A new year, a new release of Postr. This release has some useful bug fixes. Now to finish off that grand refactoring...

• Use the GNOME proxy if set
• Don't try and upload images over 10Mb, as Flickr will reject them
• Add a big Upload button to the window
• Fall back on ISO-8859-1 when reading metadata
• Don't show error dialogs with no message

The tarball is here, and packages for Debian are building now.

Military.com reports that the UK government will no longer use the term War On Terror [1]. Sir Ken Macdonald (the UK’s chief prosecutor) said that “terrorists” are criminals and need to be responded to in that way. This of course is the only logical and sensible thing to do. Soldiers who are taken prisoner are released when the war ends, if members of al Quaeda are considered to be soldiers then they would have to be treated in the same manner. The next logical step is to persue criminals who are members of al Quaeda in the same way that other criminals are persued. As far as I am aware there is no country where the majority of murderers are members of al Quaeda. Other suspected murderers have the right to a fair trial and people accused of al Quaeda membership deserve the same. Another interesting statement is that “The term “Islamic terrorist” will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities“. Finally they realise that there is a huge number of Muslims who want nothing to do with terrorism and that such people are the best potential source of leads when it comes to tracking down criminals associated with al Quaeda. Thanks to Bruce Schneier for blogging about this [2]. Bruce’s blog post has some interesting comments, one is “you can’t make “War” on “Terrorism”. “Terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy. To declare war on Terrorism is about as confused as declaring war on Blitzkrieg” by Carlo Graziani. Carlo also writes “It’s stupid to declare a “war” if you have no idea of when and how the war will end, and no clue about how to bring it to an end. If there is no real prospect for declaring “victory”, the “war” will go on for ever. This is tantamount to saying that insofar as we take the rhetoric of war seriously, we are agreeing to live under what is essentially martial law, in perpetuity. We are stipulating that the sort of emergency measures that a nation might consider taking in time of war — suspension of civil rights for certain suspect groups, suspension of laws limiting government surveillance powers, etc. — may be only a decree or a vote away, forever. There can be no more corrosive climate to liberty than war. If we really allow this idiotic rhetoric to be taken seriously, our polity is doomed.“. A particularly insightful comment from umacf24 is “How did the early 20th century Anarchists stop? Well, one of the attacks precipitated an unprecedentedly bloody and catastrophic war in which both sides used WMD. Military setbacks caused revolutions in the Russian and German empires which led in turn to most of misery of the rest of that century. Not a happy parallel“.

• [1] http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159067,00.html


• [2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/war_on_terror_o.html

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I'm exhausted, but very relieved. The important news: the operation was a success, the surgeon, Dr D. Craig Miller, bless his cowboy boots, managed to spare the aortic valve (he'd given us a 99% probability of being able to do so beforehand), so we don't have to be concerned about pig/cow valves for now, and mechanical valves later. He was reluctant to say that her own valve will last her the rest of her life, but it should last a "long time, long enough to have a family". When I left the hospital, Sarah was in intensive care, extubated, conscious, and talking to me, but very very tired. She's got a daunting array of things coming out of her at the moment (a lot of which I couldn't see because she had blankets over her). It's been a long day, so I decided to head home, rather than potentially keeping her awake for the next two ICU visiting times tonight. Here's the time line that I recorded: 05:15 - Arrive at the hospital to go through the admissions process 06:35 - I leave Sarah shortly before they're going to wheel her off to the operating room (I'll get into my fun at the end). 09:30 - I ask for an update, and they tell me she's going on bypass 10:30 - It looks like they can save the aortic valve 12:25 - Still doing the valve stuff, making a new sinus of Valsalva 14:15 - I ask for another update, everything is going okay, someone will come out to talk to me 14:55 - Still going, at least another hour until they start to close up 15:15 - Closing up, surgeon will be out to talk to me 16:10 - Surgeon comes out to talk to me about how the operation went 16:50 - I got to see Sarah briefly in the ICU, she was still intubated, but conscious and seemed to respond to my voice ~18:15 - Extubated. Spoke with her briefly. She was very tired, and I decided to let her rest for the remaining visiting times and go home and get some rest myself So what the surgeon had to say for himself was very interesting indeed. He didn't end up doing exactly what he'd said previously, based on how things looked once he actually got in there. He said that the sinuses of Valsalva were paper thin. So thin, you could see the blood flowing through them. They were about 0.5mm thick, rather than the normal 1.5mm thick. Sounds a bit like a disaster waiting to happen. Apparently it's not possible to detect this with imaging, you have to get in there and see it for yourself. He didn't end up removing as much of the aorta as previously planned (specifically the part around the transcending arch) as whilst the diameter was a bit bigger, the tissue apparently looked healthy. He said the part of the aorta he did remove (preceding where the braciocephalic, left common carotid and left subclavian arteries branch off) was "cheesy" in consistency, so it's not like she just happened to have an enlarged aorta, no aneurysm, and way too thin sinuses of Valsalva. There was definitely some unhealthiness to the aortic tissue, just not as bad as thought from the imaging. So it's all good. I think she'll spend a day or two more in the ICU before getting moved to a normal ward, but it's too soon to say what's going on with all of that. There's some elevated risk of stroke due to blood clots for the next 24-48 hours, but she's on blood thinners, so it shouldn't be a problem. The day was pretty crazy for me. I'm not sure if it was stress, or the stomach bug that's been doing the rounds of Central Park Apartments, but I went to bed last night at 11pm, was up again at 1am, with shall we say, a gastrointestinal upset, and up again at 3am, throwing up. We got up at 4:15am to get to the hospital. I felt really nauseous all morning, and was an absolute wreck while I was in with Sarah when they were putting a peripheral line in her before they wheeled her off to the OR, so I bailed about 5 minutes early and just made it to the bathroom in time to throw up again. I haven't eaten all day, just tried to keep the fluids up. I'm debating having some plain boiled rice for dinner, or waiting until tomorrow to have something easy on the stomach. I definitely felt a lot better as the day progressed, but my stomach is still pretty tender. Sarah and I ate pretty much the same stuff yesterday, so I don't think it can be food poisoning. She tends to have a very sensitive stomach at the best of times, so I'd expect her to be showing problems before me if it was food poisoning. But enough about me, I'll live. I hope it's not a stomach bug, as I don't want Sarah to come down with it as well, now that she's on the road to recovery from this surgery. Many thanks to Shona, Briana, Laura, and Christina for spending time with me throughout the day to keep me occupied. ICU visiting hours are every even hour between 10am and 10pm, for thirty minutes at a time, so I plan on spending all day at the hospital tomorrow. Hopefully I can find a good spot to get some EVDO coverage, so I can update things as the day goes along, rather than at the end of the day when I get home, like I had to today. Hopefully I'll sleep better tonight than I did last night.

I’ve been thinking about the comment policy for my blogs. I have started deleting comments when people subscribe to comments and use fake email addresses (I get the bounces and it’s annoying). Also I am deleting comments that don’t make much sense or which don’t address the topic of a post. Some people seem to search for blog posts marginally related to a topic that they want to vent about. I’ve had someone request that a comment be removed because it was written by someone with the same name as him (see this post if you want to read the details [1]). I’ve written a short document about unique names on the Internet [2] on my documents blog, hopefully it will be useful for other people who become concerned when they discover that they don’t have a unique name. My general policy about comments is probably going to be not to delete them unless requested by the author of the comment (if there is a good reason), and otherwise to only delete them for technical reasons or for being wildly off-topic. One thing that seems missing from most blog ethics documents is a section on comments. When I write my own code of blog ethics I’ll have to write a section about this. Suggestions are welcome.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/07/30/porn-vs-rape/


• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/internet/unique-names/

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I haven't blogged since last year :-D so a "Happy New Year!" is required.

So what happened meanwhile? Quite a few things, both good and bad.

• 15th-16th of December: severe teeth pain, and since it was weekend, I couldn't see a dentist
• 17th of December: I got a dentist appointment and got rid of the pain; more sessions planned
• 18th of December
• around 17 o'clock: I start feeling back pains;
  
• around 19 o'clock: takes me 20 minutes to walk from the office to the subway station, 15 minutes more than it usually takes; I postpone the second dentist appointment because of the back pains;
• later that evening: I end up calling the emergency service because the back pain became unbearable; they arrived about 2 hours later; after some basic treatment I was able to sleep
• 19th of December:
  
• I had the rescheduled dentist appointment scheduled at 9 o'clock; the back pain became so bad that I couldn't sit on the dentist chair; I had to postpone again the appointment
  
• later that day: I had to call in sick, the back pain was back; I spent all day indoors and just tried to rest
  
• 20th of December:
  
• my father and my fiancee came and took me home;
• while on the road the people from emag called me to tell me the laptop is fixed - sadly, about two hours too late
  
• I went to the doctors' and got the papers for the sick leave; until the end of that week I was to feel better, but not great.
• Christmas' Eve and Christmas:
• although planned to be spent at my sister's, we had to stay home since I wasn't feeling well enough for a 50km drive
• nice gifts were exchanged; even the hardest ones to please were pleased
• my sister, my brother in law, my nephew and my niece came to Caracal; it was nice to see Andu (my nephew) literally jump in my arms out of sheer joy (in spite of the back pain, I was glad); Denisa was so cute telling "Tica, Tica"[1] to Santa, especially since, at her stage of verbal development, using verbs seems to be optional :-)
  
• New Year's Eve and 1st of January:
• spent (finally, as planned) in Craiova, with my sister, my brother in law and some of their friends
• was nice to see again my nephew and my niece
• on the 1st: drove back to Caracal on a really bad road due to the heavy snow fall during the morning of that day;
  
• 2nd of January:
• heavy snow falls; a layer of snow of approximately 50cm covers everything
• the area where a neighbour shoveled the snow the previous evening seems to be leveled with the rest

Maybe at a future point in time I'll post a picture or two with my nephews.

To all the people, thanks for the support and, once again, Happy New Year!

[1] a simple poem for kids

I'm just wadeing through Debian-Mailinglists on the search for enhancements and false-positives.

and i just came over debian-security-announce, a lists that sends a helpful message back to submitters that aren't allowed to send out advisories.

That message didn't contain a Precedence-Header so i added one, and wondered which value would be appropriate... I remember to have seen three values: 'junk', 'bulk' and 'list' (the latter should be set for all our Mailinglists).

So i tried the usual ways to find out about some more possible values, but i couldn't find a RfC or another Document that describes correct usage of the Precedence-Header.

So, i set the Header to 'junk' now, but if someone could point me to some documentation i would be thankful.

Update: formorer pointed me to RFC 3834 - Recommendations for Automatic Responses to Electronic Mail which contains all of the things i needed to know. Thank you.

For a while I’ve been reading the Lenovo blog Inside The Box [1], even though I plan to keep my current laptop for a while [2] (and therefore not buy another Thinkpad for a few years) I am interested in the technology for it’s own sake and read the blog. A recent post concerns a new desktop machine billed as “our greenest desktop ever” [3]. The post has some interesting information on recycling plastic etc, and the fact that the machine in question is physically small (a volume of 4.5L and no PCI expansion slots) means that less petro-chemicals are used in manufacture (and some of the resins used are recycled). However the electricity use is 47W when idle!!! On my documents blog I have a post about the power use of computers I own(ed) [4] which includes my current Thinkpad (idles at 23W) and an IBM P3 desktop system which idles at 38W. Both machines in question were manufactured before Lenovo bought Thinkpad and IBM’s desktop PC business (so they technically aren’t Lenovo machines) and they weren’t manufactured with recycled resins. But the claim that the new machine is the greenest ever is at best misguided and could be regarded as deceptive. I think that the machine is quite decent, but it’s obvious that they can do a lot better. There’s no reason that a low-power desktop machine (which uses some laptop technology) should take more than twice the power of what was a high-end laptop a few years ago. Also comparing power use with P3 machines (which are still quite useful now, my IBM P3 desktop runs 24*7 as a server) is quite relevant - and we should keep in mind that before the Pentium was released no system which an individual could afford had anything other than a simple heat-sink to cool it’s CPU. This is largely a failing of Intel and AMD to make power efficient CPUs and chipsets. It’s also unfortunate that asymmetric multi-processing has not been implemented in recent times. A system with a 64bit CPU core of P3 performance as well as some Opteron class cores that could be suspended independently would be very good for power use with correct OS support. For example when reading documents and email my system will spend most of it’s time idling (apart from when I use Firefox which is a CPU hog) and the CPU use will be minimal for scrolling - a P3 performing core would be more than adequate for that task (which comprises a significant portion of my computer use). Then when I launch a CPU intensive task (composing a blog post in Wordpress or compiling) the more powerful CPU cores could start. It would be good if Intel would release a Pentium-M CPU (32bit) with the latest technology (smaller tracks on the silicon means less power use as well as higher clock speeds). A Pentium-M running at 2GHz produced with the latest Intel fabrication technology would probably use significantly less power than the 1.7GHz Pentium-M that is in my Thinkpad. Put that in a desktop machine and you would have all the compute power you need for most tasks other than playing games and running vista and you could get an idle power less than 23W. The new Lenovo machine in question does sound like a nice machine, I wouldn’t mind having one for testing and running demos. But the claims made about it seem poorly justified if you know the history.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/09/a-long-laptop-lifetime/


• [3] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=99


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-power-use/

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Somewhere at the beginning of the holiday madness, which seems like a long couple of weeks ago, my laptop crashed and came up with a bad superblock. That's Not Good, but fsck fixed it, and I was too busy preparing for company and parties and trips and stuff to do anything about it. And forgot about it. Of course it died. Right before new years, and with only 5 minutes advance warning from SMART before it started spewing IO errors and corrupting files. I have a new drive on order, and am running diskless from NFS over wireless, which is an amusing way to use a laptop, but acceptable if you don't plan to go anywhere for a few days. Maybe they'll be snowbound days. This seems less of a disaster than other times a laptop's disk has died on me. When did it start to become routine? Maybe this will be the second to last time -- I certianly hope that my next laptop has a flash disk. The Debian Live CDs were quite helpful before I set up the NFS, and I even managed to use the default gnome desktop for an evening with them, without utterly hating it. My mr and etckeeper setup made it easy to check everything back out from revision control. So the tools for dealing with a dead laptop disk are improved, though d-i still doesn't support installs over NFS, which would have saved me some time setting that up. The first snow is starting to fall..

[Reposted from debian-publicity.]

I started a page on the wiki to assemble a timeline of the interesting events of 2007: Timeline2007.

Please help me complete it! I've collected events from the News section of the website, times.debian.net and the -devel-announce and -project lists. I may have missed some important items, so feel free to add your own.

Sound Juicer "Esoteric Quotes, Most Frightening" 2.21.1 is available now. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Special thanks to the wonderful people who worked on a few bugs I tagged as gnome-love, and Carl-Anton for working on the SJ GHOP task!

• Save custom genres (#382667, thanks Jonh Wendell)
• Make the progress bar smaller (#460650, thanks Stefan Oderbolz)
• Detect VFAT and NTFS filesystems and strip characters they can't handle (#321436, thanks Carl-Anton Ingmarsson and GHOP)
• Inhibit power management suspension when ripping (#344947, thanks Carl-Anton and GHOP)
• Don't crash when finished extracting (#498500)
• Remove the Rip Completed dialog (#504639)
• Set pipeline state to NULL when disposing (#495410)
• Escape the album and artist in the cluebar (#504862, thanks Luca Cavalli)

* ST:TNG Season 5 Episode 5 "Disaster" was just awesome. One day we'll even catch up on modern shows. Probably about the time when Angie's favourite game stops being Nethack, though.

* Leif is now 73cm tall.

* I should update my profile photo.

* I love how a last minute flight during high season from Vancouver to San Francisco is less than $300CAD.

* I'm sorry I haven't replied to emails and LJ comments from folks. I've been trying to actually stay *off* the computer over the winter break.

I've been asked by a few people how we're celebrating NYE now that we have a baby. Angie put it best:

"Leif's asleep! Quick! Let's... Sleep!"

I've had a blessed 2007. So far 2008 is looking pretty good. =) I do resolutions in July rather than January. I don't think anyone should try to start something new in the coldest part of the year. That's the time for sitting inside and eating cookies. Not that it's anything resembling cold here...

Hugs, my friends.

http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/

Happy new year A year ago we got in touch with various Taiwanese aboriginal tribes to try to start localisatione efforts. Thanks to the research the Taroko people did during 2007 and the prototype work of tonight, the Taroko people in Taiwan can see the computer calendar of the new year in their own language:

Our bed we live, our bed we sleep
Making love and I become you
Flesh is warm with naked feet
Stabbing thorns and you become me
Oh, Id beg for you, you know I ll beg for you
Pick a song and sing a yellow nectarine
Take a bath, I ll drink the water that you leave
If you should die before me
Ask if you can bring a friend
Pick a flower, hold you breath
And drift away...

She holds my hand we share a laugh
Sipping orange blossom breezes
Love is still and sweat remains
A cherished gift, unselfish feelings...
Oh, Id beg for you, you know I ll beg for you

Happy Gnu Year, Holgi! You know I d love to be there with you :*

You may remember that, short before the release, Aj had a HTML page for packages in NEW, living in his ~/ajt/new/ on our ftp-master host. It was based on a patch from Thomas Viehmann and got lost with the ries crash. Today I reimplemented it, putting it directly into dak and the ftp-master codebase and webtree. My work is also based on Thomas patch, but I reworked the whole thing a bit. I’ve written a new dak command, show-new, which is based on process-new, the command I always use when I process NEW packages. Obviously not with all that functionality, it doesn’t need any reject capability, but it still has some nice parts. Like

• it only runs on packages and their versions if no html output had been generated in the past
• Automatically removes html files of packages no longer in NEW
• It runs right after generating the NEW overview page, hourly. So it should be similar up-to-date (or outdated) as that page is.

To not duplicate code too much this also meant that various code blocks had to be moved into daklib/ files. If you want to look at it - the NEW Overview, something that I wrote long ago, has links to the per-package-version files. Just click on the version number. I have plans to enhance it even more, like having the lintian output use colors too. To make that easy I filed a bug against lintian asking for it. For the other changes - well. I think the layout can be enhanced, possibly going a bit in the direction of the removals summary page, but that will take some time, as I need to talk to my CSS-masters for it. And while I was changing dak code I did some more changes to it. One patchset already got applied from James, removing the obsolete non-US support. I have a large number of other changes, but have to redo them, much more using bzr branches, so James can more easily pick single changes out of them. The changelog for those applied changes is pretty impressive with its length, I think…

2007-12-30  Joerg Jaspert  joerg@debian.org>
        * dak/dak.py (init): add show-new. This is based on a patch
        submitted by Thomas Viehmann in Bug #408318, but large parts of
        handling it are rewritten and show-new is done by me.
        * dak/queue_report.py (table_row): Add link to generated html page
        for NEW package.
        * dak/show_new.py: new file, generates html overview for NEW
        packages, similar to what we see with examine-package.
        * config/debian/cron.hourly: Add show-new call
        * config/debian/dak.conf: Add HTMLPath for Show-New
        * dak/examine_package.py (print_copyright): ignore stderr when
        finding copyright file.
        (main): add html option
        (html_escape): new function
        (escape_if_needed): ditto
        (headline): ditto
        (colour_output): ditto
        (print_escaped_text): ditto
        (print_formatted_text): ditto
        - use those functions everywhere where we generate output, as they
        easily know if we want html or not and just DTRT
        (do_lintian): new function
        (check_deb): use it
        (output_deb_info): Use print_escaped_text, not print_formatted_text.
        Also import daklib.queue, determine_new now lives there
        Also add a variable to see if we want html output. Default is
        disabled, show_new enables it for its use.
        Most of html, besides header/footer are in examine_package instead
        of show_new, as it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with it at
        the point the info is generated.
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): Moved out of here.
        (check_valid): Moved out of here.
        (get_type): Moved out of here.
        * daklib/queue.py (determine_new): Moved here.
        (check_valid): Moved here.
        (get_type): Moved here.
        * dak/init_db.py (do_section): Remove non-US code
        * dak/make_overrides.py (main): ditto
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): ditto
        * daklib/queue.py (Upload.in_override_p),
        (Upload.check_override): ditto
        * daklib/utils.py (extract_component_from_section):,
        (poolify): ditto
        * dak/import_archive.py (update_section): ditto
        * dak/symlink_dists.py (fix_component_section): ditto
        * scripts/debian/mkmaintainers: ditto
        * scripts/debian/update-mirrorlists (masterlist): ditto
        * config/debian-non-US/*: Remove subdir
        * scripts/debian/update-readmenonus: Removed.

In the recent past I did some more dak changes. Just to list them here, they are

• Fixing daks handling of keys that have expired subkeys together with non-expired subkeys (or non-expired “master” key). That created silent rejects (only sent to ftpmaster, not to the maintainer) in the past. Now it works, iff the signature is valid. (We check other reject reasons like unknown or revoked key, badsig and some other things that can go wrong before that).
• Internal for the NEW queue I adjusted the lintian call to also show what lintian warnings/errors maintainers try to override - and to have its display in color. lintian now also runs on the .dsc file, not only on the individual changes, which also helps me to spot some more errors in NEW which I previously may have missed
• The script to look at the packages in NEW also had a bug that disallowed to look at copyright files from packages using bzip2 compression in their binary tarballs. It did use some ar p tar xz pipeline, which I changed to using dpkg-deb -x and —fsys-tarfile.
• I removed a check for a dpkg pre-depends for bzip2 using binaries, as the dpkg version from sarge knows how to deal with them.

(Most patches applied by James. Can’t remember if someone else applied one. If so that would be Aj). And - at the end of all this - I will finally update my dak package again. Im not sure I get it uploaded this year, as I’m away tomorrow, but it will get an update fairly soon! Ha.

I am very saddened by the state of the IT industry. It seems like nearly everyone who works in or around IT is, to put it bluntly, a cowboy. There appears to be very little desire for actually helping people; instead all I see is a very large number of people circling around looking for the next person they can make a quick buck off. In short, most of the IT industry is composed of people who are little better than shysters and conmen. As a case in point, I recently had contact with someone who is trying to get an online store running. They've been trying, unsuccessfully so far, for several months. They've been screwed over by basically every IT-related person they've had contact with so far. Now, after all of their suffering, they've finally gotten in contact with me. Most of their money is gone, and they're deeply behind schedule. So I'm left trying to pull a miracle job in little time and with little money. Yes, I could shoo them away, because they're asking for more than they can afford, but there's a little spark of helpfulness left in me, and I'll try to get them going as best they can with what they've got. If they'd found someone competent right at the beginning, they'd have been fine. They started with sufficient cash and time to produce a good end result. But chancing upon someone decent doesn't have good odds in IT; it's a bit like winning the lottery. This story isn't unique in my personal experience, by any stretch. There seems to be a near-endless procession of non-technical people who come out of their encounters with the IT industry battered and bruised, whether it be on the web, in their business infrastructure, or their personal computing needs. While it's easy to blame the customer for not managing themselves and their computing properly, I don't think it's fair to lay the blame on them -- to me, that's like blaming the patient for dying on the operating table, when the responsibility must lie, prima facie, with the surgeon. It's the surgeon, after all, who is the (presumably) trained and experienced professional in the relationship, and it is his responsibility, primarily, to ensure that everything goes smoothly[1]. Depressingly, I don't see much of a way around this problem. The few IT people who did care could try and group together, build some sort of a rating or "membership implies quality" system, educate the consumer, and try and drive the cowboys out, but guilds and trade associations are frowned upon these days, smacking (as they do) of restraint of trade and collusion. Government regulation never seems to produce anywhere near the desired result, while hoping that the consumer will either rise up and demand quality, or will gain sufficient knowledge to be able to pick a cowboy is a complete non-starter, for the same reason as teaching everyone basic surgical techniques isn't going to improve the quality of hospitals.

---

There's an ad that used to be on Australian TV for a certain bank, where a guy is at a party and he's asked by another of the partygoers what he does for a living. As he replies, "I work in banking", the entire party goes silent and stares at him in horror. It's only when he says, "It's OK, I'm with $BANK_BEING_ADVERTISED" that everyone looks happy again and continues on with their party. Although I've never had that particular experience, I'm almost getting to the point where I'm not happy telling people what I do for a living. This is because in any non-trivial collection of people, there's almost certainly going to be at least one person who has had such a poor experience with the IT industry that they're either going to take it out on me, ask me interminable questions about computers, or will just hate me on principle. It's unfortunate that brothels don't have pianos any more; if I were to say "I play piano in a whorehouse" I'm pretty sure the response would be "lawyer or sysadmin?". As Edsger Dijkstra said back in 2001, "The average customer of the computing industry has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed." Are you?

---

1. That isn't to say that the patient (or client) has no responsibility in ensuring a positive outcome -- if you go bungee jumping the day after open heart surgery, or never send your web developer any content, you're very unlikely to have a positive outcome. However, it seems to me as though the only customer consultation done by most IT "professionals" on taking on a project is a Homeresque "I only have two questions. 'How much?' and 'give it to me'".

Whilst I'm very pleased with my new segmented network setup, and the new machine, I'm extremely annoyed that I cannot get a couple of (graphical) Xen guest desktop guests up and running. The initial idea was that I would setup a 64-bit installation of Etch and then communicate with it via VNC - xen-tools will do the necessary magic if you create your guest with "--role=gdm". Unfortunately it doesn't work. When vncserver attempts to start upon an AMD64 host it dies with a segfault - meaning that I cannot create a scratch desktop environment to play with. All of this works perfectly with a 32-bit guest, and that actually is pretty neat. It lets me create a fully virtualised, restorable, environment for working with flash/java/etc. The bug was filed over three years ago as #276948, but there doesn't appear to be a solution. Also, only on the amd64 guest, I'm seeing errors when I try to start X which mention things like "no such file or directory /dev/tty0". I've no idea whats going on there - though it could be a vt (virtual terminal) thing?. The upshot of all this is that I currenly have fewer guests than I was expecting:

skx@gold:~/blog/data$ xm list
Name                                      ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State   Time(s)
Domain-0                                   0     3114     2 r-----   1180.6
cfmaster.services.xen                      1      256     1 -b----      1.0
etch32.desktop.xen                         2      256     1 -b----      1.4
etch32.security-build.xen                  3      128     1 -b----      1.4
etch64.security-build.xen                  4      128     1 -b----      1.4
sarge32.security-build.xen                 5      128     1 -b----      1.0

Some people will have come across this: They've started some long-running process, e.g. some computation for their thesis, and want to be notified when it's done. Depending on the setup, they can't just background it and run wait in the shell.Or you might want to run some expensive process somewhere, but there is some larger thing going on right now, so you want to wait for that to finish (you know, it's often better when people don't fight for memory and put all the load on the swap drive...).Or you need to monitor some process that might crash, and want to schedule a notification or restart.Here's how I'm doing that now:

busywaitpid command-of-process && notify-send "Computation is finished!"

Which will singnal a popup bubble when the process is finished.Here's the script:

#!/bin/sh
mypid=$$
pid= pgrep -of $@   grep -vE "^$mypid$" 
if [ -z "$pid" ]; then
  echo "No pid found." >&2
  exit 2
fi
echo "Waiting for pid $pid."
while test -d "/proc/$pid"; do
  sleep .1
done
# Make sure it's gone...
test -d "/proc/$pid"   exit 1
exit 1

Note that it will wait for the oldest (-o) process where the full command line (-f) matches the given parameter.Bugs: it doesn't handle when there are multiple processes matching the query - it will use the oldest (as given my pgrep).[Update: Specto, aptitude install specto, is a GNOME GUI application that you should be able to use for this purpose (amongst others such as website change monitoring)]