At night, the outdoor temperature usually drops to a sane level. If the skies are clear, it may even get quite cool. Take advantage of this by opening the windows at night and filling the building with cold air to prepare it for the day ahead. If you leave the windows open in empty rooms, take care to fit grilles or similar in the gap to keep out large things like birds (and chasing a bat around a room is not fun and probably unhealthy for both of you). [... permalink to full text]

I’ve seen several requests for a simple set of instructions that test a distribution against the LSB. I wrote some Debian-specific instructions in a mailing list post back in October, and thought they’d do better as more general instructions. Before you start, you have to find out two things about the distribution you want to test:

• How to install the LSB on your distribution. At minimum, your distro should provide something like a “lsb” package. Make sure that’s installed.
• How to install LSB packages on your distribution. RPM-based distros have it easy here, since the procedure is likely to be the same as installing any other package on your system. Debian users (and users of Debian derivatives) need to use alien; I’ve found that you get the best results with alien -ick [package]. Other distributions will have their own ways, possibly involving alien as well.

Go to the LSB download page and start downloading everything under the Runtime Tests for the LSB version and architecture you want to test. Make sure you don’t get the betas unless that’s what you want to test. You will also need the lsb-python package from the Application Battery list. Install all of these packages. Once all of the packages are installed, run the tests:

• /opt/lsb/bin/lsblibchk
• /opt/lsb/bin/lsbcmdchk
• Add /usr/opt/lsb/appbat/bin to your PATH, run gcc -dumpmachine to get your machine triplet, and run /opt/lsb/share/test/qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]/run_tests. Answer the questions as appropriate.
• For the X test suites, install enough of XFree86 or X.org on your system for proper client support, as well as the Xvfb X server. Debian users can install the x-window-system-core and xvfb packages, but see below about problems with Xvfb. After this is done, go to the directory /opt/lsb/test/vsw4 and run the run_vsw4.sh script found there.
• For the main runtime test, make sure the loop driver is loaded. (This is mostly a problem on systems using udev.) After the test package is installed, set passwords for the “vsx0″, “vsx1″, and “vsx2″ users, log in as vsx0 at a system console, and run run_tests. Logging in is required; su or sudo won’t work. The default answers to the questions asked are mostly OK, but a few don’t have good defaults. In particular, you’ll have to tell the script the right passwords for the vsx users, and you should make sure the test block device is /home/tet/test_sets/nonexistb. Be prepared to type the root password several times to set up various things the tests need.

Most of the tests are quick, taking less than 15 minutes usually per test. The runtime test takes somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours, and often looks like it has hung. Don’t assume the runtime test has hung until it’s run overnight. If you’re using an emulator, don’t give up on runtime until it’s run for at least 24 hours. The tests create two kinds of files: journal files, and the official runtime report (created by the runtime test). Where you ran the tests, look for files with names starting with “journal” in the current directory, or for paths like results/0001e/journal. The C++ tests create a directory called “qmtest_libstdcpp_[version]”. There’s a handy utility called tjreport in /opt/lsb/bin; run that on the journal to get a quick summary of the results. If you want to post results, use tjreport. The official runtime report (in /home/tet/test_sets/results) has some additional information: a list of FIP (Further Information Provided) results. What to do with failures: First, make sure it’s really a failure of the environment, and not a failure of the tests. The LSB publishes a list of official waivers for test failures; check that your failures aren’t on that list. For failures not on that list, Google is your best resource; most likely, someone else has experienced the same failure, and will have more information about it. If you really can’t figure it out, come over to one of the LSB’s mailing lists and ask around. On Xvfb: The Xvfb versions shipped with most distributions have bugs that can cause problems. Anything running XFree86 will likely not be able to complete the X tests, and anything running X.org may see a number of failures. Because Xvfb is not required by the LSB, you can replace Xvfb with one that doesn’t have these bugs. Recent Debian xvfb packages for etch don’t have these bugs, so Debian and derivatives can use them for testing. (The sarge backport of Xvfb can be installed on vanilla sarge without upgrading any of the other XFree86 packages; missing packages can also be pulled from the sarge backport without affecting the packages that do ship.) Please post questions, problems, criticisms, etc. in the comments. A version of this might end up on the LSB site someday, so any improvements would be appreciated.

I got up this morning with hundreds of messages in my inbox, and re-sorted them to the correct folders. My monkeyplexer program, which sorts stuff into the correct folders automatically, has been running out of control. I developed it for a version of CRM114 that's now totally obsolete, but the file formats and interfaces have all changed. I've taken a poke at bringing the program up to speed with later versions, but it's just not bad enough to deal with. Also, the horrendous interface of crm114 is just too ugly to imagine. Blech. Instead, I took the opportunity to unsubscribe from about 25 mailing lists that I no longer read and that go from my inbox to an overstuffed folder to a trashcan two weeks later. Hopefully this will take some of the pressure off of the monkeyplexer until I get time to either a) move to something easier and bayesian like ifile or b) upgrade monkeyplexer. tags: crm114 email monkeyplexer folders mailing lists sorting

My mom, the rattlesnake magnet So, my Mom got bit by a rattlesnake yesterday morning. She'd taken a baby car seat out of my Dad's car the night before to put it in her car, but it was too late and dark so she left it in the driveway to install in the morning. Apparently when she tried to install it the next day, a rattler had snuck in there to sleep and nailed her on the arm. (My folks live on a pretty big lot in wt:Los Altos Hills, and there's a lot of wildlife, of the fuzzy and also scaly nature.) She got to Stanford Hospital just fine, and she's had 4 rounds of anti-venom. She's hurting but they think it's going to be all right. The strange part of the story is that this is the second time she's been bitten by a snake. I'm not sure how she's survived the process twice, but I'm pretty amazed that it happened twice at all. Waiting for news, here in Montreal... a little nerve wracking. tags: mom rattlesnake bite los altos hills

Peer-to-peer, broadcast style I read through TechCrunch that three major studios will be distributing shows via P2P in the coming months. That's all well and good, but if it's a for-pay system (content costs $0.99 and up), why should you have to contribute any bandwidth into a peer-to-peer system? For a dollar a pop, these should be easy, high-performance HTTP downloads, not shaggy and unreliable p2p stuff. I contribute my upstream bandwidth to Free Software and Open Content, not to re-forwarding something I had to pay for. tags: p2p tv techcrunch for pay

Stimulus and response Thanks to Matt for forwarding this excellent summary of blogs. tags: blogs matt malex microbes

While on the subject Our home mail server went on the fritz while we were in California, and it was a serious pain in the keester. I had to redirect all our mail redirects from our home server (bad.dynu.ca) to Gmail. The home server's back in business now, but I hadn't changed the email stuff back yet... and today I decided not to. I've re-pointed mail for our business, Wikitravel, and personal domains to the old Wikitravel server at iWeb (the same server this site runs on). I think that's probably the best thing for us to have a "home" server that's not at home; we really need to be able to get to our stuff from the road. It's been good so far; most of the domains were pretty easy. It's been the ones I'd forgotten about that are a hassle. Like, say, bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us. Damn, man. The geographical .us domains used to be one of my favorite things. Now they're not so much. tags: mail server move .us iweb gmail

Second wife So, I guess I'd finished some work yesterday, and I was feeling pretty good about it, because after dinner I decided to spend a little illicit "me" time. And with me, that usually ends up being a game. I'd heard a lot about Second Life, and I was especially impressed by some of the important appearances in the world, like Larry Lessig and Mia Garlick of Creative Commons. But I also have a terribly addictive personality, which is exemplified by the large pile of coffee cups on my desk, but also by the way I go completely crazy over video games. I just don't play them that often any more, because they suck up huge parts of my life, and in the end I've just moved a few bits around. So I try to steer clear. So the fact that there doesn't seem to be much to do in SL -- no level-ups, no territory to conquer -- is kind of an advantage for it. So I gave SL a try last night. I had to use one of our laptops, since the Linux alpha of their client doesn't work on Ubuntu (as far as I can tell). I'll say this: it's awfully nice for graphics, and the world is incredibly built out. But I felt a little bit like a hobo in Vegas -- everything was about casinos and strip clubs and huge fancy houses and cars and planes that I couldn't afford. SL is pretty famous for charging for every little thing, and building an impressive dual-world economy. It seems to have worked pretty well -- there's lots of chasing after the lucre in SL. It was awfully good on the eye-candy, but I felt like Neo in the Matrix: all I could see was dollar signs behind the colors. When I told Maj this morning why I was up till 2AM last night, she gave me a serious scowl. I'm pretty sure my SL days are over... mostly. After all, there's a theory that MMORGs are the reason why we haven't met any aliens -- that any sufficiently advanced culture is going to get sucked into pretend worlds like SL and not go out and explore the universe. tags: second life mmorpg games vr cc

Once you understand which parts of your building are warm and which are cool, think about where they are and where the doors and windows are. Remember heat rises and think about whether you can keep some doors open and other doors shut and direct the heat [... permalink to full text]

MJRay started my posting in his blog why he is going to fold his feed (send only the first paragraph or so in the RSS feed instead of the full text). Wouter, Phillip, JoeyH, Noodles, have expressed why they don't like the idea. So I'll just have to <AOL>ME TOO!</AOL>
Folds are nice for news feeds, where you want to quickly gaze at the headlines and just open the articles that are worth something, great. (BTW, I hate when Barrapunto or Cofrad a send only the title, not the whole first block. Too little information to judge!) But for personal blogs, for following friends' lives and opinions, it's... Just torture.

MJ Ray, couldn't you just export the complete entries via your RSS feed? (This also applies to other users of folding.)

I hate folds, too. In fact, it's the sole reason why I just removed the blogs of Laurent Gatto an Frederik Rousseau from Planet Grep, a Planet dedicated to Belgian FLOSS people. In my arrogant opinion, a planet should be more than just a bunch of links. If I want a bunch of links, I'll just read debian-www for a few days; there'll be plenty of online casino or so owners asking for us to link back to them in that time. And rest assured, these people have a bunch of links. Instead, a planet such as Planet Debian, Planet Grep, or, say, Planet Gnome should be an easy read. A thing one can read top-to-bottom. Without having to follow links to be able to just read whatever people are talking about. And, the claim that folds help people ignore irrelevant stuff is just plain nonsense. If there's a post that I'm not interested in, I'm perfectly capable of using the scrollbar, thanks. It's no big deal; I do that for quite a number of blog posts already. Especially those suckers that come with folds.

My blog covers several topics, not all subscribers are interested in all of them and I don't want to split it yet; A surprising number of my readers use tools which don't support full-text delivery well IMO; I prefer it in other blogs I read because it lets me choose whether to read the full text, rather than scroll down a lot. [...] For a round-up of other [permalink to full text]

[...] every building is different, too. Spend some time walking around your building at different times and noticing [...] Try to figure out how the heating system works[...] Sadly, I've no links for this yet, as all my stuff is on paper. Any suggestions? [permalink to full text]

[...] every building is different, too. Spend some time walking around your building at different times and noticing [...] Try to figure out how the heating system works[...] Sadly, I've no links for this yet, as all my stuff is on paper. Any suggestions? [permalink to full text]

The Greenpeace campaign against toxic e-waste is in the news today, following a survey that shows buyers are willing to pay a small extra [...] many mobile phone makers, hp and Dell have committed to phase-out. [...] Acer, Apple, IBM and Toshiba are in the hall of shame. Something to [... cont with links...]

Despite its own spam creation, Google is keen to be seen as helping to fight spam. To that end, it files invalid spam reports like this report from Erich Schubert. As Erich writes "That totally sucks, that a perfectly valid and correctly sent email, that is also delivered correctly, is reported as spam amongst the big ISPs." [cont with links...]

Over the next few weekdays, I'll post some tips here based on how I've been keeping cool in Lynn this year. Last summer, my office overheated and two pieces of hardware failed. [...] I think air conditioners are mostly evil, for reasons I'll describe later. They also only solve one symptom, not the problem. How can you keep cool without them? Time to learn from science, nature and some old tricks. [permalink to full text]

[...] listened to the Morning Report for the first time. It seems a better way to [...] channel4radio kept asking me to register, which involves reading reams of legal bull - far too much for a test download. So, I went to channel4.com/news and found the download [...] the Daily Mail Picnic, which is crisp and biting. It also let [continues with links on my site]

I was the first bike in from the Norfolk Arena, reaching the post office in under 8 minutes. I was brought to a stop by the high volume of schoolchildren at one point on the route! The other cyclists who started with me arrived just 40 seconds later. The lead car arrived after 11 minutes 30 seconds. We were surprised it [...]

when someone replies to tell others not to reply to the thread, then others reply to agree. Should taking meta-discussion to the absurd be a banning [...]

Being Father's Day today gives me pause to consider Debian Jr., a project for kids. The goal was to make Debian the OS kids prefer to use. I wanted my own kids to grow up enjoying using a system that puts the fewest barriers in the way to learning about how computers work, and to making computers work for them. It's nearly six years later now: enough time for my second youngest to grow from a toddler to an eight-year-old girl, for my youngest girl to be born and put to the test the lower limit of our "for kids from 0 to 99" slogan, for our boy in the middle to grow from a preschooler to a preteen, and for the two oldest girls to turn into teenagers. Perhaps by the time we have grandkids, Debian Jr. will finally be "done". In that time, our kids have gone from using a VT-420 attached to my Pentium 100, exploring commands using the "magic" tab-key at the bash prompt, playing with words and letters in pico, to playing 3D games and creating artwork in the Gimp on the family Sempron 3300+. And through it all, they've remained happy and proud to use Linux, which none of their friends have. They have become, I believe, more firmly grounded and comfortable with computing than they might have been using a system "dumbed down" for kids. To all the Debian using fathers out there today, Happy Father's Day! May you and your kids' lives be enriched as you share in the finest OS in the world.

I've refocused the Debian Jr. programming metapackage on languages made for kids. I'm sure there are some who have used scheme or python with their kids, and sure, if you want to do that, go ahead. But these were only initially included because of a lack of choices. Littlewizard is an icon-based language only recently added, and kturtle replaces the less-kid-friendly ucblogo. I've also been pursuing #236721 to see what it would take to get Squeak into main. While it doesn't look like there's hope of that anytime soon, recent changes to their licensing might allow it to go into non-free.

Next Tuesday, 20 June 2006, I will be taking part in the Bike To Work event in King's Lynn. Groups will be meeting up at 8am at: the Norfolk Arena, Saddlebow Road; the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gayton Road; and the Co-op Rainbow, Langley Road. At 8.30am, riders will set off for the main Post Office, Baxter's Plain, probably arriving [...]

David, you wrote about Class::DBI performance. Even without benchmarking you could have found out, that Class::DBI is quite slow. Fortunately there are some alternative object-relational mappers available in the perl universe. The best ones I found so far are Rose::DB::Object and DBIx::Class. I took a closer look at both and would like to share my experience. As this shows, RDBO is faster than DBIC in most of the case. The generated SQL doesn't differ too much and therefor it must be the perl side of things that makes the difference. Matt S Trout <dbix-class@trout.me.uk> says:

  However, RDBO achieves its perl speed by aggressive inlining of stuff
  etc. - for example the main object retrieval function in RDBO's manager
  class is >3000 lines in a single sub. DBIC values extensibility over a
  few extra sub calls, so methods are much more broken out and there are
  many more ways to hook into the DBIC execution process to extend.

Also its idea of resultsets is something I really love. Here's a small example to illustrate that:

  my $user_rs = $schema->resultset('User')->search(  registered => 1  );
  $user_rs    = $user_rs->search(
		    comment.title => 'Foo'  ,
		   
		  	join     =>   'article' => 'comment'  ,
			order_by => 'user.name',
		   ,
  );

  # no sql executed yet.
  # now you can use your resultset as an iterator or query a list of User
  # objects from it or ..

  while (my $user = $user_rs->next)  
	  ...
   

  # or

  my $count = $user_rs->count;

Using these resultset makes it extremely easy to built up queries piece by piece and to work together well with, for example, a templating system. You don't need to fetch all row-objects and give them to your template. You can just pass the iterator to the template library. There's a lot more to say about this two object-relational mappers (for example RDBO supports prefetching of multiple one-to-many at once, which DBIC doesn't), but maybe you just should take a look yourself. I personally prefer DBIx::Class for its vast extensibility.