The idea of replacing the auto tools with GNU make code could be a good thing. I tend to just write simple Makefiles, and avoid using autofoo in new projects at all. That's not good for portability, but it's excellent for sanity. But, what caused the auto tools to become such a mess in the first place? Part of it was the design, which from 30,000 feet is to write a code generator for some not ideal, but lowest common denominator language, and ship a copy of the (generated) code with every project. The new design is to write an include file in some not ideal, but almost lowest common denominator language, and ship a copy of that with every project. This avoids many of the pitfalls in the original design, such as having to deal with, and avoid editing, thousands of lines of nasty generated code when a build fails. I'm afraid it doesn't avoid other pitfalls we've seen with the auto tools. One being that all these copies of code need to be kept up to date. Another being that the interfaces between such an include file and the Makefile that would use it tend to be very broad, and, if not very well defined, can make upgrading the include file break things. As happens when you try to use the wrong version of the auto tools on a project that was written for an earlier version. Maybe smarter people than I can get around these problems. And there's probably, sadly, truth to the idea that to get a system like this really widely adopted, it needs to distribute build code that uses only lowest common denominator tools. (I was going to talk about how I started off using a similar include file but redesigned and sidestepped these problems while still getting wide acceptance for a build tool in the Debian community, but I see I already blogged about that earlier, in debhelper autoconf grudge match.)

Long weekend of travel and family, and now we're back on our way to Montreal. I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend with my father's family in New Jersey, where he and my mom both grew up and where 4 of his brothers and sisters still live (and their kids, and so on). We left Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, had dinner in Albany, and got down to Newburg (New York) in the early evening. The next morning we spent several hours at the nearby Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, which was about as crass and consumeristic as it sounds. But the loonie is still strong, and it's nice to buy some clothes. I especially like buying things a few sizes smaller than what I had to get a few months ago. Wednesday night we got into Hillsborough, NJ, where my Aunt Barbara lives, and visited with her and her family. Barb has four great kids -- Phillip (16?), Maddy and Vicky (14?), and Nick (13?), who are all my cousins despite being at least 20 years younger than me. When Amita June was too tired to move we hit the hay for the night, and in the morning we all hung around playing Wii sports (even AJ!), and had a hearty dinner in the early afternoon. Then we went to my Uncle Paul's for dessert, coffee, and a nice 2003 Ramos Pinto Vintage Port that we brought along. Friday and Saturday we spent at my Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty's house in Highland Park (New Jersey). They have a great 100-year-old house right by the Raritan River, and it was really nice seeing them. We had dinner with Paul and his wife Eileen on Friday night, and we saw the lighting of the Christmas tree in Princeton. Today we started the two-day trip home. It's not really that long a drive -- about 6-10 hours, depending on the route and kind of weather -- but we like to split it up into two days, since we have a 2-year-old aboard. We stopped in New York (city)/Queens to see our friend Jen for brunch at a nice place called Quaint, where I got a good house-cured salmon and Maj had an excellent bowl of granola. Amita got some nice challah french toast, which she wolfed down with the help of her kind parents. Tonight we stopped in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to sleep over. I like this part of MA, and the New York Times had a recent article about its bookish culture, called In the Valley of the Literate. We had a nice quick dinner at Bueno Y Sano in Northampton, and we'll stick around tomorrow for more shopping (books! Whole Foods!) and a little site-seeing before we head home. It'll be good to be back in MTL, though. I miss my bed, and we only have a few weeks there before we're off again to California for Christmas time. tags: travel thanksgiving newjersey amitajune shopping pioneervalley

Montreal SantaCon Speaking of Christmas, one of the things we'll be shopping for tomorrow is santa costumes. Friday, November 30th is SantaCon Montreal 2007. SantaCon is a world-wide anarchic cluster-together of goofballs and lunatics who go rampaging around their town from bar to mall to bar in full Santa costume (or Mrs. Santa, or elves, or reindeer, or something similar). Everyone's invited, nobody's in charge, and a fun time is had by all. SantaCon started in the 90s in San Francisco (like everything), but I never managed to go. I finally went to SantaCon in Austin in 2001, and had an amazingly good time. My pals at The Ministry of Truth have photo evidence here and here and here. There's nothing like overflowing a bar with 100 of your new best friends, all dressed like Santa, dancing and goofing off and having a good time. It brightens up everyone's day. Anyways, we'll be picking up Maj the beginnings of an outfit here on the US side of the border, so she'll be able to accessorize with her own bits and pieces. I'll probably pick up a couple of spares for friends in Montreal, too. I'm really looking forward to the event -- it should be a good time. There's a Facebook event for people who go for that kind of thing. tags: santacon montreal cacophony santarchy santacon2007 santaconmontreal2007

le Sans Fil to go municipal I was excited to read (via Steve Faguy) that our beloved local community wireless group, le Sans Fil will be providing wireless to many parks and open spaces around Montreal. This is great news for Montrealers -- the city had previous vowed up the street and back that it would never have a municipal wireless program of any sort. So good deal. It sounds like it's going to be a tough job -- I don't think wiring up outdoor spaces for wireless is anywhere near as easy as doing caf s or homes. And I think it's going to be tough to show value -- after all, people are only outdoors in parks in great numbers during the few warm months of the year here. And when people are out in parks, they're not usually checking their email -- they tend to do more outdoorsy things. But my guess is that park culture will adapt to the new resource pretty well. Congrats to SF -- I think they're a great organization that's up to this new challenge. tags: montreal ilesansfil muniwifi

Apparently some people worry that Gforge may be abandoned, or on the verge of being superseded with the proprietary "Gforge Advanced Server" rewrite. Let it be known that I for one have no plans to switch to Gforge AS, for all the reasons you'd expect from a free software user and advocate: I don't have access to the source code (it's made illegible by some sort of industrial PHP obfuscator), I can't hack it because the license doesn't allow me to, I can't audit it for security flaws, I can't adapt it to particular needs, etc. Since a significant part of my income comes from maintaining Gforge instances for clients, with local modifications for their particular needs, it's an economical necessity that Gforge stays free. And evolving. Right. Having said that, I guess I have to show concrete evolutions in addition to principles and ideals. So what changed recently?

• I believe the Gettext transition is now more or less complete. The initial bulk of it was done during the summer, but a few odds and ends were still dangling, such as plural forms here and there. The translations should now also be used in the appropriate place (no more receiving an email in Dutch even though you're French, simply because the person who clicked on the button that triggered the email was Dutch). I'm trying to bring the French translation to completion, but it's a long and boring task, so it'll happen gradually. As for other languages... "patches welcome".
• I've started using IPv6 at home, with a dual IPv4+IPv6 stack and hostnames that resolve to both kinds of addresses. The problem is that neither Gforge nor its packaging were designed with IPv6 in mind, so the Apache virtual host didn't listen on the IPv6 address, and even when it did, Gforge wouldn't understand IPv6 addresses in its session code. All that has been fixed, and you can now run Gforge on a dual-stack server.
• Lots of "undefined variable" PHP warnings have been fixed (not only by me, by the way). They probably weren't harmful by themselves, but they were signs of sloppy coding.
• The FCKeditor plugin now uses FCKeditor as provided by the Debian package, rather than its own (outdated and unmaintained) copy.

All this has committed and uploaded to Debian. As usual, please test and report failures. Plans for my foreseeable future include:

• Making the clean-and-working Mediawiki integration plugin public (the delay is not due to technical reasons).
• Using placeholders in SQL queries, to reduce the risk of SQL injections. This probably means a full audit of all the places in the code where queries are made, so it may take some time.
• Maybe a full audit for HTML injections and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, too. Probably a long and boring task too.
• Switching to ucf for management of config files.
• I'm still toying with the idea of switching to dbconfig-common, too. But since I'm not sure it's going to be good enough, that's not very high on my priority list.
• I'm pondering whether I should try to make a live-CD with an installed Gforge. Or maybe a fully automated installation with debian-installer and preseeding. That may debunk the misconception that Gforge is hard to install.

Places where help would be most welcome:

• Translations! I can do French, I fixed a few strings in Spanish and Japanese, maybe I can do some minor fixes in German too, but that's not good enough. Of course, translators should be aware this is not a small task: gforge.pot contains about 2200 strings. But even reading and fixing (or removing) the obviously incorrect translations would help.
• Packaging for RPM-based systems. I fear that aspect of Gforge has been all but abandoned, and I don't think there are any working RPMs around.
• Testing, testing, testing. Gforge is rather versatile, and a big piece of software. I don't use all the features myself, so bugs are likely to lurk in those places I don't see often enough.
• I know some of you out there have a locally patched Gforge installation. You know you'll have a hell of a time porting those patches to the next version when you upgrade. Why not share them, so everyone profits from them (and you can then profit from the patches from the other users)?

There. That was the news. Now for a bit of trivia: it's amazing how having a metric of one's productivity gives an incentive to increase it. I found mine on Ohloh, which provides code and license analyses and statistics on free software projects, as well as statistics on commits by contributors. They even have a shiny widget with a scrollable timeline showing commits over time, as well as comparative commit graphs. My obvious personal goal is to get up to the first position among the contributors, but of course I wouldn't complain if the current top committer stayed ahead by springing back into activity.

Serious server rooms have large (and expensive) air-conditioning and filtering systems. Most “server rooms” however are not like that, often it’s just some space in a store-room, sometimes near printers (which are a source of air pollution [1]). The servers that are stored in serious server rooms have air filters as a standard feature. For small server installations it’s often a desktop PC used as a server which has no filters (and often lacking other server features such as ECC RAM). Recently Dell in Australia started selling low-end PowerEdge servers for $450 plus delivery (similar machines to the $800 Dell servers I previously blogged about [2]). Also refurbished machines from HP and IBM can often be purchased at auction for similar prices. Even if you have a proper server with filters on all air inlets it’s still a benefit to have reasonably clean air in the server area. A few years ago I bought four Sunbeam HEPA [3] air filters for my home to alleviate allergy problems. I’ve had one running 24*7 in my main computer area for most of the time since then. As well as wanting to keep my machines free of dust I have the extra issue of machines that I buy at auction which often are filled with dust - the process of cleaning them frees some dust in the air and it’s good to have a filter running to remove it. Excessive dust in the air can prevent cooling fans from operating and cause damage to hardware and loss of data. Of course the really good servers have fan speed sensors that allow the CPU to be throttled or the machine to be halted in case of severe problems. But for desktop machines you often only have the temperature control mechanisms that are built in to the CPU and sometimes machines just start having memory errors when the fan malfunctions and the machine gets hot. As one of the biggest problems facing server rooms is heat dissipation I decided to measure my air filters and see how much electricity they use (it seems reasonably to assume that all their energy eventually gets converted to heat). I’ve now got a blog page about power use of items related to computers [4]. My air filters take 114W when on the highest speed and 13.9W when on the lowest. Initially I was a little surprised at the figure for the high speed, but then I recalled that the energy required to move air is proportional to the speed cubed. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t leave an air filter on overnight in summer… I’m now going to recommend such filters to some of my clients. Spending $400 on an air filter is nothing compared to the amount of money that a server failure costs (when you have expensive down-time and pay people like me to fix it).

• [1] http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/news/2195474/laser-printer-research-worrying


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/25/designing-computers-for-small-business/


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


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

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I've used the Quod Libet music player since 2005. Mostly happily, despite the occasional really weird bug. The core of Quod Libet for me, the thing that no other player has, is the album list, just a big list of all available albums, with cover icons, and an easy way to limit the display to ones matching a search term. (I'm not one of those people who does complex, detailed playlists; I tend to play one album at a time, in order.) Quod Libet has lots of other nice features, including a great metadata editor, but the album list is the only thing I use daily. I mostly run Quod Libet on relatively slow machines (with decent speakers), with the display fed to my laptop. Lately it's been feeling a bit slow to scroll around in the album list with hundreds of albums and album icons being displayed over the network and everything running on an old laptop, or an overloaded server. I've known about mpd for a long while, and it's clearly a better fit for how I use servers to play music, but I could never stand to use any of the clients for long. Today I hit the triple cocktail of evil bugs in Quod Libet described in bug #413284. This is a potential last straw type bug, that's been open since March, and which I'd read before and hoped I'd be lucky enough to escape. This motivated me to try the Sonata mpd client again. It has a very clean looking and generally good interface, though like all mpd clients, it annoys me by being based around a playlist, and not making it easy to just select an album from the library and immediately start playing it. But there's a trick that makes it usable for me. I added all my music to the "playlist" (using the mpd command line) and ignore the hard to use library. Since Sontata does have an excellent type-to-limit-display feature, I can just type the name of an artist, album, or track, press enter, and it jumps to it and starts playing.

Thanks for the comments/mails on my previous post. I've now started the migration properly. All code currently held upon cvsrepository.org will be moved to http://repository.steve.org.uk/ - a nice system-agnostic name. So far I've only setup the pages for two project (my dotfiles and ~/bin) but I'm happy with the process, and the naming scheme appears sane to me now. Using sub-domains I need only install one CGI which is a big win, and using a simple set of templates + mod_rewrite all projects get the same look and feel. I've still got to tweak the stylesheet a little, but otherwise I'm happy with things. I can host both public and private repositories, and that all works magically. Of course the huge win is no longer needing to run a pserver for CVS! All future checkouts will be via HTTP, and the rare few people with commit access will be able to do so over SSH. Once things have been migrated I'll cause the cvsrepository names to redirect to the new locations, and keep that up until the domain expires as a transition period. (I think +1 year :)) The other job for the weekend is releasing a fixed security update for Samba, to fix the regressions.... That is in hand, but the buildds are being slow. If they're not all done I'll release it anyway today/tomorrow. I'm annoyed that I handled the timing so badly, but I hope that people don't hate me for it.

Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.22 is out. Just one bug fix, which shows that my users all use OpenBox.

• Fix decorate/undecorate with OpenBox (thanks Rafa Mu y o)
• Fix typos in man page (Lo c Minier)

Downloads are in the usual place.

My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely... The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work, don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working Windows! Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included. When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will be enough. No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648. Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only option it now gives me is to reboot. Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally installed and it even runs! Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk? As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.

I am making a small project with TurboGears and I am just loving the widgets and the identity framework. There are some rough spots, like the documentation, but luckily for the most pars you can just launch an ipython interpreter and use tab completion to look at what functions are available. But then I got this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./start-foo.py", line 23, in
from foo.controllers import Root
File “…Foo/foo/controllers.py”, line 22, in
action=”save_settings”
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/turbogears/widgets/meta.py”, line 169, in widget_init
validator = generate_schema(self.validator, widgets)
File “/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/turbogears/widgets/meta.py”, line 277, in generate_schema
if widget.is_named:
AttributeError: type object ‘SettingsFields’ has no attribute ‘is_named’

And I could not find any help on this. Luckily I found Lucas manual and by comparing the code I found that in this part of the code:
settings_form = widgets.TableForm(
fields=SettingsFields,
action="save_settings"
)
Instead of passing the whole SettingsFields class, an instance of it needs to be passed ( as in “fields=SettingsFields(),” ). Cann’t wait to see all the goodies they are making now in TG 2.0, but considering my experience, I will wait until they update the documentation for it before diving in.

Haven't written anything for way too long, I tried to put something down again last week, and this is what I came up with. It's not influenced by anything special, it's not as well as I usual prefer, but still, I thought I should share.

life is strange
it starts off without knowledge
in the end you die love is strange
it starts off with bad heartaches
in the end - alone things are strange
still we try to survive it
go on day by day

At work we're currently in a managed office, which means we don't control the network in any way. As a result we're all individually VPNing back to the lab network in the US. Not a great situation, but it does the job while we work out what's happening with our own building and a local lab. The HQ end is running on a Nortel Contivity. This causes a bit of a problem; I need a working VPN setup in order to work, but the Nortel stuff is non standard. How to get it going under Linux so I can switch from XP to Debian? I found 3 options, in order of preference: vpnc There's a Nortel branch of vpnc, though it's from an old release (0.3.2). There are some reports of it working ok, and quite a few of problems. vpnc gains points for being entirely Free software. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=441042 has some further details. Novell VPN client Novell have a hacked up version of ipsec-tools that adds http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?turnpike, a framework for different types of IKE. They have a novell-nortelplugins package that has a binary plugin supposedly supporting Nortel VPN access. Not quite as nice as vpnc, but it's still userland and does use the kernel's IPSEC stack. Apani Nortel client Apani do a commerical Nortel VPN client for Linux, as well as Windows CE/MacOS and Solaris. It's not that up to date (supports up to kernel 2.6.18, though there are patches that get it working on 2.6.22) and involves a binary blob kernel driver, but they do claim to offer support for it and it's where Nortel will point you for single client licenses. I have, of course, ended up with the (paid for) Apani client. I tried vpnc and the Novell client but couldn't get any degree of success from them. VPN remote ends don't really provide a lot of feedback (which is understandable - it hardly wants to tell me if I'm failing on a username, password, or something entirely different) and I don't have any access to the Contivity device to read its logs. I think the main issue is that my connection has no IPSEC group id or password, and both vpnc and the Novell stuff ask for that. The Apani client is happy with just my username and password, which I think is used for some corruption of xauth. At some point I'll try fighting vpnc again, but for the moment I have my VPN connection working under Debian and thus I'm back to Debian at work. As an added bonus the reaction of my coworkers has been good - instead of "Why would you want to?" I've had comments like "I wish I'd installed Linux when I started." and "Actually, I might do that myself after Christmas."

As mentioned in my previous post [1] the government is using our money to advertise its policies. I previously covered the “Internet as a threat to children” issue, the other big one is drugs. The first significant message in the “Talking with your kids about drugs” document concerns the criminal penalties for drug use. That could largely be removed if the penalties were dramatically decreased and if hard drugs were administered to registered addicts for a nominal fee. Forcing addicts to commit crimes or work as prostitutes to pay for their addiction just doesn’t work, economically or socially. The next message is that parents should be involved in their children’s lives and be trusted enough that their children will accept advice. A large part of this would be related to the amount of time spent with children which is determined to a large degree by the amount of time not spent working. As I mentioned in my previous post it seems that the actions of the Howard government over the last 10 years has made things significantly worse in this regard by forcing more parents to spend large amounts of their time working (including situations where both parents work full-time) just to pay for a home. One notable omission from the document was any mention of alcohol problems (apart from when mixed with illegal drugs). By many metrics alcohol causes more harm than all the illegal drugs combined. The US attempted to prohibit alcohol and failed dismally, and alcohol is legal in most countries. The government doesn’t want to adopt a harm-minimisation approach to drugs (which bears some similarities to the approach taken to alcohol) and therefore is stuck trying to claim that one somewhat addictive mind-altering substance is somehow inherently different to all other mind-altering substances. The document provided no information at all on harm minimisation. The idea seems to be that it’s better for some children to die of overdoses than for other children to potentially be less scared of the consequences of drug use. The problem is that children are very bad at assessing personal risk so they simply won’t be scared off. It’s best to provide equipment for testing drug purity etc to reduce the harm. The list of reasons for young people to try drugs starts with “availability and acceptability of the drug“, Parmesan cheese is more available and acceptable than any drug but I’ve been avoiding it at every opportunity since I was very young. :-# More serious reasons in the list include “rebellion“, “depression“, “as a way to relax or cope with stress, boredom or pain“, and “to feel OK, at least temporarily (self-medication)“. But predictably there was nothing in the document about why children might consider that their life sucks to badly that they want to rebel in that way, be depressed, stressed, bored, or in pain to a degree that drugs seem like the solution. It seems unreasonable to believe that the school system isn’t a significant part of the cause of teenage problems. Flag poles for flying the Australian Flag [2] seems to be John Howard’s idea of a solution to school problems. I believe that the solution to school problems (both in terms of education and protection of children) is smaller classes, better supervision, an active program to eradicate bullying, and better salaries for teachers. I’ve written about related issues in my school category. I believe that the best thing for individual families to do is to home-school their children from the age of 12 instead of sending them to a high-school (which is much more damaging than a primary school). Another significant issue is drug pushers. They are usually drug users who try to finance their own drug use by selling to others. As most drug users get the same idea there is a lot of competition for sales and therefore they try to encourage more people to use drugs to get more customers. In the Netherlands, Coffee Shops sell a range of the milder drugs at reasonable prices which removes the street market and therefore the pushers. When drugs are produced commercially the quality is standardised which dramatically reduces the risk of infection and overdoses. When drugs are sold by legal companies they are not sold to children (a typical pusher can be expected to sell to anyone). The document has 3.5 pages of information about some of the illegal drugs (out of 23 pages total). They include all the most severe symptoms that most users don’t encounter. If someone reads that information and then talks to a drug user they will be laughed at. They also group drugs in an unreasonable way, for example listing “marijuana” and “hashish” as synonyms and list problems that are caused indirectly. If alcohol was included in that list it would include beer and methylated spirits (ethanol mixed with methanol to supposedly make it undrinkable - rumoured to be consumed by homeless people) in the same section and imply that blindness and other bad results of drinking “metho” apply to beer. It would also say that alcohol kills many people through drunk-driving and is responsible for rapes, wife-beating, and any other crime which can statistically shown to be more likely to be committed by a drunk person. A final issue with the document is that it advises parents to be “informed, up-front and honest” when talking to their children about drugs. Unfortunately the document itself doesn’t demonstrate such qualities. By omitting all information on harm minimisation it is not being up-front at all, and by not mentioning alcohol it’s simply being dishonest. Anyone who tries to convince someone else to not use illegal drugs can expect to hear “but you drink alcohol” as the immediate response from the drug user, it’s necessary to have sensible answers to that issue if you want to be effective in discouraging drug use.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/22/internet-and-an-election/


• [2] http://www.pm.gov.au/media/interview/2004/Interview925.cfm

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Before the election was called the Howard government (being unethical in every way) started using public money to campaign. Part of this election campaign was two documents sent out to every home (AFAIK) coupled with a media campaign, one was about children and drugs, the other was about children and the Internet. I have to wonder how many people were fooled by this, including a picture of John Howard on the first page after the index made it pretty clear what the purpose was. Before I analyse the content of the documents one thing to keep in mind is the cost of the Iraq war, which the Sydney Morning Herald [1] estimates at $3,000,000,000. Note that this doesn’t include the life-long medical and psychiatric care that some veterans will require or the cost to the economy of such people not being productive tax-payers. It does note that 121 employees of the Australian military have been discharged on medical grounds. If each of those 121 people was disabled in a way that significantly impacted their life then the cost could be as much as $242,000,000. Let’s not assume that everyone who is currently serving and regarded as completely fit will be fine in 10 years time either. The Prime Minister gives a personal introduction to each document, the “NetAlert” document states that $189,000,000 is being spent to protect children on the Internet. The “Talking with your kids about drugs” document states that “more than $1.4 billion” has been spent to combat illicit drug use, I’m not sure what time period that covers - it seems to be his entire 10 years as PM so that would be $140,000,000 per annum. Obviously declaring a war of aggression against Saddam Hussein is something that he considers to be more important than protecting Australian children. Now the content of the NetAlert document. It starts with $84,800,000 to provide access to “the best available internet filtering technology“. I have to wonder, how much would it cost to develop some new Internet filtering software from scratch, or what the opportunity cost might be to re-assign resources from organisations such as CSIRO to the task. I expect that in either case the total would be a lot less than $84,800,000. Developing free software for the task would be a much better use of resources and would also allow cooperation with similar programs in other countries. In the unlikely event that $40,000,000 was required to develop such free software it probably wouldn’t be difficult to get a few other governments to kick in some money and make it $10,000,000 per country. Of course saving $70,000,000 doesn’t sound like much (a mere $3 per person in the country), but it is significantly more than the Free Trade Agreement with the US [2] was supposed to bring in (from memory it was promoted as improving the economic position of the country by $50,000,000 but the best available information is that it made our balance of trade worse). $43,500,000 in additional funding for the police to combat online child sex exploitation is small but OK (it would be better if some of that $84,800,000 had been saved on filtering software and allowed greater expenditure in this area). But it should be noted how child rape in Aboriginal communities is used as a political issue and nothing constructive is done about the problem [3]. I believe that protecting children against rape is far more important than controlling illegal porn (which is where the majority of that $43,500,000 will go). Another possible avenue of research would be on more secure computer systems for Australian homes. It’s all very well to install some filtering software, but if the PC running the software in question is hacked then it’s immediately turned off. Attacks that involve turning web cameras on without the knowledge or consent of the owner are not uncommon either, it’s not unreasonable for a child to get out of bed and then do some homework on their computer before getting dressed - with an insecure computer and a web-cam connected this could be a bad thing… If the Australian government was to mandate that all government data be stored in open formats and that all communication with government computer systems can be done with free software (as a matter of principle you should not have to buy expensive software to communicate with your government) then the incidence of insecure desktop OSs would decrease. The document does recommend some basic OS security mechanisms, but if you use an OS that is insecure by design it’s not going to work. The core message of NetAlert is that children should be supervised when using the net. There is one significant problem with this, full supervision of children requires that at least one parent is not working full-time. In a previous post I compared median house prices and median incomes [4] with the conclusion that even with both parents working it’s difficult to afford a house. It would be difficult for a single income that is below the median to be used to pay the rent on a decent house. So it seems that a significant portion (maybe the vast majority) of Australian families will be forced to do what the government would consider to be a compromise of the Internet safety of their children by having both parents working full-time jobs to pay off a large mortgage (or in some cases merely to pay rent). I believe that making houses more affordable would improve the protection of children and provide other significant benefits for society. If you look at chart 1 and chart 2 on the House Prices research note from the Australian Parliamentary Library [5] you can see a significant increase in the difference between CPI increases and house prices increases since 1996 (when John Howard became Prime Minister) and a significant increase in the ratio of house prices to average income. The charts only include data up to 2006 so don’t show the effects of the Howard government’s “workplace reform” which lowers wages for many people who are below the median income. John Howard is responsible for houses being less affordable and parents being forced to spend more time working and less time supervising their children, I find it offensive that he now tells people to spend more time supervising their children. The document does have some good basic advice about how to supervise children and what level of supervision is necessary. The problem is that children from an early age know more than the typical parents. I doubt the ability of typical Australian parents to implement some of the supervision suggestions on 12yo children. I have been considering writing my own documents on how to filter and monitor child Internet access but the main problem is determining ways of doing so that can be implemented by someone who is not a computer expert. In summary, the Howard government is responsible for reducing the supervision of children and therefore exacerbating the problems that they are claiming to solve. Their NetAlert program provides some information that can’t be implemented by the majority of Australians and entirely skips some of the most sensible steps such as using only secure OSs on machines that will be used on the Internet. I believe that Fedora and CentOS should be recommended by the government in this regard because of the combination of good security by default (of which SE Linux is only one component) and the ease of use. Computers are cheap enough that most families with good Internet connections (the ones at risk in this regard) have multiple computers so no extra cost would be incurred.

• [1] http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/3b-and-rising-rapidly-cost-of-iraq-war/2007/03/20/1174153066804.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-United_States_Free_Trade_Agreement


• [3] http://aboriginalrights.suite101.com/article.cfm/child_rape_dossier


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/06/housing-prices/


• [5] http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2006-07/07rn07.htm

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Yesterday I posted to -qa about a watch helper script I wrote so freshmeat projects can be used in watch files.

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By the time of writing this post there hasn't been any reply yet, which actually disappoints me.
So abusing a little on the fact that my posts are visible on planet.d.o I'd like to know what is everybody's opinion (replying to my message on -qa is preferred to seeing some blog post comments :)).

Freshmeat by providing an XML file with the project's information seems to be addressing the common problems caused when trying to keep track of upstream in a more-or-less automated way.

I really hope this script is put together with sf.php at qa.debian.org/watch/ to make it possible for even more packages to use watch files to keep up with upstream versions :).
And about the xml-fetching *problem* I'm open to suggestions and preferred ways of doing it.

Next thing to do is write some similar script for the kde,maemo,gnome,xfce,debian,qt,etc - apps,look,art,themes,etc .org websites (this will require some collaboration on the site's side unless I play with some regexes, again, to extract the information and generate some listings like with freshmeat.php).

The lender for one of my student loans has apparently started using a rather cool system to manage incoming customer service calls. If all the call-takers are busy, then instead of forcing you to sit there listening to a call telling you how important your business is to them, they let you request a call-back. They ask you to enter a phone number where they can reach you, then give you a time window in which they'll be calling (in my case I think it was about two minutes wide). When my turn came up, they called me and I was able to speak with a human immediately.

This is such a huge improvement over the typical call center experience that I'm amazed it hasn't caught on more broadly.

• It's presumably good for them since they don't have to pay for a long incoming toll-free call, particularly when most of the call is just muzak.
  
• It's great for me, because instead of sitting by the phone like a hawk in case I miss the customer service rep, I can go do something useful for a few minutes until the time the call is scheduled for.
  

I'm guessing that this option will be available in more and more places as companies computerize their telephone systems. Another nice twist, if there are any telephony guys reading this, would be to allow me to request the customer service call from a Web page, eliminating the toll-free call altogether and presumably saving some expense for the company.

An interesting question for me is how they generate those estimates of when they'll be able to help you. I'm guessing that they use some queueing theory to estimate the most likely wait time for the next incoming customer, but this is something I have only a fuzzy awareness of. However they did it, the estimate seemed accurate enough to me.

One says the eyes are the mirror of the soul. I made this experience back in easter for the first time. I was over at my brother's place for easter celebration when I got up in the morning, went into the bath and looked into the mirror for morning toilet. I washed my face like always with cold water to refresh myself, and when I removed my hands... I was sure I was looking into a female face. It quite a lot bewildered me; it was the first time this happened. And I wasn't even properly shaved...
An experience like this is something special I guess, and it happened more and more often in the meantime. I guess this is one more proof that what I feel is the right thing. ... even though still some others seem to be immensly ammused by it. When I went to the ceilidh at the debconf in EDI I received some pretty nasty responses to my outfit, which I didn't expect within a project about Freedom and Openness. Though, I give the people the doubt of not knowing what they have done. It's too much in human nature to joke about things they don't understand, not knowingly insulting others. I'd like to dedicate this fine tune from Garbage to them: Bleed Like Me. If you listen closely to the lyrics you might be able to find out why... There has also been a genderfuck night in the club next to the night venue which on the other hand was pretty nice. It was attended by quite some people from Debian, some expectedly, some to my happy surprise. Thank you again guys, for making this evening to something special. I hope you keep it in as nice remembrance as me. My former SO drew a while ago a pretty nice picture about me. I didn't ask for it, or did hint it, which makes me even more happier about it. Thank you Babsi, really. :) I switched my hackergotchi on Planet Debian to it just in case. Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. I stumbled upon it in the Venus Envy comic I got notified about earlier this year, you might want to check its contribution, but beware, it might as disturb you as it does to me. I'm thankful that Erin dis survive it, because she gives so much strength with her comic to me and possibly also others...

If I think that the FSF did the wrong thing, is there any way in which I can display my opposition? Can I become a negative member? Can I make an antidonation: get them to give me money? Update: In other words: I think that the AGPL is not free. Clause 13 is a restriction on usage. I’m very disappointed. (And the GPLv3 is not a high note for the FSF either).

Some years ago I worked on a project where software reliability should have been a priority (managing data that was sometimes needed by the police, the fire brigade, and the ambulance service). Unfortunately the project had been tainted by a large consulting company that was a subsidiary of an accounting firm (I would never have expected accountants to know anything about programming and several large accounting firms have confirmed my expectations). I was hired to help port the code from OS/2 1.2 to NT 4.0. The accounting firm had established a standard practice of never calling free() because “you might call free() on memory that was still being used”. This was a terribly bad idea at the best of times and on a 16 bit OS with memory being allocated in 64K chunks the problems were quite obvious to everyone who had any programming experience. The most amusing example of this was a function that allocated some memory and returned a pointer which was being called as if it returned a boolean, one function had a few dozen lines of code similar to if(allocate_some_memory()). I created a second function which called the first, free’d any memory which had been allocated and then returned a boolean. Another serious problem with that project was the use of copy and paste coding. A section of code would perform a certain task and someone would need it elsewhere. Instead of making it a function and calling it from multiple places the code would be copied. Then one copy would be debugged or have new features added and the other copy wouldn’t. One classic example of this was a section of code that displayed an array of data points where each row would be in a colour that indicated it’s status. However setting a row to red would change the colour of all it’s columns, setting a row to blue would change all except the last, and changing it to green would change all but the second-last. The code in question had been copied and pasted to different sections with the colours hard-coded. Naturally I wrote a function to change the colour of a row and made it take the colour as a parameter, the program worked correctly and was smaller too. The next programmer who worked on that section of code would only need to make one change - instead of changing code in multiple places and maybe missing one. Another example of the copy/paste coding was comparing time-stamps. Naturally using libc or OS routines for managing time stamps didn’t occur to them so they had a structure with fields for the year, month, day, hours, minutes, and seconds that was different from every other such structure that is in common use and had to write their own code to compare them, for further excitement some comparisons were only on date and some were on date and time. Many of these date comparisons were buggy and often there were two date comparisons in the same function which had different bugs. I created functions for comparing dates and the code suddenly became a lot easier to read, less buggy, and smaller. I have just read an interesting post by Theodore Ts’o on whether perfect code exists [1]. While I understand both Theodore’s and Bryan’s points of view in this discussion I think that a more relevant issue for most programmers is how to create islands of reasonably good code in the swamp that is a typical software development project. While it was impossible for any one person to turn around a badly broken software development project such as the one I describe, it is often possible to make some foundation code work well which gives other programmers a place to start when improving the code quality. Having the worst of the memory leaks fixed meant that memory use could be analysed to find other bugs and having good functions for comparing dates made the code more readable and thus programmers could understand what they were looking at. I don’t claim that my code was perfect, even given the limitations of the data structures that I was using there was certainly scope for improvement. But my code was solid, clean, commented, and accepted by all members of the team (so they would continue writing code in the same way). It might even have resulted in saving someone’s life as any system which provides data to the emergency services can potentially kill people if it malfunctions. Projects based on free software tend not to be as badly run, but there are still some nasty over-grown systems based on free software where no-one seems able to debug them. I believe that the plan of starting with some library code and making it reasonably good (great code may be impossible for many reasons) and then trying to expand the sections of good code is a reasonable approach to many broken systems. Of course the ideal situation would be to re-write such broken systems from scratch, but as that is often impossible rewriting a section at a time often gives reasonable results.

• [1] http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2007/11/18/does-perfect-code-exist-abstractions-part-1/

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CHRISTOPHER MCKINLEY asked:

"I live on the costa blanca spain. I have been told that bbc and itv are to start broadcasting a free to air service which we will be adle to pick up on a small dish. It's scheduled to start in Feb/March 2008. Could you tell me if this is true?"

No, I can't tell whether that's true. The BBC/ITV Freesat service is expected to start in 2008 and I think March is meant to be when Channel 4's Sky encryption contract finishes, so I guess that's where that date comes from. That seems highly probable to me. Then again, Freesat has been advertised as launching in 2006 before. However, I doubt that BBC and ITV will move off of the Astra 2D spot beam that they moved to when they went free-to-air and back to the wider beams needed for small dish reception on the Costa Blanca. So, it will still not work for you. Sorry. (I'm not too cross about that, because the main terrestial Spanish channels seem to be encrypted on satellite.)