature classes, but no high school English teacher has ever assigned Newton s Opticks, despite its incredible importance to the world. Newton revolutionized science, mathematics, and philosophy, but Opticks doesn t speak to the modern heart like Romeo and Jiuliet still does. Generations of people have learned more about the world from Shakespeare than from Newton. I don t have Wil s gift for writing such touching stories. I ve only been able to even approach that sort of thing once or twice, and it certainly won t make a career for me. Like Wil, I m rarely the youngest person in the room anymore. His days of being a famous teenage actor on a scifi series are long gone, as are mine of single-handedly defeating entire teams at jr. high programming contests. (OK, that s a stretch, but at the time it sure felt exciting.) But unlike him, I m not completely content with my niche yet. I blog about being a geek in rural Kansas, where there still aren t many. I m a dad, with an incredible family. And I write about programming, volunteer for Debian and a few other causes, and have a surprisingly satisfying job working for a company that builds lawn mowers. And yet, I have this unshakable feeling of unsettledness. That I need to stop and think more about what I really want to do with my life, perhaps cultivate some talents I don t yet have, or perhaps find a way to make my current path more meaningful. So I will take Wil s book as a challenge, to all those that were once sure of what their lives would look like, and are less sure with each passing year: take a chance, and make it yours. And on that score, perhaps I ve done more than I had realized at first. Terah and I took a big chance moving to Kansas, and another one when we bought my grandparents run-down house to fix up and live in. Perhaps it s not a bad idea to pause every few years and ask the question: Do I still like the direction I m heading? Can I change it? Wil Wheaton gives me lots to think about, in the form of easy-to-read reflections on his own life. I heartily recommend both Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives. (And that has nothing to do with the fact that the Ubuntu machine he used to write the book probably had installed on it a few pieces of code that I wrote, I promise you.)

14 December 2009

Joey Hess: two films

I've been watching some good films recently. Two I especially liked. baby camel in sidecar man in taxi Goodbye Solo starts in Winston-Salem and ends up at Blowing Rock. Both settings, as well as the taxi in between, are very familiar. The characters could easily be people I've met. Tulpan is set in a steppe in Kazakhstan. The desert and dust devils mostly reminded me of Mars. Particularly of this amazing shot taken by the Spirit rover. dust devils on Mars! Still, I felt so much more at home in Tulpan. Kept pausing it to check out how the family had their yurt set up and furnished, and watched their very real-seeming life unfold, right down to the lambing scene. While Solo took the very familiar, and confounded expectations and biases at every step. They're both fine films, from directors I want to see more of. I've seen Ramin Bahrani's work before Solo, and especially liked Man Push Cart. Don't know if I will ever find any of Sergei Dvortsevoy's earlier films.

7 December 2009

Simon McVittie: RC Bugs of W48-W49

More release critical bug squashing of the "week" (fortnight, really): Removals from testing and proposed removals from unstable: Possible candidates for removal: Other drive-by QA:

Cyril Brulebois: RBCN

I really liked doing stuff like Zack s RCBW in the past, but nowadays I m busy with some buildds, reporting RC bugs because some maintainers don t test their uploads, as well as posting patches to fix FTBFS on GNU/kFreeBSD. But from time to time, it s also fun to close RC bugs. Here s a new concept (that I probably won t reproduce as regularly as Zack and his minions, though): RCBN for Release-Critical Bugs of the Night. Those are now closed: Many thanks to Peter Green, to Ruben Molina, and to Ilya Barygin for their patches. Special thanks to Richard Darst for orpie s patches: he even managed to get rid of embedded code copies while addressing the FTBFS. Nice! Unfortunately, in the same time, I had to open some FTBFS/RC bugs: So, what s next? Get back to work!

6 December 2009

Ian Wienand: Distance to 1 million people

On a recent trip up the Oregon coast, a friendly doorman at our hotel in Portland was inquiring about our trip. When we mentioned we passed through Bandon, OR, he quipped that Bandon was the place furthest from a city of one million people in the USA. I guess a normal person would just think "oh, that's interesting" and move on, but it has been plaguing me ever since. Firstly, I had to find what cities in the USA had more than 1 million people. Luckily Wolfram Alpha gives the answer: (I certainly wouldn't have guessed that list!) From there my plan was to find the bounding box of the continental USA; luckily Wikipedia has the raw data for that. Combined with the latitude and longitude of the cities above, I had the raw data. I couldn't figure out any way better than a simple brute-force of testing every degree and minute of latitude and longitude within the bounding box and calculating the distance to the closest large city; the theory being that from one particular point you would have to travel further than any other to reach a city of 1 million people. Luckily, that is short work for a modern processor, and hopefully the result would be a point somewhere around Bandon. I'd already become acquainted with the great circle and measuring distances when I did Tinymap, so a quick python program evolved. However, it turns out that the program picks the far south-east corner of the bounding box. Thanks to the shape of the USA, that is way out over the ocean somewhere. I can't figure out a way to get an outline of the USA to test if a given point is inside the border or not, but all is not lost. I modified the program to output the the distance to the closest large city along with the location to a log file, and then imported it into gnuplot to make a heat-map. The hardest part was finding an equirectangular outline of the USA to place the heat-map over, rather than a much more common Mercator projection; Wikimedia to the rescue! I actually surprised myself at how well the two lined up when, after a little work with Gimp, I overlayed them (big) Distance to a city of 1 million people (km) From this, I can see that Bandon, about a third of the way up the Oregon coast, is a pretty good candidate. However, probably not the best; I get the feeling the real point that is the furthest from any city of 1 million people is actually somewhere in the central-middle of Montana. However, we can also fiddle the program slightly to disprove the point about Bandon. The numbers show the closest large city to Bandon is LA, at ~1141km. Taking another point we suspect to be more remote; the closest large city to Portland (where we met the doorman) is also LA at ~1329km. So to reach the closest large city you have to travel further from Portland than Bandon, so Bandon is not the furthest place in the USA from a city of one million people. Myth busted!

25 November 2009

Erich Schubert: Google Wave rolling out?

When I got my Google Wave account, it took the invitation about a week to arrive. A few days ago, I got my first own invites, and invited some colleagues (in an attempt to actually find a use for Google Wave beyond "rich media live messaging"). Within a few minutes they were "in". Now I just got my second set of invites. So is Google Wave now getting ready for mass opening, rocketing user numbers?As you might have already guessed, I'm not convinced by Google Wave. It's technically interesting and well-done. The demos are all nice. It's just that the UI in the browser is a bit fragile and cumbersome, and the big question so far is:
What does Google Wave allow you to do that you couldn't do before?
To me, there has been little actual use so far. Wave can do everything, but isn't optimal in any of them: Yes, I'm aware that you should differentiate between the protocol and the ui. Still pretty much everything is currently designed for the web browser with full JavaScript and Flash capabilities.Of course this isn't the end yet, Google Wave will evolve. Maybe into something cool, maybe it will remain just a niche thing. Maybe some cool apps will just use Wave as protocol. But I figure, I'll mostly wait for these things to happen first before I become a frequent user of Wave.The biggest thing I see is the "spam" (this especially includes 'Quiz', Mafia Wars and similar Scamville type of 'apps' that surely will show up in no time, once Wave is open to the public). What will Wave provide to me to handle this flood of worthless information that I'm getting more and more?P.S. Please don't bother to ask for invitations to Wave.P.P.S. here's how to replace the odd scrollbars with the regular OS scrollbars with a really simple user style (CSS).

24 November 2009

Jordi Mallach: Ten years as a Debian Maintainer

On the 24th of November of 1999, the Debian ftpmasters processed the NEW package wmbiff, which got installed in the potato distribution. This sponsored upload by Fernando S nchez was the first of my packages to hit the official Debian archive, thus officially making me a Debian maintainer. So, in short, today is my tenth anniversary as a Debian contributor! I actually started a few days before, and soon after that upload, many other ITPs and uploads followed. I will always be thankful to fer for his patience with my upload sponsoring until I became a Debian developer with full rights and was able to upload myself. During these years, I've been involved in many teams and different tasks, with my activity and dedication probably peaking around 2001 or 2002, when I apparently was doing a crazy amount of different stuff. I started doing plain packaging work of software packages, some of which also have come a long way (thanks for that, Chris!), but soon started to contribute in other Debian tasks. I think it's safe to say that the task that has ended up having more impact in the people that surround me was bootstrapping the Debian Catalan community and starting the Catalan translation of Debian's website, which soon after triggered the creation of a formal Debian Catalan translation project. I've also spent a lot of time giving back to the NM team which helped me get a Debian account through the still experimental new New Maintainer process, and the QA team helping as I could with the never ending release cycles of potato and woody. At some point I got engaged in the GNOME packaging tasks and the creation of the Debian GNOME team, and picked up the Catalan translation of GNOME 1.5.x releases, which eventually opened me the doors of Softcatal , a Catalan non-profit devoted to the promotion of the Catalan language in technology. I've believed in Debian's values since my classmate Ulisses Alonso prodded me to install Debian on my desktop back in 1997. Even if getting X up and running on bo was a real pain in the ass, knowing that the system I was running had all been written by people driven by altruism was enlightening; months later it was time to give back. Of course, I've not been able to keep my motivation or output as high as I'd like. Debian as a collective has sometimes taken some decisions which were not so easy to understand from my point of view. The outcome of the non-free votes was a bit appalling, and having debian-devel becoming more and more a battleground instead of a civilised mailing list certainly did not help at some point (unsubscribing from it made my life a lot simpler!). Joining a triathlon club, having a girlfriend and suddenly rediscovering my neglected social life didn't help either. The result is that my dedication has been wanning noticeably since 2005 or so, but I still do my best to keep up with most of duties, even if I'm aware I'm clearly neglecting a few of them. I am very proud of having been a part of an incredible project like Debian, and hope to be around for at least ten more years. Not only because I love and believe in Free Software; thanks to my involvement, I've been able to work on Debian-related jobs for all of my professional career, but above all I've been very lucky to make lots of real friends. Today's has been a nice day full of remembering and mailbox digging. Thank you, Debian!

Steve Kemp: This is the part where you tell me what matters is on the inside

Some technology evolves very quickly, for example the following things are used by probably 80% of readers of this page: But other technology is stuck in the past and only sees laclustre updates and innovations (not that inovation is mandatory or automatically a good thing) Right now I'm looking at my webserver logs, trying to see who is viewing my sites, where they came from, and what their favourite pie is. In the free world we have the choice of awstats, webalizer, and visitors (possibly more that I'm unaware of). In the commercial world everybody and their dog uses Google's analytics. On the face of it a web analysis package is trivial: If you add javascript-fu to each of your pages you can track page titles, exit links, screen resolutions, and other data to record too. (Though I guess thats a seperate problem; trying to merge that data in with the data you have in your access log without making nasty links like "GET /trackin.gif?x_res=800;y_res=600". Anyway I guess with cookies you could correlate reasonably carefully.) In conclusion why are my web statistics so dull, boring, and less educational than I desire? I'd be tempted to experiment, but I suspect this is a problem which has subtle issues I'm overlooking and requires an artistic slant to make pretty. (ObLink: asql is my semi-solution to logfile analysis.) ObFilm: Bound

Russell Coker: Car Drivers vs Mechanics and Free Software

In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said If you don t know how to make a surgery, you don t do it. If you don t know how to drive, don t drive. And if you don t know how to use a computer, don t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses. Later he advocates using a taxi. Now I agree about surgery apart from corner cases such as medical emergencies in remote places and large-scale disasters. I also agree that it s good to avoid driving if you aren t very good at it (that would be much better than the current fad of sub-standard drivers buying large 4WD vehicles). But I don t think that people who lack computer skills should avoid using computers. When cars were first invented everyone who owned one was either a mechanic or employed one. Driving a car often involved being well out of range of anyone else who might know how to fix it, so either the car owner or their chauffeur had to be able to fix almost any problem. As the car industry evolved the level of mechanical knowledge required to own and operate a car has steadily decreased. I expect that a significant portion of drivers don t know how to top up the oil or radiator water in their car and probably don t know what is the correct pressure for air in their tires. To a large extent I don t think this is a problem, owning a car involves regularly taking it to be serviced where professionals will (or at least should) check every aspect of the car that is likely to fail. If I used my windscreen-washer less frequently I could probably avoid opening the bonnet of the car between scheduled services! When budgeting for car ownership you just have to include regularly spending a few hundred dollars to pay for an expert to find problems and fix them with of course the occasional large expense for when something big breaks. When the computer industry matures I expect that the same practice will occur. Most people will buy computers and plan to spend small amounts of money regularly to pay people to maintain it. Currently most older people seem to plan to have a young relative take care of their PC for them essentially free mechanic services. The quality of such work will vary of course, and poorly designed OSs that are vulnerable to attack may require more support than can be provided for free. Due to deficiencies in city design it is almost essential to drive a car in most parts of the US and Australia as opposed to countries such as the Netherlands where you can survive quite well without ever driving. When a service is essential it has to be usable by people who have little skill in that area. It would be good if driving wasn t necessary, I would be happy if I never drove a car again. The need to use computers however will continue to increase. So we need to make them more available to users and to support users who can t disinfect computers etc. The only skill requirements for using a computer should be the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse! This requires a new industry in supporting PCs. Geek Squad in the US [2] seems to be the organisation that is most known for this. I expect that there will be multiple companies competing for such work in every region in the near future, just as there are currently many companies competing for the business of servicing cars. We need support for free software from such companies. Maybe existing free software companies such as Red Hat and Canonical can get into this business. One advantage of having such companies supporting software is that they would have a strong commercial incentive to avoid having it break unlike proprietary software vendors who have little incentive to do things right. The next issue is the taxi analogy. Will software as a service with Google subsidising our use of their systems [3] take over any significant part of the market? Of course the car analogy breaks down when it comes to privacy, no-one does anything remotely private in a taxi while lots of secret data is stored on a typical home computer. Google is already doing some impressive security development work which will lead towards low maintenance systems [4] as well as protecting the privacy of the users to the extent that you can trust whoever runs the servers. My parents use their computer for reading email, browsing the web, and some basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet work. The mail is on my IMAP server so all I need is to have some way to store their office documents on a server and they will pretty much have a dataless workstation. Moving their collection of photos and videos of their friends and relatives to a server will be a problem, transferring multiple gigabytes of data on a cheap Australian Internet access plan is a problem.

23 November 2009

Vincent Sanders: Fitting Everything In

Recently I have been having issues fitting everything I want to do into the time available.

As my kids grow up they always seem to need to be taken someplace or picked up from an activity and that is on top of the daily school run. I recently worked out I spend over eight hours a week, a whole five hundred minutes, taking them to and fro.

Now do not get me wrong, I actually enjoy spending time with my children and we do talk and interact during these occasions but it is hardly a stimulating activity walking to school or being driven to a club.

Add to that my job and its traveling requirements and assuming I want to sleep, eat etc. and all of a sudden I discover I have about forty hours left in a week to share between my family and hobbies.

Anyone with kids knows they are a wonderful time sink :-) and of course the family home often needs something doing. All of a sudden I realize why I feel like I often end up having to trade sleep for my hobbies!

As I get older I find I still have the same number of ideas for projects but the realization that even if I find the time to start something I am unlikely to be able to devote the resources to finishing it. Being one of life's boring people who like to finish a project they start (ok at least make something useful) this means I tend not to start new things too often.

All of this has lead me to become very careful about how I spend my free time and on what. It means my personal involvement in software projects like Debian and the Linux kernel is nowhere near the level I might like. Similarly my music practice (or absolute lack thereof) causes my teacher to get snippy with me.

As you can imagine starting something like a blog when I do not have enough time for what I am already doing is something of a challenge for me and may indeed falter. However I shall give it a chance as I feel a need for public place to share all those small things which I would probably put on my personal website if I had time to work on it ;-)

Jon Dowland: sid fail

Every now and then I have a demoralising experience with the quality of Debian packages in sid. That's to be expected, sid is a development distribution, but it still sometimes gets on my nerves. I've decided to write about some of my experiences. Some rules: I may not rant without Earlier in the week I was interested in doing some very simple video editing. A bit of searching and I come across the name of a potentially useful program: 'pitivi'. As luck would have it, there's a Debian package! However, the program within won't run. I also discovered more or less immediately that the package (provided a useless, whitespace only README file)[http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=556850]. Today I was looking at tracing stuffs, and I discovered etrace. The very first action I tried after installing it was to look in /usr/share/doc/etrace -- which was devoid of documentation. (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=514083)

Martín Ferrari: Movies

Just wanted to share comments on some movies I've watched recently. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian

20 November 2009

Steve Kemp: I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet.

I've really enjoyed reading some of Matthew Garrett's entries about legacy PC hardware features - specifically the cute hack involving A20 and the keyboard controller. Reading things like that really takes me back. I remember when the z80 was cutting edge, and I discovered you could switch to a whole new set of shadow registers via "exx" and "ex af,af'". I remember using undocumented opcodes, and even now I can assemble and disassemble simple z80 machine code. (Don't get me started on the speedlock protectors and their fiendish use of the R register; that'll stick in your mind if you cracked it. I did.) I remember being introduced to the PC, seeing subdirectories appear in MS-DOS 2.0, network redirectors appearing in DOS 3.x, and support for big hard drives appearing in MS-DOS 4.0. I remember the controvosy over the AARD code in the betas of Windows 3, and the focus that was given in the book "Undocumented DOS" which mostly focussed upon the "list of lists". (At that time I'd have been running GEM on an IBM XT with hercules (monochrome) graphics.) I remember learning about that a .COM file was a flat image, limited to 64k which loaded at offset 100h, to accomodate the PSP (program segement prefix) for compatbility with CP/M (something I've never seen, never used, and known nothing about. I just know you could use the file control blocks to get simple wildcard handling for your programs "for free") I wrote simple viral code which exploited this layout, appending new code to end of binary, replacing the first three bytes with a jump to the freshly added code. Later you could restore the original bytes back to their original contents and jump back to 100h (I even got the pun in the name of 40Hex magazine.) I recall when COM files started to go out of fashion and you had to deal with relocation and segment fixups. When MZ was an important figure. I even remember further back to when switching to protected mode was a hell of tripple-faults, switching back from protected mode to real mode was "impossible" and the delight to be had with the discovery and exploitation of "unreal mode". All these things I remember .. and yet .. they're meaningless to most now, merely old history. Adults these days might have grown up and reached age 20 having always had Windows 95 - never having seen, used, or enjoyed MS-DOS. How far have we come since then? In some ways not far at all. In other ways the rise of technology has been exponential. Back then when I was doing things I'd not have dreamed I could update a webpage from a mobile phone whilst trapped upon a stalled train. There are now more mobile phones than people in the UK. In some ways that's frightening - People miss the clear seperation between home & work for example - but in other ways .. liberation. I have no predictions for the future, but it amazing how far we've come just in my lifetime; and largely without people noticing. The industrial revolution? Did that happen with people mostly not noticing? Or was there more concious awareness? Food for thought. ObFilm: Terminator

17 November 2009

Florian Maier: another debian bug squasing party at limux office

To celebrate the move to our new office building, there will be another Debian Bug Sqashing Party! The event will take place from 27.11. to 29.11. Here is the Google Maps link. The BSP starts on Friday afternoon at about 17:00. As always, everybody with moderate Unix skills is welcome to participate. Some Debian or programming knowledge is also desirable. For Debian Newbies, there will be a packaging introduction on Friday evening. Please be prepare your Notebooks for a Wireles LAN setup, as we're still not done with the cabling after our move to the new office building last week. Last, but not least i'm glad we will be able to sponsor some pizza for the hungry developer crowd ;-) More information about BSPs is available here:

15 November 2009

John Goerzen: Jacob and I Visit Wichita

Today didn t exactly go as planned. Terah woke up feeling sick, and by mid-morning was really wanting a nap. Not that that is likely to happen with a 3-year-old and a 4-month-old in the house. I needed to visit the WSU bookstore sometime anyhow, so I suggested I d take Jacob to Wichita for awhile. Jacob had been talking of seeing the trains again for awhile, so he chose these overalls for the day: 2009-11-14 11.23.26.jpg He wanted me to sing Home On The Range several times as we drove. We stopped at WSU first, and he enjoyed running down the wide sidewalks and trying to hide behind bushes. Then it was on to lunch at HuHot Mongolian Grill. Jacob chose his own ingredients (with some help from me). He chose fish, which noodles he wanted, and of course had some baby corn and carrots. He got a full bowl of ingredients, and of course his favorite part was watching them grill it. He polished off most of his plate, too. 2009-11-14 13.28.22.jpg He had been talking about ice cream all day. In fact, mention Wichita to Jacob, and he ll almost immediately say, Shall we get some ice cream? I wonder who he gets that from Terah usually takes him to Cold Stone Creamery, but we didn t have enough time to go there. So we went to The Old Mill Tasy Shop, something of along-time local legend in downtown Wichita. Jacob enjoyed noticing that the old brick wall had holes in it while they scooped out his chocolate ice cream and my strawberry sundae. He was too busy devouring his ice cream to notice it came in a metal bowl until I pointed it out to him. 2009-11-14 14.16.43.jpg Then it was off to the Great Plains Transportation Museum. It was a quiet afternoon in November; not the packed crowd like the last time we were there. He went for the old Santa Fe diesel passenger locomotive first (which he insists is a freight train ). Of course you get to go inside almost everything, and he enjoyed going inside that one, sitting on the engineer s chair, and playing with handles and knobs. We went in several of the cabooses, and he noticed the train potty in one. It s the old open to the ground type, and if you look down inside it, you see the rocks that are underneath the caboose. Jacob thought it was very interesting that the train potty has rocks in it. The museum is right next to some active freight tracks, and Jacob was very much hoping that there d be a freight train going past. He wasn t disappointed; we saw two, plus an airplane and a helicopter. A successful visit, I d say. <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=71377" height="267" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"><param name="flashvars" value="intl_lang=en-us&amp;photo_secret=8517185815&amp;photo_id=4104904370"><param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=71377"><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed allowfullscreen="true" bgcolor="#000000" flashvars="intl_lang=en-us&amp;photo_secret=8517185815&amp;photo_id=4104904370" height="267" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=71377" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object> So I didn t really get done anything I had planned to today, but in spite of being behind on stuff, it s a better day than I had planned. I really enjoy going off and doing things with Jacob. While we were eating lunch, I asked him if he had fun at the bookstore. Yeah! I have fun EVERYWHERE! What a fun perspective, huh?

12 November 2009

Russell Coker: Links November 2009

Credit Writedowns has a populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle [1]. It s an interesting analysis of the way the US economy is working. Bono writes for the NY Times about Rebranding America [2]. He praises Barack Obama suggesting a different reason to believe that the peace prize is deserved and describes what he believes to be the world s hope for the US. IsMyBlogWorking.com is a useful site that analyses your blog [3]. It gives some advice on how to improve some things as well as links to feed validation sites. Evgeny Morozov gave an interesting TED talk How the Net Aids Dictatorships [4]. I don t agree with his conclusion, he has some evidence to support his claims but I think that a large part of that is due to people not using the Internet well. I expect things to improve. The one claim that was particularly weak was when he mentioned radio stations in Rwanda as an example of technology being used for bad purposes the entire point about the first-world discussion about such things is the radio vs the Internet. Ray Anderson gave an inspiring talk about The Business Logic of Sustainability [5]. He transformed his carpet company, decreasing it s environmental impact by 82% and it s impact per volume of product by more than 90% while also significantly increasing it s profitability. He says that corporate managers who don t protect the environment should be regarded as criminals. Making his company more environmentally friendly reduced expenses (through efficiency), attracted more skillful employees, and attracted environmentally aware customers. Managers who don t follow Ray s example are not only doing the wrong thing for the environment, they are doing the wrong thing for their stockholders! Ray s company Flor takes carpet orders over the web [6]. They won t ship a catalogue outside the US, so presumably they only sell carpet to the US too. Marc Koska gave an interesting TED talk about a new syringe design that prevents re-use [7]. His main aim is to prevent the spread of AIDS in the developing world where even hospital staff knowingly reuse syringes. It will also do some good in developed countries that try to prohibit drug use. David Logan gave an interesting TED talk about tribal leadership [8]. His use of the word tribe seems rather different from most other uses, and I am a bit dubious about some of his points. But it is definitely a talk worth seeing and considering. Deirdre Walker is a recently retired Assistant Chief of Police who has worked for 24 years as a police officer, she describes in detail her analysis of the flaws in the TSA security checks at US airports [9]. Brian Krebs wrote an article for the Washington Post recommending that Linux Live CDs be used for Internet banking [10]. Windows trojans have been used to take over bank accounts that were accessed by security tokens, that could only be accessed by certain IP addresses, and that required two people to login. It seems that nothing less than a Linux system that is solely used for banking is adequate when a lot of money is at stake. The NY Times has an interesting review of the book Ayn Rand and the World She Made [11]. It seems that Ayn was even madder than I thought. Gary Murphy has written an interesting analysis of the latest stage in the collapse of the US Republican party [12]. The ABC (AU) Law Report has an interesting article about Evony s (of China and the US) attempting to sue Bruce Everiss (of the UK) in Australia [13]. The Guardian has an insightful article about the IEA making bogus claims about the remaining oil reserves [14]. It seems that the experts who work for the IEA estimate that oil is running out rapidly while the US is forcing them to claim otherwise. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written an interesting article about the economic effects of the war in Iraq [15]. Apparently it caused the loss of over 2,000,000 jobs considerably more than the job losses that could ever result from efforts to combat global warming.

11 November 2009

Yves-Alexis Perez: Key transition (this is _not_ a meme)

Ok, so following the trend, I created some time ago a new GPG key, which I'm now transitioning too. I've set up a transition document, available at http://molly.corsac.net/~corsac/key-transition.txt. It's signed by both the old and the new keys and is reproduced below: 
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160,SHA512
Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:44:05 +0100
I've recently set up a new RSA-based GPG key, and will be transitioning away
from my old DSA-based one.  The old key will be revoked soon, so I prefer all
future correspondence to use the new one.  I would also like to ensure that
this new key is well-integrated into the web of trust.  This message is signed
by both keys to certify the transition.
The old DSA key was:
pub   1024D/C5C05BAE 2004-11-11
      Key fingerprint = DE26 2FC4 7097 FFC6 DE2C  D8C0 4D44 C020 C5C0 5BAE
The new RSA key is:
pub   4096R/71EF0BA8 2009-05-06
      Key fingerprint = 4510 DCB5 7ED4 7040 60C6  6476 3055 0F78 71EF 0BA8
If you already know my old key, you can verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:
  gpg --check-sigs 71EF0BA8
If you don't already know my old key, or if you're extra-paranoid, you
can check the fingerprint against the one given above:
  gpg --fingerprint 71EF0BA8
If you have previously signed my old DSA key, and if you're satisfied
that you've got the correct new RSA key, then I'd appreciate it if you
would sign my new key as well:
  caff 71EF0BA8
The caff program is in the signing-party package in Debian.  Please be careful
to generate signatures that don't rely on the weakening SHA-1 hash algorithm,
which requires some careful configuration even if you've already configured
gpg correctly.  See http://www.gag.com/bdale/blog/posts/Strong_Keys.html for
the gory details.
Thanks,
- --
Yves-Alexis Perez
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEAREDAAYFAkr6sqQACgkQTUTAIMXAW64HiACeIyabQueDHAeiAX8EkIeApiDj
++UAn2z7YkjHx0lQh0+s5WdhikG0YztiiQIcBAEBCgAGBQJK+rKkAAoJEDBVD3hx
7wuodUcQAKMbG9Rehxz+uZ6fST99cHt5Fjnv9TorY4hQaQK+85ZgiwPaHMHfYM1G
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DDMMed39UJl7bF73hV9ywGecxPpeh+dtoVnh0VT16uK2xTvW6ICEZgaPw1xfPUHS
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Z0wzJrmOxRyhvs5DOSOpNVlXZhffNQM1f42xxG8cUDaIf7pR5jK+xqHV7tIBQE1D
CrD0mt+YQCnngK0i4wQTO7VT/vjypf4A9W+VSsoJJpRhBbngU4pHu9JWqO84/7AA
j5FN8ug15MWysaS+FQ/EqzHmT7BGBWaTPv3yGlHKUjx0w4bPEpbH7y3fwHAcmOFf
xFRzvZFQ03zeer06yAqTVNuwr77HZgrCzgyQVgIkegAg6iUPiZcs
=CBT+
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Jan Hauke Rahm: Long time no see

It s been quite a while since I posted something in my blog. I had to recover from not going to Debconf9 which was real sad. Right before the conference, I mean like a day before it, I got more or less sick and just couldn t fly the next day. I managed to rebook the flight (thanks to SwissAir) for the next day but it wasn t meant to be. I would have loved to meet the Debian crew , get my GnuPG key a bit more into the web of trust, discuss a few issues, envy the fast end evolved notebooks everyone else has You can imagine it wasn t easy to see the conference going its way via live stream when I was actually planned to be there. Again sorry to everyone who worked for me being sponsored and everything! Anyways, time goes by and a lot happens, none of which I d like to publish in a blog, except: I got a part time job. :) If you ve ever asked me about my experience with Linux vServers or web hosting in general, and if you even asked me where to get such with fair prices and good support, I might have mentioned a small firm in Germany which I m a customer of for a long time now. And about two months ago it just so happened that they called me. I admit, I know the owner of the company (haven t seen him in a too long time, though) and I already considered us friends. But I was still surprised when he asked me to work for him. It s not a big deal, he said, just administer the servers we re running and take care of them. It s a few hours a month, don t worry, you can do it! All that with a scary smile Now it turns out he had more in mind and I m working on different projects at the same time, but still have the system (all Debian of course) at first priority. I have no clue if he s satisfied with my work or if he s just afraid to tell me (you know, us being friends and all), yet the systems are up and running and I m learning every day. I even got the chance to write a small project in ruby which I wanted to do for a long time. Love it! So, this is the first time that I recommend him not only because I trusted him with my system but also because I know your system would be safe. ;-) Need an IT partner in Germany or the Netherlands? o-byte.com Uhhh, I have to ask for a raise after this hymn :) Something else I forgot? Well, I became a DD but that s also some time ago, so hmm no, that s it for now.

10 November 2009

Yves-Alexis Perez: Call for help

So yesterday we had a really nice meeting with few french Debian folks. Luk and Ralf were visiting us, so we went at Prosper's for some meat and wine (and Aberlour). We were a bit too much to be able to speak to everybody (so mainly there were two 6-packs of people), but it was fine anyway. Though, the main point of the evening was that some (most?) teams in Debian are really (*really*) understaffed, and it might become problematic in the near future (like now). For example, from what I understood: I don't know the state of other teams, but it doesn't really look fine for the incoming freeze. So if you want to give some help, even if you're not yet technical enough, feel free to offer it to the teams above. Usually, starting with just using the package is enough. If you use it, you want it well-maintained, and there _are_ stuff to do to which don't require large technical knowledge, and the (few) active contributor will be happy to have some help and point you to what you can do. If you want to give some time to Debian, before filing some ITPs (even if you'd really like to have that package you use everyday), check if you can't do something for those above teams (and others which might need help too, like release team or kernel). Oh, and don't be scared, working on Debian is fun. It's time consuming, but it's rewarding. Don't let it become not fun.

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