$ python
[...]
>>> exit
'Use Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit.'

I'd love to hear the reason. Update: Michael Ablassmeier pointed me to a pretty good analysis. Update 2: The title is actually courtesy of Ari. My bad.

Sometimes I am in a whistling mood. So today as I was running some errands [1], I whistled Abba's "The Winner Takes It All". Some kids stepped up to me and asked what kind of crap I was whistling and whether I was gay, Abba is "out" and "sucks anyway". They did not appreciate when I asked why they even recognise it then. :) WTF? Sure, Abba is not everyone's thing, but "The Winner Takes It All" is an all-time, very beautiful hymn which will never die. Unlike the crap aired on the radio these days.

[1]	My iron broke and I need my shirts ironed for a conference next week. Switzerland is bloody expensive: 4 per shirt, and that's just ironing.

In related news: After a very Cure-centric last week, I find myself totally digging Pulp now; I've been listening to the seven albums I have pretty much since Sunday morning. "Masters of the Universe" must be my favourite so far.

Mako, I see and agree with your point. I guess I failed to make mine: Planet is not what I would call "public discourse", or is it? Instead, I think it is often used as a platform to be heard without the risk of someone arguing against one's point (on purpose or not, and I am not trying to plead not guilty here). I find abbreviated summaries with clearly biased views -- humorous, sarcastic, or otherwise subjective -- disturbing because I believe that they will have some subtle influence on the decisions cast by those who don't have the time to completely make up their own mind for lack of time to follow all the discussion leading up to the debate. That was all. By all means, I like Debian in (large) part because of the public discourse.

Josh isn't quite sure how to answer questions about Debian at parties without being stamped nerd. I have often met this challenge. And I think I got good at it. Rule number one: stay away from opinions, comparisons, and technical details (at least in the beginning). Give them the humanly-comprehensible facts and do not mention Windows or OS X unless asked. For me, Debian is "an operating system ("computer system") that is completely free, which lets me do a lot of cool stuff with the computer." I don't mention that I am a developer so as to not scare people off. After this 20 second introduction, you can usually tell whether your peers are interested. If they are, give them a little more: "It is developed by thousands of volunteers who all help out without getting paid, because they all use the system and want to make it better." By now, the first questions should come, and usually they mention other operating systems. A great line is "well, I've found XYZ to be inadequate for my needs, but to each their own". Don't go confrontational. And don't grow over-enthusiastic, that's what nerds do. At other times, the first question will be about how anything can be free (as in beer) these days. Be careful not to answer with too much idealism. Also, I've found few to care about "free as in speech" at this point of the conversation. If your audience is still with you at this point, now is the time to dive into depth. Now you can talk about idealism, technical superiority, security, whatever, but always keep in mind that you don't want to compare (laymen don't care about comparisons too much) and that you want to draw from metaphors as much as possible to make them understand. I usually take the opportunity to touch upon privacy issues and trojans, faked email senders and that kind of stuff. My audience usually grows quite pensive after some time, and I have yet to meet some layman who didn't ask "just why would anyone care about my data". Explain "pwned" computers and distributed denial of service attacks, or the scenario where someone impersonates you can does bad stuff. Finally, I've often found it to be fun to play somewhere along the lines of "do you really want to know" and exciting their interest by being somewhat discrete about it all. I've also had success with the direct approach: "ah, but I'm a geek, you couldn't care less about my stuff." People usually ask for more infos. After all, you are at a party and not in front of your machine; anyone with something else but mush between the ears will put two and two together and suspect that you aren't actually a geek, at least not at the moment. Those are the people worth talking to. Anyone else (including drunkbolds) is a waste of time, IMHO. It helps to have some Knoppix or Ubuntu CDs in your pocket and just hand them out. People really get excited about free stuff. And a live CD can work wonders. Do not try to convince people to try it out or you will become a support hotline. Instead, tell them about LUGs and mailing lists (and how cool it can be) and put the challenge on them: "if you try it, those are your support channels. Are you up for it?"

Now playing: Xela, For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights What a great album title. The music is a little like Boards of Canada, but less groovy and more ambient. It'll be good even on sunny days and early winter evenings, depending on your mood.

What's the point of the biased blog entries several people put on Planet, in which they analyse the candidates (did I say biased?) and state how they're going to vote? If you're trying to make a difference, run for DPL yourself, or use the time to get some work done on Debian. I wish we'd have guidelines that would encourage voters not to disclose their preferences before the ballot is out.

My udev problems disappeared, which may well be related to the 0.087-2 upgrade that happened yesterday on the machine. Oh well. I am posting this followup because I have been contacted by someone on the Ubuntu team -- someone I like and respect -- who shone some light on the issue. Apparently, Debian's udev only pulled about a third from Ubuntu's interface renaming changes and ignored the rest. I have not tried Ubuntu's version, but that person claims it works perfectly. Assuming that it does, it's not hard to imagine how one third of the code wouldn't work as expected. So while Ubuntu still needs to work on contributing back as a whole (IMHO, and there are many expections), Debian should take a little more care when cherry-picking changes.

I have a server with libapache2-mod-musicindex serving several hundreds of gigabytes. I also have a headless router at home with a soundcard. My desire was to figure out how to make the router stream music from that server before I went to sleep. Just short of coming up with a quick'n'ugly hack, Decklin Foster saved my day by pointing me to mpd. It runs as a daemon and accepts network commands. It wasn't until I found out that you can pipe the playlists served by libapache2-mod-musicindex to mpc add that I completely fell in love. Now I hacked together a script, playstream, which I can integrate with mailcap:

$ cat <<_eof >> ~/.mailcap
audio/mpegurl;     ~/bin/playstream -q '%s'; nametemplate=%s.m3u
audio/x-mpegurl;   ~/bin/playstream -q '%s'; nametemplate=%s.m3u
audio/x-scpls;     ~/bin/playstream -q '%s'; nametemplate=%s.pls

The -q option queues the playlist up next. Other options I've added are -a for append (the default), and -r for replace. I know I should have this in version control, but that's all under construction right now. I have asked the mpc maintainer to include it. Update: Firefox is once again really annoying. I appreciate the fact that it tries to honour the mailcap standard. However, if I say that the handler if playstream -q %s, I really mean that, including the -q; Firefox apparently just reads the first word and appends the downloaded file. Argh.

It won't be long before I grow grey hair if udev keeps pulling tricks on me. Yesterday, an upgrade to 0.087-1 hosed one of my systems. The system is sarge-based, but it is connected a to a cable modem needing the cdc_ether driver, which 2.6.8 does not have. Since I don't expect backports of 2.6.15 to sarge (Update: backports.org has a 2.6.15 backport, but it won't solve my problem it seems), but also don't want to migrate my system to testing, I simply decided to pin linux-image-2.6.15-1-686 and all its dependencies to unstable with APT:

Package: linux-image-2.6.15-1-686
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600
Package: initramfs-tools
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 600
Package: udev
[...]

The install worked, and off I went to reboot... but the machine did not come back up, and booting 2.6.8 with the new udev also failed. Great. At first, I thought I knew the problem, but at closer inspection, it was something else: udev's ide.agent hung itself up and timed out. It turns out it was looking for hd141 instead of hda, and once I found that out, it didn't take long to put two and two together: 141 is ASCII 97 is 'a'. And if you echo hd\141 just like that, the shell will swallow the backslash. Marco, the udev maintainer blamed a broken shell, and I identified busybox-cvs-static to be the problem; Replacing it with busybox from unstable fixed the issue. Now all that remains is to convince Marco that the bug has nothing to do with initramfs-tools when it occurs in a script provided by udev. initramfs-tools depends on busybox-cvs-static busybox since it works with either. If udev doesn't work with busybox-cvs-static, it has to conflict, which is not really an option though, due to a libc6 upgrade loop. Fortunately, the 2.6.16 kernel will make ide.agent obsolete, so the problem shall vanish in smoke. With one problem solved, I woke up this morning to find another. I use udev's network interface renaming feature to ensure that my interfaces always have the names I expect, and that their names give me a hint as to what they're connected to. Sure, using /etc/modules to ensure a defined load order would work fine, but I have too many machines under my control to want to remember that eth2 on this machine is the wireless LAN. So I use the following udev rules:

wall:~# cat /etc/udev/rules.d/local-interfaces.rules
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="00:02:8a:80:21:31", NAME="internet"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="08:00:46:b1:2d:ee", NAME="lan"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="00:50:04:5b:ec:b3", NAME="wlan"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="00:04:23:72:4e:6c", NAME="wifibackup"

Update: Bas Zoetekouw suggested to match against something else than MAC addresses, for testing. Thus, I tried PCI IDs (using the topmost SYSFS device entry in the udevinfo output):

KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS device ="0x24c4", NAME="internet"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS device ="0x103d", NAME="lan"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS device ="0x5157", NAME="wlan"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS device ="0x1043", NAME="wifibackup"

The problem remains the exact same. It also remains the same if I completely remove wlan and wifibackup. When I woke up this morning, I found the following mess:

wall:~# ip addr
2: internet: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 08:00:46:b1:2d:ee brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: eth0_ifrename: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:02:8a:80:21:31 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
4: wifibackup: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:04:23:72:4e:6c brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
5: wlan: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000
    link/ether 00:50:04:5b:ec:b3 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    inet 192.168.14.129/25 brd 192.168.14.255 scope global wlan
    inet6 fe80::250:4ff:fe5b:ecb3/64 scope link
      valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

The wlan and wifibackup interfaces are configured correctly (I use wifibackup to hook into the various open WLANs around, when my provider goes down, or I need more bandwidth). But internet was assigned to the LAN interface, and eth0_ifrename, well... that's just whacked. Looking at the udev code, this seems to be due to a patch Marco pulled from Ubuntu, which is to guard against race conditions in the renaming. For instance, if eth0 needs to become eth1 and vice versa, udev renames the first to eth0_ifrename and waits until the other has finished its identity change. The patch, however, is a hack: it tries endlessly to rename the interface to its final target name, which, in my case, obviously goes on forever.

10:18  * Md just copied it from the Ubuntu package
10:18 < madduck> why???
10:19 < Md> because it worked in my artificial setup

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time that Ubuntu's "giving back to Debian" (which requires Debian to go out and fetch) is two steps back rather than one forward. I would hope that maintainers of criticial packages (such as udev) would exercise more care when pulling from Ubuntu. And that Ubuntu would please stop adding hacks to packages and instead concentrate on fixing issues at the root the Debian way. So my problem still persists, and even given Ubuntu's ifrename patch problems, I can't figure out what is actually going on. It does not help that udev also suddenly stopped logging interface name changes. Yes, just like that.

KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="00:02:8a:80:21:31", NAME="internet"
KERNEL="eth*", SYSFS address ="08:00:46:b1:2d:ee", NAME="lan"

How can these two rules actually trigger the rename conflict? The only way I could imagine is that udev gets confused and falsely renames 08:00:46:b1:2d:ee to internet. Then, when it gets to the other card, a name collision occurs, udev chooses eth0_ifrename as temporary workaround, and then tries forever to rename eth0_ifrename to internet, which will never succeed. So why does udev get confused in the first place? Why would it ever name the interface 08:00:46:b1:2d:ee internet? Beats me. But I better end here because the world surely doesn't need just anoAther udev rant. Update: I forgot to mention that the renaming works just fine when I unload/load modules from the command line. It's only during the boot process that things go wild. Update 2: I should not that it does not work fine some of the time if the modules are loaded in quick succession.

Mainly to make my life as a foreigner here in Switzerland easier, but also for tax purposes, I am founding a company... tomorrow actually. It'll be a "GmbH", which is the German equivalent of "Ltd"/"LLC": a separate legal entity with limited liability from the side of the participator (that's me). Only problem: I don't have a name. Part of me wants a regular German name (none of the "let's choose English words to make it sound cool" approach). The other part of me already operates internationally. Part of me would love to found "moo LLC" or "madduck consulting Ltd.", and the other part would prefer a little bit more seriousness. Part of me can't be bothered and would be happy to settle with "Martin Krafft Schulungs und Beratungs GmbH", and the other part doesn't really think that's very compelling. Both parts of me are tired. Let's hope the morning brings new ideas, for I don't have time to wait much longer.

I am trying to set up an older laptop for use as a router in my flat. I chose this approach over a stand-alone device (such as this one) because I want to have fuller control over my router, such as the ability to add a transparent caching proxy (squid). A main concern with setting up this machine is noise. Ideally, I want it to be completely silent, but I do need a hard drive. Thus, I am trying to configure the drive to spin down when not in use. Thanks to the laptop-mode-tools package, and syslog-ng's caching functionality, this works like a charm... ... until I start squid. For some reason, squid likes to read blocks on /var every few seconds, even if it is not being used at all. I imagine this is some cache replacement/maintenance stuff. So now I need to find out how to disable it, or how to control the interval. Ideally, I would like squid to doze when it's not in use. Only when it serves requests is it allowed to do cache maintenance. If you know how I could accomplish this, please let me know! Unfortunately, I do not have enough RAM to put my entire cache onto a shmfs.

It's now been over a week since I visited my brother in Leipzig, with the intention to head over to Chemnitz on Saturday morning to attend the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. It turned out that Saturday was just too nice a day (and Friday night too long), so I skipped the fair on that day and stayed with my brother, which wasn't a problem as my only required appearance in Chemnitz was Sunday morning for a talk on the Debian package lifecycle. So Saturday we ate an extensive breakfast, hung around, took a walk, met some folks, listened to a bunch of tunes, played countless Stratego games (this will have to be my favourite board game), and generally had a marvelous chilling time. So Sunday morning I got up early, hopped on a train and arrived in Chemnitz around 9:40 with ample time to make it to the campus where my talk was to be held at 11:00. Ample time -- or so I thought. Public transport in Chemnitz doesn't really wake up until 10:30, and the train schedule isn't descriptive of what actually happens on the track. So with a bunch of running, I finally ended up on a train to the south station, from where I walked. My talk went very nicely. I talked about what happens to a package between the developer's machine and Debian stable, giving insights into dak, the various parallel archives (such as stable-proposed-updates and experimental), and describing how security updates as well as volatile and backports fit in. The slides are accessible through your browser (but are German-only, sorry), thanks to the wonderful magic of docutils and S5 -- a great presentation system based on XHTML and CSS2 (it's written by one of the CSS gods). You can get my template with bzr. It and the slides are available under the terms of the Artistic Licence. Also in Chemnitz, my publisher Open Source Press officially released the German translation of my Debian book. It's good to see that finally out of my way. :) I left the campus early because I was too tired. I regret it because the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage seem like a nice event, and there were a bunch of talks I really wanted to see, but I simply couldn't. Till next year.